I hope to see my mother and the hundreds of people who had their Hiya housing stolen get proper justice and be added to upcoming social housing projects. 🙏
Why does MTCC have to be based in Male' City in this day and age? Is there anyone who can give me a solid justification? The majority of their operations are scattered across the country. Same goes for FENAKA. Other cities also deserve better corporate jobs.
I still think this was a better approach to decentralisation. Atolls fracture the country into far too many pieces thus making it difficult for some atolls to sustain an economy. I believe we should split into provinces with each province being able to retain 20% of the revenue.
In the kind of party we envision, membership won’t be open to just anyone.
Every member will undergo a thorough background check before being entrusted with any position, and a disciplinary committee will ensure accountability and integrity.
There’s also a clear line, a list of individuals whose record makes them unfit to join any party that genuinely values honesty and principles. Majority of former Ministers, CEOs and MDs will easily secure a position in that list
Midhuam logic is to provide housing to thousands instead of giving that land to few hundreds.
You support giving the all available land in HM to 1500 people. How do you think the place will look like after a decade? Fancy bungalows rented at a minimal price or tiny apartments rented at maximum possible market rate?
When gov develop 700sqft hiya flats public could protest and lower the rent from 11K to 4K.
When you and rest of the 1500 people develop 700sqft apartments, people will be forced to rent that at any price you set
Free land shouldn’t be given on any inhabited island in the Maldives, not because people don’t deserve land, but because we simply don’t have enough of it.
If we had the space, I’d say give 10,000 square feet to every Maldivian. But we don’t.
When land is freely distributed in a country with limited space, it always ends up concentrated in the hands of a few. Everyone else gets left behind, forced to rent or depend on those few landowners.
That’s exactly what happened in Male, in Laamu Gan, and in many islands across Addu. And if we keep going down this road, it’ll happen everywhere else too.
Take the 2023 Binveriyaa Scheme as an example. Over 200,000 people live in the Male area. Male’ is already packed. The only remaining open land was in Hulhumale Phase 2 and Phase 3. The government gave away nearly 90% of all available space and 100% in P3 to less than 1,500 people.
In other words, we handed over the last remaining land in a city of over 200,000 residents (and counting) to 1,500 families - PERMANENTLY
There’s a demand for about 40,000 apartments in the Male’ area, and that number will only grow. The land given to those 1,500 families is big enough to develop more than 30,000 apartments.
After looking at the ever increasing residents and limited lands, the Gov had two choices:
1. Keep the land under state ownership, develop it, and provide highest possible quality, affordable housing for 30,000 families.
OR
2. Give it all to just 1,500 families.
They chose the latter.
And if you can’t see what’s wrong with that, I honestly don’t know how else to explain it.
When you compare, you can see the level of damage Binveriya Scheme caused even from an urban development point of view. Phase 2 was set to become a city with jobs, commercial activity, tourism, boating etc. Now it's just a place for sleeping.
@rsh1Mohamed I think one way to alleviate congestion would be to move our administrative capital to a different location, while Male' remains as the financial capital of the country. Ankara, Brasilia and upcoming Nusantara are worth looking at.
The debt situation we face today is mainly because of the Solih administration. Between 2019 and 2023, debt stock grew by MVR 56.7 billion, the largest increase in our history. Yet there is very little to show for it. Much of it went into projects with no real economic return, and a lot was lost to corruption.
This government is now paying the price. Close to MVR 20 billion has been spent on debt servicing in the last 18 months alone. That is money which could have been used for development.
We have successfully negotiated with our biggest creditors, India and China, to rollover and restructure payments. This is a common practice even among wealthier nations. It is not a default. The $500m sukuk due in 2026 will also be refinanced, just as the MDP government refinanced the Sunny Side bond in 2022.
It is true that raising new financing is difficult today because of high debt to GDP and a weak credit rating. But once the sukuk is refinanced, market access should improve.
MDP officials now talk as if they were experts in securing financing. Yet when Abdulla Shahid, the so called “world president,” was Foreign Minister, the Solih government failed every year to even secure 20% of the grant aid it projected.
In the Maldives, a lot of industries have been controlled by tight nit circles of oligarchs for generations. It is the consumers who have suffered because of them and their greed. So if the only way to break them is for the government to infiltrate, then I see no reason not to.
@midh_am We need to completely reform our laws regarding the use of land. Issuing land with no regard to its value in GMR has made it worse. Providing housing units for all income categories and affordable housing schemes is the way to do it imo. Not making a select few, millionaires.
Parties in power change but we the common folk get played every time by empty promises. The poor remain poor and the cycle continues. This time it has to be different. It has to be a fight against the elite. Fuck all political parties and their elitist sugar coated agendas. 🖕
@Mihaarunews Iceland doesn't even have a standing army but it's a more powerful and secure country than the Maldives due to certain bilateral agreements it has with other nations.
@Mihaarunews All that and we'd still lose in like 5 mins in a conventional war with almost any decent power.
Power doesn't always mean military strength. We have a far better chance of becoming more powerful and secure through soft power. Through bilateral agreements in trade and defence.