City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (43 page)

I ask whether he speaks Arabic. “I am a Muslim and I refuse to speak that fucking language. I don’t want to speak to Arabs. I understand it but I refuse to speak it.”

I tell Anwar that he is on the wrong side of a government policy that seeks to increase the number of Arab expatriates at the expense of Indians and Pakistanis. The aim is social cohesion, since Arab foreigners have more in common with Emiratis than do South Asians. Anwar listens carefully. He says this policy is ruining Dubai.

Jim chimes in: “What do you think of Sheikh Mohammed?”

I’ve been in Dubai for three years at this point and I’ve never heard anyone criticize Sheikh Mohammed by name, not even Westerners. There is a long silence.

Anwar returns to his earlier theme: Dubai is discriminating against the people who built the city, the laborers and Indians and Pakistanis who fill the ranks of midlevel professionals. They’re being systematically marginalized, he says, due to ethnic favoritism.

Eventually the anger burns itself out. He drops Jim off, then it’s just the two of us. I ask whether he’s planning to return to Pakistan. He’s silent. We reach my block and I direct him to stop. I step into the street and pay the fare. He turns to take it and I look at his face. He’s utterly deflated. I wish him good night and shut the door.

There are many facets of the immigration debate. Another is the $55,000 yearly subsidy given to the average male Emirati. It’s no wonder the country needs to import foreign workers. Emiratis get free land, cheap electricity, and free water. Health care is free. Food and gasoline are subsidized. Education is free, often including graduate degrees in Europe and America. When they marry, Emirati men are eligible for no-interest loans to build houses. The state gives them $19,000 toward their wedding costs. Many earn windfall salaries for sponsoring foreign businesses. And there is no income or property tax.

“What else do you need money for? Suppose someone gave you $55,000 a year, would you be inclined to work?” asks Nico Vellinga, a Dutch economist who coauthored a Zayed University study that examined the subsidies. “People aren’t interested in working when you take away the incentive. The sheikh wants to be good to people, even spoil them. But there is a tradeoff.”

These are big subsidies, even by Gulf standards, and they’re part of
the unwritten tribal bargain that has kept royals in power decade after decade. Handouts don’t make for a competitive workforce. Privileged attitudes and a lack of skills have already excluded Emiratis from the private sector. British scholar Christopher Davidson describes the quandary as “one of the hidden costs of political stability.” The payments keep people happy, but they’ve destroyed the relationship between work and income.

The UAE grapples with a citizen unemployment rate near 20 percent
¹⁰
in an economy that creates tens of thousands of jobs a year. Fewer than 10 percent of the Emirati workforce toils in private companies, where 99 percent of employees are expatriates. Eighty percent of Emirati workers hold government jobs and most of the rest work for state-owned companies like Emirates airline and Dubai Properties.
¹¹
Of the few in the private sector, many—especially those in banking—owe their jobs to government quotas.

The CEOs at the top of UAE companies are Emiratis. But these men are often figureheads. When it comes to the skilled jobs, Emiratis are absent. In 2007, Bloomberg News reported that just one of the twenty-eight companies on the Dubai stock exchange’s main index had an Emirati chief financial officer.

Vellinga echoes the words of Sheikh Mohammed. The educational system needs to prepare students for the jobs that exist: management, trade, engineering, information technology, accounting. But two-thirds of citizens get degrees in arts, education, and religion.

Vellinga spoke in a Zayed University coffee shop, surrounded by young Emirati women giggling over milky lattes. The students wore high-fashion
abayas
and pecked away at laptops trimmed with fake leopard skin and feather boa ruffs. The all-female university with its American professors is an egalitarian place. Sheikh Mohammed’s daughters take classes alongside poorer girls from Umm Al-Quwain and Sharjah in a stunning campus where buildings of glass and fabric are mirrored in rectangular pools. But like the UAE’s work culture, Zayed University isn’t a bastion of feverish study. Emirati girls glide through the halls at their glacial walking pace, back straight, head high. At 5:00 p.m. most days the campus—including the library—shuts down and the students’ brothers or fathers collect them from the curb. There is none of the frantic studying, the all-nighters in the library, or the activism that typifies universities in
the West. It was an appropriate place to illustrate the effect of subsidies.

But women are the bright spot in the UAE education picture. They are more inclined to finish university and take education seriously. “We’re more bookish,” says Hamda bin Demaithan, herself a Zayed graduate.

Women make up 70 percent of university graduates and nearly 80 percent of the student body at the coed national university in Al Ain. Female graduates have swept into new jobs in government, starting at the entry level and working their way up. The youngest staffers in three of Sheikh Mohammed’s top policymaking bodies, The Executive Office, the Executive Council, and the prime minister’s office, are mainly women. The Executive Council, on the thirty-seventh floor of the Emirates Office Tower, is awash in black
abayas
. One employee said 70 percent of the council’s staff were women.
¹²
Sheikh Mohammed predicts that women will someday take most leadership posts below the royal family.

Increasingly, the pool of unskilled locals is made up of Emirati men. Education has never been a particularly respected pursuit in male society. Many are content to finish high school and take high-salary, low-skill jobs in the police and military. This attitude is one of Sheikh Mohammed’s biggest headaches. He harangues his subjects to take private sector jobs, warning them that efficiency drives are trimming the government workforce and increasing its skills. In 2006, he extended civil servants’ seven-hour workday to eight hours. Now and again, the sheikh pops up for photo opportunities in the malls, shaking the hands of Emirati “pioneers” who work as checkout cashiers or supermarket butchers.

