RESIDENTS of Jeddah were surprised by a series of disturbing text messages and e-mails requesting them to join a popular campaign to save the city amid the state of bewilderment that gripped them due to the flash floods. The messages asked them to collect votes to file a lawsuit against the Jeddah municipality for its failure to deal with the disaster.
The strange thing about these communications is that the Friends of Jeddah program issued them, which is part of the municipality itself. The website link for the campaign is the same as the municipality’s site. The registration form that volunteers fill in carries the official logo of the mayoralty.
My wife, a lecturer specializing in electronic sites, told me about this. “Though the Friends of Jeddah program is one of the programs of the mayoralty, yet it does not fall into its direct remit,” says the blurb on the Facebook page for the campaign. This raised doubts among the volunteers. Some of them accepted the claims at face value while others said it was not possible to sue the mayoralty through a campaign it was supervising.
I suppose the mayoralty is aware of what was going on. I also suppose that it wished to absorb the anger of the residents and urge them to assist in overcoming the impact of the floods. Unfortunately the campaign has harmed the municipality instead. The municipality discovered that it has no manpower specializing in tackling disasters and does not know where to get it. The municipality requested drivers with four-wheel drive vehicles but did not know what to do with them when they arrived. They did not have any work plan or anyone to tell them what to do.
The mayoralty should have taken down the link, punish the official responsible and disown the campaign. When the supervisors of the campaign realized that they had no role to play in the relief effort, they dropped their bid to sue the municipality and joined welfare societies that distributed food and clothes among victims.
An ethical issue produced by the misuse of the Internet now confronts us. No individual or organization should cheat Internet users and recipients of the text messages. Many messages were received from parties requesting donations for filing a lawsuit against the mayoralty. I must commend the civilized step taken by the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry when they asked about 20 welfare organizations, not including the Friends of Jeddah, to distribute relief aid to badly affected areas.
