There appears to be a need to reconceptualise the nation's home and foreign policy agenda. Dina Ezzat looks at how it might be done Against a backdrop of a litany of stories of corruption, mismanagement and frustration, this week there was an attempt to offer an alternative mood as the public was introduced to news and images of President Hosni Mubarak launching infrastructure projects and services that cater mostly to the disadvantaged. The inauguration of a new water refinery in the Delta city of Gamasa, and the opening of a mega medical centre in Cairo's middle class neighbourhood of Zeitoun were both projected by the state as part of a concerted effort to attend to the needs of the less privileged segments of society. The inaugurations were programmed as part of a carefully planned presidential schedule tailored in a fashion to mélange foreign policy meetings and visits with home-front shots that are more often than not tuned to the interest and attention of the middle and lower classes. Still, coming almost back to back with the news of the Dweiqa tragedy in which dozens of people living in a flimsy shantytown were crushed to death when a cliff collapsed at the eastern edge of Cairo, the inaugurations served as a reminder to the wider public that the needs of the close to 50 per cent poor of close to 80 million Egyptians are atop the agenda of the state. However, such an initiative -- previously scheduled or not -- seems to be lacking the steam required to deliver the objective of impressing a public that feels humiliated and frustrated by the performance of the government and by what some qualify as the tolerance demonstrated by the head of state towards this government. "I am not sure what the government or [the senior state officials] are doing for us. I'm really not sure," said Thurayah, a Cairo housewife in her late 50s. According to Thurayah, a public school teacher, "the fact of the matter is that there are many problems that demand the immediate attention of the government but the government is not paying the attention required." The rockslide in Dweiqa or the implication of prominent businessmen, who sit on prominent seats of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), in crime and corruption are not Thurayah's worst worries. "Here in Nasr City, which is not a shantytown, we suffer a serious water shortage problem. We also have problems with the cleanliness of the streets." The housewife who says she is living "comfortably" with the income of an engineer husband who works in a Gulf country and provides for her and her two university daughters, is also concerned about the traffic "that is moving from bad to worse", the cost of basic commodities "that increase every other week with no warning" and the quality of education that her daughters receive at the nation's most prominent university: Cairo University. "I cannot imagine how the people of Dweiqa and such places are managing. God help them." In a neighbourhood called Hegr Shubrah, about a 15-minute walk from the Cairo train station, the images of those for whom Thurayah's heart goes out are simply shocking. Living inside and not on the outskirts of the capital as is the case of the vast majority of over seven million dwellers of shantytowns, residents of Hegr Shubrah are forced to put up with an endless leakage of the city sewage system. For them, walking through streets full of leaked sewage is not an issue. The overflowing of leakage into their houses, where most bedrooms consist of simple mattresses put on the floor, is the real issue. "Why can't the government do something for us? Why doesn't the governor come to see this place?" said Mahmoud, an unemployed 30- year-old carpenter. For Abdel-Moneim Said, an NDP ideologue and head of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, it is wrong to ask whether the launch of some infrastructure projects or public services facilities will help contain the unmistakable public anger over the flagrant incidents of corruption and mismanagement. "If a hospital is inaugurated today this is probably because it has been under construction for three years and the time for its inauguration was due this week anyway. And if we have a huge problem in one shantytown [even as disastrous as the one we saw in Dweiqa], this does not mean that the problem of shantytowns started today, because it has been there since the 1950s," Abdel-Moneim Said argued. For him, the assessment of government statements and moves should be made against the list of priorities set by the society and not in contrast to any particular incident. "The issue is one of priorities. We need to ponder the priorities of the society and then decide whether [the government] is attending to these priorities or not," he said. According to Said there is no clear list of priorities that the entire society seems to be in agreement over. And, he added, it would seem that the government, "as is the case in most developing countries", is simply trying to contain one crisis after the other "with an obvious time-lag, instead of being ahead of the mostly predictable problems." In the daily press, at times even in the semi- official papers, and in many of the talk shows, even those aired by state-run TV channels, dire warnings are constantly being issued over the grave consequences of continued mismanagement, mostly because of a government which many qualify as distanced from the concerns of the average Egyptian, and the infiltrated corruption of a limited group of businessmen, mostly billionaires with some link or other to the NDP. The basic warning is that the mix of mismanagement and corruption will ultimately defeat all the good work -- some argue there is very little of it -- that some in the government and the regime are trying to introduce. "One day we will wake up to learn first-hand that the promises of attending to the needs of the poor and the news of starting new services that cater to their needs did not pay off. The poor will pour out of their shantytowns into our part of the city and start looting supermarkets and damaging our cars," Thurayah predicted. For Thurayah, the anger vented by the poor last week in Dweiqa stands in firm contrast to official government statements like the one made this week by Finance Minister Youssef Ghali, in the wake of a meeting between President Mubarak and the International Monetary Fund director, to assert the government's sensitivity to the needs of the economically unprivileged. It is this kind of anger that she fears is about to reach its peak. But Said said such alarmist scenarios are simply unscientific. The political scientist said he is not worried "none whatsoever" about the deluge that many have been predicting. There is no violent revolution in the pipeline, he said. "The simple fact is that most revolutions were the inspiration and work of the middle classes and not of the very poor. In Egypt, there is evidence that the middle class is actually thriving. Look at the increase in the number of mobile users and the high consumption of food commodities during the month of Ramadan despite the complaint about prices soaring." However, Said is not at all attempting to underestimate the challenges that the society and government are confronted with. In fact, he argued that the challenges of development are pressing "to the extent that we should dedicate much more attention to them, even through our foreign policy apparatus, than we do with lost causes like the Palestinian- Israeli struggle that has drained much of Egypt's energy as it defies resolution [mainly] because of the lack of a clear Palestinian vision on how it should be resolved," he argued. According to Said, Egypt has obvious foreign policy concerns to worry about but those should mostly be related to securing Egyptian products better access to world markets and working on the compatibility to and competitiveness of Egyptian products within such markets. For a long while foreign policy moves have not been a source of inspiration or admiration in the view of public opinion. According to newsroom editors in some independent and semi-official papers, the news of presidential meetings with foreign leaders is not subject to much prominent attention due to the lack of interest on the part of the reader to such news. This week, the meetings of President Mubarak with the foreign minister of Spain and the European Union foreign and security policies coordinator were not given much prominence even by the semi-official papers. On Tuesday, the front page of the daily Al-Ahram prioritised coverage of Mubarak's inauguration of a new hospital, and the political statements made by Presidential Spokesman Suleiman Awad after a meeting between Mubarak and the king of Bahrain on Egypt's committed efforts to achieve Palestinian reconciliation.
