Invitation to a Retirement

I was woken up this morning by my father, who just wanted to talk. I watched his face reacting as if to a bitter taste while he complained about the unfairness of forced retirements that government ministries impose on their senior employees.

In this country, UAE nationals make up less than 11% of the total population. That's the official number. We're probably around 5%. From the total number, exclude all those who are not employed by the public or private sectors: the elderly; men and women with private businesses; housewives; students and the unemployed. How many of us are employed then? Not many, I suppose.

Why, I wonder, in a wealthy country as the UAE, that provides - according to a Gulf News article - 300,000 jobs every year, do we find some unemployed UAE nationals? The article, written by an expatriate, goes on to criticise UAE nationals (as usual) and attribute their ill fortunes to their own laziness and unwillingness to work the normal hours of the private sector (8:00-5:00).

What about me? I'm a qualified UAE national, with work experience in both the public and private sectors. I was in high demand when I only had a Bachelor degree. The moment I earned my Masters, I have suddenly become an outcast. Nobody wants to hire me. Everybody is scared to hire me. They're scared for their budgets.

Yes, I will demand a high pay. People's salaries here are determined by their passports. Americans and Europeans are up there, at the top of the economic ladder. Qualified Asians remain at the bottom, unless they carry the right passport. And we, UAE nationals, are not even in the middle.

Why shouldn't I demand a high pay? The cost of living is outrageous and the prices are soaring. Unlike once upon a time, we don't get free housing anymore. In a survey on the most expensive cities in the world, Dubai ranked 34th this year, while Abu Dhabi ranked 45. I'm baffled, looking at the cities that rank above Dubai: they have excellent, state-of-the-art public facilities, including reliable transportation. Why is Dubai making us pay so much to live here? Why am punished for being a citizen of this country, and for having my ancestors belong here?

I don't complain about the weather; I love the heat. I can survive when DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority) decides to carry out maintenance and cuts the electricity for 5 hours in the neighbourhood. I don't mind the censorship, and I don't mind when Etisalat makes me pay a fortune to make international phone calls and charges me 30pence for every text message I send locally, when people in the UK get deals for 500 free minutes, or 500 free text messages, and cheap international calling cards. Heck, they even get to use Skype, which is not available for us here.

We endure that, and even more, yet we are smirked at contemptuously for demanding a high pay. My money, as a UAE national, will be invested in this country. Most expatriates here invest in their home countries. They're ultimately going home, so they're not going to spend or invest here the way a UAE national would.

Mohammed Al Gergawi is said to be one of the most intelligent UAE nationals in the country. He's done wonders for the economy, and he's been generously rewarded by the government. Gergawi, I must add, is not the exception to the rule. He is one of many bright UAE nationals, and one of the very few who were given a chance to prove their metal.

Gergawi started working for the public sector. Many UAE nationals prefer to work in the public sector. The Gulf News article claims that this preference is due to the shorter working hours of the public sector. That is far from the truth.

If Gergawi had not worked for the public sector, he would not be where he is today. He would not have got the chance to excel, simply because he would be deliberately sidelined and marginalised in the private sector. Many UAE nationals complain of hostilities against them by foreigners, Westerners and Asians alike. Asians, however, do it in a very subtle way. Like wolves, they form packs that attack individuals, not groups. They intentionally make the work environment unbearable for UAE nationals to force them to leave. This is due to the fear that UAE nationals might rise in ranks or replace them, especially with the Emiratisation drive. Still, I prefer the unconfrontational Asians to the abrasive and arrogant Westerners (Americans, to be accurately specific).

Before leaving to pursue a Masters, I had worked for a semi-governmental organisations, in which the big boss and supervisor were both Americans. Apart from making us do the menial work, they discouraged their UAE national staff from doing any professional development courses by asking them to work over-time. They also denied them any paid, international professional development opportunities that were exclusively granted to the Western staff. They have managed to successfully create a culture of fear at work, parallel to the American government's work at home, except this one is unveiled by any claim of democracy, equality and freedom. I'm proud to say that I was the only outspoken and confrontational member of the staff; they hated me. Needless to say, the feeling was mutual.

I could not go and complain to the HR, because when I first tried, I realised that the Westerners running the HR department could not bring themselves to be impartial. I decided to take justice in my hand. I treated my boss and the supervisor with unconcealed contempt and derision. I openly questioned their double-standardness when they asked me why I took extra 10 minutes for my lunch break, or why I was having coffee with someone from a different department. "Why not? I saw X having coffee with Y for the past two hours, you didn't seem to mind." At first, there was an attempt to make excuses for X, who was also a Westerner. The lamest of these excuses was, "X is probably having a meeting with Y, and their discussing work." Luckily, at that instance, I found X having coffee with Y, and through the window glass that made them look like mute animated objects, I could tell they were having a fun time, with no folders on the table in front of them to lend their casual meeting any feigned air of professionalism. I pointed at them and said, "Does that look like a professional meeting?" My supervisor reversed in her steps back to her office with a nervous laugh, and waving her hand in the air as if to dismiss this as a one-time occurrence. The morale of this story: she never questioned my timings again. Bitch.

Now let me get back to my father's concerns: he was upset that senior citizens, who are physically and mentally capable, were being forced by the government to retire after 30 years of service. It was a forced retirement, making those hard-working, experienced people feel inadequate. The juices of their youth have been squeezed fresh out of them, and now they've been made to feel like sour layers to be discarded of. "Why" my father asks, "do they do this, when we're a minority in our own country? Why do they have to force us into retirement when we still have a lot to offer?" My father is 57, the age of Dubai's ruler, Mohammed bin Rashid. I needn't elaborate on that.

Those who have been given a "forced retirement" have also suffered financially. Prior to the new government decision to increase the pension of those retired employees to up to 70% (not exceeding AED 6,000), many people had to live with a pension that deducted the same amount from their basic salaries. They had no benefits, either.

My father made an interesting observation: the government is following the policies of other countries in its pension programme. What the government does not seem to realise is that in other countries, like Egypt, for instance, imposing retirement after a 30 year service is necessary in a country that has more than 80 million citizens. In a country with its natives making up less than a million, what's the hurry in sending people to an early retirement? And it's not like the government is poor, and cannot afford to give them their whole salaries without deducting any amount or denying them all benefits.

Rulers in this country are surrounded by financially comfortable people. They can never, and should never, guage the financial status of the average UAE national by looking at their acquaintances and those who keep their company. With citizen being made to feel dispensable to the country's development, the zeal that drives individuals to create, produce and give will die prematurely and we'll end up embodying the stereotypes mentioned in that expat-penned Gulf News article.