Many Saudis are questioning the way the Shoura Council selects and initiates a debate on the issues it wants to discuss. The reference here is to the issues proposed by the Shoura members outside the subjects the Shoura is required to discuss as part of its routine work.
Some argue that despite the noticeable development in the performance of the Shoura over the past years, it fails to address many of the genuine concerns of the citizens.
People’s pressing concerns need to be addressed without delay since any postponement would only further aggravate the situation.
Those who say the Shoura is missing many of the important issues that affect people’s daily life attribute this to the narrow margin of freedom available to the Shoura members when it comes to proposing the subjects they think should be put up for discussion.
Others have gone too far, calling the members an elite group in which most of them are not even aware of people’s problems because these problems were never part of their concerns.
They say some Shoura members have lived all their life away from the kind of problems facing the man on the street and when they become Shoura members they continue to live in isolation of public concerns. This is why they apply different criteria to define a problem.
The Shoura has a specialized committee known as the petitions committee (I don’t know the logic behind choosing such a name). The work of this committee is to receive suggestions made by the public.
However, information about the nature of the committee’s work and its progress is sketchy. A committee of that nature should have been one of the leading Shoura bodies.
It should serve as a yardstick to measure public opinion and identify people’s concerns and priorities.
The Shoura is said to have received 54 ideas and suggestions submitted to it by members of the public during its current session. Only a fraction of these have been included in the Shoura’s agenda or actually put up for discussion.
The least the Shoura could do is to have a look at the suggestions and proposals sent to it by the very members of the public it seeks to serve.
