Renting out school buildings is part of our Saudi specialty. Let us suppose that the annual rent for this school is SR120,000. In 30 years the government would have paid SR3.6 million, which is enough money to purchase a large piece of land and build a brand new school on it.

The school building near our old house is not meant to be converted into a school. It was a villa made to accommodate a family of eight to 10 people, but is now in fact accommodating about 200 girl students!

The kitchens and sitting rooms of the villa have been converted into classrooms. If this is happening in luxurious residential districts, can you imagine what the situation would be like in undeveloped districts? What will be the case in villages and hamlets?

The renting of private buildings and converting them into schools for boys and girls is a problem that has continued over a long time and no one knows the real causes behind it.

I estimate that if the Ministry of Education had started building schools since 1980 at a rate of 1,000 a year, it would have built 30,000 elementary, intermediate and secondary schools for boys and girls by 2010. I will also include in this number the Qur’an memorization schools.

According to the data of the Education Ministry itself, we now have a total of 23,364 schools, including 12,458 elementary, 6,841 intermediate and 4,065 secondary schools for both boys and girls.

This means that if we had started constructing schools since 1980 at the rate of 1,000 per year, we would have eliminated reliance on rented school buildings seven years ago.

I am only talking about the period since 1980, which is not really in the distant past as formal education started in the Kingdom since its inception more than 70 years ago.

We still do not know where the blame lies. Is it with the Finance Ministry, which does not approve the purchase of land and construction of schools?

Or is it with the Education Ministry, which fails to present plans to end the problem of relying on rented property? Or is it the fault of the planners?

We can easily create a proper educational environment, including new school buildings, qualified teachers and up-to-date syllabuses. I have not talked about men and women teachers, which is another problem in education.

Even today, I read in local newspapers that the Education Ministry is looking for houses to rent for schools. The ministry has rented such buildings for decades.

We have no financial shortage that prevents us from building proper schools. We are just hemorrhaging our funds on rent.