Crude World (27 page)

He spoke fast, like a man who knew the connection might be cut at any moment. He quickly climbed the stairs to his apartment, and I could hear him gasping for air. His heart was not good, he said. Mugaiteeb was in his fifties and had ulcers, sciatica and thyroid problems. His financial health was not robust, either. He was $150,000 in debt and paid for his cell phone and Internet connection with credit cards that were nearly maxed out.

Opening the door to his apartment, he was met by his eighteen-month-old daughter.
Sweetheart
, he said in Arabic,
sweetheart
. I could hear the daughter’s playful voice, and I could hear him start to cry. I asked whether we should talk later.

“She is going to miss me if she grows up without her dad,” he replied. He began to sob again. The next day he had to submit himself to a system whose tortures and deprivations he had devoted his life to uncovering. He wasn’t sure he would even have that long, because the police could come at any moment if they realized he was talking to a reporter. He spoke as though to a confidant, even though we had never met.

“We have to make our lives meaningful. People die by the thousands every day without doing anything. We must make meaning.”

He paused.

“I am sorry for talking so much. I am very tired. I was beaten up two months ago.”

He said his wife had just arrived home.

“She does not know the news yet,” he whispered.

The youth of Saudi Arabia are children of oil. In 1973, the population was six and a half million, but the infusion of postembargo affluence helped fuel a demographic explosion. Baby boom followed baby boom, and the population is now about four times larger than it was thirty-five years ago. These Saudis would seem to have it made.

The latest boom was well under way when I visited the country in 2005. Riyadh’s skyline was, at that moment, a panorama of cranes and extraordinary new buildings, including the Kingdom Center, a thousand feet high and shaped, at its top, like a postmodern bottle opener. Nearby, the Al Faisaliah Center had been designed in the form of an elongated pyramid, with a sphere housing a restaurant at its apex. The government was planning to build entirely new cities and further alter Riyadh’s skyline with the $480 million Al Rajhi Tower, in the shape of a sail. The architectural brashness, mirrored in other countries and emirates of the then-booming Persian Gulf, made the vistas of Chicago, San Francisco and even New York seem tired and dull. And what was inside these buildings was remarkable, too. I visited the lobby of Al Faisaliah one morning and chatted with a real estate agent who was selling million-dollar vacation villas on man-made islands off Dubai whose collective shape resembled a palm tree. Sales were brisk as well-to-do Saudis, dressed in impeccable white
thawbs
, inspected a scale model of the fantasy islands. Actually, the islands were real—they were under construction, and the first ones wold be completed a year later—but the most striking architectural statement, when oil prices fell as the global economic crisis took hold in 2008, was the forest of immobile cranes throughout the Persian Gulf. The construction of skyscrapers and cities and fantasies had stopped cold.

The illusion of everlasting wealth was carried along (yet undermined) by the fact that foreigners held two-thirds of all Saudi jobs (and an even higher percentage of private-sector jobs). Bangladeshis and Sri
Lankans labored at construction sites, Egyptians and Sudanese populated service industries, Americans and Britons ran the oil industry and banks. It was possible to spend months in Riyadh without speaking to a Saudi. Drivers, waiters, shopkeepers, bankers, nurses and doctors were almost all foreigners. The man who was selling the villas in the lobby was not Saudi. This would seem a benefit of possessing the world’s largest oil reserves, because an army of foreigners can be paid to do your work. Saudi Arabia was one of the last nations on earth to outlaw slavery, in 1962, so it was accustomed to a subclass of workers.

