Al-Watan

Unemployment is the most dangerous problem our country faces. It is one of the greatest challenges that countries face around the world. Officials want to drive down the unemployment rate to nine percent by 2020. This means that today’s unemployment rate is over nine percent.

Most young men who are unemployed do not have sources of income; their parents give them money and some of these families receive government welfare each month. There are also other unemployed young men who hate to be without work and are ready to do anything to get themselves out of their misery.

In 2016, there were 177,000 young men who were searching for jobs compared to over 700,000 young women. We always talk about replacing expatriate workers with Saudis, but this is not the solution. This is because we have around 10 million expatriate workers who get paid less than SR3,000 a month and around one million who get paid more than SR3,000. If we decided today to replace the one million expatriate workers who earn a decent monthly salary with Saudis, what would we do with the other unemployed Saudis whose number is on the increase annually? Terminating the contracts of the 10 million expatriate workers and replacing them with Saudis is not the solution.

The best and most effective solution for unemployment is to create more job opportunities. The private sector in our country enjoys a lot of privileges in addition to government support but it has not played a sufficient role in solving the Kingdom’s unemployment problem. We need to focus more on the private sector and think about how more jobs can be created. This sector has a lot of potential and could play a vital role in reducing unemployment.