By Amira Howeidy First Published 7/20/2007
In the sizzling July temperatures, something unmeteorological and very sinister is provoking Cairo's heat sensation.
Those behind it give it happy terms like Egypt's "growing economy" and "real estate boom." After acquiring large swaths of cheap, mostly desert land from the state, Arab and Egyptian real estate companies are now reselling their purchases at staggering prices to the citizens of this country — or at least some of them.
Promising a new life of ultimate "luxury" and "higher" standards to Egyptians, the Dubai based Emaar and Damac companies began their official sale of housing units a few days ago. The price of one meter in Emaar's Uptown Cairo housing units in the Moqattam district is LE 7,500 ($1,339). Damac's first housing project located at the beginning of the Cairo-Alexandria highway is LE 6,500 ($1,160) per meter. These are just primary phases for Emaar and Damac. Egyptian real estate tycoon Talaat Mustafa's Madinati city project in the desert of New Cairo is LE 4,129 ($737) per meter.
One obvious problem with these rates is that in the short span of two months, they caused an enormous and exaggerated surge in Cairo's real estate prices. Emaar's cheapest and smallest housing unit — a 93 square meter apartment — costs a staggering LE 700,000 ($125,000). The cheapest apartment in Madinati costs LE 925,000 ($165,178).
In a country where annual per capita income is $1,260 (according to 2005 World Bank figures) it's not difficult to imagine that the targeted market of this type of real estate is limited to a miniscule fraction of society. Only in very rare circumstances does this include the upper middle class.
And with the "lifestyle" that these prices offer, come the values. What was once a middle class district, Moqattam is now associated with Emaar's — note the English name — Up Town Cairo project. Both Emaar and Damac's websites — which primarily address a Gulf Arab clientele — are only in English. Damac's newspaper advertisement campaign was also — you guessed it — in English, with marketing slogans such as "The most expensive lifestyles in the Middle East" and "Sorry, the Damac luxury is not for everybody."
Indeed. Here are multi-billion dollar Dubai-based companies (where per capita income is $25,000) invading Egypt's real estate market, surging prices to maddening heights with the blessings of the IMF and World Bank applauded by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif.
Meanwhile the vast majority of this population can only watch from a distance as more and more desert land is resold to the very rich, then transformed into European, American or Dubai-style gated communities with English names. And with every new project and impressive advertisement campaign, comes the assertion that only the very "privileged" are welcome.
At the same time entire villages in Egypt's delta live without fresh water supplies, relying instead on polluted water. As a result, kidney failure and hepatitis C are as common as influenza. But the daily demonstrations of the "thirsty" have fallen on deaf ears. Officials are too busy selling Egyptian land, banks and assets and issuing hollow statements on how these revenues fund development and infrastructure projects. Needless to say, these projects never materialize. Our railway network, sewage system and basic services have collapsed and almost every Cairene has a story to tell about days without water and long hours of power cuts.
Fifteen years after the government initiated its controversial privatization of public sector firms program, a new aggressive state policy is now underway to sell bigger and faster.
Last year saw the selling of 90 percent of the historic Omar Effendi stores to the Saudi Anwal company for LE 589.5 million ($102.7 million) although a government appointed committee had originally valued it at LE 1.14 billion.
When the government decided to sell a majority stake in Bank of Alexandria last October to Italy's Sanpaolo for $1.6 billion, it became clear that the state is reducing its role in this country's economy.
Back then President Hosni Mubarak promised there will be no more selling of state-owned banks. But last week the cabinet decided that 80 percent of Banque du Caire, one of Egypt's four main state-owned banks, will be sold in a public auction in six to nine months. On Tuesday it was none other than deputy secretary general of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) Gamal Mubarak who defended the decision arguing that the move is part of efforts to reform the banking sector. Proponents of this policy point to the massive debts Banque du Caire accumulated over the years, largely blaming "mismanagement" and "bureaucracy." Selling to the private sector, they say, should lift the burden off the government.
But they fail to mention how decades of corruption within the establishment allowed for the accumulation of these debts. Four years ago while investigating the loan deputies case the prosecution concluded that it is both the "corruption" and mismanagement of two banks — Misr Exterior Bank and Banque Du Caire — that have been responsible for the bulk of the country's banking fraud.
