DOHA: Some members of the Public representative body, the Central Municipal Council (CMC), have lambasted the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning and said it was delaying building affordable marriage halls for nationals.
Soaring costs of weddings, which high-rent marriage halls are a major contributor to, are responsible for delayed marriages of Qatari men, CMC members said. The CMC had earlier recommended that the state must chip in and construct low-rent wedding halls to help citizens cut marriage costs. The halls were to be built in different parts of the country.
The Social Rehabilitation Center (SRC) was assigned to implement the marriage halls project in collaboration with the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning. All legal procedures to launch the project had been completed but a CMC member said that some municipalities have not so far allotted plots of land on which marriage halls are to come up.
Mohammad Faisal Al Shahwani told local Arabic daily Al Raya that the marriage hall project would come in handy for Qatari youth, especially from low-income categories, who, after employment, wait for up to five years so they could save enough to spend on marriage. “They marry late as a result,” Al Shahwani said.
Escalating costs of marriage and huge dower (up to a million riyals in many cases) a groom must give away to his bride are the main reasons why Qatari youth prefer to get married to foreign women.
Hamad Lehdan Al Mohannadi, another CMC member, said that the worrisomely rising rate of divorce in the Qatari community could be largely attributed to bank loans a man takes to spend on his marriage.
The loan becomes a vicious trap and a newly married man must forego a major portion of his monthly salary to repay it with the result that he doesn’t have enough to spend at home. “This creates problems and hurts the marriage. It, many a time, leads to divorce,” Al Mohannadi said.
Citizens who say they are above 30 and have not yet been able to get married point out they wonder why there are such huge differences between the rents of marriage halls in Qatar and those in other GCC countries. “The differences are enormous,” a citizen who gave his name as Abdulaziz Al Shammari, said.
During the wedding season the rents of marriage halls go up to QR500,000 in Qatar whereas the rate is quite low at between equivalents of QR7,000 and QR12,000 in neighbouring countries. A banquet for 500 people can cost up to QR250,000 in some marriage halls in Qatar, said another citizen.
A Qatari woman said people in the community mostly spend a lot on marriage for show-off. “Public awareness campaigns should be waged to discourage people from competing with one another just for show-off,” the woman who gave her name as Nada said during a group discussion hosted by Al Raya.
The Peninsula
