Threnody

So the Dubai Lands Department is slowly rolling up all the available real estate in Dubai’s delightfully eclectic and rather human Satwa area, making compulsory purchases that are causing howls of pain from landlords who believe (not unnaturally given the current trend in prices and the likely land use) they are entitled to a great deal more.

The tenants, a rather quieter voice, are being slowly ushered out – in cases this is happening before the rent cycle has finished and cheques are still being presented for rents on houses that people are being evicted from. Of course, in this instance, the tenant has no rights at all in terms of stopping these cheques: the landlords often ‘discount’ the post-dated cheques that tenants have to give for the coming year’s rental period, which means the landlords sell them to a bank in return for a percentage of their value in order to get cash up front. A cheque’s as good as cash in the UAE, so you can’t stop a cheque and if you fail to meet it, you’re immediately in the ‘wrong’ in the eyes of a legal system that likes to deal with simplicities to a degree of absoluteness that often descends into black farce. So if you default on a cheque, the beneficiary has the right to go to the police and have you arrested. The police won’t be interested in why you defaulted: the fact of the matter is that you did. So the tenants have to choice but to pay and then try to get their money back from the landlords. And, as anyone who’s had more than 10 minutes experience of living out here, that’s harder than getting your kid back from the Social Services.

I was down in Satwa Friday morning: I had to pop by the office. It’s wonderful to see the place waking up (which it does a great deal later on a Friday than on a weekday): the smells of cooking from the various restaurants and the garish shopfronts of the Dhs10 shops; the car accessory places already hurriedly slapping sheets of tinting on impatient customers’ Patrols and Altimas; the growing bustle in the supermarkets as an often bewildering array of people from all over the world wander along the sunny streets past the hanging displays of plastic toys, saris, second hand televisions and cooking pans. It’s a marvellous place, a real place: one of the few areas of Dubai that is truly organic.

And they’re going to replace it with yet another copy of Milton Keynes in the sun, another soulless slab of projects with a Prozac-induced strapline tacked onto its beige faux-adobe walls and smoked glass windows. Apparently even Safa Park’s going to go. And apparently Saudi super-investor HH Prince Walid Bin Talal’s the man behind the project. That’ll cheer up the landlords!

What the people doing this fail to realise is that Satwa is part of what makes Dubai interesting and unique: it’s like a rainforest – you might not think it’s terribly relevant, but this is where the oxygen and the material of life and biodiversity comes from. Pretty much every Filipina shop assistant in Dubai lives in Satwa – it’s cheap enough. If Karama is a little India, Satwa is a little Manila. You need places like Satwa for ordinary people to live, work and shop: for people to enjoy restaurants like Ravi’s, still the best Indian restaurant in Dubai, or Pars (Iranian), Al Mallah and Beirut (Lebanese). Satwa is the place where you’ll still find ‘poor’ stores selling cooking pots and charcoal; where cobblers will mend shoes for a few Dirhams and tailors knock up shirts for a few Dirhams more. This is the place where the plant souk rubs shoulders with the pet souk - a confluence that occasionally makes you think you ARE in a rainforest!

Cities need this: they need layers. What makes Cairo or Beirut great cities is that they are like great oak trees: they have the triumphs and scars of the ages written on them like the rings of a tree’s trunk: their walls and roofs reflecting the accretion of years of ordinary human beings living their lives, creating a diversity and tale of the passing years that makes the city so human and real. Even Amman, mostly settled since the 1920s, has layers of history from the past 2,000 years to the present day. So what if Satwa’s only a little piece of the past - it’s Dubai’s past. Which make it a little piece of something that is, in itself, small and rare enough to be treasured.

Dubai, so focused on its future that it has no time for the past, is slowly killing the things that originally made it a city worth visiting. The great Hatta track, like so many of the other tracks through the mountains that used to delight friends and family when they came visiting, is now black top. The beaches are so crammed with hotels that you can’t go camping or have a beach-side barbeque any more. The projects are tens of acres of soulless, squashed-together housing overshadowed by apartment blocks designed by architects from Toy Town. Thousands of hotel rooms and huge swathes of pleasure parks, stadia and artificial tourist attractions are going to stretch out into the desert from the beaches. And anything that isn’t regulated, new and air-conditioned is going to get steamrollered. So they’re going to tear down the Indian cantonment of Karama. And they’re going to rip the soul of of Satwa to give us an air-conditioned luxury shopping lifestyle megalopolis.

And not one solitary person who lives, works, shops or owns property in Satwa today wants this for its future.

Stoned

Remember the pointless promotional stone that computer company Acer sent to thousands of disinterested Gulf News readers way back at the beginning of summer last year? The one attached to the blob of ad-babble (‘Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy...’) that was rather pathetically promoting the Acer Gemstone laptop?

I had a desk clearout yesterday and found the blasted thing, lurking behind a pencil pot.

Obviously my bid to swap it for the moon á la One Red Paperclip has not really worked very well as evidenced by the fact that I don’t own the moon and I still have a small, smooth and black stone with a flaw in it lurking on my desk at work.

