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Dubai South Properties, which is building real estate at the area encompassing Al Maktoum International Airport and the Expo 2020 Dubai site, expects to invest Dh2 billion in residential schemes by the end of next year, its chief executive said.
Around half of that has already been spent building 6,000 homes over the past two years, to be delivered by 2020.
The government-owned entity has also spent an additional Dh1bn on infrastructure and utilities to serve Dubai South Residential City as it is developed over the coming years.
“We are very careful with what types of properties we bring to Dubai South to make sure there is no saturation – we do not want to jeopardise what else is going on in the market,” Mohammed Al Awadhi said in Dubai on Wednesday.
Together with third-party developers building smaller clusters of homes, the total investment to 2020 “could easily reach Dh2.5bn”, the chief executive said during an event to update reporters on the scheme’s progress.
Dubai South, formerly known as Dubai World Central, was launched in 2006 as the world’s first “aerotropolis”, with Dubai’s second-largest airport, Al Maktoum, at its core.
The programme is intended to be a new urban centre for Dubai, and has seven districts spanning 145,000 square kilometres, including a logistics zone close to the airport and an office development.
Several projects at Dubai South Residential City have already been completed or are nearing completion, bringing thousands of new homes to the emirate, Mr Al Awadhi said.
The Pulse, a freehold mixed-use community comprising 1,200 new homes, is set for handover from mid-2019, while Crew Village, a luxury shared-living development built on behalf of clients, is set to be completed in 2020.
Two more communities, The Villages and Park Lane, have been designed and will be built from this year. The company is seeking joint venture partners to bring the rest of phases one and two – around 30 per cent of the total Residential City masterplan – to fruition, the chief executive said.
He told The National that Dubai South Properties intends to announce a new mixed-use project spanning almost 1 million square feet next month, following an agreement with an unnamed developer. He declined to reveal further details.
Residential City Retail – a shopping district – will bring 30,000 square feet of retail space for leasing by 2020, with ambitions to develop a total 18,581 square metres in the longer term. There is enough land at the site to design a third and fourth phase after Expo 2020, the chief executive said.
Outside Residential City, plans are under way to provide at least 2,000 hotel rooms across the wider Dubai South district before Expo 2020. And the first properties at Sakany, a 22-building staff accommodation complex intended to house 17,000 workers in time for the Expo, have been completed. An additional residential scheme, Sakany One, will provide cheaper housing with a shopping centre nearby.
Dubai has witnessed a real estate market decline in the past three years on the back of lower oil prices, which have crimped consumer purchasing power and driven a fight for affordability across the Emirates.
Residential sales and rental prices have fallen, but developers are bringing new, cheaper products to market to meet demand. “Now is the time for developers to be realistic and provide true value for money,” Mr Al Awadhi said.
“Cautious”, smaller developers are retreating right now, which is bringing greater equilibrium to the market and resulting in higher-quality product, he said.
NBC 6 Investigation: Illegal Casinos?
One year after a gambling scandal prompted Florida to ban casino-style games from storefront arcades, cash is once again changing hands amid what appear to be video slot machines at businesses in Broward County, a Team 6 hidden-camera investigation has found.
An undercover producer who went into Play It Again arcade in Davie and Boardwalk Brothers in Tamarac was able to pay cash to obtain credits on a players card. After inserting the card into what appear to be video slot machines and playing for a period of time, the producer was able to exchange the remaining credits on the card for cash – based on how many credits she gained or lost.
They also deny the cash returned to players is based on accumulating points from winning spins on the machines. They say players get reward points, redeemable for merchandise or cash, but those points have no relationship to winning or losing points on the spins of the virtual wheels.
But the Team 6 Investigators producer saw her $18 in winnings at one location and $15 in losses at the other were based on points accumulated or lost through play on the digital machines.
The Florida Legislature banned casino-style machines from arcades last year as it revamped gambling laws in response to a crackdown on internet casinos, which claimed their gambling was legal under the state sweepstakes law.
Dozens were arrested, including Kelly Mathis, attorney for the group, Allied Veterans, which led what prosecutors called a $300 million illegal gambling operation. The lawyer was convicted of racketeering and received a six-year prison sentence, though he remains free pending appeal.
Then-Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll resigned on the day of the raids after investigators found she was paid public relations consulting money by Allied Veterans while a state legislator.
But the Fishers say they are not breaking the law.
“The cash changing hands are not for anything as far as the game played,” Mitchell Fisher told Team 6 Investigators.
Days later, he and his partner, brother Jason Fisher, watched the hidden camera video that appeared to show cash-based credits flowing from players cards through machines and then being paid out in cash.
Agreeing that cash should never be exchanged for game credits at arcades was the Fisher’s own attorney, Michael Wolf, who also represents the Florida Arcade and Bingo Association.
