OMAN: Sultan Haitham should be well prepared to address fiscal challenges

GULF COUNTRIES - In Brief 11 Jan 2020 by Justin Alexander

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Oman's bizarre and untested succession system, set up by Qaboos to reduce the risk of rivals (after he’d deposed his father), was supposed to involve three days of deliberation by the Royal Family Council, during the period of official mourning, and only if they could not agree would two letters written by Qaboos be opened to reveal his suggestion. Our assumption was that this would not be required and the Council, which has had at least a month of warning that the succession was finally imminent, would select a candidate, most likely Qaboos’s cousin and the deputy prime minister, Asad bin Tariq al-Said. Instead, the letters were opened almost immediately, in front of TV cameras (video) and Asad’s brother Haitham was publicly revealed (in both of them!) as Qaboos’s nominee. He was sworn in as sultan, before attending Qaboos’s funeral in Muscat’s Grand Mosque.The selection of Haitham is not in itself a surprise and, as we noted in our brief last night, he was a leading candidate. If we’d been betting we would probably have given him about odds of about 4:1 (20%), versus 3:2 (40%) for Asad. He had clearly been a candidate for decades and was widely seen as the leading candidate between about 2010-16, after older relatives ceased to be viable options and before Asad was also appointed to the cabinet, in a more senior role as deputy prime minister. It is unknown when Qaboos last updated his letters, first drafted in the 1990s, and there was always a risk that he might die suddenly with an out-of-date recommendation sitting in the envelopes. However, he had ample warning and was thought to have sufficient functioning in his final weeks to address this issue (indeed one of t...