But in fact Saudi Arabia, even in its boom days, had a severe economic problem. More than 30 percent of Saudi men were jobless, and they were not pleased, because few had a prince’s stipend. Of course, this seems odd. Why didn’t they just take the jobs that foreigners had? The answer was simple: most Saudis would rather be unemployed than accept low-paying, difficult work. And the good jobs—the ones in banking and other well-paying sectors—were out of reach for most Saudis because their education was insufficient. The elite sent their sons and daughters abroad for university and secondary school because the kingdom’s recently formed educational system—its oldest colleges date from the 1950s—produced third-rate graduates whose studies were controlled, until a few years ago, by religious leaders who continue to exert a significant amount of influence. Even in the region, Saudi graduates could not compete: Egypt produced better engineers; Lebanon churned out better bankers. The best Saudi geologists did not graduate from King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals but from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas. The government tried to force businesses to employ locally educated youths, but the program hasn’t gone well. An American who ran a midsized engineering firm in Dhahran told me of a Saudi he reluctantly hired for a white-collar job who had a habit of assigning his work to expatriate Asians in the office. Making the situation worse, the Saudi did not listen to advice or instructions from the better-skilled Asians. He was not just worthless but disruptive.

These sorts of problems help explain why the country didn’t have thriving industrial or technology sectors. The government had no
shortage of funds to invest in new industries but lacked an ingredient that successful economies like China, Germany and Chile tend to possess: educated and motivated workers. And, unfortunately, the industry Saudi Arabia did possess—oil extraction and refining—was a miserly one when it came to job creation. Outside Dhahran I visited the corporate and residential compound of Aramco, the state-owned firm where the pay and benefits were wonderful but only for the lucky few with jobs there—and many of them were foreigners.

The compound was located at the spot where, in the 1930s, Max Steineke and his team of geologists had pitched their tents to explore for oil in the empty desert. Several million people now lived in the region, and the “camp,” as it was still called, had the feel of a gated community. Its Rolling Hills Country Club had a golf course and a clubhouse serving burgers and salads. There was a bowling alley, duck ponds, baseball diamonds, parks with gazebos and grills, a horse stable called Hobby Farm, a skateboard park, a movie theater, tennis courts, a miniature golf course and miles of jogging paths. The streets had bucolic names like Prairie View and Eastern Avenue, and they were plied by yellow school buses and carefully driven SUVs that made full and complete stops. The ranch-style homes whispered “America” into your ear, as did the lawns and the kids on bicycles.

The white-collar residents of this enclave, who were a mixture of Saudis and expatriate Americans and Europeans, called themselves “Aramcons.” Their lives were apart from what lay beyond the gates. In the rest of Saudi Arabia, Islamic custom prevailed, overseen by the
muttawa
. Women in shorts did not jog on the streets in the rest of the country, where they wore body-and-head-covering abayas when not at home and were forbidden from socializing with men who were not their fathers, brothers or husbands. Movie theaters were banned outside Aramco’s gates, because reproducing the human image was still frowned upon (with the politically useful exception of the country’s monarchs, whose faces and names were everywhere). The camp had a high-tech hospital that was far better than all but a few medical centers in the entire country. (Even so, when first-rate treatment was required,
a private suite at the Mayo Clinic would be reserved for Prince X or Princess Y.)

My host was a Saudi employee of Aramco who was proud of the comfortable and enlightened life the company had created for its workers. After lunch in a camp restaurant that had the feel of an Ivy League faculty club, and that was staffed by Filipinos and Sri Lankans, we got into his car and drove toward Dhahran, a few miles away. There were no more lawns or even sidewalks along the roads, no women chatting with men or driving cars (the camp is one of the few places where women can drive in Saudi Arabia), no more of the quiet contentment that was the shared condition of Aramcons enjoying their well-paid jobs, excellent health care and competitive schools that prepared their children for modernity rather than joblessness or jihad. As I have said earlier, it is one of the oil industry’s structural tragedies that it requires few workers, so there was little room for Saudis at their own oil company. In a country of more than 20 million people, Aramco employed 50,000, and each year it hired just 500 new employees.

“We are rich, but rich in what?” my host asked, downcast, as he dropped me off. “It is oil. It is not factories.”

But there isn’t even enough oil.

It sounds ironic or impossible, but Saudi Arabia, which has far more oil than any other nation and tends to be regarded as an expanse of wall-to-wall multimillionaires, does not have enough oil to make everyone rich, even when prices are high.

