How Saudi Arabia's spending spree reached the end of the line

Autocratic monarchs once left an echo of their glory in the ruins of the megaprojects they commanded at the peak of their unchallenged power. Those monumental physical traces are to be found in the fertile plains, mountainsides and deserts of the Middle East. But one of their most prominent modern counterparts may only have a digital footprint to leave behind for some of his most ambitious concepts.

A decade ago, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman – or MBS as he is widely known – decreed a revisioning of his country that leapt from the realm of science fiction. It was called Vision 2030. Extraordinary monolithic structures were to help bring forth new technological marvels not just for the Kingdom but for the world.

Those ideas were made manifest in lavish PR material conjuring up fantastical landscapes that attracted reams of coverage that mingled awe and derision. It was made possible by the near $1trn (£744bn) sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF) whose riches, so dependent on oil, were to be used to create the foundation for a future without oil.

Four years from 2030, there has now been, perhaps predictably, a retrenchment. Part of that is down to financial imperatives, as a big fall in oil prices before the current war in the Middle East meant that even Saudi Arabia's extraordinary wealth took a hit.

Even though those prices have now shot up because of the war, the uncertainty created by the conflict will continue to put constraints on Saudi revenue and spending. And the influx of foreign investment in these hyper-expensive visionary projects has never materialised to the degree on which the Saudis had been banking.

But is it a recalibration or a retreat?

Some of the most striking projects are now being watered down, put on hold or even abandoned. Several come under the once all-embracing umbrella of the $500bn Neom mega-project.

It looks like The Line, which was meant to redefine the concept of a city as it stretched ramrod straight across more than 100 miles (161km) of untapped land in the north west of Saudi Arabia, looming taller than The Shard, is being turned into something considerably more prosaic.

The winter resort of Trojena in the mountains of the north west has also been reined in. There is snow up there, belying the image of Saudi Arabia as an unyielding desert, but it doesn't last very long. The concept of a year-round mountain resort took the area into a realm of artificiality that is no longer seen as viable. There were to have been miles of ski slopes and a full-on ski village with a man-made lake and luxury hotels and shops – a mini St Moritz in the mountains of Arabia. It was meant to have been ready in time to host the Asian Winter Games in 2029, but that has now been cancelled, with the Games to be held in Kazakhstan instead.

The Cube – a massive structure of flats and offices that could have contained the Empire State Building 20 times over – has been jettisoned entirely. It was set to cost an estimated $50bn.

Most recently, one of the apparent crown jewels of the Kingdom's vaulting ambition to become a world powerhouse of sport from a standing start, the LIV Golf tour, has been reassessed as a hugely expensive dud that's cost some $5bn to date and brought neither a financial nor a reputational return.

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%.

Wald thinks there is a fundamental failure to take a realistic view of the potential of such projects by the officials behind them. "Where did they think the market was? Who told them that this was a possibility? There's a big 'yes man' mentality. You get people telling the king what he wants to hear. And that goes for consultants too, because they want the big contracts. So, they'll say what they think their Saudi clients want to hear – and then these things fall short."

That pattern goes back decades, with foreign companies often not wishing to risk the highly lucrative contracts they've secured by asking questions.

Some believe that when MBS became de facto ruler of the Kingdom in 2017, he inherited a system that badly needed overhauling.

Ghanem Nuseibeh, an economic analyst who's followed the shifts in Saudi Arabia for years, says MBS inherited "a social economic system that was very much out of touch with the modern world" that was "heading towards total stagnation."

Vision 2030 was designed to change Saudi Arabia in three ways: economically, politically, but also socially. "The very, very tricky thing for them was that they needed to implement those in concert."

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.

Long term, it's actually scared away investors, he said. "And all the oppression also affected how investors see Saudi Arabia as a government, as a country, that lacks what investors want, which is predictability. When you have no predictability, you can simply be an investor one day and the next an arbitrary detainee - and nobody wants that.

Vision 2030 helped shift the conversation, as did the parade of major sports and entertainment events that started coming to Saudi Arabia from 2016, hugely transforming both its internal reality and its outside image. It wasn't all surface; headline-grabbing moves such as finally giving women the right to drive did shift Saudi Arabian society. To such an extent that a prominent US-based Saudi fashion influencer told me that her Saudi friends teased her for being behind the times in her attitude each time she visited.

But human rights issues still overshadowed these changes. As MBS and the Saudi sovereign fund moved into one new sphere after another, accusations of sportswashing, artwashing, greenwashing and so on have multiplied. Many prominent figures from the world of sport and entertainment have been happy to appear in Saudi Arabia, but others have refused, citing its human rights record. Thousands of fans have flocked to Riyadh for events such as motor racing and boxing, but other potential tourists have been put off by negative views of the Kingdom.

That doesn't, however, negate the fact that for many young Saudis, the ambitions of MBS have been inspiring and popular.

The big cutback in spending on some of the flashiest projects – which looks to the outside world like at least a partial admission of failure – is being cast in as positive a light as the Saudi authorities can manage.