But the Fishers now say they are no longer an arcade.
“What we did is we changed our business to a social club so people pay a daily membership to come in to play at our location,” Jason Fisher explained.
His brother said the reward points are based on simply showing up, buying credits and spending time on the machines.
Davie Police tell Team 6 Investigators they have an active investigation underway, but neither they nor the state attorney would comment further.
Coming, in the not-too-distant future: A world where regulations are automatically incorporated into companies' policies. This would allow businesses to more quickly and more accurately conform to regulatory changes, let them better deploy their human compliance personnel and give regulators immediate visibility into companies' compliance efforts.
Embedding regulations into algorithms was proven possible in a recent test, providing momentum to the effort to make regulations machine-executable and to reduce the amount of human oversight needed to interpret and implement rules. The breakthrough heralds a future far different from the one that exists now, where regulators issue rules, companies take months to figure out what they mean, then more months to configure their systems to conform to the new rules.
“One of the reasons why this is momentous...is it stands for this position that regulators can really embrace technology and that law and technology can intersect in ways that they haven’t previously,” said Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer at U.S. technology firm Immuta, which operates a data-management platform used by companies in the finance, government and life sciences sectors.
A two-week "tech sprint" held in December by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the Bank of England and some U.S. and European technology firms, including Immuta, provided the first-ever confirmation that machine-executable regulation is possible, said Nick Cook, head of regulatory technology and advanced analytics at the FCA.
Financial firms have long talked about the human effort needed to interpret a rule and how to comply with it, said Mr. Cook in an interview. “What we are trying to address...is a way of expressing the requirements in a form that could be interpreted by machine without human or expert interpretation,” he said.
Mr. Burt said in an interview the work he did with students from Yale Law School during the sprint involved looking at a small segment of the regulatory handbook to see if it could be made machine-executable, and then to see if that code could be put into financial company data to drive reporting back to the regulator.
"This idea of making regulations machine-executable has been around for a while, but until last month no major regulator had taken it seriously enough to devote the time and resources to seeing if something like could be possible,” said Mr. Burt.
Mr. Burt said the FCA and Bank of England started by asking two questions: What would the future look like if we put regulations in code, and what are the risks as to how should regulators start thinking about that? “It’s something we’ve been doing for quite a while: how to embed law into software, then connect that to data security and privacy,” said Mr. Burt.
In a paper published after the sprint, Mr. Burt said the task is to make the effort scalable. “It can’t just be one rule at a time; one human translating one rule doesn’t scale,” he said. “We need a way of mixing automating the translation [of the code into executable actions], then having human supervision and review."
While operational security and factors such as resilience were not fully assessed during the sprint, Mr. Cook said cyber will be one of a number of core topics to explore and assess with industry. "Cybersecurity is a shared responsibility, and we take a cooperative approach to address this threat," he said.
When it comes to the cybersecurity and privacy implications of embedding regulations into code, Mr. Burt said there would need to be controls and monitoring to ensure the integrity of the data. "Standard information security models generally prioritize confidentiality over integrity, but I believe that would have to change," adding he thinks the "world is moving in this direction."
Regarding privacy, he said he's not sure there’s a clear answer at this point. "Turning laws into a machine-executable code base would centralize the ways laws are promulgated and managed, so it would be easier to understand who is and isn’t in compliance," said Mr. Burt. "On the other hand, regulated entities would understand the laws better and could react to changes in the law immediately, which would increase their ability to stay compliant--and to remain in control."
Esther Otim lives with her two children in a single-room rented house at Angwetagwet, Adekokwok Sub-county in Lira District says after her husband’s death all the properties including land were grabbed by his relatives.
Internationally, women’s rights to land are underlined in several international declarations including the CEDAW 1979, the Beijing Express Declaration 1995 and the Millennium Development Goals 2000.
Irrespective of one’s academic background, thousands of women from across the eight districts of Lango Sub-region remain vulnerable in their bid to access customary land.
The head of governance and advocacy at Facilitation for Peace and Development (FAPAD), Ms Juliet Ebil, says the local cultural norms are both backward and discriminatory, treating women as possessions and denying them rights.
“The issue here is that the cultural leadership is biased towards women in that in most families it is only the boy child that inherits land,” she says.
According to Ms Margaret Rugadya, a social–legal policy analyst, the basic gender distinctions in land access, ownership and control are remarkably similar across all sub-tenures and across northern Uganda.
The social breakdown, caused by displacement to camps, has certainly weakened the clan’s ability to enforce its traditional rules of protection, she said in her Associates Research Occasional Paper No.4, November 2008.
Prior to the displacement, the family structure protected wives, widows and children against attempts to interfere with their right to use land. This tradition has been threatened in the return situation, Ms Rugadya said.
