I grew up in a country where “ghost projects” is a phrase everyone understands without explanation. In 2025, government auditors confirmed 421 of them among roughly 8,000 flood-control contracts inspected — infrastructure that existed only on paper while public money vanished into it.

I’ve watched this pattern my whole life as a student journalist covering my own government: a scandal breaks, officials express outrage, nothing structural changes, and eventually a new scandal replaces the old one in the news cycle. Now the same government is being handed a 1,600-hectare “AI-native” industrial hub, financed with American capital, and told this time it’ll be different.