We must admit that the minister of health showed real courage when he revealed a bribe offered by the owner of one of the Kingdom’s pharmacy chains. The owner had attempted to bribe an official in the ministry by paying him SR10 million. The aim was to control the market in medicines by opening 200 new pharmacies and putting the competition out of business.
The minister is to be commended for allowing details of the incident to be published; he refused to back down although he knew the man offering the bribe had powerful connections. It is the presence of those powerful connections which frighten many officials into keeping silence.
When such things have happened in the past, many authorities chose to look the other way or to appoint investigating committees which meant that nothing was ever done and that sooner or later, everything would be forgotten.
We have never heard of even one official in a ministry being exposed and punished for accepting a bribe or embezzling money. As if all big officials and important businessmen are honest and pure and respect the law and as if only small employees whose photos and family names appear in the newspapers accept bribes.
I will not discuss why these little men who accepted bribes have their names published while in the case of the businessman offering SR10 million, only his initials have been published. How many others would be implicated if a proper investigation were done. And how many of those would be people with well-known names and important positions?
It is time we stopped saying that all businessmen are honest and law-abiding. It is time we let the departments charged with protecting public money and enforcing the law do their job. No doubt the man offering the bribe is attempting to secure a monopoly in the medicine market. Haven’t we seen enough of monopolies here? Soon someone will have a monopoly on the food market, in the car spare parts market, the gasoline market and so on.
What we need are more officials such as Dr. Hamad Al-Manie and Abdul Aziz Neyaz, the head of the licensing department in the Health Ministry. We need honest people who realize and accept their responsibility to protect our country from unscrupulous individuals.
