Modibbo Kawu
Tuesday, November 4th, 2025. On this our last day in Jeddah, the Red Sea Saudi Arabian costal city, I decided to get a hair cut from the Brazilian barbing outfit adjacent to our Ibis Hotel, in the central business district of this sprawling city. My barber was a young man called David. As is my wont, I engaged him in a general discussion. David told me that he arrived in Saudi Arabia over a year ago. He was born in one of the Favellas of Sao Paulo. It took 16 flying hours to arrive in Jeddah, and, surprisingly, David confirmed that it was within the past year that he learned to speak the English language that he spoke quite competently.
The presence of this barbing salon is a further nod to the general opening to external influences that’s become the hallmark of life here in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah is the country’s second biggest city, after Riyadh, the capital. It has a population of over three million people. Jeddah is a sprawling and very affluent city, by all measures. Its streets are neatly well laid out, and the central business district resembles that of any of the other prosperous cities of the Arab Gulf region.
The shops of the main avenues carry the logos of the main international brands. Shopping seems to be very big here, and a consumerist culture is very much part of the ways that the ruling family has earned legitimacy. That goes with the incredible investments in high-end infrastructure. Oil money has been put into the pockets of people as much as it has been used to earn and shore up the consent of the people, with expansive welfare facilities.
Yesterday, I was fasting, as I normally do every Monday. We decided to have dinner outside of the hotel. It was cool and gently breezy at night, so the ambience was certainly very conducive to such an outing. The restaurant that we selected was also an international brand, and the food was as international as they came. The country has truly embraced an openness that has increasingly become central to daily life. Here in Jeddah, just as we also found out in Madinah and Makkah, there is a considerable number of women behind the wheels of vehicles on the streets of the three cities. That’s in sharp contrast to the situation in the past.
The malls in Madinah and Jeddah have clothing outlets displaying cuts of clothes that appear very Western in every sense. These could fit into malls in Milan, London, or Paris. Several young women, the Gen Z type, have now entered the workforce. They’re properly attired as Muslim ladies without exception, and they’re obviously quite educated and seem quite happy to be earning livelihoods outside of their homes. They appeared to be curious about the world, with almost each one of them clutching an iPhone. They asked questions, too!
I think Muhammed Bin Salman, MbS’ opening up of the country meant that the gene has completely escaped from the bottle. The younger people have tastes, ambitions, and worldwide connecting mindsets, like young people everywhere, in this age of rampaging neoliberal capitalism. It was going to be difficult to have kept them locked within very conservative frames for long.
The 2011 Revolts which started in Tunisia, and was to sweep through the Arab world shocked the oil Sheikhdoms of the Gulf to the realisation of the need to move in the new direction of opening up, and loosening the vice-like ideological grip that the conservative Wahabiite clerical community held on social life, since the foundation of the country. The Saudi population has also become very young, with a median age of 29.6 years, and it is quite educated.
Saudi Arabia is an important node in the geopolitical strategy of United States Imperialism in East Asia. MbS envisages the survival of the monarchy as tied directly to Westernised modernisation, which aligns closely with American interest. There are also strong pressures to be part of the so-called Abraham Accords to normalise relations with Zionist Israel.
It is not popular with the Arab streets because for the overwhelming majority of Arabs, the plight of the Palestinian people remains a central political, social, and emotive issue. This is especially so, in the past three years of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, Palestine. It is instructive that MbS told an interviewer in the midst of the ongoing Gaza genocide that he doesn’t care about Palestine, but his people do!
I am actually on a visit to Saudi Arabia for the lesser Hajj, the Umrah. It is also my first trip out of Nigeria in seven years! The last time I travelled out was in October 2018 to Rabat in Morocco. It was, in fact, at Rabat, that I first read the press statement by the ICPC, which alleged “monumental fraud” at the NBC, because funds were paid (properly and legitimately) to Pinnacle Communications Limited, within the context of Digital Switch Over (DSO) contracts. I returned home to address a press conference to put the records straight that there was no “monumental fraud.” Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was actually arriving at the commencement of a highly orchestrated, multi-pronged effort, to tarnish our names, and to put us through media and court trials, each designed for the single purpose of removing me as DG of the NBC.
For the six years of trial, because my passport had been seized by the authorities, I was very much a non-member of the world community, cut off as I was, from one of the great pleasures of my life; the educational and recreational experiences of travel! When I arrived at the Abuja airport for this trip, I honestly felt very much like fish out of water after a seven-year hiatus. But the fact that I could finally resume international travel, just as much as being discharged and acquitted in court, are truly important victories against the forces of evil that conspired against us.
