Citizens have questioned the credibility of Jeddah Municipality, which has won 18 Arab and international IT awards but failed to repair its central computer system for nearly a month, affecting thousands of business and personal activities of individuals and firms and undermining its reputation. "My application to get a building construction license is held up at the engineering firm, which has failed to process the application electronically due to municipality's system breakdown," said Musfer Mohammed. "Whenever I visit the engineering firm, they said the computer system of the municipality is still out of order and nobody can tell me when the system will be repaired," he told Al-Madina Arabic daily. Fouad Al-Ghamdi said he was unable to inform the municipality the growing number of mosquitoes in Samir district due to the system breakdown. "I tried to call the municipality on 940 to inform it of the problem but the system is not working." "Where is the municipality's IT department, which has won several international awards and what is the reason for its failure to fix the problem at the central computer system during the past 25 days," he asked. Jeddah Municipal Council and the IT Department were not ready to respond to questions related to the breakdown. Abdul Majeed Al-Batati, chairman of the council and his deputy Dr. Adnan Al-Bar did not respond to Al-Madina's queries while Dr. Arwa Al-Aama, assistant to mayor for technical affairs, also kept mum on the issue. Asked when the system would return to normal and how they are going to deal with individuals and firms whose applications could not be processed during the past month, Al-Aama said: "Contact the information center, which is responsible for talking to the media." The system breakdown has affected the issuance of licenses for construction work and building permits for shops. The municipality normally issues about 7,500 such licenses each month, in addition to permissions for digging works issued to contracting companies as well as for telecom and electricity companies. "We received applications for at least 5,500 construction licenses and since the system broke down 25 days ago we were unable to process more than 4,000 such applications," an informed source at the municipality told Al-Madina. "We were supposed to receive about 900 construction designs from engineering firms during this breakdown period," said the source who requested anonymity. The breakdown affected renewal of licenses to be issued to shops as well as work of the municipality's service centers across the city. However, another official said some departments of the municipality have started working partially. "Efforts are under way for all departments to get back to work in full swing shortly," he added. Al-Madina visited the municipality's Aziziya branch office and could not find any clients and the official in charge said the office stopped working a month ago due to system breakdown. Asked whether the branch municipalities would be able to provide paper-based services, the official said it was impossible because all services are now linked with the computer system. "All applications should be sent to the municipality through the system," he added. The official believed the system would return to normal within two days. On Dec. 1, Jeddah Mayor Dr. Hani Aburas tweeted that efforts are being made to repair the computer system and all electronic services will resume shortly. The municipality has 14 branches and 26 service centers across the city.
