As well as their high unemployment rates, the UAE’s northern emirates provide perhaps the most interesting example of poverty in the Gulf monarchies, given the increasingly visible divide between the country’s richer and poorer emirates. According to statistics from 2008, Abu Dhabi’s contribution to the UAE’s overall GDP was nearly 56 per cent, while Dubai’s contribution was about 32 per cent. As such, the five other emirates combined accounted only for 12 per cent of GDP. Even more alarming, perhaps, was that Abu Dhabi’s contribution to the federal budget — from which most development assistance for the poorer emirates is funded — was only 3 per cent of its GDP, while Dubai’s contribution was only half a per cent of its GDP.[550] It can be argued that since the UAE’s independence in 1971 the relative GDP contributions of the northern emirates have actually declined.[551] The poor conditions have manifested themselves in different ways. Small protests have occurred, some of which have been bought off with promises of increased housing benefits, while others have been quashed by federal security forces.[552] In 2006 inhabitants from a village outside Ra’s al-Khaimah blocked roads to stop trucks getting through. The authorities responded by sending in tanks and then followed up with substantial financial compensation for the villagers. More often, however, nationals of these emirates simply complain of a variety of problems ranging from a lack of basic utilities to housing shortages. But in all cases their remonstrations serve to dispel the myth that all UAE nationals are wealthy and content.
In Ra’s al-Khaimah, for example, residents continue to complain about the water supply being cut, sometimes for several days at a time,[553] and ‘major rodent infestations’.[554] Some national families also complain of small houses that they cannot afford to repair. Interviewed by a state-controlled newspaper, one UAE citizen claimed that she slept on the floor with her three children, and could only afford to treat the damp and mould by selling her marriage dowry gold. She further claimed that she wouldn’t have been able to afford furniture unless her daughter — a policewoman — was able to help. Having waited since 2008 for a new house, she has visited the housing office daily asking why her name is not yet on the list and demanding that ‘All I want is a house from the Government for my babies… I don’t want a lot of money in the bank’.[555] A Reuters report from 2011 painted a similarly gloomy picture, describing the ‘…absence of digital billboards, shopping centres, and hotels that typify Dubai. Instead, desert roads are dotted with clusters of small apartment blocks, car repair workshops and discount retailers. Clotheslines are laden with laundry left to dry in the sun, and diesel generators are placed near commercial and residential buildings, to compensate for power shortages’.[556]
For years various rescue packages have been dispensed to the northern emirates, but these are understood to have either been too little, or have quickly been swallowed up by corrupt officials in the emirate-level governments. In 2008 a $4.3 billion grant was allocated by the federal government to oversee physical infrastructure projects in the northern emirates. But despite the size of the sum, the announcement of the package was greeted with scepticism by some of the recipient municipalities, with one anonymous spokesperson stating ‘We often hear about these projects from Abu Dhabi, but we haven’t seen them come into action’.[557] In 2011, shortly after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, it was announced that the northern emirates would receive an additional $1.6 billion in aid. The federal government also claims that it has a twenty year plan in place that will address some of the ‘gaps and other issues such as healthcare, education, housing, roads, and water’.[558] It also promised to build more than 100 kilometres of new rural roads,[559] and doubled the funding for a small business development programme that aims to increase job creation in the region.[560]
These planned improvements have prompted some analysts to argue that ‘…the federal government is capable of increasing spending in these smaller emirates to stave off any social unrest’.[561] It seems likely, however, that the UAE’s wealth gap will keep on growing. A report from summer 2011 remarked of Ra’s al-Khaimah that ‘[although] less than 300km from the UAE’s capital territory of Abu Dhabi, its neighbourhoods of low cement buildings and dusty cars feel as if they are in a different country’.[562] Similarly, UAE nationals interviewed by reporters complained that ‘…the wealth disparity between the northern emirates and Dubai and Abu Dhabi remains the most challenging issue for the stability of the country as a whole’. They also agreed that developing utilities, health care and education were the most pressing needs and added that they rarely travelled to emirates outside Dubai and Abu Dhabi because they lacked adequate services.[563]
Usually considered immune from economic deprivation or other such problems due to the country’s very high wealth per capita, even some Qatari nationals have recently begun to bemoan their circumstances. In 2007, a prominent Qatari cleric[564] began to highlight their cause, claiming that there is ‘poverty in cash-rich Qatar and [there need to be] programmes to alleviate it by providing long-term interest-free housing loans and opportunities for self-employment to low-income citizens’.[565] In early 2011 a state-backed newspaper threw more light on the issue when it was reported that some Qatari nationals had been posting on internet fora about the need for greater assistance for ‘low income families who are living off a meagre dole’, the problem of ‘salaries being high, but resources getting exhausted by the middle of the month since rents and food prices were skyrocketing’, and the increasing need to cross the border to the nearby Saudi city of Hassa to ‘buy household provisions every month… in order to make ends meet’.[566] And later in 2011, although a rather narrow example, the same newspaper claimed that a number of Qatari families were upset over the Qatar Tourism Authority’s cancellation of the annual Doha Summer Festival. Explaining that these families were hard-pressed due to ‘piling bank loans which make it more difficult for them to afford holidaying abroad’ and had been ‘looking forward to the summer festival… due to [their] financial problems’,[567] the report again seemed to challenge the stereotype that all Qatari nationals enjoy substantial state-provided benefits. More recently, an extensive report by a Qatar-based consultancy firm argued that it was a ‘myth that all Qataris were rich… this is not the case’, and claimed that nearly three-quarters of Qatari national families were actually in debt, often to the tune of $65,000 or more.[568]