As some may recall, I tried giving it away to colleagues but no-one would take it. And I can’t really just throw it away after all this time: I feel the need to get some sort of value out of it.

But what? What on earth can you do with a piece of promotional stone?

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...

Armageddon

Things are getting pretty apocalyptic around here. There's a dolphin with a flick knife slashing every undersea cable around: the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG cables have both been broken in Egypt, the Falcon cable's gone in the Gulf and now Qatar's managed to lose a cable link as well. At the same time, the weather's screwed, there are earthquakes breaking out all over the Emirates (interestingly, this would appear to be a scoop for arabianbusiness.com - I can't find any other mention of it) and everyone's talking about expanding Salik. Well, to be honest, Matar Al Tayer's talking about expanding Salik, everyone else is talking about what a completely dumb idea that is: over 66% of respondents to an arabianbusiness.com poll have apparently said they didn't agree with any immediate expansion of the scheme.

Quick note for anoraks: SEA ME WE is an acronym for South East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe while FLAG is an acronym for Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe. Falcon isn't an acronym, it's a non-aquatic bird and so obviously the ideal namesake for a submarine cable.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, a Dubai-based lawyer has come to the remarkable conclusion that not having AIDS or hepatitis is proof positive that unwilling, unprotected penetrative sex can not have taken place with someone who does have AIDS and hepatitis. Further findings expected from the city's progressive thinkers are set to include the incontrovertible facts that the earth is in fact flat, the moon is made of cheese and the stars are angels' daisy chains.

The latest Gulf News story on this trial is very unclear and appears to say that the defendant has been acquitted, but that just seems very odd. Any clarity to be had out there appreciated.

Serendipity

How strange after I posted that leaving HSBC bank in Dubai would be a Day of Joy. The young lady that processed our application for a new bank account at Lloyds was called Joy.

Joy

Note: This post might come across as grumpy. C'est la vie.

I have finally done it. On Saturday I have an appointment to visit Lloyds Bank Dubai Branch to open a local account with them. I’ve had an international account with the branch for over a year now and it’s been great – not a problem. My local bank, on the other hand, has been a different story altogether.

So this move will end 15 years of frustration and anger at a bank whose incompetence and blithering, mind-numbing stupidity at every imaginable level mark it as really quite special. The main thing that's stopped me moving in the past is that I have constantly been told that my lot was no better or worse than anyone else's. Having tried the grass over at Lloyds, I can tell you it's a damn sight greener over there as far as I can see.

I find it hard even singling out instances of my local bank's stupidity to regale you with, which is a shame as I’m sure some of them would be amusing to tell. But there are simply so many of them. My bank can’t be relied upon to take a faxed instruction for an international transfer and execute it. They have sent transfers twice, not at all, lost transfers and charged me Dhs 180 every time for the pleasure. Their call centre is laughable, a joke. You can’t speak to anyone in the branch, you’re routed straight through to the call centre. The call centre don’t have the contacts of the human beings in the branch you might at some stage wish to talk to. The call centre staff are plodding and pedantic. Their music on hold, infuriatingly, is frequently reduced by a technical hitch that has been there for years, to a condition approaching white noise. They always ask if there’s something else they can do for you when they have been unable to help you.

They have frequently blocked my Visa card (invariably just when you actually want it and always because of a security concern over a mundane and obviously routine transaction) without any attempt to contact me prior to instituting the block. They never block it when I do something mad like buy dinner for 15 people in Dubai on the same day as I've hired a car in London.

Their Internet banking service is marred by layers of maddeningly impenetrable ‘memorable questions’ passwords and other daft requirements. Their telephone banking service has a nine figure code that’s different to your bank account number. In fact, in order to use their services, you have to memorise over 30 digits of information.

I find it hard to talk to them now without being assailed by a feeling of deep-rooted loathing. I know that every transaction will, for some reason, turn into a sub-standard and frustrating experience. And yet my expectations, already lower than rock bottom, are never quite low enough to avoid disappointment with every new transaction.

And so, finally, I have been driven over the edge and am moving away. My old bank was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation – known popularly as HSBC. It was the British Bank of the Middle East when I opened the account. Now I’m going to close it. I should have done it years ago. But damn, it feels good to know I’m finally doing it now!!!

The world’s local bank. LOL!

Minted

As Bill Gates’ visit to the Emirates dominates the newspapers, I’ve dropped my car to Al Habtoor in order that they can gouge me in the traditional, and distressingly regular, gouging spree that is Servicing A Pajero.

Mr. G, our regular cabbie, took me into work and so, as we slowly pushed our way through the choking, aggressive gridlock, he updated me on the dark, subterranean world of the UAE’s taxi drivers. And it’s pretty grim stuff. With all the fuss we’ve seen in the international and even local media about construction labourers and their conditions, it’s strange that nobody’s looked at what the taxi companies are doing. Apparently, drivers are resigning in droves, driven to going back home by a rigidly enforced Dhs 300 per day target and a 16-hour day, 7 day week as well as a system of punitive fines that is surprisingly similar to the labour conditions of industrial revolution Britain. Drivers are fined on a seemingly totally arbitrary basis for not meeting their targets, for any damage to their cars or for pretty much any other reason you can think of.

