Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dream of a new Saudi reality is just getting weirder. Instead of improving his people’s living situation, MBS continues to spend billions of dollars hosting major entertainment, cultural, and sporting events as a deliberate strategy to cover up his image as a pervasive human rights violator.
This huge spending on unreal projects, while Saudi Arabia’s unemployment and poverty rate continue to rise, sparks widespread controversy at home and abroad.
In this regard, Los Angeles Times has warned against MBS’ unreal and unstudied projects, raising a question mark over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s gamble to overhaul his country of 36 million people.
The paper cited he Jeddah Tower as an example, saying that it emerges in the distance as an under-construction 826-foot-tall spaceship presiding over Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city.
Planners envisioned the tower as the piece de resistance of a full-on economic revitalization with the declared aim of nothing less than “changing the mind-set of Jeddah.”
Instead, six years after it was to open, it remains a construction site with no construction — at the moment, the paper added.
Jeddah Tower Work Stalled
In 2017, MBS announced his flagship Neom project, a Massachusetts-sized megacity being built in Saudi Arabia’s northwest.
Then came the Line, a pair of “horizontal skyscrapers” stretching 105 miles — yes, miles, meaning that the two complexes would run an unbroken distance equal to that between downtown Los Angeles and Joshua Tree National Park.
Launched in 2008, the Jeddah Tower was the brainchild of Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, at the time the country’s most high-profile royal entrepreneur, before the crown prince became the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
Construction progressed rapidly at first, erecting 63 stories by the end of 2017. Then Mohammed became crown prince and launched an anti-corruption purge — critics characterized it as a power grab — that ensnared Prince Alwaleed and the Binladin Group, the tower’s main contractor. Work stalled; just as it was about to restart in 2020, the pandemic hit.
Since then, the site has remained quiet despite the occasional statement to the contrary — and a website that still features a fly-through animation of the tower with the tagline “It’s happening.”
The crown prince has his own plans for Jeddah, which might explain the lack of progress on the tower. In December 2021, he announced the Jeddah Central Project, previously known as the New Jeddah Downtown, which is spending $20 billion to develop 2.2 square miles in the southern part of the city. Using much of the same rationale behind Neom and the Jeddah Tower, Saudi authorities say, the project will add 47 billion riyals — $12.5 billion — to the country’s economy by 2030.
Collective Eviction
Over the last year, Saudi authorities tore down 32 Jeddah neighborhoods, displacing hundreds of thousands of people — some estimates say more than 1 million — almost half of them migrants whose families came decades ago for the pilgrimage to Mecca and never left.
Sometimes residents were given only 24 hours’ notice before power and water were cut off, with no chance to stop the bulldozers that soon followed, according to the paper.
The speed and breadth of the demolitions brought a raft of condemnation from rights groups saying they violated international human rights standards and discriminated against foreigners.
Other detractors level an often-repeated criticism that the Saudi government should invest in improving creaking infrastructure in Jeddah rather than building fancy towers.
Jeddah authorities defend the project as a necessary corrective to decades of neglect and insist that compensation to those displaced is being disbursed equitably.
But the track record of similar endeavors, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, raises questions of whether people want to live in the sort of sterile environment on offer.
King Abdullah Economic City, which opened more than a decade ago and sits on a pristine chunk of coast nearly 70 miles north of Jeddah, was supposed to attract 2 million people by 2035; to date, its population has numbered anywhere from 4,000 to 7,000.
The Bulldozer Prince
Along the same line, the Economist also shed light on Jeddah demolition campaign, warning that MBS’ 2030 vision will only augur destruction more than reconstruction.
A project costing $45bn to overhaul Jeddah was unveiled 13 years ago, but never materialised. This time, befuddled residents have seen plans only for the waterfront and for converting an obsolete desalination plant into an opera house. For homeless Saudis, the prince’s masterplan, Vision 2030, augurs destruction more than reconstruction, according to the report.
Like Prince Muhammad himself, many of Jeddah’s 4.7m people initially welcomed the bulldozers. They flattened the slums reputedly home to criminal gangs, drug mafias and prostitution rings, as well as the poor quarters housing foreigners doing menial work. Bereft of proper drainage, the city is prone to flooding and needed a facelift.
But joy turned to consternation as the bulldozers moved north, levelling old Saudi houses, mosques and handsome villas, and reaching perilously close to the old city, a UNESCO heritage site.
Growing anger
The mass demolition campaign has triggered a growing anger among Saudis who went into Twitter and TikTok to express their total rejection and condemnation to the ongoing demolition policy.
An Anonymous Twitter account said that more than 1 million people are homeless in Jeddah city because Saudi government destroyed their houses, stressing that forced displacement is a crime.
Along the same line, many Twitter accounts retweeted Amnesty International as saying that “the ongoing demolition of dozens of neighbourhoods in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah to enable redevelopment is violating human rights standards through forced evictions and a lack of compensation for foreign residents.”
