I was shopping at a department store the other day and was pleasantly surprised to notice that several of the frontline positions had been Saudized.
“About time,” I mused to myself smugly whilst simultaneously taking immense pride in the success of my compatriots who had been elevated to the status of full time employment in a fairly decent organization. I could never understand why it was that in spite of our burgeoning youth population, many of whom presumably were of working age, and tough government directives that penalized companies for not complying with the minimum quotas for hiring locals, the process to introduce Saudis into fairly mundane positions was taking forever to achieve.
As I stood at the till pondering over the intricacies of the labor market, a smartly kitted out new recruit ushered a gentleman, wielding a pair of socks, to barge right in front of me and began to serve him. My initial look of adulation transformed post haste to one of total dismay and the young cashier chided me for my uncharitable expression with the words, “But sister. Sorry. My brother only has a pair of socks!”
Silly me! I should have known the unwritten law of common retail sense that affords pairs of socks a superior status to all other forms of clothing. Sock buyers should therefore not be expected to condescend to queue like us mere extraneous garment purchasers.
This coupled with the fact that the sock purchaser shared not only the same nationality, but perhaps even tribal origins with the store employee should have totally exempted him from standing in line in the first place. Such profound affiliations run deep within the culture of purchasing etiquette it seems, so I inwardly chastised myself for entertaining the heinous expectation that I would go down in the history books as setting a dangerous precedent and be served ahead of a pair of socks. When it did come to my turn eventually I was confronted with the rather penetrating query of, “Ha. Are you going to buy these?”
“No,” I began sarcastically reaching into my handbag to fish around for my wallet, “I just like standing in line.”
I looked up having retrieved my credit card and much to my astonishment the guy had vamooshed into thin air. I stood around for a couple of minutes wondering whether he would magically reappear but to no avail. As there was no other assistant around I was left with no other option than to search for him. I finally found him skulking under some hair accessories staring defiantly at a sticky label gun with all the intentness that an ascetic would muster up trying to decipher the meaning of life.
“Excuse me,” I gently approached coaxing him out of his temporary state of nirvana, “but I would like to pay for these please.”
“Do you want them or don’t you want them?” he gruffly reproached.
“Yes. I really do want them,” I conveyed with as much sincerity as I could conjure up at the time. “Please,” I further cajoled as he continued to crouch in meditation.
Muttering something to himself, he got up lethargically and leisurely strolled over to the cash desk.
What ensued was a series of bungled transactions that had to be voided by a supervisor (who had evidently lost all faith in his group of trainee disciples) and took all of 15 minutes to complete. As I was leaving the shop the metal detectors announced to all and sundry that, in spite of my fairly decent appearance, I was in fact a cleverly disguised shoplifter.
I returned to the cashier red-faced, as he tipped the contents of my plastic shopping bag onto the counter and tut-tutted as if I were somehow responsible for not removing the security tags through the manipulative dexterity of my Yuri Geller-like gaze.
My next encounter was on a trip to the local supermarket. I was in the middle of having my items scanned at the checkout counter when all of a sudden the frisky teller pulled a stick of miswak from the pocket of his thobe, began cleaning his teeth and midway through my conveyor belt full of shopping, a cool 35 minutes before the midday prayer, unexpectedly announced, “Baad al salah! Baad al salah! (after prayer).”
With this verbal declaration of his intent to abstain from keying in the rest of my goods, he perched his cap on his head, smoothed out his thobe and walked out of the automatic doors, abandoning my grocery and me in the wake of his fateful departure.
An Indian assistant resignedly shook his head and proceeded to start where his colleague had left off. I can think of countless incidents where I have come across such apathy and disinterest. So much so that I often wonder how things still manage to run in spite of the inefficiency of it all.
What bothers me is not so much the attitude of these individuals as the system of incompetence that produces them. This really is a serious issue with far reaching implications.
Saudization is a critical process and absolutely essential for the furtherance of economic progress. However, in order for it to be effective, there needs to be a more scrupulous and honest examination of the quality of employees we are thrusting upon the labor market. It is just not good enough to position our own citizens into key jobs that they have neither the training nor the aptitude for, just because they are Saudis.
No matter which way we look at things, the crux of the issue is that we have yet to bridge the gap between our system of education and the dictates of effectual employment.
Though ostensibly a cruel realization, we need to confront the fact that when our students leave schools, colleges and universities, several of them simply don’t possess the necessary skills to render them effective in the workplace. Indeed, many of our graduates have to be retrained in an endeavor to make them professionally viable. This is a failure of the system, not the individual.
Values such as self-actualization, the intrinsic ambition to succeed and basic life skills must be instilled in the very young within our own cultural and socio-economic framework.
I believe that there are a huge number of talented Saudis who can be a great asset to the nation and any organization that they work for if they are provided with the correct opportunities of training and advancement.
In order for this to happen though, we must be courageous enough to revamp our education system in its entirety and rebuild it based on market led forces. Education must be relevant, not an abstract exercise in how to obtain a degree certificate without learning anything much in the process.
We need to stop focusing our energies solely on our depleting oil riches and instead shift our sights to the potential wealth of our rapidly growing numbers of young people.
The deluge of petro dollars we are currently being flooded with would be better utilized investing in the future of our youth rather than further adding to the ostentation we have grown so heavily addicted to.