Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) continues to squander the nation’s resources on his personal luxuries and whims while his people go hungry and thirsty.
According to top-secret sources, Saudi Arabia continues to struggle with the desalination of drinking water due to a large energy consumption that is not environmentally friendly. While the country cannot do without the desalination plants that provide water to more than 32 million people, doing so would be in conflict with sustainability goals such as achieving net-zero energy consumption, as they account for 15% of the country’s oil production.
According to the sources, Saudi citizens might experience thirst if drinking water desalination plants are not maintained.
At desalination plants across the kingdom, Saudi employees understand just how crucial their work is to the population’s survival.
The Ras al-Khair plant produces 1.1 million cubic meters of water per day — 740,000 from thermal technology, the rest from reverse osmosis — and struggles to keep reserve tanks full because of high demand.
Much of the water goes to Riyadh, which requires 1.6 million cubic meters per day and could require as much as six million by the end of the decade.
Instead of establishing national projects that serve his people, MBS plans to raise $11 billion from a syndicated loan as he seeks to finance his failed projects including NEOM.
MBS has been pushing to host prominent sports and entertainment events in an attempt to whitewash his poor human rights record. This includes lavishing funds on recruiting football stars.
Sources familiar with the matter recently revealed that MBS has personally intervened to include one of soccer’s biggest names in a multi-million-dollar contract.
Riyadh is now seeing more than $64 billion in entertainment investment, with a significant proportion of that going to the live music industry.
MBS’s Vision 2030 prides itself on offering “world-class entertainment” and says that it has organized up to 3,800 entertainment events in the country, attended by more than 80 million people.
Well-trusted sources revealed that MBS is aiming to turn Saudi Arabia into another China for Hollywood.
It has already spent billions of dollars to stand up a new golf league, invested billions more into video-game publishers and is now turning its attention to Hollywood, the sources said.
This huge spending on sports came as part of MBS’s efforts to whitewash his bloody image and poor human rights record.
However, human rights organisations have long accused Saudi Arabia of using sport to whitewash its poor human rights record.
