Page 155 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

152 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

artillery, military transport, naval patrol boats, helicopters and jet aircraft
he has also acquired Jaguar strike aircraft and a Rapier air-defence system.’
Since his mostly illiterate soldiery are incapable of operating this complicated

weaponry, he has had to engage large numbers of expatriate officers from
Britain, Pakistan, Jordan and elsewhere for the task. The extensive head­
quarters of the SAF near Sib serves as impressive testimony to the central
place that the armed forces occupy in the life of Oman, as well as in the
country’s budget.
The reality behind the programme of economic and social development is

not fully reflected in the statistics given a couple of paragraphs back. Although
hospitals and dispensaries have been built and equipped, competent staff to
run them have not been easy to recruit. There are no more than a score of
Omani doctors among the 200 or so-that have been engaged. Most of those
recruited are Indian or Pakistani, and the quality of medical competence they

possess is not conspicuously high. The same might be said of the nursing and
dispensary staffs. Enrolment in the new schools opened since 1970 has far
outstripped the capacity of the educational system to cope with it. An inspec­
tion team from the World Bank reported at the end of 1973 that the standard of
the teaching in the schools was abysmally low. Nearly half of the teachers had,
of necessity, been recruited from other Arab countries, and two-thirds of the
teaching body as a whole were unqualified. Things may improve, perhaps with

the help of the new college which is being established to train Omani teachers,
although (as experience elsewhere in Arabia has all too unhappily proved)
substantial expenditure upon education is no guarantee of satisfactory results.
The electricity generating system and the water desalination plant have cost
roughly five times as much as they should have cost to construct, while the size

of the bills for the sultan’s palaces and his beach residence at Sib remains the
subject of wild speculation.
Why, it may well be asked, cavil at the cost and effectiveness of Oman s
development programme when these are dwarfed by the extravagances and
grandiose follies committed by the Gulf oil states as a whole? The Omanis, after
all, have reacted to the new prosperity brought by oil in a way that was only to
be expected of a people to whom penury and harsh need have been the chief

constituents of life for centuries. The reasons for cavilling are twofold. Oman s
reserves of oil are limited. Production from the fields peaked in 1976 and since
then it has been on the decline. By 1981, it is estimated, it will be down to ha
its 1976 level. There is oil in Dhufar, discovered by an American company in

the 1950s. It is heavy oil, with a high sulphur content, unlike the higher qua ty
light oil produced from Fahud and the other fields on the edge of the cent*a
Oman steppes. Its exploitation would not have been considered economica y
feasible before the price of crude oil was quadrupled in the closing mon s o
1973. As it is, Royal Dutch Shell, which has a 34 per cent holding in etr0 ,
Development (Oman) Limited, the principal concessionaire (the su