Page 358 - UAE Truncal States_Neat
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The External Influences
         financing a project was soon to be no longer a problem? Some form of
         political union was anticipated, and therefore more effort might have
         been made to provide these states with national administrators to
         run the country in the future.  130
           Whichever route might have been followed, that is to provide an
         education predominantly in the technical or predominantly in the
         administrative field, the outcome would have been rapidly overtaken
         by events. After all, education is a long-term process. Even after the
         discovery of oil in commercial quantities in Abu Dhabi in 1960 it was
         impossible to predict that the resultant economic boom would be so
         great, and would build up so rapidly. It was also not possible for
         people to obtain training, in the lime before the boom and before the
         union in 1971, in the management of the new situations that were
         themselves a product of the economic and political changes.
           British involvement in development in Abu Dhabi was always of a
         different nature from that in the rest of the Trucial Stales. It was
         consultative, not active. One of the reasons why a British Political
         Officer was sent to Abu Dhabi in 1957 and the post was upgraded to
         Political Agent in 1961, and why the British Government took great
         pains to find suitable British advisers for the Ruler, was that they
         wanted to encourage the Ruler to speed up development himself.
         These advisers were directly employed by the Ruler of Abu Dhabi,
         and therefore took their instructions from him and not from a
         development agency or from the British Government. As in the case
         of the employees of the Development Office, or other expatriates
         working in Dubai, they frequently made a valuable contribution to
         development in their special fields. But they could not be expected
         to be particularly interested in the problems concerning the co­
         ordination of development efforts throughout all the Trucial States.
         In the late 1960s Abu Dhabi had become wealthy and was making a
         considerable financial contribution to the development of the
         northern Trucial States; the standard of living of the people in Abu
         Dhabi improved dramatically compared to the changes in the other
         states. The long term significance of this imbalance was not
         recognised at the time, even by the advisers. Yet its rectification
         would have facilitated the transition to a unified State which sooner
         or later was to replace the anachronistic array of small shaikhdoms.
           The Ruler of Abu Dhabi, Shaikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, repeatedly
         turned down offers from the Political Agency to include Abu Dhabi in
         assistance programmes and surveys. But it was Shaikh Shakhbut

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