Abed Khazendar Al-Riyadh You may be surprised to know that we suffer from unemployment despite the availability of numerous government job openings. There are hectic efforts being carried out to fight joblessness at a time when the cost of living has skyrocketed. The Ministry of Civil Service announced that there were 155,764 vacant government jobs, representing 13 percent of the jobs approved in the general budget. I also read in a local newspaper that there were 40,000 vacancies in four government ministries. Nobody, except the Civil Service Ministry, has come up with convincing justifications for this. I do not believe the vacancies existed because of the lack of applicants. Therefore, the ministry itself should take part of the blame for not filling these vacancies. The ministry did not say that it had invited applications but no one had come for interviews. The other ministries also share part of the blame, especially those who have job vacancies. When a ministry has vacancies to fill, it should coordinate and consistently follow up the matter with the Civil Service Ministry. We as citizens should also follow up the case and write about it tirelessly. There is another issue, which is connected to the matter of job vacancies. This is the presence of foreigners in government jobs that could easily be taken up by Saudis. These jobs are not in the fields of medicine, engineering and other rare specialties. Why do we not nationalize these jobs? Or is the Ministry of Labor only concerned with jobs in the private sector while ignoring available government jobs? It is the duty of the Labor Ministry to nationalize the government jobs as well.
