Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine concerning a new government body called the National Security Council (NSC). He seemed to believe that it was some sort of new intelligence agency.
I explained to him what I thought the purpose of this organization was.
The Council of Ministers is primarily occupied with executing policy through implementing successive five-year plans.
As you may imagine, ministers and their subordinates are inundated by an enormous amount of work that makes it almost impossible for any of them to think beyond a five-year horizon.
It was therefore necessary to create a department of the government that is isolated from the daily grind of execution and implementation; this department then has the task of looking far into the future of this country to try to anticipate future events based on current trends. Their horizon must necessarily be twenty, thirty, fifty and even a hundred years.
Their job is to gather data from various sources within and without the government and within and without Saudi Arabia; to analyze this data themselves or to commission think tanks and universities or individual experts.
The aim of all this is to identify the various challenges that face or will face the nation at some point in time. These challenges may range from the military to the cultural and everything in between.
They help in formulating policies that can be then incorporated in the various five-year plans in order for the nation to meet these challenges in an orderly, organized and institutional way. It is an attempt to move away from reactive methods of governing to more proactive ones.
In my humble opinion, there are two points that must be implemented to ensure the success of this new council. One, at all costs the new council must not be burdened by the constraints of the existing obsolete bureaucratic procedures that are rendering most government departments ineffective (a challenge that I am sure will be a top priority for the NSC). Two, this council must not be politicized in any way; this is the only way to ensure its effective service to the nation.
