Page 249 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

246 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

planned for Yanbu, whose population was to be expanded to 115,000 souls.
Other airports on an impressive scale were to be constructed elsewhere,
including one at Jiddah to handle the pilgrim traffic. When completed, it
would be the largest in the world. An aluminium smelter, a car-assembly plant,
a dozen desalination and electric power installations and several cement fac­
tories were also to be built. Pride of place, however, was given to the construc­
tion of an extensive gas-gathering system, which would provide the abundance
of energy upon which the industrialization of Yanbu and Jubail was projected.
As if all this were not enough, it was also announced that some 270,000 new
housing units, 2,000 new schools and 11,500 new hospital beds were to be
constructed by 1980.
What on earth, one might well ask, had these technological marvels, which it
was airily proposed to erect upon the desert sands at a cost of milliards of
dollars, to do with the people of Saudi Arabia, most of whom were still living
much as their forebears had lived for a thousand years previously, and hardly
one of whom over the age of twenty-five or thirty could read or write? The
answer, of course, is very little. It was all part of the ‘numbers game’ which we
have encountered in the Gulf states, the purpose of which is to provide

emotional and intellectual catharsis. Just how far removed are the Al Saud’s
industrial fantasies from the people they rule may be judged from the fact that
while half the working population of the country is engaged in agriculture and
pastoralism, these pursuits were allocated a mere 0.8 per cent of the develop­
ment programme’s budget. The euphoria was shortly to be dissipated. By the
spring of 1977, barely eighteen months after the programme had been
unveiled, the Saudi government was forced to prune it drastically. Inflation,
incompetence, corruption and the sheer multiplicity of projects, along with the
physical and technical difficulties encountered by foreign construction firms
working in Saudi Arabia, had all helped to send costs soaring. So, too, had the
loss of financial control over the development programme, with different
factions in the royal family and the ministries committing and spending funds
as they wished. Millions, perhaps milliards, of dollars literally went missing,
although as we shall see later, much of the money may have been siphoned off
for other objects. By the early months of 1977 it was reckoned that the
programme would require twice the original sum estimated for its implementa­
tion, some $56,800 million a year instead of $28,400 million. Oil revenues were
simply not running at that level, so the axe had to fall. The planned aluminium
smelter was cancelled, the car-assembly plant was cancelled, five desalinauon
and electric power installations were cancelled, and the steel mill was scaled
down to a projected productive capacity of 300,000 tons per annum instead 0
5,000,000, with the possibility that it might not even be completed. The cost 0
the elaborate gas-gathering system was now estimated at four times the origma

figure, and its completion date at 1985 instead of I979> a revision sobering
enough to make potential foreign participants in the venture back hurne y