Saudi mega-city: Prince Salman’s desert dream
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s planned $500 billion mega-city is an oasis of stunning cliffs, sandy beaches and high-tech projects powered by wind and solar energy where robots outnumber humans and a cosmopolitan lifestyle offers sports, concerts and fine dining.
That vision showcased in a promotional video at an international investment conference in Riyadh this week bears little resemblance to the kingdom’s present where an oil “addiction” has created dependency on state handouts and a puritanical clergy imposes ultra-conservative mores.
It is the latest dream of 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who rose from relative obscurity two years ago to the top echelons of power, becoming heir-apparent in June. Ambitious and energetic, the modernizing prince is driven by regret that his kingdom, the largest Arab economy and the world’s top oil exporter, has fallen behind smaller neighbors.
Early on, he laid out a plan to shake Saudi Arabia out of its slumber after decades of gerontocratic rule. But his aspirations are a tall order in a country where the royal family rules in a pact with austere and powerful Wahhabi clerics wary of modernization. His latest plan to build the 26,500 square km (10,000 square mile) business zone called NEOM-getting on for the size of Belgium-captures both the scale of his ambitions and the worries surrounding them.
Some executives at the conference - dubbed “Davos in the desert” - remained skeptical about Riyadh’s ability to execute its grand design given its primitive legal system and sluggish bureaucracy.
The young prince acknowledges the difficulties but has pledged to push ahead. “This is a challenge. The dream is easy but making it come true is very difficult,” he said.
Double-edged sword
He described the Saudi youth he is counting on to achieve his vision as “a double-edged sword”. “If they work and go the right way, with all their force they will create another country, something completely different ... and if they go the wrong direction it will be the destruction of this country,” he said.
Under his Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed plans to float a stake in oil giant Saudi Aramco and privatize other state assets to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund to invest in infrastructure and industrial projects. Hit by low oil prices, Riyadh has been cutting spending and trying to raise fresh revenues as it grapples with its budget deficit of $98 billion in 2015. It has already dipped into recession. Future reforms are expected to cut subsidies, raise taxes, overhaul an outdated education system, trim the public sector and give women a bigger role. That challenges the religious conservatives who have posed the greatest threat to Al Saud rule in the century since it founded the modern kingdom.
The clergy has become more careful about publicly criticizing the ruling family. Some 30 clerics, intellectuals and activists were locked up last month in what rights groups described as a “crackdown on dissent”. The official council of senior religious scholars praised the crown prince’s NEOM plan and his comments on moderate Islam in a tweet this week.
Whether MbS, as the prince is known, will achieve his modernizing vision, which relies on the private sector driving growth and providing the state with new revenue, was the subject of animated debate in conference halls. “The project is certainly a novel idea and one with a lot of potential but a lot of details still require clarification,” said Raza Agha, a chief economist at VTB Capital. “Beyond the challenges of funding and building a project of this scale, the seemingly ad hoc nature of this, and other, announcements only serves to add to Saudi policy unpredictability,” he said. Steffen Hertog, a leading scholar on Saudi Arabia, told Reuters the project is meant to draw on matching private investments “so if these for some reason are not forthcoming, the fiscal risks to the public purse should be limited.” —Reuters