Before 1996, Qatar was a barren desert of 320,000 people, many of whom are normadic.
Yesterday, they casually spent $96Billion on Boeing Jets for Qatar airways, the largest purchase in history.
Their $450B fund owns more of London than the British Royal Family!
How the Qatari desert rulers engineered the silent takeover of the West:
The journey started with a “disappointing” discovery of natural gas and not crude oil, which is what they were looking for.
In 1971, Qatar and Shell found something beneath the Persian Gulf they thought was worthless. Not oil, which they wanted. It was just natural gas. But this disappointing find would change everything in later years.
They had stumbled upon the North Field, the largest natural gas reservoir ever discovered. This field contains about 10% of global gas reserves.
Qatar couldn’t do much with the natural gas yet. The technology to export gas profitably didn’t exist as of then. This humongous lucrative discovery sat untapped for decades.
Then in 1995, everything changed. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani overthrew his father in a bloodless coup. The new leader saw potential in that untapped natural gas field. He invested a whopping $20Billion on liquefied natural gas when experts called it a foolish decision.
The gamble paid off immediately and spectacularly. By 2006, Qatar became the world’s largest LNG exporter.
Their GDP per capita soared from $2,755 in 1990 to over $50,000 by 2020. Billions of dollars flooded into the tiny nation monthly.
What they did with that money was remarkable: Qatar deployed cash strategically worldwide. They created the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) in 2005, one of the most aggressive sovereign funds ever.
Their London shopping spree was unprecedented. It included the following prime assets:
* Bought Harrods for $2Billion.
* Acquired stake in Canary Wharf.
* Built The Shard—Western Europe’s tallest building.
* Bought 20% of Heathrow Airport.
* Acquired Chelsea Barracks.
But they didn’t stop in London:
Qatar purchased Paris Saint-Germain and made it a global powerhouse.
They acquired a 10.5% stake in Volkswagen Group.
They built Qatar Airways into one of the world’s top airlines.
All from a country smaller than Anambra state of Nigeria.
Their most brilliant move? Creating Al Jazeera in 1996. With a $137Millio grant, it revolutionized Arabic media and expanded globally. This single investment gave Qatar unprecedented soft power across the Middle East and the rest of the world.
Qatar’s transformation required massive labor. The solution? Import millions of workers from South Asia. Today, 88% of Qatar’s 2.8Million residents are foreign workers without citizenship.
The nation performs a dangerous balancing act. They host America’s largest Mideast military base, while maintaining ties with Iran.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia blockaded Qatar for 3.5 years, accusing them of supporting terrorism. Qatar survived by reshaping supply chains. Their natural gas gamble keeps paying off. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Europeans desperate for non-Russian gas turned to Qatar.
In 2019, Qatar launched a $30B North Field expansion to increase LNG exports by 64% by 2026. It was a perfect timing.
This unlikely power broker shows how wealth transforms global influence. With just 320,000 citizens, Qatar wields power on par with nations 100x its size.
Money, deployed strategically, creates influence that transcends limitations.
What about Nigeria the white elephant and so called “giant” of Africa?
Culled from Abdooll Khamees Facebook page.