Those involved in the mega-fraud scandal were NDP MPs, businessmen and senior bank officials. So instead of tackling the roots of Egypt's economic problems which is government-condoned corruption, the state chose the easy way out: sell, sell and sell. In fact, last month Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MP Farid Ismail presented an interpellation in parliament claiming that approximately 60 percent of Egyptian land is now owned by foreign investors. Independent business estimates suggest that currently foreigners own 18 percent of Egypt's banking sector.
It is no wonder that a new movement opposed to the "selling of Egypt" was born last month. Its founder, Yehia Abdel Hadi is ex-chairman of the board of Banzione, one of Omar Effendi's sister companies. Abdel Hadi was part of a group tasked with evaluating Omar Effendi and the one who filed a complaint to the public prosecutor accusing Minister of Investment Mahmoud Mohieddin, and others of squandering public funds by trying to sell the department store chain at a knock-down price.
The movement's latest statement condemning the selling of Banque du Caire rightly sounds an alarm to the ease by which national assets are sold to foreigners and the private sector. Why shouldn't we be skeptical of assurances that Egypt's two national banks — Al-Ahli and Cairo Exterior — won't be privatized if similar promises in the past were not kept? What guarantees are there that they won't sell the Suez Canal one day, asks the movement? This might seem exaggerated, but who would have thought that so much of Egypt would be sold under our very noses, as we — ironically — mark the 55th anniversary of the July 23 Revolution?
<http://merip.org/mer/mer243/kanna.html> Dubai in a Jagged World
Ahmed Kanna
Ahmed Kanna is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Iowa
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The Invisible City
<http://merip.org/mer/mer243/kanna2.jpg> Workers make phone calls in one of the sveral labor camps near Dubai. (Julian Warnand)
If capital is illegible in Dubai, other migrants to the city—the ones who build the visible city—are all too "legible" and all too manipulated. With the construction boom of the 1990s came hundreds of thousands of migrants from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and further afield in Southeast Asia.[7] All these migrants, clearly visualized and regulated by the state as "guest workers," are restricted in their off hours to the invisible parts of the city. This might be neoliberalism's central irony: Categorical simplification and visibility for the purposes of control result in invisibility in the moral sense.
The Sonapoor labor camp, where most of the migrant workers are housed, lies outside the main city limits, about a ten-minute drive from Dayra, in the eastern part of the city. The landmark at the outer edge of the visible city is the al‑Mulla center, which, having been built in 1979, is the city's oldest shopping mall. Al-Mulla is now considered a gateway of sorts, past which no respectable European or local Arab person would venture. Perhaps aware of this, the workers have given the camp an unrespectable name. "Sonapoor is a very bad word," said my guide, adding that it is Malayalam (the language commonly spoken in the Indian state of Kerala) for a woman's sexual organ. In fact, the camp's name is a Hindi term meaning "city of gold." My guide, who is not from Kerala, may have been honestly mistaken. Yet his belief about this word's meaning, as well as its real meaning, encompasses the range of sentiments that workers feel for Dubai. For many Pakistanis and other South Asians preparing to emigrate to Dubai, the place is very much a dream city where fortunes can be made instantly, ending years of penury in the home country. And yet, it is also undeniable that the actual experience of the city can be painful and darkly ironic.[8]
Squat buildings mark the spot where we turned off the main, paved road and drove along unpaved roads crowded with men in the uniforms of different companies, returning from or going to their shifts. Large buses emptied their human contents and were refilled. We passed a couple of camps. "That one is al‑Habtour," said my guide, naming a Dubai construction firm. "That one is al-'Abbar." These are both large companies, with uncooperative security personnel and, presumably, stricter surveillance of workers. They are too dangerous to attempt entry. We turned off and reached our destination. The guard was not even at the security kiosk. We proceeded into a walled compound, past communal toilets. There were six or seven bedrooms on either side of the compound, a communal kitchen and a TV area with easy chairs and sofas.