Over these fourteen days, we have been in Madinah and Makkah for the spiritual exercises of the Umrah. Jeddah is a stop off point on the way back home. Madinah had a calming and welcoming ambience. It was indeed a tremendous privilege to be able to pray in the Prophet’s Mosque over the six days that we were in the city. Just as we were able to promenade the streets of the city, including visits to historical sites and mosques, associated with the life and times of the Noble Prophet Muhammad (SAW). On the evening that we arrived in Makkah, I met a Ugandan pilgrim at the hotel lobby who validated my feelings about Madinah. Madinah, he asserted, very much calmed him down!
Makkah had a slightly different effect on the individual. It was, after all, the heart of the main religious and spiritual exercises of the Umrah. At the centre of it all was the Kabbah. After the Isha’a prayers, we set out to join hundreds of other pilgrims from all over the world, to circumambulate the Kabbah with each person locked in prayers and the crowd jostling, shoving, pushing, and many attempting to touch the black cloth draped around the sacred location. Some seemed to become rather overwhelmed by the experience, and these were expressed in very loud and frenzied shouts. Yet, with each promenade around the Holy site, there were accompanying prayers and recitals.
We went round the Kabbah the first, second, third, until the seventh time. By this point, I was drenched in my sweat, but I felt that spiritual satisfaction of having completed the process. We accompanied that with praying two rakaas before moving with the multitude to the point of embarkation for the next spiritual endeavour.
That next ritual was the Safa and Marwa promenade which was in homage to Hagar (wife of Prophet Ibrahim, AS) running between the two hills seven times in search of water for her infant son, Isma’il. When her very difficult search failed, there was the burst of the blessed Zamzam water by the infant son’s feet. That heroic run in desperate search for water was what we all simulated. At several points along the walk and trot, there were Zamzam stations to assuage our thirst with the sacred water.
The expansive area around the Kabbah is permanent work-in-progress as there were workmen carrying out ongoing construction, maintenance, and redevelopment. It is not for nothing that the Saudi ruler is also officially the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” meaning the Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, and the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah.
An internet search noted that the entire Grand Mosque and its facilities consume a peak load of electricity, approximately 118 MVA (Megavolt Amperes), which is roughly equivalent to 118 megawatts (MW).
The power is not generated at the Kaaba itself but supplied through a large, robust network that includes:
Four main stations.
13 substations.
Eight backup generators with a capacity of 32 MVA in total.
Furthermore, this extensive infrastructure ensures an uninterrupted power supply for the mosque’s vast needs, including massive air conditioning systems (155,000 tons capacity), over 120,000 lighting units, 8,000 speakers, 8,000 surveillance cameras, and 519 escalators, especially during peak times like the Hajj and Ramadan when millions of worshippers are present. The power infrastructure has maintained uninterrupted service for over 40 years without needing to use external backup stations.
It is very impressive statistics just as the remarkable construction of underpasses in Makkah, Madina, and Jeddah, in response to the growing transportation needs of these cities. The government has also put in place an ambitious railway development structure, which has cut travel time between Madinah and Makkah to just two hours! The bus that we chartered did the road trip in over four hours. As we drove into Jeddah, I saw electric-powered trains crossing each other within the city.
There’s no gainsaying the fact that even Saudi Arabia has several lessons to teach us as a country and especially, our ruling elite. From investments in
electricity that was truly delivered to serve people, to other areas of infrastructure, through to provisioning for the people’s welfare, there seemed to be more responsible indicators in Saudi Arabia. The devotion to service of their country is at the heart of legitimacy for ruling classes.
That is precisely what is missing in our country. We are saddled with a ruling elite that doesn’t have basic ethos of service nor even patriotism to the country. They have captured the state to serve narrow personal desires. It is the antithesis of progress for leaders to manipulate sinecures to enrich themselves, their family, and a mafia-like group of hangers-on. Unfortunately, that has been the tragic experience in Nigeria.
The last few days have been dominated by news of the allegations of a genocide against Christians in Nigeria and the threats issued by President Donald Trump. The Nigerian ruling class grovels like slaves especially to United States Imperialism. That is why there’s been a flurry of reactive activities in response to the threats issued from Washington. Suffice it to say that we face multiple problems that demand a much more patriotic set of solutions than the surface scratching approach that has often been deployed by the Nigerian state. In a globalised world, there can be no hiding place for choices that rulers make, negative or positive.
When the African peasantry in their wisdom, say that our rice can only cook inside our pot, they teach fundamental lessons of dedication to and respect for the needs of our people as the most elevated endeavours of leadership, than the desperate, often fleeting and vacuous gestures of endorsements by individuals and institutions from abroad. Those who endorse leaders from abroad are only true to their own interests and agendas, never our own.
I am concluding the last few lines of this piece as we transit through the Istanbul Airport in Turkey. That tells its own tale for another time. It has been very fulfilling to earn two weeks away from home. But home is where the music is and the rhythm of existence sends very loud sounds of call to duty to fatherland that we cannot resist nor escape. Warts and all, it’s always good to return home.
Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, Ph.D.; FNGE.
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia/ Istanbul, Turkey.
Tuesday, 4th & Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.