The crucial thing is not how many barrels of oil a country sells every day, but how many it sells
per capita
. For example, Kuwait’s exports are one-fifth Saudi Arabia’s but Kuwait’s population is ten times smaller. On a daily basis, Kuwait produces more than a barrel a day of oil per person, whereas Saudi Arabia produces just about half a barrel. By this measure, Saudi Arabia is not even among the top five petrostates. The monarchies of Kuwait and Brunei can squander as much money as humanly possible—weddings can include almonds that are coated in gold flakes—and still there will be enough money for their nonroyal compatriots to live an easy life. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenues.
are sufficient to enable the royal family to build vast palaces for themselves and impressive highways for the masses, and to tax no one, and to offer education and health care subsidies, but insufficient to underwrite a consistent level of high comfort for all. In the early 1980s, per capita income reached $28,000, which ranked Saudis quite high in the world at the time, but it soon collapsed, along with oil prices, to one-quarter of what it had been—one of the most precipitous drops in national income in the twentieth century. It shot up again in the 2008 boom that pushed oil to nearly $150 a barrel, but then it dropped again as oil prices did. It was a roller coaster.

In a way, the grandness of the country’s infrastructure was akin to the boast of a con man. King Fahd International Airport encompassed some three hundred square miles (though most of it was unused desert), had its own desalination plant, a mosque for two thousand worshippers and greenhouses. It was the largest airport in the world by surface area and, in fact, was larger than the
country
of Bahrain. Yet KFIA’s main terminal was probably the emptiest airport in the world. A Saudi friend who met me there one day pointed out its wasted opulence as we walked through a vast air-conditioned garage that was all but devoid of cars. His laughter echoed off the walls, which had been built, like the rest of the multibillion-dollar airport, by Bechtel. These edifices reminded me of a complaint I’d heard from a dissatisfied prince in Riyadh who’d pushed for economic reforms that had not been adopted. “They are not nation building,” he’d said of his own family. “They are building buildings.” And when oil prices dropped in 2008, even the building of buildings came to a near halt.

Had oil done much good for the country? It might have been a strange question, but I tried it out on Bassim Alim, a lawyer in Jeddah who’d signed a controversial petition for greater openness in the kingdom and who was defending several colleagues thrown into jail for demanding more democracy. Alim wasn’t a critic of the liberal, whiskey-sipping variety. Educated at Harvard, he wanted Islam at the center of Saudi life. In his view, that didn’t mean the country had to deprive itself of political or economic pluralism.

We met at Casper & Gambini’s, a café with the feel of a Manhattan
restaurant, minus the alcohol. The decor was urban chic, with silver air ducts, polished wood, exposed brick and electronic music that emitted a sophisticated vibe. The place was filled with stylish young men and women. Because this was Saudi Arabia, where unmarried men and women are forbidden from mixing, the men sat downstairs and the women were upstairs, where there was a separate entrance. They could not see each other, but text messages of flirtation whizzed between them; occasionally there would be a round of laughs at a nearby table as one of the youths passed around his cell phone to show the latest missive he had sent or received.

“Oil has done nothing for this country that we couldn’t have done without oil,” Alim said. “I don’t believe that in this region there is a nation that received all this wealth and squandered and looted it the way it has been done in Saudi Arabia. Cairo has an underground transport system and fourteen different universities. Cairo is poor, it is struggling, but it has a well-developed media and academic structure. There are political parties, though Mubarak is an asshole. There are protests, and society is vibrant.”

Steak sandwiches were brought to our table by a Lebanese waiter. (Saudis would not take such jobs.) I was thinking to myself that if Egypt was enviable, something was badly amiss. Alim explained that his jailed colleagues had not gotten into trouble for signing a give-us-the-head-of-the-king document; their petition merely asked for greater popular participation in the affairs of government. The king had a Consultative Assembly, the Majlis, whose members were appointed and infrequently summoned. Token municipal elections had been held, but the winners had almost no power. The king decided how much money would be allotted to each ministry, and outsiders were not allowed to look into allegations of waste or abuse. “No one can dare ask the government for accountability,” Alim said. “Where is this money going?”