User:Saifur Rahman Khokon

Saifur Rahman
A senior journalist, Saifur Rahman spent more than 21 years of his 23-year career with Gulf News – the largest circulated English daily in the GCC. He worked his way up, starting as a Sub-Editor in March 1992, then moving towards writing as a Senior Reporter before taking over the key Business Section as Business Editor.

For seven years, he lead a team of journalists – 20 at one point of time – covering local, regional and international business and economic news, comments, analyses and features. Later, he retired as Associate Editor to pursue a career in business. During the course of his career, Saifur Rahman remained a keen observer of the socio-economic and political developments in the Gulf and covered a large number of regional and international conferences.

A prolific writer, he has more than 6,000 published articles – including breaking news reports, analyses, features, in-depth stories and special reports, as well as political analyses covering a wide range of areas including civil aviation, tourism, real estate, construction, trade, shipping, retail and macro-economic issues. He has travelled extensively to cover significant global events and won a number of awards and recognitions for his works.

A Bangladeshi national, Saifur Rahman holds a Master of Social Sciences (MSS) degree in Government and Politics from Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He lives with his family – wife and two daughters – in Dubai, his home for 22 years. The Visionaries is his first book.

The Visionaries
Rome was not built in a day, but Dubai was – well nearly. This is how Dubai’s rise from the desert sands like the rise of the Phoenix from ashes, might be referred to in future. The emirate’s economic miracle defies principles of economic theories and sometimes logic. However, it is a reality.

The country’s open-door policy has helped international traders to locate businesses here that in turn helped the country to attract talents and investment. From the formative years, the UAE’s leadership has invested resources in physical infrastructure to build roads, ports and airports and later in soft infrastructure that helped boost trade. The UAE economy currently feeds into a fifth of the mankind – through import, export and re-export activities that fuels its economic growth.

Truth is really stranger than fiction. What Dubai achieved in the last ten years, most countries can’t do it even in centuries. Dubai not only provides a perfect plot for a Hollywood flick, it could also be a good case study for the students of MBA and Public Policy in leading business schools in the world.

Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan once described Dubai as ‘one of the world’s great economic miracles’ in one of his comments. Historians in future might refer to the rapid-fire growth of this magnificient city and its economic miracle in this manner. However, how many of us – those living in this exciting city and in exciting time – realise this?

Dubai’s economic miracle – and how it all happened, has not been adequately explained. To many observers, it remains a wonder. Those who visited the emirate in the 1980s and 1990s – will find the developments of the last decade in which the freehold real estate boom massively changed the city’s landscape, just unbelievable.

Dubai is a perfect example of how one man’s vision could change the course of a city-state’s economy and its fortune. The term ‘Vision-driven Growth’ was perhaps never executed anywhere in the world better than in Dubai.

However, that vision has been translated into reality through the government’s pro-active and business-friendly policies and the private sector’s participation led by visionary business leaders. A good number of businessmen had the vision to realise the new economic opportunities created by the government policies and vision. So they have undertaken risks by investing in this economy and benefitted from these opportunities.

This book does not try to narrate the economic history of the emirate, but tries to explain it in bits and pieces. A must read for those who want to know more and importantly, want to understand how the economic miracle was created!