(Voice of Paul) – When Qatar was announced as the official host country of the FIFA World Cup in 2022, a lot of grumblings swirled up on the internet with the usual image damaging philosophy of Arabs, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait for their so-called terrorism sponsorship and male-dominant patriarchal societal form of governance.
In some instances, people from the Western hemisphere considered travelling to this country to watch football as dangerous and unsafe, because the country has been labelled unsafe and as a human right violator – hyped by the usual Western media propagandist news channels such as BBC and CNN. However, to everyone’s surprise, Qatar 2022 was crowned as the best hosting event by FIFA since its inception.
I remember at one of the conferences by the regional leaders of the Arab leaders, Prince MBS mentioned that Saudi Arabia would soon become the new Europe. For a lot of people from the global south, Europe and North America are considered as a stable society with functional societal systems and what the Prince meant in comparison was that the same would be for the Gulf States.
Fast forward to November 2023, Dubai, one of the most industrialized cities in the World in the United Arab Emirates, hosted Miss Universe event – a dramatic change in perception of what can happen in an Arab country.
In October of 2023, Saudi Arabia hosted one of the most streamed sporting events – the fight between Francis Ngannou and Tyson Fury. Entertainment industry giants like Kanye West, Mike Tyson, and Cristiano Ronaldo were there, and guess what happened, they all loved the country with no recorded event of knife stabbing, kidnapping, or gunshots, as these things mostly happen in the West lately.
What these key global sporting events indicate is a redemption of the image of the Arab world – a turning point for the so-called unsafe and uninhabitable place titles that Western media have given them.
This March, Saudi Arabia has hosted again, another boxing fight between Anthony Joshua and Francis Nnganou with hundreds of millions of people watching globally. Apart from these global sporting events, European players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Sadio Mane, Benzinma, and others have moved to Saudi Arabian clubs to play there. Additionally, MBS is continuing to construct – an ambitious single structure to house millions of people with state-of-the-art facilities and amenities. As these are going on, MBS is gradually achieving its goal of transforming the whole of the caliphate into a European-style society.
The saddest part is that while leaders worldwide are investing massively in technology and infrastructure, most African countries are not self-sufficient in food security. Political officeholders in Nigeria and Africa at large need to wake up from their incompetence coma and get the continent on its economic feet.