AMIDST the coronavirus pandemic, numerous products have gained astonishing popularity: ranging from hand sanitisers to a surge in toilet rolls panic-buying in Australia. However, what caught the attention of the world, was the image of a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, wearing a mask, and holding a ‘hand sanitiser’ box attached around him.

This ‘human’ hand sanitiser dispenser sparked outrage on Twitterati, with many accusing the oil-rich kingdom’s company of ‘repackaging slavery’ and called the act a ‘dehumanisation of developing world’s migrant workers’. The detractors accused Aramco of being racist and class-conscious.

That being said, while I realise that on many occasions, Saudi Arabia has not been the most diplomatically pious: however, on this instance, it was merely offering a service. The global media, in general, has a way of attributing all things bizarre to the oil-rich kingdom, so as to malign its image. All other channels follow suit: they amplify and propagate the slander by jumping on the bandwagon.

The facts are: the worker is voluntarily employed, not forced. Similarly, Safeguard Pakistan held a similar initiative in Karachi Eat a couple of years ago: their workers were providing handwash and water sprinklers to festival-goers to wash their hands. Why was that regarded as normal, and this regarded as an abomination of human values? Simply put, why the hypocrisy when reporting about Saudi Arabia?

There might be multitudinous problems with how Saudi Arabia governs itself, but hand sanitiser isn’t one of them. Also, due to the frenzy, the sanitiser man is now stopped from doing so: he is now probably unemployed, and the one little initiative undertaken to combat the coronavirus is now cancelled. Much ado about nothing!

Muhammad Abdullah Qureshi
Karachi

Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2020