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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Debate Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters To be, or not to be, prepared
By Amira HoweidyStore some water on 31 December, either by buying it bottled or simply filling a few containers. Have flashlights, fresh batteries, candles and matches on hand. Alternatively, oil lamps are inexpensive and provide plenty of light.
Fill up your car with gasoline. Have a reasonable amount of cash at home, but do not drain your bank account.
Stock up on enough food -- canned and non-perishable -- to get you through a number of days, possibly without power.
Put off stocking your freezer until after the first few days of the new year.
These are just a few of the Y2K precautions that are being circulated on the Internet, by word of mouth, or even via printed instructions issued by some Western embassies.
Will air traffic be paralysed? And will the nuclear missiles in a neighbouring country go off and land here as MP Thoraya Labna warned earlier this week in parliament?
Or should we relax and take for granted the optimistic official statements that Egypt is 97 per cent Y2K compliant? The alternative is to take seriously Western reports listing Egypt as one of the countries least prepared for the millennium bug.
The official story is that Egypt is not fully automated and this is why, although the government reacted much later than it should have, it still managed to finish the necessary precautionary measures on time and has even prepared contingency plans.
But independent Y2K consultants are stating otherwise. International Monitoring, a London-based specialised consultancy assessing Y2K damages and delays in 140 countries via a IM-Y2K Risk Rating Report, rated Egypt among the 10 worst-prepared nations for possible Y2K problems.
It claimed that Egypt still needs to fix 6.85 million bugs, estimating the damage caused by possible Y2K problems at $16.2 billion. Moreover, the report put the "potential impact" of the bug in terms of "day delays" at 32 days in utilities, 25 in the telecom sector, 19 in the finance sector and 50 in the transportation sector.
The group has predicted that only 10 per cent of the Y2K-related system failures and problems will occur on 1 January. It expects the bulk of the problems to emerge days, or even weeks, after the event as a series of coincidental errors compound.
International Monitoring, a specialised group operating with less than a dozen direct associates, started researching and gathering Y2K information in late 1997, focusing on macro-economic analysis and risk modeling.
Obviously contradicting official statements, these predictions are backed by strong arguments. Although the group says that surface evidence does not show Egypt to be at risk, "yet we found in our research that governments tend to over-estimate their preparedness," a group official told Al AhramWeekly.
For example, when their senior analyst Nick Gogerty was testifying in Washington before a US Senate committee, the testimony of a person helping NGOs prepare for system failures was also heard. This person, an ex-Congressman, recounted to the committee a story about a water-treatment facility in Cairo that had been registered as Y2K compliant. A group of third party observers went in to verify this, but found that a temperature monitoring system for a chlorine containment facility was not compliant. Had it not been fixed, the risk, said Gogerty, would have been a chlorine gas release in Cairo.
Officials, though, are adamant that Egypt is fully prepared. In an interview with the Weekly , Raafat Radwan, chairman of the cabinet's Information and Decision-Support Centre, responded with a loud laugh to International Monitoring's predictions. "$16.2 billion? This figure is much larger than all public sector investments. Where on earth did they get this figure?" he asked.
A technical Y2K committee was established in early 1998 by the Central Agency for Public Moblisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), and included cabinet ministers, representatives of the Central Bank and the General Trade Union Federation. The committee's main coordination and planning procedures were executed in line with the directives of the Information and Decision-Support Centre (IDSC) which reports directly to the prime minister. It drew up and implemented four plans of action, the last of which was the test phase which officials say ended on 30 June, 1999. This was followed by six phases, continuing until 31 December, and including contingency plan training.
Radwan insists that "we have been operating compliant systems for the past six months." This also applies to the petroleum, electricity and transportation sectors as well as the Suez Canal. "We also have contingency plans which we have been applying for one day per week in all sectors," he added. Some of these contingency plans are back-up operations, while the rest are manual operation plans. Moroever, the government has endorsed Y2K precaution procedures that should eliminate possible problems. For example, the principal water-storage tanks throughout the nation will be full as of 6:00 pm on 31 December and cinemas will not have their usual midnight show.
Responding to fears regarding manual over-rides in the medical sector and how this could affect those in a critical health condition, Radwan suggested that "dialysis, blood transfusion or even cardiograms do not have to be made at midnight on 31 December."
"Do our hospitals provide second-by-second medical care in the first place? What is everyone going on about?" he asked.
Radwan refused to provide an estimate of possible damage "because we won't have damage; this is a too much big word for what we expect."
So what do they expect? "Minor problems, and this is not our evaluation alone; foreign bodies such as USAID and the US embassy support this assessment," he said.
According to Radwan, the government initially estimated Y2K repairs to cost approximately LE2-3 billion, "but now they are unlikely to exceed LE180 million."
"We don't take IT scam artists seriously; they warned of the 9/9/1999 bug and many others and nothing happened," he laughed.
Take it lightly, or prepare as you would for a potential storm; just make sure that you have the ways and means of passing the time during a power cut.
