Qaiser Mutawie
Al-Madina
Recently I watched a less than 30-second video clip circulated on social media wherein the minister of housing mentions that the housing crisis is a matter of crisis of ideas. These comments stirred angry reactions on social media and other platforms. The clip is just a short part of the minister’s speech and doesn’t reflect what he meant. It is apparent to anyone who listened to the minister’s entire speech despite what the short video includes. What matters is that during the entire speech the minister didn’t offer a single clear plan to solve the housing crisis.
The problem is that the Ministry of Housing has been established for several years with a large budget estimated to be SR250 billion to build housing units. But until today the citizens didn’t see anything materialize in reality. The ministry was running and continues to run in empty circles around the problem without setting a solution or a clear plan to solve it. It’s like they ran out of new ideas for this dilemma.
Not to be harsh on the minister of housing and his ministry alone, new ministers at service ministries in general who took enough time after being appointed to identity existing problems and then perhaps issue plans and solutions didn’t do that – even though some of them started issuing decisions for a while, so how did these decision come into play without a plan?
Generally, identifying the problems of the citizens need not take a long time. They may be in education, health, employment, housing or others. It is because, these problems are not new; they have been around for a long time now.
The truth is that the problem is not a crisis of ideas as much as it is a problem that stems from the lack of new ideas among all new ministries offering services to find viable solutions to support citizens. Those ministries run around problems for a very long time and we think they have come a long way to find solutions, yet in fact most of them have not even started to figure out a way to solve the problem.
If ministries offering services do not have new ideas that could be utilized to create plans to solve problems, that are announced with a start and implementation dates, you will find in five or ten years that we are still at the same point where we are now.
