Okaz BEFORE we had a ministry for housing, the low-income citizen had a good chance of obtaining a home. He would take a land offered as a grant by the municipality and then wait in line at the Real Estate Development Fund (REDF) to obtain a loan to build the house that would accommodate him and his family. If the citizen died during the long waiting, his inheritors would be exempted from paying the rest of the loan installments. If he lived and paid his loan installments, he would be exempted from paying the last two installments. True, the journey might be protracted because of the long list of applicants at the municipality to obtain the land grant or at the REDF for the loan. Though the journey to build a house might be long but still it was possible. All of a sudden a housing ministry surfaced. We welcomed its establishment believing it would cut short the long journey we have to cross so as to build a house. We believed that the new ministry would build housing units that would mitigate the pressure on both the municipality and the fund. The ministry came up with various offers including what it called "housing products". It gave the citizens the option to either be given a land and a construction loan, a land alone without a loan to finance the construction, a loan to build his house on his own private land or a ready-made housing unit. Accordingly, the distribution of the land grants was withdrawn from the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and given to the Housing Ministry. The REDF became an integral part of the new ministry. Of course you all know what happened after that. Nothing was realized of the ministry's projects in any region. Not a single housing unit was distributed anywhere. Since the ministry took over, I have not heard of any land grant given to any citizen even in the deserts of the Empty Quarter. If you know of any citizen who has received a land grant from the ministry anywhere in the Kingdom, please tell me about him or her to take a selfie with them. Today the ministry came up with a new fabulous invention called the "expedited or the urgent loan" in agreement with a number of commercial banks. The nutshell summary of this invention is that the REDF will no longer give the loans of SR500,000 as it used to do in the past. Instead, the citizen should go to a commercial bank, obtain the loan and pay the interests. The legitimate question here: if I can obtain the loan from a bank and purchase the land from the proprietors, what is the use of the Housing Ministry? Why has it been established in the first place? Is it a ministry or a salesman who will mediate between the banks and the landowners? Will the ministry receive a commission for its efforts with the banks to extend the loans or will it be doing this for the sake of God alone? I wished so much that we never had anything called the Housing Ministry. We were better off without it. Waiting a long time to obtain a land grant from the municipality and a loan from the REDF was much better than waiting for the ministry to give us a piece of land, a loan or the two together. I wished so much that we had never known the ministry or its "housing products".
