Garbage for all

By Salama Ahmed Salama

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That we seem congenitally incapable of efficiently organising something as essential as garbage collection suggests that Egypt deserved to garner no votes in its recent 2010 World Cup bid. What is wrong with us? What is wrong with our management practices, with our bureaucracies, with individuals, with society? The problem cuts across classes: indeed, it sometimes seems that the entire population stands somehow opposed to the most basic levels of public cleanliness. We extol its virtues, of course, but only as long as it does not involve the least expenditure or effort.

It is telling that not one neighbouring Arab state has failed to find an answer to the problem of garbage collection, and they found their answers many years ago. Yet here in Egypt we struggle down the ages with what seems to be an intractable problem. And no matter how hard we struggle, whether by ourselves, or having contracted foreign companies to help, the problem persists.

It is, perhaps, telling that no sooner had contracts been signed with two foreign companies, the one Spanish and the other Italian, to oversee garbage collection, than disagreements broke out between the companies and the municipalities that had contracted them. And so we return to square one. Containers full of rubbish can be found on roofs, and on the landings of buildings, in back streets and alleyways. That is, of course, if the containers themselves have not been stolen, or else had their wheels removed to be re- employed for a variety of mysterious purposes.

And amid the heaps of festering garbage it hardly matters who, in the end, is to blame. The governorates' that negotiated with the foreign companies obviously failed to reach sufficiently airtight agreements and the whole sorry spectacle is now being dragged through a series of court cases. And there is, naturally, always the whiff of corruption to add to the general malodour of the garbage: local government is a hot bed of corruption, and suspicions that all is not as it should be when it comes to the manner in which contracts have been administered is unlikely to be far from the mark.

I say that the apportioning of blame hardly matters because, whoever is in the end responsible on a bureaucratic level, it hardly excuses us our own slovenliness. We seem to care little beyond what happens within our own houses. There are a great many people who, perfectly willing to spend hundreds of pounds on mobile telephones, on cigarettes and the like, launch legal actions, and generally raise hell, the moment a few pounds are added to their electricity bill to pay for garbage collection.

What informs our attitude to garbage? Could it possibly constitute a form of civil protest, an ironic comment on the chaos that seems to dominate our lives, from the level of traffic direction to the provision of education, and even security?

Modest, low-income households are extremely keen on cleanliness. Yet the state's idea on raising standards of living favours some classes over others. The attention accorded to infrastructure, tourist and investment projects answers, first, to the interests of businessmen, while the prioritising of particular neighbourhoods is equally divisive. The results we see everywhere, as any sense of belonging is undermined , and the piles of rubbish grow.