Following his coup against the previous Saudi Crown Prince in 2017, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) attempted to portray himself as the extraordinary young man who would liberate the Kingdom, restore its glory, alter citizens’ reality, and paint a bright future for the nation. However, these lies soon dissipated and it became evident that MBS is an abject failure by all political, economic, and social science standards.
MBS’s inability to succeed in any investment project he undertook is revealed by far more convincing evidence. Among them are the following:
First, reports from the international media exposed Saudi Arabia’s severe financial crisis, forcing it to scale back its plans and objectives for the Mohammed bin Salman Vision 2030 project, which is regarded as a disastrous failure for the biggest projects, headed by NEOM and The Line. The regime’s media outlets extolled the virtues of these illusory projects, but it soon became evident that all of this information was false.
According to The British Financial Times, the Saudi government is actually doing this by reducing the size of projects and spending rates on new investments due to mismanagement, poor planning, and foresight. The government is afraid that this will damage its economic reputation and its ability to carry out the projects that it has announced and marketed to the world. The Saudi government is reportedly ashamed to formally announce a reduction in spending on the Bin Salman project because of the large budget deficit.
Energy expert Simon Watkins told the Oil Price International website that Saudi Arabia no longer has the funds to invest in new projects or increase its oil productivity. Thus, it is unable to invest in new initiatives.
In its analysis of Aramco’s first-quarter financial results, “Bloomberg” stated that the company’s shares fell to 9.2% this year and that net income decreased by 14% to $27.3 billion from the prior year.
These stories, along with hundreds more, exposed all of MBS’s lies since 2017 and demonstrated that the conferences he hosted at the start of his term in office were nothing more than deceptive media bubbles for a young man who had no understanding of state politics or federal administration.
The second indicator of MBS’s failure is the way his projects stopped functioning and the scope of their accomplishments shrank as a result of his attempts to find financiers. Saudi Arabia specifically requested support for NEOM from Kuwait and later from China, but to date, neither nation has given her a single dollar.
Knowing that these same banks had previously signed an agreement worth 23 billion riyals earlier in 2023 with the aim of establishing NEOM, a green hydrogen company, NEOM’s management also announced the signing of an agreement with the most significant banking and financial institutions in Saudi Arabia to obtain financial facilities worth 10 billion riyals. A three billion riyal contract was also inked by NEOM to finance a portion of the development project on Sindala Island and get it ready for tourism this year.
The third piece of evidence comes from Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, who stated that the government is currently reassessing and delaying NEOM City project sub-projects. He also suggested that The Line City, which was originally planned to be 170 kilometers long and house a million people, would only be 2.4 kilometers long by 2030. This statement highlights the extent of the failure that MBS’s projects have reached.
The Saudi government’s declaration that the budget has a significant deficit in the first quarter of the current fiscal year 2024 serves as the fourth piece of evidence. This deficit, as well as those that came before it in recent years, are the result of MBS’s heedless spending on imaginary projects that he hopes to execute but about which influential organizations and economists have cautioned him.
The fifth witness is the Saudi Minister of Finance, Mohammed Al-Jadaan, who stated last month that his ministry is putting together a plan to reorganize civilian and military salaries and distribute them in accordance with Gregorian dates. This will give the government a whole month’s worth of payouts. This indicates the extent to which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has experienced a deficit since MBS took over.
