KUWAIT:  The interior ministry has made a number of recommendations to the demography adjustment committee comprising of elements from the interior ministry, ministry of social affairs and labor and the manpower authority to prevent any manipulation, said security sources. The sources explained that the highlight of the recommendation was to ban transferring the residency visas of expats terminated from government positions to work for the private sector, which impedes the policy of replacement and adjusting demographic imbalances and opens the door wide to visa trafficking.

MoI also recommended reviewing the actual needs of expats, which leads to recruiting numerous marginal laborers of a certain nationality. Accordingly, MoI suggested imposing quotas per nationality, using timed contracts for government projects and hiring only those with enough experience and training in order to prevent visa trafficking.

In a similar move, the Civil Service Commission recently asked the education ministry to terminate the contracts of 1,186 non-Kuwaiti employees by the end of this year, said informed sources, explaining that the employees to be terminated include 312 teachers, 223 social and psychiatric researchers and 604 office boys.

The sources added that the education ministry had received a letter in this regard from CSC including the contracts to be terminated prior to setting the ministry's 2019-2020 budget. "If the ministry does not respond within a fortnight, the finance ministry will be contacted to take the needed measures to terminate the contracts and deduct their funding from the 2019-2020 budget," the sources explained.

By B Izzak and A Saleh