Page 248 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest* 245

been incensed by King Faisal’s refusal to increase his financial allowance to
enable him to meet his matrimonial obligations. Yet despite these con­
siderations, and notwithstanding the dissatisfaction felt by King Saud’s family
over the way in which they have been pushed into the background since his
deposition, it seems in all probability that Faisal ibn Musaid acted alone and

primarily out of a desire for vengeance.
Following the immense increase in her oil revenues after the oil-price rises of
1973-4, Saudi Arabia embarked upon much the same carnival of consumption

and construction as did the minor oil states of the Gulf. As in their case, the
massive expenditures and grandiose undertakings of the Saudi government
have been exhaustively chronicled by the world’s press - with much the same
expressions of awe and deference as those with which the native chroniclers of
Najd were wont, in years gone by, to celebrate the exploits of the house of
Saud. An economic development plan had originally been introduced by the
late Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz in the autumn of 1970. It was to be implemented
within five years and to cost 4,100 million riyals ($911 million). Although a
shade ambitious, the plan was not entirely divorced from the realities of Saudi
Arabian society or the limitations of its native economy. Improvements were to
be effected in agriculture, education, medicine and communications, the
country’s defences were to be strengthened and a start was to be made with
industrialization. Some progress had been made towards achieving these ends
by the time the five years were up, but too many of the funds which had been
expended (aside from the large sums spent on arms and military equipment)
had gone on urban construction of an unproductive kind - palaces, hotels,
office blocks, apartment buildings and so forth - while industrial investment
had been limited to petro-chemical works and a steel mill, the iron ore for
which had to be brought half-way around the world.
Not in the least deterred by this experience, and captivated by the vision of
apparently limitless sums of money at its disposal in the years ahead, the Saudi
government announced in the latter half of 1975 the inauguration of a second
five-year plan of awe-inspiring dimensions. Its cost would be 498,000 million
riyals ($142,000 million), and it was intended to bring Saudi Arabia with one
gigantic leap into the last quarter of the twentieth century. At the heart of this
prodigious enterprise — conceived with the disinterested guidance of the Saudi
government’s American consultants - would be two huge industrial complexes
located respectively at Yanbu, a small port on the Red Sea, and at Jubail, a
shing village on the Gulf coast. Jubail was to become a city of 175,000 souls,
with oil refineries, petro-chemical plants and a steel mill with an eventual
productive capacity of 5,000,000 tons per annum, the ore being supplied from

eposits recently discovered in the Wadi Fatima, near Jiddah. Jubail was also
to e developed as a major port, with a loading jetty that would stretch some

ve to seven miles out into the Gulf. Near by a huge new airport was to be
constructed at a cost of some $2—3,000 million. A comparable future was