Capital Club Dubai, the region's premier private business club and a member of the ENSHAA group of companies hosted Mishaal Al Gergawi as their ‘Under the Spotlight’ guest on Wednesday 27th April.
Under Chatham House rules, fellow writer and friend Sultan Al Qassemi interviewed Al Gergawi, ‘I have the pleasure of dialoguing with one of my closest friends but that doesn’t mean he is going to get an easy ride’, said Al Qassemi.
Al Gergawi’s comments and answers spanned over a whole range of subjects during the evening; with planned questions from Al Qassemi and spontaneous ones from the audience.
Al Gergawi, who started his career as a blogger before moving into intellectual writing, still has a huge interest and an active presence in social media. His following is certainly impressive and hearing him speak it became clear why. No matter what the subject, his ideas and opinions are creative, thought provoking and in many cases boundary pushing.
He made light of the fact that most Emiratis work in the government and that in the eyes of a parent, it is the only option. ‘My mother keeps telling my sister to get a job, but she is very happy being a business woman’, he said, going on to refer to a friend in the audience, ‘give a hand to the one guy here that doesn’t work for the government’. But his good-humored statements aside, he would always rationalize any generalizations with logic; ‘We can’t have everybody working for the government; a healthy country has a successful private sector.’
Moving on to discuss ‘Abu Dubai, A Forward Tale of Two Cities That Could Only Be One’ his controversial account of how ‘the two cities can only become one’, Al Gergawi’s sentiments on Dubai came through very clearly. He disagrees that Dubai has lost its momentum, and believes that further success will emerge as a result of its recent downfall. Additionally he hopes Abu Dhabi can learn from Dubai’s mistakes, ‘It is one country and one mistake is enough’, he said.
As he deftly moved through the subjects and questions presented to him, he gave his views on government, the Arabs’ fear of failure, the Gulf’s reliance on oil, citing it a, ‘one trick pony’, and called for more entrepreneurs.
Asked by a member of the audience if being a social commentator was hard and how you gauge where to put a limit on what you say, Al Gergawi replied, ‘Sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong, but we always provide a view that is in the interest of the country’.