Rolling back the state subsidies causing the rot cannot be done. Any sheikh who tried would probably be ousted. “People don’t see it as the government giving them something. They see it as a right,” says Anwar Gargash, the state minister for foreign affairs.

Subsidies can be revamped to pull Emiratis into the private sector. It’s a variant on Sheikh Rashid’s approach to land grants. Instead of simply handing citizens money, Vellinga reckons the subsidies should be directed toward Emiratis who take low-paying jobs outside government.

But Emiratis may not cooperate. Young Emiratis have never known the poverty of their parents. For most, prosperity is a given. Incremental increases in the wealth of an already rich person don’t mean much.

Quality of life becomes more important. People may agitate for a voice in their country’s affairs, and, like Umm Hussain, they may wish to brake the construction and immigration that is transforming their society. At some point, Sheikh Mohammed’s grand plan for Dubai may be incompatible with the wishes of his subjects.

DEMOCRACY AND TERRORISM

DUBAI AND THE
UAE are among the world’s least democratic places. Like China, Dubai has embraced unbridled capitalism without political freedom. Most people here prefer it that way. Sheikh Mohammed’s maneuverability in planning and execution depends on acting fast. The city is not going to surpass Hong Kong and Singapore if the boss has to sell his ideas to parliament. He doesn’t want to put everything on hold every few years to run for reelection.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the UAE sits in the cellar when it comes to democracy rankings. The advocacy group Freedom House rated the UAE as “not free” in 1008. The Economist Intelligence Unit in 1006 ranked the UAE 150th out of 167 countries, saying it was less democratic than Zimbabwe or Congo. The UAE got the Economist Intelligence Unit’s lowest possible score—zero—on its electoral process and pluralism. The only reason it’s not dead last is that researchers also measured variables such as a functioning government, civil liberties, and political culture, on which the UAE scores better. Saudi Arabia, despite holding men-only elections for municipal government, ranked below the UAE.

After thirty-five years of independence, the UAE held its first-ever
election in 2006. It was the last of the laggard Gulf states to allow some form of voting. Some 450 candidates, including sixty-five women, ran for twenty seats on forty-member panel called the Federal National Council.

In power-sharing terms, the election was nearly meaningless. It hasn’t been repeated. “It’s not really democracy yet,” concedes candidate Sheikha al-Mulla, a female psychologist who ran for one of eight seats in Dubai. The government hedged against revolutionary change by handpicking an electorate of 6,700 Emirati voters. It offset the panel’s twenty elected members with twenty appointed by the royals in each emirate. And the council has no formal power. It acts as an advisory body whose advice is often discarded.

The election wasn’t triggered by internal dissent. By and large, Emiratis believe their government is doing a good job, and the rise in living standards is evidence. The government organized elections more because they are global fashion. “It was getting awkward so they had to address it,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, the UAE University political science professor and democracy advocate. “From a historical perspective, it’s a step forward. But this is also for outside consumption.”
¹

Democracy isn’t seen in the same idealistic light as it is in the West. In the Middle East, democracy means chaos. Anwar Gargash, the thoughtful minister who organized the voting, said he was moving cautiously. Elections in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories have either deepened sectarian divisions or brought extremists to power. “We see elections as divisive and breaking up the social fabric,” Gargash said ahead of the 2006 vote. “We’d rather be safe than sorry. That’s why we’re moving forward in this measured way.”

The lack of democracy had become an embarrassment in a country that boasts one of the world’s highest levels of education and personal income. “I’m in my mid-forties. I have a PhD, and I’ve never taken part in an election,” Gargash said ahead of the 2006 balloting. I spoke to him again in October 2008. He’d voted for the first time in 2006. “It felt good,” he said with a broad smile.

Changes to the political structure will come in tiny increments. Gargash is mulling an extension of the Federal National Council’s term from two to four years. And he’s considering allowing more than 6,700 Emiratis to cast ballots. “For someone looking in from the outside, these are modest steps. We’re fine with that,” Gargash says.

Democracy follies in Kuwait are a favorite argument against elections. UAE papers have ridiculed the Kuwait parliament’s thirteen-year dithering on whether or not to allow in foreign oil companies. And they blasted the 2008 walkout by Islamist parliamentarians who refused to attend the swearing-in of female ministers who declined to wear headscarves.

“One of the hallmarks of the Kuwaiti parliament has been its habit of continuous quarrelling, of vitriolic grilling of ministers, and its propensity to throw the political system into turmoil,” wrote political analyst Khalid Salem al-Yabhouni in Abu Dhabi’s
The National
. Yabhouni said the Kuwait model “has proved to be one that we should not emulate.”

The popular view is that democracy is stifling development in once-mighty Kuwait. While Kuwaiti politicians waste their time discussing the finer points of headscarves, the UAE is building skyscrapers and an urban rail system. “Look at Kuwait. We can see how politics made the country stagnant. We have,
Hamdulillah
, been able to overtake the country that used to be the richest in the Gulf,” Sharjah-based political columnist Sultan al-Qassimi boasted during a forum in May 2008 at the Dubai School of Government.