Dubai has Tall Buildings, Stratospheric Ambition and a Grasp of Future Success By Tony Lennox
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." These were the prophetic words of Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the ruler of a tiny Gulf sheikhdom in the early 1960s.
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t was his way of warning that the oil which was making his community rich did not guarantee a prosperous future. He was astute enough to realise that the destiny of Dubai — then a dusty backwater on the shores of the Persian Gulf — would depend on one thing: diversification. Sheikh Rashid remembered a time when pearldiving drove Dubai’s tiny economy – an industry which collapsed when Japan began flooding the global market with cultured pearls in the 1920s.
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Rashid established his vision for Dubai just as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was making the end-of-empire decision to pull military forces from East of Suez in 1971. Cash-strapped Britain could no longer afford to defend the seven emirates, clumped together in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The emirates, known then as the Trucial States, had been a British Protectorate since the early 1800s. Now they were on their own. The Saudis and the Iranians helped themselves to outlying bits of the emirates before the UAE formally came into being in 1971. In 2021, the UAE celebrates its golden jubilee, and the world, in the intervening 50 years, has been witness to its extraordinary transformation. Dubai, the largest city in the emirates, is today a dazzling metropolis — a magnet for investors, a major trading hub linking east and west, and a playground for wealthy sun-seekers. Only a generation ago, there was nothing here but shifting desert sands; now six-lane highways wind through a forest of glittering skyscrapers. Even the police drive Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bugattis and Bentleys. Along Dubai’s shoreline, millions of tons of sand and rock have been dredged from the Persian Gulf to create artificial land extensions and archipelagos, some of which are visible from space. These reclaimed lands are crammed with 38
high-class shopping malls, water parks, marinas and mansions. Rashid’s son, and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, is Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. He is keenly involved in horse racing, and is one of the UK’s biggest personal landowners. Now 70 years old, the Sandhursteducated ruler has built on his father’s legacy and vision, turning Dubai into a city for the 21st Century. The financial crisis of 2008 briefly stalled the progress of what had become the world’s fastestgrowing economy. At the time, dredgers were constructing the World Islands archipelago just offshore. All work ground to a halt and the ruling family dipped into its own fortune to breathe new life into the project. The drive for diversity includes a recent decision to liberalise the UAE investment market. A new law has opened the door to 100 percent foreign ownership in specific sectors, giving the UAE an advantage over countries where the requirement for a local investor is still the norm. It is one of a raft of reforms designed to lessen the country’s dependence on oil. These reforms, the government believes, will contribute to the continued rise of the financial services sector, leading to investment in the automotive, property, energy and chemicals sectors. A free and open environment for business is making Dubai — and the wider UAE — increasingly popular as an investment destination. The UAE’s population has grown from around 300,000 in 1971 to 9.8m today. Only 1.4m are Emirati citizens; the bulk of the population is comprised of immigrants. Many are from the Indian sub-continent, and form the backbone of the workforce in construction and the service industry.
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