Their replacements are new labour, recruited fresh from overseas and so not aware of the grim conditions they’ll be working in. And, apparently, a good number are Afghanis carrying (all too easily available, apparently) Pakistani passports.

Mr. G’s particularly upset that 'the company' took Dhs 400 from him recently. When he asked why, it turned out it was the fee for a mandatory training course he had been given. When on leave recently, he’d had a tooth pulled and the operation had gone wrong and complications delayed his return to work. He turned up back in the UAE week late, having faxed to say he would, with a doctor’s report. The subsequent Dhs 1,500 fine was finally reduced to Dhs 500 after much bargaining.

There has been a spate of robberies from cabs in Sharjah, something like 13 car windows smashed in December alone, apparently. No, I didn’t see the headlines, either. But what really got me about this was the fact that Mr. G knows one of the drivers who was burgled and he was robbed not once but twice. For, once the police had come and taken a report then gone, the car company fined the driver Dhs 300.

There was plenty more along these lines as we sat in the traffic. So why stay? I asked him. I’m not, he replied. The second this visa’s up, I’m off.

Fair enough. But if Mr G is to be believed (and he’s an honest cove with no particular reason to slip me a line) there are thousands of these men out there working these mad hours, in a state of dangerous tiredness, for pennies - and being (illegally?) fined at every turn by the companies that employ them.

Unwell

The Emirates Internet has been doing a pretty passable impersonation of the last moments of Hal 9000 for the past couple of days. It's immensely frustrating.

I have a theory. You know how plants will move away from someone that's hurt them? (They will, I saw it on TV) I think it's all tied in with Bill Gates' visit to the UAE. I think the packets have been trying to avoid him.

Headline of the Week

Is it any wonder a bloke gets grumpy? Gulf News today has featured the headline: “etisalat emerges as most recognised mobile telecom operator in UAE”.

I can’t believe it. The monopoly provider of telecommunications to a country for over 30 years ‘emerges’ as a leading brand just over a year after its competitor launched services? Well, I never.

Etisalat’s competitor, the idiotically named Du, has actually achieved 60% brand recognition which isn’t bad, although the Lord alone knows what price tag was attached to that particular achievement. And it’s worth noting that brand recognition alone isn’t much of an achievement – most people I know have a negative or at best neutral reaction to the Du brand. This is not helped by the company’s insistence on making muckle-headed and over-blown announcements about its users or the number of people entering its competitions.

While we’re talking about Du, a minor celebration is in order in Du Towers – for the first time since they launched, last week someone failed the Du Test, asking if my mobile number should be prefixed with 050. Additionally, a highly respected journalist and pal now has a Du mobile. So now I know one person (the other 999,999 are out there somewhere, presumably) who has changed over to the challenger network. I have to record that talking to him is something of an issue as the line cuts constantly, but what to du?

Just to be clear on this: both Etisalat and Du insist on having their names spelt in lower case and I refuse to bow to that demand. It is silly.

Ra Ra Rera!!!

It's a strange, almost guilty feeling to be complimentary about a government agency when we all spend so much time snarling and bitching about the likes of the RTA and the 'responsible authorities' in general. But Rera, Dubai's Real Estate Regulatory Agency, really does seem to be doing a remarkable job of tidying up what was a very messy area indeed.

Dubai has long been in the habit of making a virtue of its 'laissez faire' attitude. In this case, laissez faire usually meant 'we can't be bothered doing anything about it' or 'this threatens some vested interest or another so let's just pretend it's not there'. These days you start to feel that there's a great big spring clean going on out there - and Rera's certainly cleaning up the real estate market.

Today's news is that owners of leases in jointly owned buildings such as flats will be able to set up an owner's association and take joint responsibility for the maintenance of the property and lands. This means that developers can no longer charge the sometimes amazing maintenance fees that they have been leveraging in the past and also gives people the right to pick their own choice of contractors. However, the developer still gets to charge a fee to cover infrastructure maintenance and this may mean the overall cost stays high. That's a wait and see situation. But the right to association is a very important principle indeed to have established.

BTW - another screwed up website (the RTA site is up today): the Rera site's homepage will display a delightful 'Coming soon' splashscreen, so go to this link to actually browse the contents. Judging from the spelling and formatting, it's still very much under construction. Which is rather ironic, isn't it?

Rera has also (to my absolute delight) announced it is to regulate the real estate advertising market to ensure that developers only promote their schemes truthfully. Developers have to submit their advertisements to Rera before they can run. I do believe that government regulation of any form of media is a very bad thing, but I am highly amused at the idea of a room full of harrassed Rera staff trying to find any grain or shred of truth in the tide of insanely hyperbolic real estate advertising that is currently swamping every white space in Dubai. It must be like fighting a path through an enormous cloud of prozac-laced candyfloss using nothing more than a cocktail stick.

Or something like that.