Down the drain

While the process of tearing down the Ramses Garage comes to an end, argues Sara Abou Bakr, it is obvious that no one will be held accountable for this very expensive fiasco

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Back to square one, after levelling the garage to the ground; during the demolition

One minute it was there, the next it was gone. Pedestrians or drivers could easily notice that the recently erected Ramses Garage has now been levelled to the ground. The garage was built to solve some of the parking problems in this crowded part of the city, right in front of the historical Egyptian Railway Station.

"They were building it for almost two years," says Am Tareq, a kiosk-owner who makes his living next to the Railway Authority. "Now they tore it down in two months." Except for a couple of underground floors, the once five-storey building can no longer be seen -- a result of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif's decree of August 2006 permitting its demolition.

The decree, according to an insider speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on condition of anonymity, cost the Railway Authority LE32 million that was extracted from the Transportation Ministry's annual budget. But the reasons behind it were not made clear by authorities; some claim the garage's location ruined the historical beauty of the Railway Authority while others declared it a security hazard due to its position adjacent to the Sixth of October Bridge.

While the case has been the subject of a widespread controversy in the last months, becoming an issue for public debate, Railway personnel refrained from answering any questions. At the Railway Authority on Ramses street, the authority's spokesman would not comment on the present situation, referring us to the deputy of the authority's construction department, Soad Abdel-Moneim, who refused to meet us on the premise that she "does not meet the press unless ordered by the director himself".

For his part, the aforementioned source added that all permits were obtained through the Cairo Governorate's municipals. When asked whether the Development and Planning Ministry was involved in the process of assessing the effect of the building on the site, he denied it, saying that the ministry approves only the Transportation Ministry's general development annual plan.

The garage is non-existent now and so is the money that was deducted from the budget to finance it. Political analysts like Amr Hashem Rabee, of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, argued that the lack of coordination in similar cases is the main reason behind the waste of public money.

"There are no long-term plans that can predict future problems and suggest solutions," he said. "With the lack of coordination comes the conflict of specialisation among the different government institutions, which results in the overlap of responsibilities. The municipals, the governorate and the ministries are all tangled up together" -- a reality made clear by the fact that the Transportation Ministry had to acquire nine different permits from the Cairo Governorate, without any of the municipals taking note of the jarring location.

Another part of the problem concerns the absence of supervision. "We don't have an effective monitoring system to which the various institutions are accountable," explained Rabee. Supervision acts as a barrier against squandering public money. "The prime minister should have ordered an internal investigation to get to the bottom of this issue."

This demand is encouraged by Hafez Abu Seada, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR): "Public money is the people's money and should be treated with appropriate consideration and ultimate caution." For Abu Seada, the Ramses Garage incident defines what it means to waste public money. The problem, as he sees it, is not with the dismantling of the garage as much as it is with the decision to build on a wrong site from the start. As Rabee commented, "the lack of administrative accountability led to the demand for political accountability."

Since there was no administrative investigation initiated by the prime minister to find out who might be accountable for the decision, an administrative lawsuit was filed against the prime minister himself. The National Democratic Party's MP Hayder El-Baghdadi took his case to court, accusing the prime minister of squandering public money.

The case was turned down for reasons, Abu Seada explains, that have to do with the judiciary being the wrong channel for this kind of case, which should be discussed in parliament: "parliament has various tools through which it can investigate and demand retribution, through a formal inquisition or a fact-finding committee." But this raises another question: if the current members of parliament have the tools to search for the truth, why haven't they? "I really don't know," says Abu Seada, "but my guess is that there is no trust in the efficiency of the parliamentary tools of investigation."

For the last two months, workers have been breaking down the garage brick by brick, manually, with extreme caution because of the sensitive location of the building -- adjacent to the Sixth of October Bridge, right in the middle of Ramses Road. The dismantling process is currently costing the government, and the people, nearly LE6 million. Thus the total waste has reached LE38 million. "Wouldn't it have been better to use this money to find ways to solve the unemployment problem," asks Am Tareq rhetorically, summarising the feeling of the layman. "It's a real waste," he adds, shaking his head.

As for Rabee, he sees it from another perspective: "Al-Ayat train accident, the current traffic dilemma, chaotic rent laws, education and health crises and the latest Ramses Garage situation all reflect disorganised government policy. These problems will continue to dog the country so long as no one can be held accountable for what they do."