I am not certain that Etheridge is on the mark here when she claims that there is economic soundness to cartels. The fact that the women's franchise was delayed in Kuwait over three decades had to do with the fact that Kuwaiti women were not allowed to have a political voice when the first parliament was formed in Kuwait in the 1960s. In other words, males took over as in the word monopoly.
Lack of women's voices in politics in Kuwait (and in some other Gulf states) and disgust at the isolated elite class had led thousands of Kuwaitis to flee the country to live abroad over the decades. Moreover, health care, health services, and other societal areas have been far-to-long adversely affected because women were not able to push for reform and better care for all.Let's take health care as an example. It is traditional in Kuwait for women to run the households in Kuwait. Thus, women are more likely to take care of the sick and elderly-or at least oversee someone else taking over such care at a small fee. Such women would have certainly demanded more quality than has been provided by hthe Kuwait health care system-a system that is regularly ridiculed almost by one-and-all. This mismanagement of health care and treatment of patients is not only true in Kuwait, but neighboring Saudi Arabia with a much larger national population has an even worse reputation for providing health care.
Compare that to the reputation of pre-1990 Iraq where the political-economic system had developed much differently than in neighboring lands. Iraq had the greatest number of doctors, good hospitals, and specialists in the Arab Gulf region for decades. This fact was not just the result of having a larger population, but because Iraq had the best educational system in the region.
Education in all the Gulf states, except Iraq and Iran, has always been well-behind the curve of other Arab lands in the Middle East. This was certainly partially due to the pre-oil era poverty and isolation of these states. However, it was also the result of a political economic system which favored elites over the vast majority of peoples.
This is why the majority of the grandparents of my former students in private university in Kuwait had not learned either to read or write.
Even in the 1960s, after the country of Kuwait had taken control of its destiny-as Saudi Arabia had done decades earlier-, Kuwait chose to use a communist model of development that relied on state largess and jobs over personal initiative. That is why the Kuwait leadership failed to permit real competition in its university system in the 1960s, and then waited for 4 decades to allow a single private university to be founded in the land. The only alternative for decades was for citizens to go abroad and find better education than the government of Kuwait afforded them at Kuwait University, now with a campus of over 30,000.
This 4-decade leg in developing competitive private university alternatives to the state-run higher educational programs will continue to hurt the nation for decades. It also puts a lot of pressure on the newer universities to follow the bribe or favor-for-the-well-connected ridden traditions of the much older private education institutions and public schools in Kuwait. In short, due to decades of having an under-educated citizenry, Kuwait has expected too little in terms of standards of many of its youths and the educational institutions that form working adults in society.
Although more than 5 new private universities have opened in Kuwait in the last seven years-when the new university law went into effect-, none of these universities has been able to develop into an institution which in any ways mirrors western or global standards in higher education. The Kuwait elitist oriented society as it currently functions is fully dependent on family and tribal connections to get good jobs for its youth. Therefore, family and friends do not support good study habits. That is, families and friends don't support high levels of academic focus from its young people or young friends. Unlike in other developing nations and advanced nations around the globe friends and family demand students focus on family time and on honing tribal or future relationships over undertaking serious university studies.
My own experience in Kuwait leads me to believe that nearly anywhere in Kuwait family, friends, and the building of connections encompasses 50% to 90% of the student's out-of-class time (including the time that they should be sleeping or resting). How could anyone be a serious university student if he only budgeted 10 % or less of his time each week to coursework?
Further, the foundations of such new private educational institutions and universities have been hindered by the cartel-like system which one might call "the nation of Kuwait", whereby the same leaders who sit in the ministry of education or work at Kuwait university end up leading the new private universities.
Hence, the system fails to train good leaders who could hope to change if Kuwait needs to change quickly-such as when oil demand drops abruptly as has occurred more than once in the state's short history. Meanwhile, the need for leadership is obviously there. Kuwaitis of all ages are constantly asking for good leadership and complaining about the lack of leadership. In short, the entire system is unsound in its development of leaders who can take the country out of a cycle of corruption and bad management at any speed that is reasonable and helps the greatest variety of people.
Worse still, besides failing to develop good leadership, Kuwait and other Gulf States often create a nation of workers who feel alienated and misused. This is not sound and surely leads to growing demands and outlets for anger, such as alcohol, drugs, and suicidal tendencies when driving one's car. (Kuwait is considered the second most dangerous country in the world to drive in. Sadly, Kuwaitis and other ex-pats tell me that driving in Saudi Arabia is even worse.)
In a way, some of what I have observed in Kuwait over the past four years has struck me as similar to what I observed in Japan when I worked there in the 1990s-as well as to the USA I have grown up or lived in over four decades. For example, in Japan inefficiencies were excessively high at Japanese universities and in their educational systems in general, too. Many Japanese were alienated and suicide was high. (In the USA, suicide is also high among all age groups compared to other nations around the globe.) Moreover, many Japanese felt like they were being trained to sit in offices and just look out their windows all their life-rather than being asked to dig-in, show strong drive, and creativity. Similarly, America of the 1980s and 1990s attempted to copy parts of the Japanese Inc. model of running companies. For example, the Japanese emphasis on outsourcing became a major theme of doing business in the USA and in companies it dealt with throughout the world.
All the Gulf Arab oil states offer similar outlooks for youth and young adults entering the working world. In Kuwait, I recently taught a student who said that she had been trained at Kuwait University to be a petroleum engineer. After graduating four years ago from that university, she said that she was soon given a job in the oil ministry where she did basically nothing for three years.
The young Kuwaiti engineer continued. She would go to here office at the ministry in the morning. She had a computer and worked at it-playing games, surfing the internet, and occasionally typing something up that was, indeed, related to work. However, most of the time there was nothing at all to do there-except to sit around talking to here colleagues.
This young mother of two told me, "I was bored to death." She applied three straight years to be accepted at a government-run oil firm instead. Finally, she was accepted, but instead of placing the woman in a job immediately where she could use her engineering skills, she was initially sent to work in data processing. (I believe she has now been transferred to a more amicable job.)
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