Expatriate engineers were among those who won elections to the different technical chapters of the Saudi Council of Engineers (SCE).
The election was conducted on Tuesday and the results were announced yesterday. This is the first time that expatriates were allowed to contest the elections along with Saudis.
An overwhelming number of winners were Saudis because in each of the seven-member committees five seats were reserved for the locals. Two seats on all the committees were earmarked for expatriate engineers registered with the council. Elections were held for all the seven seats. Saudis contested against Saudis for the top five seats while expatriates vied among themselves for the remaining two.
Among the expatriate winners were American, French, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese engineers. Names of all the winners are published on the council’s website at http://www.saudieng.sa.
The council of engineers consists of 12 different technical committees or chapters such as civil engineering chapter, electrical engineering chapter, mechanical engineering chapter, green-building engineering chapter, operation and maintenance chapter and project management chapter.
However, elections were held for only seven chapters because there were not many contestants for the remaining five committees. Elections will be held for those five committees at a later date.
In all, 125 engineers, Saudis and non-Saudis, nominated themselves for elections to the different committees. Once their names were cleared, the contestants took an active part in electioneering. They mobilized the engineering community through e-mails and text messages.
Despite the vociferous campaigning, a mere 1 percent or 1,000 of the nearly 90,000 engineers registered with the council took part in the actual voting.
“The total voting percentage was dismal,” said Abdul Rahman Zaid Yousef Al-Arfaj, a member of the council’s board of directors. “Only 1,001 votes out of nearly 90,000 registered engineers is certainly not good.”
However, he said, the good part is that engineers of five different nationalities emerged victorious. “This is big news, delightful news, and so let us focus on this good aspect of these elections,” Al-Arfaj told Arab News yesterday.
The lone Indian contestant, Riyadh-based Iftikhar Ali Gaur, was initially declared elected in the green-building category but he was told later that his nomination was found to be invalid.
“I won the maximum number of votes from expatriates and I was even declared elected,” Gaur told Arab News. “Late in the night I was told that my election was declared invalid because I was not registered with the SCE as a consultant engineer.”
According to the rules, only those who have registered with the SCE in the “consultant engineer category” are eligible to contest the elections. All other engineers can vote but not contest. Among the four different categories that expatriates are registered with the SCE are engineer, associate engineer, professional engineer and consultant engineer.
“I was not aware of this particular rule,” said Gaur. “I wonder why they cleared my name in the first place. Since my name was on the list of candidates, I campaigned in a big way and a.m. happy to have garnered the maximum number of votes from fellow expatriate engineers in my category.”
Despite the invalidation of his victory, Gaur was delighted with the electoral exercise. “I enjoyed every bit of these elections; I am not dejected at all, I am happy,” he said.
There were a couple of Pakistani engineers too among the contestants but they lost.
Elections to the SCE committees are held once every three years. The next elections will now be in January 2016.
Expat engineers win elections to various SCE committees
