By Dheemant Anil

Abstract

Saudi Arabia is at a crossroads. Unless the ruling Saudi Dynasty chooses to get rid of its dependency on oil, it risks going down the same road as the first two Saudi States and risking the very existence of the power and legitimacy of the Saudi Arabian State and the dynasty. Therefore, Saudi Arabia needs a rapid change of focus from oil to a knowledge-based economy and to reduce glaring inequality to survive the next century.

Introduction

Before I talk about Saudi Arabia, dear reader, I would like to bring your attention to the story of the Kongo Kings, a very rich and wealthy kingdom. Our story begins in the 15^th century, during the age of exploration, when Diogo Costa, found and explored the region we know today as the Congo. He claimed the land around the mouth of the river in the name of Portugal.

The Explorer then found out and made the first contact with a powerful kingdom, the Kingdom of the Kongo, which was enormously wealthy and prosperous, with its cities and towns, and its capital, Mbanza, having a population of 60, 000, 

590 miles to the north, another Portuguese explorer, Alvaro Camina, founded the volcanic islands of Sao Tomé and Principe, just off the coast of the Gold Coast, modern-day Ivory Coast. These islands were uninhabited, and for the Portuguese, they were used as a colony first for penal labor and then as a plantation, Which could fetch a premium during the days of early Capitalism. They needed labor for it. The first workers died due to tropical diseases. And here is where the destiny of the two nations met each other.

The Portuguese invented the plantation system, a system in which cash crops were grown in a centralized processing system that would be managed by the planter, who would receive a share of the profits made. This system, however, required its fuel in the form of raw labor power; that is, it needed a large workforce that would be able to live in the tropical heat of the island.

This is where the Kongo Kings come in; they had a large population and could exploit an area with a large population. Along with this, they would be able to provide the Kongo Kings with the labor that was needed.

This was the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as we know it. As Europe established its colonies in the new world, it required the help of the Congo Kings to feed the growing demand for slaves. As a result, the Kongo kings became increasingly wealthy and prosperous. And were commemorated as one of the major reasons why the Industrial Revolution happened, and yet if you live outside Portugal or Brazil, you would have never heard about the Kongo Kings, and the fact is, they no longer exist; their palaces are now just mounds of dirt in rural Angola, and not even many of the Angolans know or even care about the Kongo Kings.

You might wonder if this is a lesson on the line of the famous poem Ozymandias, but it is not about that; it is about how dependence on one resource can and most likely will lead to the downfall of the country’s economy if the other states decide to move away from it. It is also a lesson in the fact that if a political establishment hates innovation, dislikes citizens’ rights, and enforces strong control on the rights of the citizens, the state, no matter how wealthy it might be, will soon fall into the abyss.

The Kongo kings used only one innovation that would help them acquire more slaves in the form of muskets and gunpowder, using these to great effect in providing and devastating the African hinterland. It also served as a tool for oppression.

Quite a similar thread can be drawn between the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Kingdom of the Modern-Day Petro States, which shows how many of these states are still caught within the grip of king oil and, as such, have not been able to keep up with the changing world, instead relying on the same old beliefs that the Kongo Kings had, that the world would still need them, even if the technology has been moving forward and might make the resource you have redundant.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is the proverbial example of the Arabic-rich Petro State. It is one of the richest countries in the world and a major regional power, and this is perhaps, according to me, one of the most surprising of all.

Saudi Arabia, in a reasonable way, would not have been a regional power, let alone a major power. It does not have fertile land to speak of. The population is limited, and the land provides no geopolitical position to act on. The Only asset of Major influence, it has is the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Historically, Saudi Arabia has been under the boots of mighty empires or has been ignored by the sands of time. This region was then reunified by a leader who came for the Saudi house; his name was King Abdelaziz Al-Saud, who made the nation, which was still just a unification based on tribal loyalties. But all of this changed when oil was found in the country, and soon a deal was struck with the Americans. In return for the defense of Saudi Arabia, they would fuel American industry and the economy at a cheaper rate. American progress was fuelled by Saudi Arabian oil, and as such, it became a partnership of mutual benefit.

However, now all of this is changing rapidly. Saudi Arabia was behind a variety of reasons why the Americans would intervene in Middle Eastern affairs. The Gulf Wars and then the 2003 Invasions of Iraq—all of this was done in a manner to protect the Saudi Arabian Regime from the consequences of its actions and fight its wars. But now American policymakers have been suffering from Middle East fatigue, i.e., there is no longer value attached to the region and American oil needs are now being fulfilled by the rather expansive oil and gas reserves of the North American Continental Shale itself. All of this has led to a decrease in interest in defending the regime and, rather, frosting the relations between the two.

Saudi Arabia, itself suffering from a variety of internal issues, has also not been able to translate its wealth into a comprehensive national power, and as such, it has been forced to rely on talent from the outside to fulfil highly specialized roles like IT and engineering. Saudi Arabia also does not have a large enough population to work in its industries and, as such, has to import workers from poorer nations to work on its oil wells, which are still its lifeblood.

 Saudi civil society lives in its cocoon; it has isolated itself from the state as a whole, and the relationship between them is transactional; that is, Saudi Arabia lacks a culture of learning and innovation, which has been encapsulated in the fact that the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces have a lackluster performance. The armed forces of any nation are a mirror of the form of instruction they are given. The Saudi Arabian military has been well known for the large amount of corruption within the ranks.

It has reached a point where Saudi Arabia has to rely on Sudanese mercenaries to be able to continue its wars. All of this shows that Saudi Arabia lacks a comprehensive sense of unity and operates on a clan-based patronage system. This has also added to the conundrum in Saudi Arabia.

There is also the case of massive inequality in Saudi Arabia. While the royal family and the Al Saud Clan enjoy the wealth of the nation, 25 percent of the population is under the poverty rate, and a massive number of people are barely employable and must rely on the state to be able to eke out a living to sustain itself.

There is also a major problem that is extremely fundamental to Saudi Arabia, which is the fact that it has been founded based on Salafi Islam, which is an extremely puritanical version of Islam that demands that the faith be taken to its earliest iteration. These clerics have a lot of power, and as such, it has limited the authority of the kings to decide cases where it demands that the decisions be made in a manner that would be rational and would be provided for the well-being of the nation-state, and it would also be under the consideration of the Saudi Kings to take.

Conclusion

So, what can be done to improve the state of Saudi Arabia? First, it would require the state to achieve centralization, for the king to put his people and the people of Saudi Arabia first, and to be able to build a Saudi Arabian nationalism that would include all the people of the nation regardless of tribal background, be able to provide them with a unification factor and be able to reverse some of the powers that the Salafi clerics have. The second would be to diversify the economy to include several other sectors.

Although some steps have been taken to reform Saudi Arabia, I believe that they have gone too far for the Saudi state to make reforms work in any way possible. The state is too fractured and fragmented to be able to put its best foot forward to be able to do the reforms needed for the state to keep running. The only thing the world can do now is hope that the splash over will not bring the world economy into another depression.

Image Source: https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/collapse-saudi-arabia-cataclysmic-power-shift-middle-east-2

About the Author

Dheemant Anil is a student of BA LLB (Hons) 2021, and is a student of History and international relations and as such writes for the Nickled and Dimed magazine.