As soon as the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the NEOM city project at the top of the projects of his economic vision for the Kingdom in 2017, his media began talking about NEOM and its huge gains, as Al Arabiya launched an unprecedented media campaign to market their illusionary NEOM project for the Saudi citizen, and the gains that the Saudi people are expected to reap, which will boost the Kingdom’s economy, and what the Kingdom’s domestic product will reach.
Al-Arabiya channel marketed that the project will be based on an economy that is a mixture of the traditional sectors that the Kingdom has known and the economic sectors in which the Kingdom will precede the whole world, which will enhance the increase in exports to the region and the world. However, MBS’s Al-Arabiya did not specify the products that it will export to the world.
Al-Arabiya also promoted that the project will contribute to creating and increasing job opportunities for the private sector, which will require an increase in employment, but the reality was disappointing and revealed a significant decline in the economies of the private sector, which resulted in the liquidation of employment in the Kingdom, and the closure of hundreds of private sector companies, and the suffering of other companies in taking their financial rights from the Saudi government due to the aggravation of the Kingdom’s economic crises, as well as the high unemployment rates among the Saudi people.
Al-Arabiya celebrated Neom because it is a promising project that will attract people to live in it in happiness due to the more luxurious life, and wider job opportunities, but it is now ignoring the suffering of engineers and workers who moved their families to NEOM, but they are suffering depression, loneliness, and the lack of life requirements, education and other services, which forced some of them to resign and leave.
Al-Arabiya channel claimed that net imports to the Kingdom will return about 70 billion dollars of the revenues of goods currently imported from abroad with the possibility of production in the “NEOM” project (such as cars, machinery, and communication equipment), but it has not addressed the decline in investments, the drained Sovereign Fund, as it is now the main financier of the project, which increased the Kingdom’s debts and increased the budget deficit.
The most popular promise was that NEOM would provide opportunities for an innumerable number of people in the Kingdom, which will make them travel to the new city instead of traveling for tourism outside the Kingdom, which will make the Kingdom’s economy benefit by recycling its sons' money in tourism in their city instead of traveling to other countries. However, after four years since the launch of the project, the people of the Kingdom became more sure about the failure of the economic vision.
The question remains, did Al-Arabiya, four years after the launch of Vision 2030, dare to discuss what the Crown Prince has achieved from this vision, what are the remaining stages, and what are the gains made by the Kingdom from NEOM?
