Safouq Al-Shammari Al-Riyadh We often hear the phrase, "born with a silver spoon in mouth". I do not believe that this saying can be applied on any ministry more than on the Ministry of Housing. No other ministry was given a bounty of facilities like the Housing Ministry. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has allotted an amount of SR250 billion for the ministry to execute its projects. The ministry has also been exempted from the terms and conditions of bidding for contacts and purchases. It has the right to choose any contractor of its preference. All these facilities were given to the ministry to enable it to carry out its duties without hindrance and delay. Despite this huge budget, which is equivalent to the budgets of many countries, and the other facilities, the ministry has not produced anything worthwhile so far. The Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs has provided 169 million square meters of land in 238 locations to the Ministry of Housing, which it considered to be sufficient for the construction of 200,000 housing units. The ministry claimed that these pieces of land cover only about a third of its needs, which is 170,000 housing units. If we believe the ministry's figure we will be obliged to ask: Where are these 170,000 units? We have not seen any complete project yet. In fact, the execution of some of its projects is less than 5 percent. If the ministry had built housing units on plots dedicated to it, people would sympathize with it and would demand that it be given more land. But when people discover that the ministry has not done anything with the plots in hand, they will come to realize that the problem is not the availability of land but the ministry itself. Therefore the ministry's excuse of scarcity of land is just an attempt to cover up its failures and amounts to no more than throwing dust in the eyes. I have no doubt that if we gave these funds and these plots of land to an international company we would have seen hundreds of thousands of constructed homes. The biggest hurdle that can face any project is lack of funds, which does not apply in the case of the Housing Ministry. With the huge funds and the pieces of land owned by the ministry we should have seen complete cities already built. I think the biggest problem facing the ministry is that it does not know what it wants. Sometimes the ministry wants to be a contractor, at other times a property developer or a real estate dealer buying and selling land. I strongly believe that meetings held inside the Housing Ministry are meant to discuss finding excuses for its failure and to put the blame on other ministries rather than finding quick solutions to expedite its work and improve its performance. It is high time to make deep and radical changes in the ministry's setup because its current team has not been up to the level of ambitions and challenges. Other service ministries such as the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Water and Electricity also suffer from bureaucracy and slow accomplishments. They also need to be revamped and restructured. Their teams and mechanisms too are in need of change.
