I was on the highway traveling from Jeddah to Madinah when about 50 km away, I saw a ghost on the horizon! As my car approached the object I realized that the anonymous phantom was rather a building built in the middle of the desert and in a place void of water and life. As we went past I read some signs that indicated that it was in fact a college of business administration.
I looked left and right surprised and shocked to realize that a college had been constructed in such a desolate and isolated place where there is nothing but wolves and sand. At the outset considering the structure was in such a desolate space I thought it might be a hospital where people would be kept in quarantine. But there seemed to be no residents, water arrangements or even electricity.
After thinking about the reasons as to why the authorities had selected such a distant and deserted location for a college, I thought to myself, “Well at least it is on Planet Earth.” However, I still could not find a logical explanation as to why the building had been set up so far away.
After about a year, I discovered some satisfying answers in the writings of Dr. Abdullah Dahlan, the chairman of the board of trustees of the college. Dahlan was commenting on an article written by Abdullah Khayat in Okaz at the beginning of this month. Dahlan’s remarks were tragic and underlined the complications that projects have to face in the Kingdom. It seems that projects, which in essence are supposed to provide national services and speed up the process of Saudization, are in fact doomed.
To banish a private college 50 km away from the city is ample evidence of the negative way the Kingdom’s land is distributed. In this case what happened was that the Ministry of Finance refused to lend the college finance unless they could provide some sort of real estate or bank insurance.
At the same time the Ministry of Education’s precondition that schools and colleges can only operate from buildings which are no less than 40,000 square meters makes it virtually impossible for such projects to materialize because loans that the Ministry of Finance offers cannot cover the purchase of such buildings let alone cover their rent.
I then began wondering how we could expect to undertake educational and health projects and expand the national economic base if organizations can’t find a foothold to finance such essential projects?
It is strange that the strategic design of the Kingdom’s towns and cities on the macro municipal level don’t set aside specific locations for the bare essential educational and health institutions that we need. This problem is all the more compounded by the fact that we have heaps of land as big as football stadiums fenced off and left empty.
