The BBC has a lengthy article about Saudi Arabia abandoning most of the ridiculous Vision 2030 projects (such as The Line, and the ski resort, etc.)
Some extracts:
Some longtime observers of Saudi Arabia, such as Ellen R Wald, the author of Saudi, Inc., feel like they've seen it all before.
"This is the same playbook, the same thing again with The Line. You know, 'We're going to build this huge thing. Oh wait, well now we're going to significantly downscale it.' And it's the same thing over and over again, and it's been that way even since before Mohammed bin Salman. They make these big announcements, they're very splashy, and then it either doesn't get built or it gets built in a significantly scaled down or [in a] 'not what it was' way."
Wald recalls the new cities that were to be built in the 2000s under a previous monarch, King Abdullah.
The "Economic Cities" programme was also aimed at diversifying the Saudi economy away from oil, which has been a perennial imperative in the Kingdom for decades. Relying almost entirely on one natural resource that will not last for ever has long been seen as an obstacle to the development of a much more well-rounded and resilient economy.
The results were largely underwhelming even as billions of dollars were expended. Several of the proposed cities never got off the ground, others were recast as more modest enterprises. The biggest, the $100bn King Abdullah Economic City on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah, did come to fruition, but the goal of it becoming a business and tourism hub hasn't materialised.
The hope had been to bring in major new foreign investment and create jobs – real ones, away from the calcified state sector – for Saudi Arabia's large and ever-growing young population. But by 2016, the rate of unemployment still stood at around 12%.
I'm always a bit puzzled by the birthrate of Muslim countries: is the secret to higher birthrates not having much in the way of Western entertainment (in the form of bars, nightclubs and even cinemas?) Anyway, I see that it has not been immune for dropping birthrates: just that it has not been as precipitous as in the West.
Back to the BBC. I didn't recall reading about the lockup in the Ritz-Carlton:
The social control exerted by the powerful and very conservative Islamic leadership of the country was seen by MBS and his advisors as a major obstacle in the ability of Saudi Arabia to achieve its full economic potential. Political change under MBS was presented as the handing over for the first time of the reins of power to a more dynamic, younger generation. But this did not mean that any new space for political discourse was allowed.
Indeed – as Nuseibeh acknowledges – MBS himself was responsible for some of the issues that have impeded the scope and rate of change - as well as casting a long shadow over his rule.
Just as he became de facto ruler in 2017, he ordered the mass detention of Saudi Arabia's elite officials and businessmen in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, which the Saudi government portrayed as a crackdown on corruption, but others saw as a shakedown. And the savage killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018 left a stain on the Crown Prince's reputation, which may have faded but remains indelible.
One Saudi who has direct experience of how the authorities there deal with dissent is Abdullah al-Ouda, an academic and human rights activist based in the US. His father, Salman al-Ouda, a prominent Saudi Islamic scholar, has been detained in prison since 2017 on charges including "stirring up unrest".
Abdullah believes that episodes like the Ritz-Carlton purge have been counterproductive to the aim of funding Vision 2030, even if those held in that gilded cage did cough up an estimated $100bn.
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