“TO WHOM are you reciting your psalms, O David?” – This applies to the ongoing housing crisis that the Kuwaiti citizens have been enduring for more than forty years, a problem that persists without resolution.

Regardless of what is written, those accountable for it, starting with the Council of Ministers and all successive councils of ministers, often ignore it or resort to a series of slogans and rhetoric as smokescreen.

Therefore, there is outcry in the desert due to the inability to comprehend the problem. Everyone is blowing their own trumpet because there is a firm conviction among all those responsible for this crisis that only their solution should be taken into consideration.

This is why we do not suggest going back to the beginning when the state built homes and distributed them to citizens. Those homes were more comfortable for their residents and were more sensitive to the social and economic traditions common in the country.

However, greed, acquisition, and trading in people’s lives have led to this being replaced by the so-called “land and loan”. We began to see these ugly concrete forests that have not been sensitive to the environment.

The crisis has today become a dilemma, especially with the extension of the waiting period to between 15 and 20 years.

This is why we have a housing crisis, something that the real estate dealers have exploited by raising the value of land and construction.

There is a group of citizens who were able to repay the loan to the credit bank, sell the house after its price increased several times, and seek to obtain another under the name of their children, family, and loved ones.

Earlier, we mentioned that Kuwait Credit Bank holds rights amounting to approximately three billion dinars that are fully guaranteed in every aspect. Therefore, by leveraging these assets to secure loans from local or international banks, and using the funds to construct housing cities with all specifications and environmental considerations, similar to the initiatives seen in Gulf countries and some developed countries, we can effectively resolve this long standing dilemma. Such a process will be profitable for society and will contribute to public revenue.

It is true that solving this issue comes at a cost, but it is cheaper than the crisis that citizens are experiencing. There are foreign companies that are ready to finance projects. Some of them built an integrated city in one of the countries and paid the loan in installments over a period of 15 years. Some others are ready to carry out the projects at the lowest costs, and then recover their money from soft loans, guaranteed by the state.

If the argument in the past was that parliamentarians rejected such solutions because they sought to obtain a share of any project, currently there is no National Assembly, and the matter is in the hands of the Council of Ministers, which has both executive and legislative capacities.

This means that there is no excuse to start resolving this crisis, unless the ministers have butterflies in their stomachs, thus causing the delay.

Here is where the role of His Highness the Prime Minister becomes essential, because he is the one who leads the ministers, and he has no excuse to delay decisions and laws that can help in the solution.

He can order the relevant institutions and the Ministry of State for Housing Affairs to contract with major foreign companies with long experience in building housing cities to work immediately on their completion.

After that, the price of the house can be paid in installments over a period of 15 to 20 years, and the waiting period can be reduced to three years at the latest. However, it seems that our screams are far from the ears of those who are supposed to listen.

Finally, we beg to ask – Why aren’t there housing banks that finance construction for individuals eligible for housing, with the state subsidizing costs and guaranteeing interest?

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times