The bedroom we entered, which has two single and two bunk beds, is about 40 square feet. It has its own kitchen and toilet, a relative luxury at labor camps, as well as a TV connected to a satellite dish and a stereo box. We were greeted heartily by an Arab worker, who offered us tea. "This is a very good room, relative to other worker accommodations" both at this company and at others, said my guide. Usually, a room like this houses 20 workers, but this one houses only four. Our host, Ma'moun,[9] has been in Dubai a little over three years. He found out about the job from an agent in his home country. For approximately $655, he obtained a visa and paid his airfare, with the company paying for the remaining expenses. Every three years, he is required to renew the visa, at a rate of about $260. Every two years, he gets two months' paid vacation, and the company allows trips home for emergencies. The company took his passport, but gives it back to him when he needs to travel. His monthly salary is $300, paid always in cash. Sometimes he does not get paid for one or two months, sometimes longer.
<http://merip.org/mer/mer243/kanna4.jpg> Two workers in their quarters make phone calls in the camp of Sonapoor. (Julian Warnand)
In the UAE, the employer, who is always Emirati, is called the kafil (sponsor), in Ma'moun's case a small construction company with 25 or 30 workers. Ma'moun and my guide described it as a relatively "good" company. Normally, however, working for such a small employer would put the worker at a relative disadvantage. When it comes to non-payment of workers and substandard accommodations, smaller companies, as opposed to the 'Abbars and the Habtours, are disproportionately the worst offenders. What does Ma'moun want to get out of Dubai? "I don't have a big, definite goal. I dream step by step (ahlam daraja fi daraja)." He doesn't know how long he wants to stay in Dubai. He is here indefinitely.
The second worker, Hamid, is from Pakistan. Unlike Ma'moun, who is a site supervisor, Hamid works in construction. He himself paid the labor agent in Islamabad for travel and visa, at a total of 130,000 Pakistani rupees ($2,138). When he arrived in Dubai, the company took his passport and a $272 deposit. In Arabic, the deposit is called ta'min, or insurance, for it insures that Hamid does not "abscond." Absconding was a big problem, especially in emirates such as Sharja, "where the accommodations are much worse, because they are not under the scrutiny from international organizations the same way that Dubai is," as someone else familiar with the workers' movement told me. Hamid's monthly salary is $163 per month, and he works about 48 hours a week plus about 2-3 hours overtime every week, which increases his income to about $218. Whereas the government requires that the sponsor pay for accommodations and electricity (and this company does seem to follow the rules), workers are required to pay for food and cooking gas. In Hamid's case, this leaves him with a net monthly income of $136, all of which goes to his family in Pakistan.
There is a canteen at the camp, or "company accommodation," to use the sponsors' euphemism, "but it is very expensive," said Ma'moun. It is pricier than Spinney's or Carrefour, two European chains that can be found in the stylish shopping malls on the other side of the city. "If a carton of milk costs three dirhams at Spinney's, it will cost three and a half here," said my guide. "But the workers have no choice. The canteen has a monopoly."
"There is a much worse company," he continued, naming a firm in nearby Sharja, where the 35 workers—all of them illegal—are sleeping on the roofs for the heat. There is no plumbing, no electricity, no food and no work. The partners in the company were an Emirati sheikh and a Lebanese-Canadian. They dumped the company when it went bankrupt, and left the workers hanging out to dry. The sponsor has not returned their passports for two years and owes them about $68,075. About ten workers went to their embassies to get replacement papers, and have left the UAE.
The third worker, Ahmad, an elderly Pakistani, has been with the company for 15 years. He told the same story about how he found the job in Dubai. "Work in Pakistan was too little, and the government does not care about its people. I used to make less than $2 per month. How can you live on that? How can you support a family?" His working conditions are the same as those of the other workers, though, since they are younger and newer here, they might be shocked to discover that building a nest egg in the Gulf might take a good deal longer than they expected. How many of them comprehend that being a migrant can last longer than settlement in their home country? "The agencies lie," said Ahmad of the labor recruiters in Pakistan. "They say, 'Go to Dubai. The work is easy; the life is easy. You will do light work like lifting crates. Small work, little work.'" The workers, illiterate in Arabic and English, sign contracts that they cannot read, he claimed. The companies, added my guide, use this as a pretext to escape responsibility when workers make complaints. "The Dubai government is good, better than the Pakistani government," says Ahmad. "It cares more about workers. But the companies are not good."
