RIYADH
Saudi Arabia is redoing a plan to overhaul its government and economy by 2020, after its launch last year led to overlap with other programmes.
The new version of the National Transformation Programme (NTP) will be “more focused” and have “clear governance,” according to an official document seen by Bloomberg referring to the programme as NTP 2.0. The revamp of the plan won’t change key fiscal or energy-related targets, but it’s needed to match it with Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s broader Saudi Vision 2030, according to the document.
Saudi officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“This is probably a natural development in the sense that the NTP and the Vision were not developed in complete coordination,” said Graham Griffiths, a senior analyst for Control Risks in Dubai. “There is a bit of cause for concern in the fact that they rushed this out in the first place, and now they’re having to redo it.”
The original NTP was designed to overhaul the Saudi bureaucracy as the world’s largest oil exporter grappled with low crude prices, and set targets for each ministry to achieve by 2020. But it was overshadowed by the prince’s Vision 2030, a broader blueprint for life after oil that calls for selling shares in state oil company Saudi Aramco and creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Neither is affected by the NTP redraft.
While Vision 2030 was announced first in April 2016, NTP had already been in development and was first mentioned in local media the previous December — well before any public discussion of the prince’s plan. That ultimately meant that the NTP had to be linked to Vision 2030 “in reverse,” according to the document.
Split
The NTP later became one of 12 programmes within Vision 2030 and as a result, many of the government agencies that were originally part of the program are no longer directly involved, including the energy, finance and housing ministries.
Many of the programme’s original targets have also been farmed out to other initiatives. Steps to balance the budget by 2020 now come under the auspices of the Fiscal Balance Programme announced in December. The revamped NTP will still run to 2020, but its implementation will also involve developing targets for 2025 and 2030, the document said, without elaborating.
Goals for the programme include improving the public sector productivity, boosting women’s participation in the workforce and developing tourism, according to the document. The first NTP also had targets for many of the areas, including boosting the participation rate of women in the labour force to 28 per cent. It’s unclear if they will be changed.
‘Constantly redrafting’
The danger is that the government could get “caught in this cycle of constantly redrafting these strategy documents,” said Griffiths at Control Risks.
Workshops to prepare the new NTP started at the end of July and will continue until the end of October, with about half of the kingdom’s ministries involved, according to the document.
Visitors to the workshops in the basement of a luxury hotel in downtown Riyadh are asked to sign a pledge of secrecy. Civil servants and consultants are brainstorming over laptops, while men and women mingle freely, scribbling ideas onto notepads emblazoned with the Vision 2030 logo.
The NTP document outlines a 16-week schedule to develop the program; a final report is due to be delivered to the government by the end of October.
