Determined for post-oil future

If you read only the western press, you would assume that Saudi Arabia was to blame for all the problems in this world. The Orlando massacre is supposedly the fault of the Kingdom because the shooter Omar Mateen visited Saudi Arabia twice to perform Umrah. Of course, no one bothers to point out to readers that around five million Muslims come to Makkah and Madinah every year to perform Haj and Umrah.
If Daesh commits another atrocity, killing innocents in the name of religion, both Saudi Arabia and Islam inevitably get the blame, with the usual baseless accusations that Saudis are funding the crazies of Daesh.
Unfortunately, we Saudis are not yet very good at promoting ourselves, our country and our causes to the world. When the Iranian government’s negotiations with the Saudi government to allow Iranian pilgrims to perform Haj this year broke down, the Iranians cried out saying that they were being denied the right to perform a religious duty. What hardly got explained in reporting of these talks was that the Iranians wanted the “right” to hold political demonstrations during the Haj, something that is strictly forbidden. After all, Haj is a spiritual journey and not a political festival in which to raise grievances. The Iranians already tried holding political rallies during the Haj in 1988 with disastrous consequences.
What we have to do is speak up and loudly about our interests and explain why we make the decisions we do as a nation. No one else is going to do this for us, and our enemies will be more than happy to use our silence and hesitation to make waves against us, spinning wild tales of horror and vileness that are hard to counteract once they are put out in public. It is in this context that the visit of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the United States is so important.
On Friday he met US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. Before that he had met with the US secretaries of defense and commerce. His next stop will be Silicon Valley to meet the leaders of high-tech companies and talk with them about the possibilities of investing in the Kingdom. This is of utmost importance in the context of the National Transformation Plan, which is part of the Saudi Vision 2030, which aims to substantially increase the country’s non-oil income and move more young Saudis from government jobs to the private sector.
Instead of focusing too much on building factories in the Kingdom, we should be focusing on the side of technology and services. For these we need a well-educated, creative and innovative workforce. Just imagine if Saudi Arabia became a regional and then a world leader in technological developments and applications? It would provide hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs to Saudi youth. But for that to happen we need serious students that get good grades and are willing to think independently and outside the box, and who are willing to take risks.
The unfortunate stereotype that we have of the Saudi workforce is that most are lazy and unmotivated. Within this gloomy perspective, most Saudis want a cushy government with minimal hours and minimal effort needed.
But Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said that this old vision of the Saudi workforce is built on the mirage that we will continue to have never-ending oil supplies at $100 a barrel. As he has already pointed out, those days are gone and we must all prepare now for a world in which oil revenues contribute steadily less to the national budget.
The deputy crown prince has also signaled that a modern Saudi Arabia must provide entertainment and cultural venues and opportunities to its people to have a well-rounded population. This is crucial to the well-being of all Saudis.
As the Americans helped us discover oil in 1938, they can now help us find our way to a post-oil future. They can provide us with the ideas and methods to achieve a wealthy post-oil future, but we must provide our own drive and determination to want to get there. Years of high oil income may have produced a generation of spoiled Saudis who hardly want to lift a finger to work, but the time has come for this to change and quickly.
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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.