The thinking now is to basically get small wins, small successes here and there, instead of these mega projects," says Abdullah. "Like, for example, the Red Sea island resort of Sindalah could be one small win that they can promote, which is basically a very traditional style of resort, which can still be presented as part of the vision, instead of the likes of The Line and The Cube. And so they can say, 'these represent the basis of Neom, and we didn't have to have the whole thing'.

This tracks with what the authorities have started saying. The governor of the PIF, Yasir al-Rumayyan, has recently said that under a new five-year plan, the fund would "focus, through its strategy, on improving the efficiency of its spending and disbursements, along with a sustainable evaluation of the performance of its businesses, to achieve a balance and ensure the sustainability of its financial resources".

For some analysts, this re-focusing is essentially the best option for the Saudi authorities and a way for them to save Vision 2030 itself.

Thamer Shaker, a prominent Saudi businessman and management consultant, frames it differently: "What we are seeing is the natural evolution from an ambition-led phase into an execution-led phase. Every major national transformation reaches a point where prioritisation, sequencing, and resource allocation become more important than the scale of announcements themselves."

Some of the headline projects – which are less sci-fi in concept – will continue to be developed. That includes the remodelling and revival of the old capital, Diriyah, in Riyadh and the massive state-of-the-art theme park Six Flags Qiddiya City, also near the Saudi capital. The successful development of the ancient site of AlUla in the north, famed for Nabataean monuments that rival Petra, is a template for how such projects can be accomplished.

The project to transform a once-forgotten corner of the Kingdom into the flagship project of Saudi Arabia's revamped national and cultural identity has cost several billion dollars already, with billons more earmarked to try to further develop it into a global tourism hub. A more achievable objective than, for example, The Line.

And of course in sport, the Saudis managed to secure one of the biggest of all prizes, the football World Cup in 2034. There's no doubt that MBS will try to ensure that there will be a visionary element to the designs, although some of the more ambitious concepts appear to have been reined in to try to keep the cost under some measure of control.

Saudi officials are clearly trying to portray the relative openness about changing course over Vision 2030 as a break with the past of concealment and obfuscation. The sense given is that they have owned up to mistakes and corrected their course.

A specialist in the political and economic dynamics of the Gulf, Mate Szalai, says this is helpful up to a point for foreign politicians and diplomats.

For them, the fact that the Saudis at least partly admit their mistakes and talk about them, that's definitely a positive sign. But I don't think that this goes as far as most investors and most stakeholders want it to.

The Saudi businessman Thamer Shaker is more sanguine: "In many cases, disciplined prioritisation can actually increase investor confidence… The conversation internationally is increasingly shifting from 'how big are the announcements?' to 'how credible is the execution model?'"

The reassessment of Vision 2030 was already under way before the war between the US, Israel and Iran. The conflict has sent a shockwave through the status quo across the Gulf region and raised doubts about the strategy the UAE spearheaded of becoming a commercial and tourist hub for the world, which Saudi Arabia had clearly wanted not just to emulate but to outdo.

Szalai says just months into its recalibration, the war has caused further confusion over the future direction of Vision 2030.

"Before the war, the key areas where the Saudis wanted to have more investment were AI and various other, substantive projects – tourism, manufacturing and mining, and some local industries. But all of these have been severely affected by the war, except for mining.

Before the war, the main message was that now Neom is going to be redefined as a hub for industries focusing on AI. Which makes sense in the context of the war, of course, but it shows that the main message is changing on a monthly basis. And that indicates some strategic confusion. But it's also a positive sign in the sense that Saudi officials know that they have to come up with a new plan.

Vision 2030 has helped the emergence of a different Saudi Arabia, to the celebration of some and condemnation of others.

But if there were three pillars to the transformation, there is still a long way to go.

Politically, dissent has been punished as severely as ever.

Socially, there have been big changes so that the very feel of living in a city like Riyadh has been transformed. That's increased the amount of money that Saudis themselves spend inside the country on a huge range of entertainment that simply didn't exist 20 years ago.

Economically, the mega projects of Vision 2030 were intended to drive the country forward finally into a future in which private and foreign investment became a match for the immense oil wealth of the state. That has only partly materialised.

For the Saudi leadership, it has of course been presented as a success story, even if not on the scale once envisaged. However much of a visionary MBS would like to be seen as, it seems clear that he and those around him also want to be seem as practical and pragmatic when necessary.

They are not answerable to the Saudi people for the many billions of dollars that have been spent on projects that may now only ever exist on the internet. As far as can be gauged, the Crown Prince's popularity remains high among young Saudis. That makes it possible to throw mega-projects like The Cube away into the bin as if they were waste paper – which in the case of The Cube may not be far from the truth.

Big players in the worlds of sport, entertainment, art and beyond that have grown to depend on Saudi cash now face a new reality in which the tap is only dripping or has been turned off.

Some of those projects like the LIV Golf Tour never seemed to add up in the first place, according to Ellen R Wald. "The question is what was their strategy originally?… I mean presumably they didn't spend all that huge amount of money, just for PR. That would be crazy."

Top image credit: AFP/Getty

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Source: BBC
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