Ms Rugadya adds that failure to understand and properly interpret customary land laws has led to loss of land. “Many believe that women do not have a say on land related matters. They misinterpret customary laws and cause more conflicts; they have also lost respect for their elders which is distracting from effective enforcement of customary decisions,” she said.
More than a third of the world’s workforce engages in agriculture and in developing countries, women make up 43 per cent of the workforce. But they comprise less than a fifth of landholders, according to BBC.
The situation is made worse by the customary land tenure system which gives cultural leaders more power and control over land.
According to a 2017 baseline survey by Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO), a Netherlands-based non-governmental organisation, land access remains a problem among women and persons with disabilities in Lango.
The survey indicates that land owned by households constitute 94.69 per cent, male headed households owned 39.2 per cent compared to their female counterparts (31.6per cent).
Mr Lawrence Alot, a resident of Barr Sub-county in Lira District, says some cultural leaders connive with land grabbers to deny widows and orphans access to land.
Ms Ebil says Uganda’s justice system has not been so helpful to women whose rights have been abused.
“Our justice system favours the rich over the poor, so if you are poor you will not seek help in the court of law because of the financial costs that come with it and the dragging of some of these cases,” she says.
Human rights activists suggest that everyone should be given titles to their land and be put under state protection.
The Lira Resident District Commissioner, Mr Robert Abak, on April 28 told a dialogue meeting for cultural leaders in Lira town that government cannot sort out issues related to customary land ownership. He, however, committed himself to ensuring that women have access to land.
But women insist that government by law has to ensure protection of citizens’ property.
“We pay taxes and in return we demand for protection and quality service delivery,” Ms Molly Okello, a food vendor in Lira town, says.
Uganda’s 1995 Constitution is seen as one of the most gender-sensitive in the region, providing a legal framework for gender equality (ActionAid “Cultivating Women’s Rights and Access to Land”, 2005).
Early in 1985, a young medical intern, Mtutuzeli Nyoka, reported for duty at Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth. There to welcome him proudly as a colleague was none other than his father, Dr Siyolo Nyoka. On that day, Nyoka senior, who had preached the gospel of education to his children, was “overtaken by emotion”.
Mtutuzeli, now author of at least two gripping novels and one book of nonfiction, is not your average medical practitioner.
As a child, he “read everything I could get my hands on” to such an extent that, “when I was not reading, I was thinking about reading”.
His education was interrupted for a year when the 1976 student uprisings swept through the land. Snippets of his biography are contained in his Deliberate Concealment, a book about his time as a cricket administrator and his fight against corruption in the sport.
Since democracy, the challenge we have as a country and as a people has been how to multiply, massify and diversify the Mtutuzeli Nyoka experience with education in general and post-school education in particular. On the face of it, this should be more possible in the democratic era. But the challenges we face are immense.
The Nyoka family is rare – rare in the days of apartheid and still rare in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike Mtutuzeli, most black graduates are first-generation graduates. Unlike Mtutuzeli, most do not grow up in houses full of books and families where parents value education. Most are born to parents so poor they reckon it is better to save their last cents for a decent funeral for themselves and their children than for post-school education. Many are born to single parents who can hardly afford to put food on the table, let alone pay university fees.
Born a few years before 1994, Philani Dladla, author of The Pavement Bookworm, had such parents. Survival and not education was what his parents were concerned with. The first book he ever owned, given to him by his mother’s white employer when he was 12, established his love for books. Gradually, he became addicted to books.
But later Dladla developed another addiction. Drugs. Which is how he ended up a street kid in Johannesburg. But the addiction to books proved stronger; he established a new profession — selling books and doing book reviews to motorists on Johannesburg’s Empire Road. In another country, at a different time, under different circumstances, Dladla might have been a literature scholar. Despite his tenacity and his love for books, Dladla fell through the cracks of our post-apartheid higher education system, straight on to the drug-infested streets of Hillbrow.
Born one year after Nelson Mandela walked out of jail, Malaika wa Azania chronicles the story of her life in her Memoirs of a Born Free. She paints vivid pictures of the poverty, resistance and violence of black life in the townships and squatter camps of her youth.
More importantly, she devotes a large part of her memoirs to her educational journey — including stories of her “refusal to assimilate into whiteness” when her single-parent mother enrolled her into a model C school. She studied for a short time at Stellenbosch University.
“The walk from one end of the garden to the other felt like a march through the valley of the shadow of death,” she wrote about her brief stint at Stellenbosch.
Currently studying at Rhodes University, Wa Azania has found solace in books and in student activism. She also writes about how her mother has struggled from one job to the other, one pay cheque to the next, and how her ability to stay at university has remained uncertain as a result. She, too, has found the post-apartheid education system an alienating space, hard to access and harder to stay inside of.
