The end of the school year for summer holidays is a time when the excitement of travelling home to be pampered by grandparents and relatives is mixed with the bittersweet parting between friends for three long months. This year, there is a new emotional burden that families are struggling with as many are leaving, not just for the holidays but for good.
Quietly lives are being dismantled, as one or both spouses are being pink-slipped or asked to take reduced pay which means maintaining families in Bahrain is difficult. The celebrated quality of life that we enjoy in the kingdom is increasingly becoming hit by inflation. How many of us have done a double-take over our electricity and water bills recently?
The nay-sayers will immediately point to the admission records in schools, especially community schools, and tell us that admissions have not dropped, so obviously families are not leaving Bahrain, let’s not panic. But then, the largest school – Indian School Bahrain (ISB), which, as a policy does not turn away any child – said recently that nearly 3,500 students have defaulted in fee payment due to parents losing jobs and salary crises.
The ISB’s roll call is always held up as a signal that things are not that bad because every year, the numbers stay the same or increase slightly. However, this is really due to parents transferring their children to ISB from other schools since the fees here are underpinned by the school’s community commitment and kept at the lowest possible level.
Look around you. High Street Bahrain has so many shutters with the legend ‘Closing Sale’ and business premises for rent. In many companies, salaries are being held back for months and staff being asked to go on leave. These are signals of the slowdown that Bahrain is going through and it is high time that we all acknowledged it and girded ourselves for the challenge. It needs to be talked about, discussed at the highest levels of our chamber of commerce and we need strategies to tide over the low tide in our narrative of progress.
Instead, what we are doing is, speaking in whispers in living rooms and majlises about the slump while applauding official data that announces non-oil economy expansion of 5 per cent in 2017 (up from 4pc in 2016), a stupendous 161pc increase in FDI and a 9.5pc increase in hotels and restaurant sector expansion. All these figures are statistically correct and the date is founded on sound research. But again, how do you explain the ground reality that many a hotel staff is seeing delays in their salaries and lay-offs because of a glut in rooms (which is natural because you build hotels with an eye to future planning and a short-term glut is inevitable)?
We take any critique of the economy personally instead of analysing it coolly and logically. Talking about bottlenecks and increase in doing business is not unpatriotic. It is a way of building for the future. Bahrain has so many good things going for it. The kingdom’s undeniable quality of life, its accessibility, governmental transparency and speed of setting up business, the manageable size for market testing, reaching bigger markets nearby and many more. We need to play up these features without losing sight of flaws that need fixing.
One thing that we need to remember is that this is a cyclical situation and shall change and climb higher – what we need is the vision to see the light at the end and the imagination to think our way through this moment.