Letter from Dubai

ACADEMIC, POET AND ESSAYIST OMAR SABBAGH AIRS HIS WORRIES FOR THE YOUNGER GENERATION IN DUBAI

Thanks to social media, news of the massacre of peaceful protesters in Lekki, Lagos, rapidly spread throughout the world. How did it happen that, in apparently democratic Nigeria, soldiers opened fire on their fellow citizens peacefully protesting systemic police brutality by waving the Nigerian flag and singing the national anthem?

Lekki needs to be put in context. Even in colonial Nigeria, massacres were commonplace. When the civil war came in 1967, it accentuated the devaluation of human life. At the war’s end in 1970, millions lay dead, finished off by indiscriminate bombing and strafing, as well as starvation and protein malnutrition.

It is a country which doesn’t look after its young. Youth unemployment stands at 13.9 million according to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which also states that the Nigerian youth population eligible for work is a staggering 40 million.

Insecurity caused by Boko Haram terrorists, Fulani herdsmen terrorists and Niger Delta militants are often cited as reasons for this, but a sizeable portion of the unemployed are also unemployable due to the lack of basic skills. The country lacks the sort of social security taken for granted in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and North America. There are no unemployment benefits. As a matter of fact, the employed are often owed unpaid salaries for upwards of ten months, even years.

The government also has a history of keeping this state of affairs in positionand again it does so with violence.

On February 1, 1971, Kunle Adepeju, an undergraduate of the University of Ibadan was killed during a students’ demonstration against poor catering services. The Police claimed that a stray bullet from one of its guns had felled Adepeju. The nation was scandalised. The university was shut down and a board of inquiry instituted to determine what truly happened.

Many other examples might be cited - from the Bakalori massacrre on 28th April 1980 to the destruction of Odi on November 20th 1999.

It is a long and melancholy history of government suppression.

Today, Nigeria boasts about 172 tertiary institutions, annually churning out tens of thousands of young men and women with little hope of employment. Only unserious societies remain blissfully uncaring about the place and disposition of alienated youths about half of whom have been trained in the sciences and have at their fingertips the knowhow to upset the applecart.

Graduates with intent to do business or go into manufacturing are hampered by lack of funds. The government has not created any new industries in the last five years. It has not paid any attention to setting up new refineries.

The national currency, the Naira, has continued to plummet in value. There was a time when the naira was superior to both the dollar and the pound sterling. But $1 today exchanges for anything between N400 and N450.

The displacement of whole populations that end up across Nigerian borders, or inside Internally Displaced People’s

(IDPs) camps mean a devaluation of farming, grave loss to incomes and hikes in food prices.

But the world is changing - and Nigeria with it. In 2015, earthmoving equipment was used to dig mass graves into which hundreds of slain Shiites were buried. But video clips of the dastardly act are in existence. Now, nearly everyone wields the immense power that is the cell phone. For this, grotesqueries like Lekki rebuff concealment. In real time, the massacre was filmed and transmitted across the globe. Official denials that it happened have been quite thoroughly discredited through credible investigations by various standardssetting organisations, including CNN.

Bizarrely, the authorities are hounding those thought to have led the #endSARS demonstrations, instead of addressing their grievances. They are confiscating passports, freezing bank accounts and shoving into detention people guilty only of participating in peaceful demonstrations. In this regard, informed Nigerians cannot get over Britain’s taciturnity in relation to a country it colonised and in which it still wields incomparable influence. In fact, repeated Downing Street administrations are seen as complicit in Nigeria’s determined abysmal plunge.

This complicity may explain why the International Criminal Court (ICC) which indicted al-Bashir has not considered a similar action on certain Nigerians whose wantonness makes the former Sudanese dictator to look like a Sunday school teacher. That is why British opinion influencers with conscience must look beyond Whitehall and systematically mobilise voices to interrogate Nigeria before it implodes.

Over the course of the last year, I have felt quite fortunate to live and work in Dubai. Whether during the period between spring and summer 2020, when lockdown regulations meant you had to apply for a permit to go from one place to the next (via a user-friendly app), or whether it was the rigors of the rules about numbers permitted in cars, taxis and social gatherings, the high levels of technological efficiency proved to be a blessing here.

So Dubai has been a comparatively good place to be during lockdown. Malls, for instance, immediately set-up mass temperature monitors at their entrances. The university where I teach built a new gate and passageway at its entrance for this purpose. In pandemic times, a highly monitored society, with efficient avenues for top-down governmental action, puts the “brotherhood” into any pat notion of “Big Brother.”

Of course, Dubai - and the UAE more generally - has suffered economically, like anywhere else in the world. Things have contracted: shops for a long while curtailed their hours of availability; work-hours in the second half of 2020 were shortened; and there are fewer jobs. A close relative spoke of laying-off a third of his staff, and having to halve salaries in the Q3 of 2020. Another was forced to take paid leave for a month from his sales job in retail.

That said, it was announced early on that the government would take keen action to make sure the country would be protected. Tourism - an important aspect of Dubai’s economy - has also suffered, but it was clear to all that as soon as it was safe enough to reopen that was done. I myself have travelled more than three times in the last year, needing only to follow PCR-testing regulations. Returning to Dubai, it usually takes less than twenty-four hours for your PCR-test at the airport to ping as an SMS on your phone. The services have always been stellar here.

I have been teaching, too, since spring last year, online and at times via a new “Hyflex” system, whereby students can opt in advance, during registration, to attend in person or remotely online. For teachers like myself this involved a scramble to learn new technologies in the classroom, by which one would lecture in person but simultaneously with a camera and microphone to engage with those learning remotely. I was anxious about the burden of learning to use the technology, but the inhibition before the event turned soon to enthusiasm on my part.

Young people’s prospects here are good; this is one of the best places in the Middle East to study alongside Beirut and Cairo. The majority of students will end up in business, media, engineering and perhaps architecture or design.

That said, the students seem to have lost some of their gusto. When I see the odd stray young person on campus, he or she invariably seems to me to look lonely. It’s much easier for an academic like myself - a person who revels in a week spent on the couch reading or thinking, writing or teaching - to deal with these circumstances than for other kinds of people. It’s also much easier for a man nearing forty, too, than for someone half my age to accept the reality of the pandemic.

I dare not let my wife catch on, but being homebound suits me like pie and goes down like sugar. Bookworms or not, it’s the young I feel for. Of course, they’re getting on with their lives, and many are learning by other means. But if things are concerning in Dubai, if I look across at my native Lebanon, I am forced to imagine what absolute lockdown would be like. That country is suffering from its infrastructural weaknesses, in a country which was weakened already by internal strife and corruption.

I remain hopeful. Perhaps when things improve, and our old outdoorsy life recommences, we will have - in a manner of speaking - gone back to the future. It might even be that this hiatus will bring forth new fruits. To paraphrase that great fabulist Lawrence Durrell: in the midst of winter we can feel the inventions of spring.