And yet, by the age of 22, she was already an author of one monograph and several newspaper columns.
Khaya Dlanga was a teenager when democracy came knocking at the door. In his book, To Quote Myself, Dlanga tells the story of how his single mother, after selling every goat, cow and every piece of land she owned, still ran out of money to pay for his fees at the AAA School of Advertising in Cape Town. As a result, Dlanga effortlessly joined the ranks of Cape Town’s homeless, working late at school so he could sleep on the premises and sometimes in abandoned buildings off campus.
Eventually, Dlanga dropped out of school without the diploma he had dreamed about, and left the Eastern Cape for Cape Town. He offers a biting critique on the post-apartheid higher education system. He asserts that black students struggle in higher education institutions because “the system is too dumb to understand their plight”.
Fate, luck and Dlanga’s relationship with religion pulled him back to education and success by a different route. At this stage he has written two books, is a multiple award-winner, YouTube blogger at large and senior communications manager for content at Coca-Cola.
Julius Malema was not as lucky as Dlanga. But he was as tenacious, if not more so. His tenacity saw 13-year-old Malema make his way from Polokwane to Johannesburg in 1993, to attend the funeral of the assassinated Chris Hani.
Malema’s biographer, Fiona Forde, in An Inconvenient Youth, suggests that Malema was badly hurt by the exposure of his poor matric results. She also notes that “he is extremely clever”. Malema, who was brought up by his mother and grandmother, never gave up on education. What the education system could not give the young Malema, he found in the student organisation called Cosas and later in the ANC Youth League. In 2010, he completed his diploma in youth development through Unisa.
On March 30 this year, Malema graduated with a bachelor of arts degree at the same institution. He is now enrolled for an honours degree in philosophy. His CV includes the establishment of the third-biggest South African political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters.
Has the post-apartheid higher education system failed totally? No. The capacity of the post-school system has been greatly improved. The enrolment figures have doubled since 1994 with black and women students constituting the majority.
Our research output numbers have grown over time. So has our aptitude for benchmarking ourselves against institutions considered to be some of the best in the world. But, as these personal stories demonstrate, by most measures our progress is neither remarkable nor perfect.
The enrolment growth has not put a serious dent in the low participation rate of black students in the system. The system is bedeviled by high attrition and non-completion rates, especially for black students. Nor has it radically altered campus culture and made it more inclusive. Campuses are still saddled with alienating symbols and culture, exclusionary linguistic and other practices, racism and abject student poverty.
The technical and vocational education and training colleges are yet to find their historic mandate and be equipped enough to fulfil it.
Less than 10 out of the 26 universities are eligible to participate meaningfully in the leading global university ranking agencies. And yet, as university fees have steadily increased, the least resourced universities, with little chance to attain global rankings, are the ones left to cater for the poorest and least prepared students. Nor are the highly ranked universities necessarily the most transformed.
For all the growth in research quality and quantity, black South Africans contribute less than 30% of the national research output. A system whose most productive researchers are white men who are approaching retirement runs a serious risk of rupture in the next decade or so. Black people constitute less than 15% of the professoriate. To date, the scarcest species in the higher education sector are black women professors.
Each of the persons cited in this article has a lesson to teach us about our higher education system. Each of them speaks of their tenacity and a deep love for learning, which finds little space and support for expression in our current system and its institutions. They expose many gaps in the architecture of our post-apartheid education system.
May other students learn of tenacity and the immeasurable value of education from the likes of Dladla, Wa Azania, Dlanga and Malema.
University of Otago academics are calling for a moratorium on all semi-automatic gun sales and imports - as the government considers urgent law changes, to deter people from rushing out to purchase firearms under the existing law.
In the wake of the Christchurch mosque killings on Friday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to make swift changes to gun laws.
Academics Dr Marie Russell and Dr Hera Cook of the Department of Public Health, University of Otago in Wellington yesterday called for "an urgent and immediate moratorium on sales and imports while changes are in process, to prevent a run on gun purchases by people, predicting that this will happen.
"Firearms imports number many thousands each year. But we don't actually know how many guns there are in New Zealand,'' she said.
There were estimates ranging from 1.2 million to two or three million firearms, she said.
Along with North America, New Zealand was one of the few places where firearms owners did not have to register each weapon they owned, except for some limited categories of firearms, such as semi-automatic rifles and pistols.
"It's likely that some firearms enthusiasts are expecting a ban or restrictions to be imposed and will be racing to purchase these items,'' Dr Russell said.
The pair want an immediate moratorium on sales, imports and advertising of semi-automatics, the removal of semi-automatics from dealers into police custody.

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