NEOM has many advantages that make it a special economic zone, therefore Bin Salman put it at the top of Vision 2030 projects, but due to his lack of experience and lack of strategic thinking, he did not seek to benefit from it to the maximum, and instead he secretly gave the chance to Israeli occupation to benefit from, according to reports and trusted study centres.
Saudi public opinion believed the media propaganda fabricated by the Saudi Crown Prince about the NEOM project, but five years later the dream city became the forgotten city.
The history of the major projects of Saudi Arabia is similar to the history of other tyrannical regimes, which makes huge propaganda over fake projects. Saudi Arabia announced many projects which stopped at the first stage including:
The “Economic Cities Program” project, a program that preceded Vision 2030, in 2006, which aimed to attract 4.5 million residents in those cities by 2020 and to diversify the Kingdom’s economy, instead of total dependence on oil revenues, however, the project suddenly stopped and made little success, as only four thousand residents moved to live there.
The failure in the 2006 projects came as a result of the same reasons in the Saudi Crown Prince’s vision 2030; great optimism, a fictitious vision, high costs, an unclear plan, and unstudied goals. Therefore, the same results for vision 2030 was expected, but failure in NEOM was even more, as the Kingdom witnessed political turmoil that seriously affected investment in it, and scared investors who withdraw their investments from the Saudi market.
The murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi also represented a major crisis for the Kingdom, which worsened its image in international public opinion, in addition to the forced displacement of Neom’s people, as well as the killing, arrest and displacement of hundreds of families, without an alternative plan to accommodate those displaced from their homes and land.
In addition to the Saudi Crown Prince’s actions with many businessmen in KSA, which caused the suspension of the project of the tallest tower in Jeddah or the Jeddah skyscraper, after he imprisoned key investors in this project, claiming to combat corruption in KSA.
Moreover, changing the culture of the society from a conservative one to an open society has led to the reluctance of many businessmen to invest in his projects which they consider hostile to the values and traditions of the society.
Till today, the skyscrapers of the King Abdullah Financial District, which are comparable to the skyscrapers of the Dubai International Financial Center, bear witness to corruption and uncertain economic visions, despite its huge costs born completely by KSA.
The authorities attribute this failure to the nature of the city of Riyadh, capital of Saudi Arabia, that it does not attract foreign and Western investors, therefore bin Salman took the initiative to build the city of NEOM to allow them to live according to their character which completely contradicts the ethics of Saudi society.
The question is: Would Neom achieve its goals or would it follow the paths of previous projects and become forgotten?
