Ahmad Hashim Alsharq IN Japan, around 30,000 citizens end their life each year due to debt trap and unemployment. As for some Britons, they offer their organs for sale in order to settle their financial liabilities. Similar reports also came from India where poverty forced some citizens to sell their children to escape from debt trap. In China, a teenager sold his kidney in order to buy an iPad2. As far as Saudis are concerned, they have also problems but these don't have such an intensity as mentioned above. You can see a Saudi smoking shisha at a rest house or playing cards in the company of his friends. He may not have any cash in his purse except his ATM card, from which he cannot withdraw any amount as the credit balance is below SR100. Such a situation was most often the result of his weak financial planning after the bank took half of his salary in loan installments while the remaining half goes toward the utility bills of water, electricity, phone, as well as school and household expenses. How great such a citizen is. He realizes the fact that he does not own a house though is nearly 60 years old. He knows well that his retirement age is near but he has little saving. As for a 30-year-old citizen, he is still unemployed but he has to feed his family. He is now thinking of buying a house in Indonesia or Sri Lanka where the cost of living is much lower there. A Saudi realizes that he is forced to borrow from his neighbor one time and from his colleague at another. The citizen has to bear with the traffic congestion everywhere he goes due to the never-ending road projects. He hopes that the mayoralty of his city would open the project on time but is surprised to see with the passage of time that the project has been halted. He then complains about the poor infrastructure that damaged his car and affected his health and above all his dignity, with the knowledge that a whopping amount of more than SR412 billion had been spent on infrastructure projects between 2003 and 2012. He also swallows the bitterness of wasting his humanity while approaching some government departments. He does not know the name of the city mayor, minister of municipal affairs, director of traffic, the court official or the chief of the Passport Department — places that he is forced to visit frequently and where he has to wait for long time to get things done. How lucky is the citizen who has to bear the fallout of the mismanagement of ministers and officials. He does not care about the names of the officials or their titles but he speaks about them through the social networking sites, saying there is a department notorious for its poor performance. Here, the problem facing us is mismanagement about which our leader, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, warned the ministers while unveiling this year's general budget. In his speech to ministers and officials at the extraordinary session of the Council of Ministers, the King said: “I say that there is no excuse for any negligence as of today.” The King had stressed the same point while addressing the Kingdom's ambassadors last year. Mismanagement on the part of ministers and government officials as well as the bureaucratic bottlenecks have planted in us some sort of indifference toward officials. This indifference turned to bitterness when we realized the losses that we incur due to their mismanagement — more than SR60 billion a year. These officials must be held accountable for what they had contributed to bring Saudi Arabia into the list of most corrupt countries. Our youths have lost 120,000 jobs in a year and that contributed in a way or other in spreading some form of administrative corruption. This resulted in falling of Saudi Arabia's position in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Rankings to 80th among 160 countries. Our country is replete with talent that has the potential to understand our problems from a much closer angle. We want officials who are fully aware of their responsibilities toward people. We want governors of cities who are coming to people to listen their demands. We want a security official to draw up wise plans to bring down the rates of road accidents that incur an annual loss of SR13 billion to the Kingdom's economy. We dream to have a minister of economy and planning, who struggles to diversify sources of income after understanding the actual requirements of development projects for regions, cities and villages, and a minister of education who is securing better output from teachers after giving them their due financial and social rights. We also dream of a civil service minister who realizes the potential danger of unemployment on the nation and admits that there is explicit weakness in the civil service machinery, and of a minister of health who empathize with our suffering when we are sick due to the lack of public hospitals and the substandard services at the existing few. We pin hope on a higher education minister who is aware of the significance of development in our life by issuing orders that help develop our academic and vocational competence so as to enable us to implement development projects with super efficiency. We want the Shoura Council to have the powers with regard to investigations and accountability, as well as for the speedy disposal of corruption cases. We want judges who do not delay judgments and a Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution that enables the government agencies to adopt effective measures to ensure accountability of employees. In our ministries, we want officials and planners who are powerful to close the loopholes so as not to award projects to unworthy people. We want leaders who are trained to formulate and implement projects by making use of their minute knowledge about the needs of the country and its people, as well as the impediments that stand in the way of realizing development, besides working to address them or curb their impact on the development process.
