DUBAI // Mohammed el Badri opened the door to a bus shelter on Jumeirah Road, walked in and immediately rushed out. Then, he did the same thing at the next one.
He chose to stand in the hot sun until his bus arrived rather than suffer the suffocating heat inside.
"Neither of the air conditioners are on," said Mr el Badri, 33, an Egyptian pharmacist. "In the winter months, they were working marvellously, but they suddenly stopped working about a month ago and haven't been fixed since."
With the summer months quickly approaching, bus passengers are demanding that the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) move quickly to repair air conditioners at a majority of Dubai's bus shelters. They are also calling for more shelters.
This week, The National visited 21 bus shelters at random in the Deira, Jumeirah, Bur Dubai and Ghubeibah areas of the city and found only six with properly working air conditioners. Another six had running air conditioners that were not cooling, with the temperature inside the shelter equalling the temperature outside.
Nine shelters had no air conditioning whatsoever, with inside temperatures reaching over 40°C — producing a feeling like that inside a vehicle left in the summer sun all day, with the windows up.
At all but the six cool shelters, people like Mr el Badri stood out in the sun or sat inside with the shelter doors open, hoping their buses would arrive soon.
The lack of comfortable shelters may compromise the RTA's ambitious plan to convince 30 per cent of Dubai residents to use public transport by next year, a marked increase from the current 8 per cent.
An RTA representative said this week that the agency would look into the lack of air-conditioned shelters, adding that there may be a technical problem.
However, Mr el Badri said he believed the RTA's goal was too ambitious, especially during the summer months, if cool shelter is not provided.
"I would prefer to drive in a car that's air conditioned than stand in the heat and sun," he said.
At a Deira bus stop in front of the Flora Park Hotel, a walking distance from the Deira City Centre Metro station, Mohammed Yousif stood in the sun for 25 minutes waiting for a bus, without a shelter.
Only a pole indicated that buses stopped there. The Sudanese translator, 34, said that if the RTA was not up to the task of building more bus shelters to match the increase in demand, it should allow the general public to do what was customary in his home country.
"In Sudan, you and I can build a bus shelter as a charitable act," he said. "We can build one ourselves, or pay the municipality to build one in memory of a martyr or a loved one who has died. It serves as a memorial to that person and earns him and the builder blessings from Allah. The RTA should consider letting people do that here."
Others have their own suggestions on ways to fix the problem.
One reader of The National, who asked not to be named, suggested in a letter to the newspaper that the RTA should subcontract the maintenance of the shelters, perhaps even to the companies that advertise on them.
"It has become an ignored or neglected problem," he wrote. "It is not understandable, as [to] whether the A/C services in the bus shelters are sublet by RTA to another agency, and whether they are saving on electricity, or is it the RTA cutting down costs, at least let them inform the passengers and let the shelter doors be kept open rather than have the suffocation without air inside it."
ealghalib@thenational.ae
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Co-founders:+Ahmad+Hammouda+and+Seif+Amr
Sector:+FinTech
Headquarters:+Egypt
UAE+base:+Hub71,+Abu+Dhabi
Current+number+of+staff:+More+than+150
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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