JEDDAH, 20 April 2005 — The storms which struck Makkah and Jeddah turned Monday into a bad day for the candidates who were using makeshift tents as their campaign centers.
Some candidates moved their campaign to their homes while others — whose houses are small — delayed campaigning till yesterday.
Bushait Hamad, one of the candidates in Makkah, said that he had to apologize to the voters who were coming to his tent to attend a poetry recitation by well-known Saudi poet, Abdul Rahman Al-Ashmawi.
Bushait said that he had to first apologize to the poet himself, then hang a huge sign asking the voters and visitors to forgive him for what he called the unexpected obstacle.
“I felt bad about what happened, my camp collapsed in the sandstorm and I’m afraid I might lose a number of votes because of this,” said Bushait who only managed to raise SR80,000 for his campaign.
Bushait, who has written a book in ten days on the elections, said he was not intending to run but his friends and colleagues insisted that he should.
On the other hand, Abdul Qader Faqeeh, the son of one of the well-known businessmen in Makkah, Abdul Rahman Faqeeh, said that his campaign was not affected by the heavy rainstorm.
Faqeeh has set his camp at his father’s huge villa. Observers said that candidates who had such plans — as Faqeeh did — won over a huge number of voters and were lucky to be one day ahead of the other candidates.
In Jeddah, candidates who were affected by the sandstorm said that they would rebuild their camps no matter how much it cost them.
A number of candidates said that the storm cost them millions of riyals but they are tied to agreements with advertising agencies which will not allow them to withdraw.
“I lost the cost of the tents, I can’t afford to lose the money I spent on the advertising agencies,” said one of the candidates who did not want to be named.
Yet, one man’s poison is another man’s meat. The storm was a boon for the advertising agencies that were on the job of redoing the broken banners and signs. They also got into rebuilding the tents, but of course, at extra cost.
Some candidates had come to know through the Met Office that the weather would be adverse for the next 24 hours which forced them to search for safer places to pitch their tents for the last two days of campaigning.
Tomorrow is election day. A total of 244 seats are up for grabs in the final round of the three-stage elections for half the members of 178 municipal councils across the country.
Cities that vote tomorrow include Jeddah, Taif, Makkah and Madinah in the Western Province, and the northern regions of Al-Qassim, Hail, Tabuk, Al-Jouf and the Northern Frontier.
More than 4,600 candidates are courting the votes of some 333,000 men aged over 21 who have registered to cast their ballots, according to official estimates.