Below the Surface
On the one hand, workers such as Ma'moun, Hamid and Ahmad live in a remote part of the city, which until only recently consisted of far humbler, often improvised dwellings. To most Emiratis and wealthier expatriates, these workers do not exist, either physically or in the moral sense. One need only note the similar position of domestic servants in the UAE, also predominantly South and Southeast Asian. Domestics are permitted into intimate parts of locals' houses—bedrooms and kitchens—that are not open to other outsiders. The reason is that exposure of private areas within the household only matters when social equals or superiors are involved. Social subordinates, such as children and domestics, are not to be feared because their opinions are not socially admissible. This social position is reflected, as well, in the local (and expatriate) practice of referring to domestics, who are always adults, as "tea boy" or "house girl."
Construction workers are similarly invisible. Such invisibility may explain why the denial of workers' human rights, as recorded in meticulous detail by a 2006 Human Rights Watch report, is routinely minimized, if even acknowledged, by Emiratis. Abuses, which the local English-language press also covers pretty well, are for locals merely "a few isolated incidents," as one Emirati told me. Organizations like Human Rights Watch are also often considered part of a US plot to shame and subdue the Arab world. As another Emirati told me: "When you look at the Arab world, who is the only one doing anything [forward-looking and modern]? Only Dubai! The Americans can't stand an Arab country [succeeding]." Better, then, to focus on the aesthetically pleasing aspects of the city and look away from, as Thomas Friedman puts it, "the warts."
<http://merip.org/mer/mer243/kanna5.jpg> Boarding the bus after a day's work in Dubai. (Caren Firouz/Reuters/Landov)
Looked at from another perspective, however, workers such as Ma'moun, Ahmad and Hamid are all too visible, if visibility is a condition for the merchant-state's ability to control workers. Their passports are expropriated the moment a company hires them. After this, they are warehoused in closely watched camps, sorted into wage categories that seem to parallel their nationalities and shipped from these "company accommodations" to their work sites in cramped company buses, their only means of transportation outside the camps. The merchant-state's knowledge of them—their country of origin, their health, their capacity for work, the extent of their geographical mobility within the boundaries of the state—is thorough and sufficient to the task of control.
None of this is to say that Dubai or the UAE are peculiar in their exploitation of migrant workers or in the use of nationality, ethnicity and even race to categorize and manipulate the workers. One sees exactly the same arbitrary discrimination and selective imposition of "legibility" on various groups in the supposedly advanced countries of Europe and North America, including in the backlash among many Americans against "illegal immigrants" from Latin America. And much worse than the Emiratis' resistance to supranational oversight of workers' rights can occur under the rubric of national sovereignty.
The point is simply that the world is not flat. Accounts of Dubai as either a beacon for the Arab world, or, alternatively, a laboratory of capitalist phantasmagoria ignore the persistence of national identity and boundaries, and their intersection with exploitation and class, as a means of rendering the world quite jagged. These accounts neglect how nationality and class continue to determine the level of mobility that a group or an individual has in the global economy. In both liberal and Marxist narratives, the power of capital pours forth unencumbered from the center to the periphery, either dragging the latter along the road of progress, or utterly flattening it and imposing the center's civilization. Both stories are insensitive to the concrete ways in which the local and the global interact.
Accounts of Dubai should scratch below the surface of the literally visible city to hit the less obvious but, from the state's perspective, equally visible parts of the city. The organization of labor and the expropriation of standardized workers' rights, the contraband coursing through the ports and the astounding buildings that present a futuristic vision while concealing their sources of financing are all logical elaborations on the original pact of 1938. They also represent the fruits of a rather prescient strategic choice that has situated Dubai as banker, developer and launderer for the wealth of the restructuring and collapsing world surrounding it.
Author's Note: Thanks to the International Programs at the University of Iowa and the Stanley Foundation for funding part of a research trip to Dubai in December 2006 and January 2007. Thanks also to members of the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, especially Kamari Clark and Annie Harper, for a stimulating discussion which inspired much of this paper.
Endnotes
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[7] Human Rights Watch, Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates (New York, November 2006), p. 25.
[8] Thanks to Annie Harper and Smriti Srinivas for an illuminating discussion.
[9] All workers' names are pseudonyms. -- Yoshie
