Okaz It seems that the officials of the ministries and government departments are busy thinking of ways and means to impose additional fees on the services they offer to the citizens rather than thinking of how to improve these services and make them worthwhile. Some of these ministers and officials are still nursing the notion that the services are a grant from the government to the citizens. They are not willing to change this attitude even after service fees have been imposed on citizens. For this reason, the citizen will not notice any difference between the services he is now paying for and those that he used to get free of charge in the past. Only the other day I read a report that the Health Ministry was considering to ask the auto insurance companies to pay for its medical services to those injured in traffic accidents. It is obvious that no one in the ministry had thought that it would be the citizen, not the insurance company, who would pay for these costs. The insurance companies will add the cost to the value of their insurance policies, which will finally be paid by the citizen irrespective of whether he was involved in a traffic accident or not. You may ask Maj. Gen. Abdul Rahman Al-Nuqbil, former director of the Traffic Department, about the hurdles his department had faced when it tried to commit the insurance companies to reduce the cost for the renewal of the insurance policy if the holder did not make any accident and therefore did not cause it any loss. When a policy holder is involved in an accident, which costs the insurance company some money, the company will automatically increase the fee for the renewal of his insurance policy. We demand good services as long as we will be paying for them but making us pay for substandard services will be like selling failure to us.
