I never knew how shallow some of us Saudis could be until I heard about the car license plate that was sold for SR200,000 at a public auction.
The license plate contained the three Arabic letters “ba”, “ha” and “b” and the numbers 666. When read in Saudi it means: “I am in love with three ladies.” At first I did not believe the story.
People are living below the poverty line in the slums of our cities; other Saudi families with up to seven or eight members are living on a salary of SR1,500 a month; widows are living on social security, which does not exceed a few hundreds riyals a month, with their children — all that, and we have people who are desperate to pay up to SR200,000 to obtain a license plate so they can join the “special club.”
We have people paying SR20,000 or more to obtain a special mobile number and up to SR200,000 to obtain a special license plate. The need to be special in our society has become a cancer. And where other people in the world work hard to earn degrees and achieve something in society, inventing, thinking, the best we can do is flash our special mobile numbers and special license plates, in the hope that they will make us better than others.
With the middle class in our country torn between either ascending to the upper class or descending to the poor class, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs for some reason thinks it is inappropriate to recognize that we have a poverty problem in Saudi Arabia. Despite footage being broadcast on TV of the poverty of some Saudis are living in the slums of our cities and photos of the crown prince’s visit to those areas being published in our local newspapers, the ministry proposed to the Council of Ministers that the name of the Fund to Combat Poverty be changed to the Fund for Humanitarian Causes.
I wonder what it took for the ministry to come up with that name. And above all, does it really make a difference? Instead of advising the superrich in our society who spend hundreds of millions of riyals abroad every summer to donate to the fund to help their underprivileged citizens living below the poverty line, the best the minister could do is give a proposal to the Council of Ministers to change the fund’s name.
The minister has not told the public, however, how much money has been donated to the fund since its establishment. He also has not told us what strategies his ministry has taken to combat poverty in our country. For starters, he could give us a thorough survey of the number of jobless people in our country (both male and female). The official figure that was published in Al-Eqtisadiah a couple of days ago that the unemployment rate in Saudi Arabia is at 8.34 percent simply is indigestible, especially if we bear in mind that there has not been a census to figure how much we have been breeding since 1992. Also, did the figure include all the jobless women in Saudi Arabia, or were only men counted in the study? Moreover, what sort of scientific tools were used in the study?
We’d like an answer. I believe that every citizen has a right to know our country’s jobless rate to discover the sort of crisis we have on our hands. That is something that matters. We are not interested in changing the name of the fund. Why change it? Don’t we have poverty in our country? We are the number one oil producer in the world, but the rate of poverty is actually increasing. That is a problem government officials might want to devote some time to.
