Page 348 - UAE Truncal States

The External Influences
Development Fund. Further generous contributions from these and
other governments followed in subsequent years.119
When Shaikh Zavid bin Sultan became Ruler in Abu Dhabi in
August 1966 he immediately gave £500,000 to the Development
Fund. He contributed a further £365,000 in April 1967, one million
pounds Sterling in September 1967 and another £300,000 in August
1968. Until the end of 1972, when (he Fund was disbanded and the
duties of the Development Office were transferred to the new federal
ministries, Abu Dhabi’s contributions rose steadily until they
covered 80 per cent of the total budget.
From 1965 more long-term projects could be budgeted for because
considerably larger sums of money were available. Although one
might expect that the Fund would be primarily concerned with the
implementation of capital projects, it also had to contribute to
maintenance and running costs of installations already constructed.
With the exception of Dubai, the northern States had no budgets of
their own to pay for the running costs of water-distillation plants and
electric generators. Such services were provided at low cost to the
consumers and had to be heavily subsidised by the Fund. In the 1971
budget there was also a sharp increase in the cost of health services
following the establishment of new health centres at Ra’s al
Khaimah, Dibah, Sharjah, and Daid.120 Subsidies for running-costs
were largely responsible for the fact that the Fund’s money could not
be evenly distributed to benefit all the northern States equally. The
statistics show that the smaller and the less developed the State, the
greater was the annual per capita assistance. To the end of 1970, BD
1,300,772 had been spent by the Fund on Sharjah (population
31,500), which was an annual average of BD 6.90 per inhabitant;
while the annual average was BD 27.90 for the 3,700 inhabitants of
Umm al Qai wain, and BD 0.80 for 59,000 inhabitants of Dubai.121 The
biggest single item in every budget, of great benefit to all the States,
was the provision for the construction of roads, and the Trucial
States Council always agreed to give priority to the improvement of
communications.122
The most obvious advantage of channelling assistance through the
Development Office, as opposed to promoting individual develop­
ment projects either through the Political Agency or through the
individual Rulers’ courts, was that a number of people could be
employed whose specialised training and experience in other
developing countries gave the Office the necessary expertise for long-

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