Samir is a one-man municipality watchdog. He stumbled into this profession as a result of years of aggravation with the bureaucrats at the Jeddah Municipality. It was when the municipality rejected his application to add another level to his ground level villa, whilst his home was surrounded on all sides by three and four floor buildings, that his frustrations led him to scrutinize and criticize municipal inaction and inadequacy.
Spending some time with him, I realized that the majority of his outbursts are shared by almost all of us. “When the new mayor came on board, I had some hopes that things would change,” he said. “This man road in on the tails of his success in the private sector, and we were positive he would turn this vital public sector around. But sadly two years have gone by, and what do you see? More of the same.”
“Just look here,” he added, displaying a voluminous file of press clippings related to the municipality. Pointing to one of the clippings, he added, “Here it reports that the municipality had studied and determined that they would punish violators caught dumping building material and rubbish onto vacant lots. Why now? I have been complaining to this same municipality for years about this practice, and they need a study and a passage of time to determine that?”
“While they grandly announced that they had managed to clear 75,000 cubic meters of such waste, don’t they know that another 75,000 or more are being created daily by building contractors? Don’t take my word for it. Drive around any neighborhood and see for yourself. And where are these inspectors out to enforce the law? Out to lunch, I bet,” fumed Samir.
“And while the deputy mayor anticipates that it would take them five years to complete this task, I can only add that this is wishful thinking. As long as there is no visible and practical application of the law, it will be a never-ending project just like our sewage system,” he explained.
Samir continued, “And talking about the sewage system, here is another report on the mayor’s announcement of a SR7 billion project that we will have to endure for the next five to seven years. Where have the billions of the past gone? Certainly not to you or I. And now, they are digging up the roads of the entire city. Find me one stretch fifty meters long on any of our streets and roads that has not turned treacherous. They dig up the roads, lay some pipes, and then expect Mother Nature to repave them. And when they do repave, it is apparently undertaken by some juveniles, not civil or road works engineers.”
Samir also criticized the municipality’s plans to turn the old Jeddah Airport grounds into a world-class city. According to the report, the mayor has recently concluded an agreement with an American consultancy firm, to design the multibillion-dollar project. The project includes educational institutions, hotels, residential apartments, recreational centers, conference halls, museums, mosques, playgrounds, government offices and a railway station. The project will be carried out on a vast area of 12 million square meters.
“Why don’t they just stick to the city they have on hand and fix it? They are more concerned with planting flowers on inaccessible roundabouts than allotting much needed parks and recreation areas in the different neighborhoods for the welfare of the residents,” my irritated friend said.
Samir pulled out another press clip. “Just look at this one. According to this, ‘an international team of experts is currently conducting a study on main Jeddah roads, including the Corniche Road, to make optimum use of them after resolving their shortcomings.’
“The municipality has finally determined that Jeddah roads are inadequate to facilitate our traffic! They finally woke up? Just what have they been doing all these years? Any one of us could have told them that years ago. And now they go and hire an international team to study the reasons and figure out the inadequacy. And after spending who knows how much on this foreign study, they determine that ten flyovers are needed to ease traffic,” Samir continued to vent.
“What are all those foreign educated Saudi engineers in the municipality doing? What is their purpose? No mayor, regardless of how committed he is, will ever change the way things are run in that bureaucracy unless he is prepared to make some bold moves. Such as laying off inefficient bureaucrats. But in our existing culture, I doubt that would happen. And we will be subject to more of the same.”
Point well made, Samir. It doesn’t take a study by foreign experts to tell us our city is in a mess, and how to go about fixing some of the wrongs. Ask anyone on the street, and most likely you’ll get a qualified answer.
