95 percent corruption
The problem of Kuwait roads and its ‘flying gravel,’ which cost me personally hundreds of dinars so far, is five percent problem and 95 percent corruption. The Ministry of Public Works announced that it plans to spend $10 billion to renovate the second and third ring roads, as well as some other roads whose fate will be the same as our current roads as far as corruption in building and negligence in maintenance is concerned. Spending nearly $10 billion on roads in a country that is suffering from reduction in income is a crime against the country.
Building a road and maintaining it are not a new issue for Kuwait, which knew road projects since the 1940s. The current bad conditions of roads have nothing to do with the nature of the material used and there is evidence of this. There are roads, even if they are few, that are still in good condition although many years have gone by since their construction, when consciousness at the public works ministry was more alive compared with the condition of the rest of our roads which became bad, although it has not been long since they were constructed. So how did this happen?
The reason is that the former were subjected to strict supervision and were void of “buttering up” while their material was being prepared and paved. The latter received what other state projects have received in the form of “corruption”. I still remember that the roads of Kuwait Oil Company in Ahmadi before the arrival of some ‘paisa (old Indian currency) swallowers’ to manage it, were very beautiful.
An expat friend said the quality of roads in the past were the result of joint work supported by research and accumulated experiences, and strict implementation of ingredients, manufacturing and execution by specialists in various fields of making asphalt roads. He said even the contractors’ tools and vehicles were subjected to testing, as far as number and usability are concerned, before signing the contract with him, and this is what is not being done currently.
The process of constructing roads is a highly complicated process as far as raw materials, specifications, manufacturing and paving are concerned. The Ministry of Public Works (MPW) in the 1970s, during the time of late Humoud Al-Nisf established the ‘Roads Research Center’ and it had a major role in ensuring quality, which has now disappeared along with the center.
In a laughable irony, Kuwait’s Ambassador in Vienna presented $100,000 in support of “corruption fighting” activities. If he had paid such an amount to a clean personality and experienced engineer Ali Al-Abdullah, the person formerly responsible for roads at MPW, to supervise roads construction work, starting from the source of raw material and all the steps they go through and ending the process of paving, we would have saved millions and would have gotten much better roads.