Rashid Al-Fowzan
Al-Riyadh
THE Saudi government has spent billions and trillions on infrastructure projects such as parks, playgrounds, roads, airports, sidewalks and other public facilities. These projects require huge funding and so use up the lion’s share of the state budget.
Now the question is whether we have set out any rules and regulations or hold public awareness campaigns to protect this vital infrastructures. Those who follow the condition of our parks and playgrounds and use our roads and streets will understand that the burden of preserving these facilities falls squarely on the municipalities, which spend billions of riyals on cleaning and maintenance every year because their preservation is a major concern of the local administration.
Every day I visit Saha, a park in Riyadh, for jogging. Many others including expatriates go to parks and other jogging tracks. Riyadh Municipality has put in a lot of efforts to develop parks and jogging areas in and around the city, which keep citizens and residents healthy, energetic and productive.
The municipality plays a big role in keeping these facilities neat and tidy. But some people park their vehicles near parks to find potential buyers or leave garbage in and around, making the municipality›s cleaning efforts fruitless and increasing its burden. We can also see a number of illegal vendors wandering around these parks to sell substandard products.
I have seen municipal supervisors in the park where I go for jogging every day and I don’t know what are their roles and what they are doing to prevent these violations and enhance public awareness on the importance of keeping public facilities clean and neat.
The municipality should have set out rules and regulations for street vendors so that they would sit in a specific area of the park after paying the required fees. The municipality can establish kiosks for the purpose, which will benefit the vendors as well as the visitors.
In order to avoid people throwing garbage in public parks, the municipality should distribute garbage bags for people to keep their waste and discard them later in the garbage skips. This will also create a sense of cleanliness among citizens and residents and make our parks neat and attractive.
The municipality should appoint a field officer to impose fine on anyone who throw garbage in public places and destroy or damage infrastructure facilities.
I believe the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and other government departments should set out rules and regulations to protect public facilities that come under them.
We have learned from experience that awareness programs alone would not be effective in educating and disciplining the public. It should be accompanied by fines and other deterrent punishments for people to change their attitude and follow the rule.
The Traffic Department is a good example. The government has put a lot of efforts to enhance public awareness on the need to follow traffic rules through schools, mosques and media organizations but it did not bring the desired results and this forced the department to resort to imposing hefty fines and other penalties.
In any case, we have to develop a culture of preserving public infrastructure facilities among the young generation so that they would follow the rules without any need for imposing punishments.
Another factor that I would like to emphasize here is that we should strictly enforce our rules and regulations without showing any leniency to anyone to achieve the desired results on the ground. This supervisory role need not be shouldered by ministries or municipalities but can be done by private companies as well.
We have to protect our valuable public facilities by raising awareness and creating necessary deterrence. If we fail to do so the Kingdom would lose its vital infrastructure facilities, which were built after spending billions of riyals.
