In 2022 Saudi Arabia’s energy minister gave a rare public display of distaste for the role of management consultants who had become virtually indispensable to his own ministry.
“The institution has no cadre to keep it sustainable,” complained Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during a talk in Riyadh in November 2022. “No future outlook safeguarded by people who take it from start to finish.”
For most of its history, the energy ministry’s operations and planning have relied on a mix of employees seconded from state oil company Saudi Aramco and embedded consulting firms.
But some officials fear Saudi ministries have become over-reliant on western consultancies, from the Big Four of Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC to more specialist strategy consulting firms, as disgruntlement grows about the outsiders’ ever-growing role in running the country.
“I’ll be in a lot of meetings where Minister X or Deputy Minister X is presenting a strategy,” said one Saudi professional who has worked both in the government and at a top consulting firm. “And the first thing that they’ll say is: ‘Ahlan wa sahlan, welcome, and I would like to let you know that consulting firm Y prepared this presentation’ . . . They don’t even take ownership of it.”
Riyadh’s use of consultants has expanded since the crown prince’s 2016 launch of an ambitious programme to steer the Middle East’s biggest economy away from its dependence on oil revenues.
To meet demanding deadlines and tackle novel challenges, from creating a Red Sea tourist destination to establishing high-tech industries, ministries enlisted even more help from foreign consulting firms including McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and PwC’s Strategy&.
