By Jamal Khashoggi

My friend Fahad Al Dakthari attended a ‘National Transformation Workshop’ launched recently to update the Saudi society about a development plan expected to be announced within the coming few weeks. In his article about the expected plan he raised the important question “Why is there the need to pay 8000 Riyal for a Saudi employee while there is an Asian employee who is ready to do the job for 2000 Riyals?”.

As the aim of the plan is to reduce dependency on oil achieve a reduction in subsidies increase the GDP and create six million job opportunities for nationals the answer to the above question will determine one of the options raised in the question.

In a country where expatriates constitute one third of its population; the question has imposed itself with the announcement of the Budget last Monday. The Budget and the associated decisions which include the increment of fuel prices and the cost of electricity and water were aimed at reducing “subsidies”. Of course these increments are going to affect Saudis and expatriates together because it is not possible to differentiate between them in this regard.

There is no choice for economic policy makers at the Saudi’s Ministry of Planning except to deal with the figure of a 30 million population of expatriates when they calculate the cost of all services infrastructure utilities and subsidies of commodities and housing. If we had implemented the cabinet decision issued ten years ago- that the expatriate population in Saudi should not exceed 20 percent of the population then we could make sound changes in the subsidies policy. The plan then would be dealing with 24 million people rather than the current 30 million. However instead day by day our country is receiving more and more expatriate workers.

Economic policy makers have to consider the impact of increasing prices when the vast majority of these revenues goes to expatriate workers through small and medium service companies and very little to Saudi brokers. The majority of these companies are owned by expatriates under Saudi names who are renting their IDs commercial registrations and thus their share in the GDP. These will clearly have an effect when we come to compare the country’s remittances of 2015 and 2016. However some will say that we cannot increase production and double our GDP without depending on the expatriate workers producing a real dilemma!

Of course increasing factories agriculture projects and services in order to raise production will need more manpower but the fact is that expatriates are not only taking Saudis job opportunities but also preventing them from acquiring necessary job skills. The job market is like school- the one who joins it learns and becomes educated and the deprived stay ignorant. The vast majority of the expat workers come to the county unskilled but over time through initiative intelligence and hard work they acquire experience and create their own businesses. Every Saudi manager has an expatriate assistant who knows everything about the job and gradually he becomes an expert and a decision maker.

Policy makers should be able to say: we don’t need any factory not designed to employ Saudis and that depends on subsidized energy. For farmers who say “From where will we get a Saudi who will accept working for 1000 Riyals?” I say that we must have no need for farms which do not depend on Saudi workers and farms should also stop using underground water that is supposed to be reserved for the coming generations. For those who talk about food security we see that no one has yet monopolized one commodity under the current international free trade agreement. This issue must be at the top of the plan for national transformation regardless of its sensitivities and political interferences and must be a national concern disregarding the anger of influential businessmen who will say “this will end Saudi’s industry”.

There must be national plan to gradually liberate the Saudi market from the domination of expatriate workers taking into account the importance of benefitting from foreign experience and skills as the US and European counties do. Expatriates consisting of one third of the population is still high compared to the proportion of migrants in the US and Europe which is still below 12 percent.

I know it is long and tough battle but we should realize that any economy that fully depends on foreigners is not a healthy economy. We should face this fact otherwise we are going to develop Saudi for foreigners.

Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi journalist columnist and author and the General Manager and Editor-in-Chief of Al Arab News Channel.