A litany of failure

What the ruling party says in its conferences and what we see around us have as much in common as a stealth fighter and the wings of Icarus, writes Ammar Ali Hassan*

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Before summoning its followers to a gathering the NDP always prepares a bundle of new lies that it presents in the form of policy papers or speeches swelled with the type of rhetoric that arouses passion and draws sympathy. One of the party's best tricks is when it offers an apology for what it calls "shortcomings" -- of which we've seen a good many. The really entertaining part of these apologies comes with the pledges to mend what has been broken, to resume what has been interrupted, to tighten what is slack. It will say anything in order to convince the people that an end to the country's stagnation and degradation is just around the corner.

Instead of putting energy into turning itself into a political party -- as the term is understood in democratic nations -- as opposed to the collection of opportunists that have coalesced around the president and his son, the party lurches from one year to the next with no sign of remorse or even second thoughts. It boasts of its achievements and promises more to come whereas, in fact, it is preoccupied only with its project for hereditary succession. Such is its obsession with seeing the son occupy the father's seat through a process that has a veneer of legitimacy but is at heart a form of coercion that it will do anything to carry out a mission that can only lead the country into further decline.

We've grown used to this party and its broken promises. Look at all the illusory mega-projects it has proclaimed, mobilising its corps of intellectuals, journalists and media people to expound their merits and praise the projects' inspiration, mastermind and ever vigilant supervisor -- that being the president, of course -- only for these projects to vanish in a puff of smoke.

There was the project to pay off Egypt's debts, towards which end we contributed donations out of our meager pocket money when we were at secondary school. And who can forget the Thousand Days Project, which suffered a heart after 60 days, and the Toshka Project, failing the test of science, both theoretical and applied. Then there was the ill-conceived privatisation drive, which favoured businessmen, brokers and policy merchants, and which has caused government to withdraw, with its tail between its legs, from the realm of public services in order to become an organ for tax collection, the protection of corruption and the trampling the unprotected underfoot. Now we hear of new mirages, a thousand factories, a million feddans, four-and-a-half million job opportunities and on and on.

While NDP conferences trumpet their "charter of citizenship" Egyptians grow ever more alienated from the police agencies, security forces and the grandees of the government bureaucracy. They reel beneath the impact of arbitrary laws, foremost among them the Emergency Law.

NDP conferences gush compassion for those on limited incomes. Outside the conference halls prices and unemployment continue to soar, farmers are reduced from landholders to itinerant workers and in cities hundreds of thousands of employees turned out of jobs roam the streets.

Brazen NDP officials boast of their deep concern for public health. In the real world millions suffer the results of contaminated foods, polluted water, air unfit to breathe. Meanwhile, government hospitals are so short of everything that entitles them to be called a hospital rather than a traditional village barber-surgeon that they can't even provide first aid.

How the NDP likes to patter on about educational reform when in public schoolrooms that there are not enough chairs to go around. Educational curricula have become ever more backwards, with those responsible for drawing them up concerned only with pocketing the allocations set aside for this purpose and teachers insisting on addressing only the lowest intellectual faculty, memory.

In its last convention the NDP pulled nuclear energy out of the bag. This sudden brainstorm came after years of deliberately ignoring Egypt's nuclear energy agency and its subsidiary bodies and effectively propelling Egyptian nuclear scientists into the ranks of the hidden unemployed. NDP luminaries also spoke of "resisting" the designs for a New Middle East, whereas on the ground the authorities are doing everything in their power to make the project a reality, as long as it doesn't jeopardise their monopoly on power or the keys to wealth.

Year after year, in convention after convention, the party parades its "new idea," which I defy any of its hucksters to define. It is a party that stands for a regime that can probably now only be reformed by dumping it altogether, a party that can barely scrape together a few hundred to stage a rally, that continues to treat the Egyptian people as mentally deficient as it boasts of its achievements.

What is the condition of Egypt after a quarter of a century of Mubarak's rule? What is the state of the country Mubarak's son seeks to inherit?

Let's begin with a report by the World Bank, which estimates that 44 per cent of Egyptians live on less than two dollars per day and of that figure, three quarters live on less than a dollar a day. According to a study by the National Centre for Sociological and Criminal Research 40 per cent of Egyptian families only manage to survive because of the help the receive from relatives or well-off philanthropists. Were it not for the donations and medical services of more than 14,000 charitable organisations the armies of the hungry and ailing would have been exposed years ago.

So as to better acquaint ourselves with the causes of this poverty, Transparency International estimates that 69 per cent of all commercial dealings in Egypt entail some form of corruption and places Egypt 77th out of 146 nations on its transparency scale. It is estimated that more than LE300 billion has been smuggled out of Egypt over the past two decades.

The CIA's country profile web site offers some telling figures: our national budget deficit for 2005 was $7.39 billion, our trade deficit was $9.67 billion and our foreign debt totalled $35.26 billion. In the same year the rate of unemployment stood at 9.5 per cent and inflation at 4.9 per cent. When Mubarak took power the Egyptian pound was 85 piastres to the dollar; now it is LE 5.74 to the dollar.

Nor do health statistics look good. Incidents of cancer have risen eight-fold as a result of carcinogenic pollutants; 20 per cent of Egyptians suffer hepatitis and 10 per cent are diabetic. Egypt has the highest rate of kidney failure in the world and is one of only six countries that has failed to eradicate polio. Psychiatrists estimate that some 20 million Egyptians suffer chronic depression.

The divorce rate has risen to 33 per cent and the number of unmarried women to more than nine million, phenomena ascribed to economic strains. Every year more than 6,000 people die and 23,000 are injured in road accidents. Egyptians living abroad now number some five million. A further six million have applied for immigration visas, mostly to the US and Canada. The illiteracy rate is 27 per cent. Seven per cent of the nation's children have never been to school; this, and the generally high dropout rate, are attributed to poverty. There are more than 100,000 street children and more than a third of Egyptians live in shantytowns. These the government is now in the process of reconstructing. Let us hope it doesn't turn into one more failed project.

On the political level Egypt, which has been under Emergency Laws for a quarter of a century, came in at the tail end of the 2006 index of political and civil freedoms published by Freedom House and was towards the bottom of the democracy index of the Middle East and North Africa produced by the Economist 's Information and Research Centre, scoring 4.3 on a scale of 10 on democratic freedoms, and is ranked 143 out of 167 nations when it comes to freedom of the press.

* The writer is the director of the Centre for Middel Eastern Studies and Research.