Kuwaiti official offends foreign residents with 'eating for free' gaff

A Kuwaiti interior ministry official has offended foreign residents of the Gulf state after blaming them for the rise of the country's debts and claiming that they live and "eat for free".

“We are flooded in debts,” said Major General Mazen Jarrah al-Sabbah, the undersecretary for the interior ministry’s naturalisation and passport branch, while "foreigners go to wedding parties to eat for free," he added.

The comments were made in an interview on the Sarmad Network channel, where the two interviewers professed an agreeable tone with Sabbah’s words.

Kuwait is home to an estimated 3.2 million foreigners alongside 1.3 million native Kuwaitis. Most of the foreigners are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Syria.

According to the Kuwaiti Residence Visa Information website, residency permits cost 10 Kuwaiti dinars (21 UK pounds or 33 US dollars) per year.

Sabbah’s comments elicited outrage from some of the foreign residents on social media, who pointed out that contrary to living without paying for anything, the country’s economy depends on the income garnered from residency permits, rental housing prices, and health insurance.

Saeed El Haj, a Palestinian living in Kuwait, calculated that regarding the annual fee that foreigners must pay for health insurance, the total revenue would amount to 160,000,000 Kuwaiti dinars (over 340,000,000 UK pounds, or half a billion US dollars) every year.

This was in response to Sabbah’s statement that foreign residents freely enjoy Kuwait’s health benefits after only paying the required annual fee for health insurance.

“This is very costly for the country,” he told Sarmad Network. “Kuwait is bleeding [spending] at the expense of the local residents. Let the foreigners pay for something.”

Kuwait has been criticised by human rights group for deporting foreign residents without trial.

Thousands of foreigners are deported every year for a variety of offences, ranging from brawling to traffic violations to failing to renew residency permits.