Egypt; political unrest obscures social service decay
The political ramifications of the Arab Spring in Egypt have been showered with attention. Less analysis has focused on how the new government is addressing the logistics and policy of providing social services. This is a mistake. If this government fails to ensure that its citizens have their basic needs met, it will dimish their legitimacy as much as the dramtic events surrounding the drafting of the new constitution. Two of these social services, that many people in the developed world take for granted, are the supply of clean drinking water and the collection of trash. Unfortunately, the government of President Morsi still has significant work ahead ahead before it can claim to be a legitimate caretaker for the people's power.
Dirty Work
Cairo, the Egyptian capital, has a sanitation problem but has not effectively addressed it with either traditional workers or modern companies. Authorities there face a gargantuan task of cleaning up the mountains of garbage created every day by the city’s almost 20,000,000 (both formal and informal) residents. This job has usually been done by the zabaleen, independent garbage men who remove refuse from residents homes, and derive their income by selling, recycling, or otherwise making productive use out of the waste. This impoverished group never becomes rich, but have been able to eek out a marginal living.
The zabaleen have long been the targets of discrimination by the authorities. Most of the zabaleen are Coptic Christians. Because they have a different faith than that of the majority in this Muslim country, seeds of distrust have grown. In 2003, the government awarded municipal waste contracts for the collection of garbage over a large amount of Cairo to large multinational corporations. This cut into the income for the zabaleen. Later, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the government ordered the destruction of all pigs in the country. Some observers believed this targeted the zabaleen, who are some of the only owners of pigs in the Muslim country. They relied on their animals to consume the organic waste they collected, and this provided a source of meat in their diet.
Since the Arab Spring, the zabaleen have faced new challenges. President Morsi, has announced a “Clean Homeland” campaign to reduce waste and beautify the country. He made solving the country's waste problems in the first 100 days of his term a central campaign pledge. However, organizers of this campaign have not worked with the zabaleen and included them in discussions about the future of waste management in Egypt. Thus, this program comes at the expense of further marginalizing the very group that traditionally relies on the trash for their living.
The government has failed to put forward concrete plans for the clean homeland program. As Ezzat Naiem, an activist who works with an NGO that promotes zabaleen issues, pointed out “multinational companies can't function without proper law enforcement infrastructure, which there isn't now and will take a very long time to establish.” Until then, Egypt’s garbage problem will contiune to worsen because it government is not creating an environment which allows traditional collectors or larger companies to addess the problem.
Clean water for some, not for all
Egypt is having trouble maintaining a supply of clean water for all of its citizens. In some areas, private developments have been allowed to siphon water for use on vanities such as lawns, instead of being used for drinking water. In other areas, polluted wells and crumbling infrastructure have left the water supply unfit for human use.
Fancy suburbs have sprung up around Cairo. These exclusive developments are often built with foreign financing and there are charges that corruption helped the developers acquire land and municipal utilities (like water) which are integral for their existence. These lavish developments spare few expenses. For example, one development, Allegria, has been dubbed “Golf City” and features a Greg Norman signature course. It is also located close to a theme park with a jungle cruise and dolphins.
The lush life inside these developments contracts harshly with the people who live in Cairo’s informal settlements. These people live on mere dollars a day and have difficulty accessing water. Even when they have a proper connection to the city municipal water supply, they can not afford their water bill. These problems became particularly acute this summer as the country has suffered historic water shortages.
Egypt also has problems from inefficient infrastructure which allows what water that is available to become polluted. For example, in the city of Minufiya, a government investigation found that chlorine was not being added to the water treatment process. Several villagers became sick from waterborne pathogens. Residents were so angry with visiting government officials that they locked the Egyptian health minister inside a hospital room and demanded that the visitors prove that the water was safe by drinking it. Clearly, those who were responsible for the supply of clean water in Minufiya were derelict in their duties. If the new Egyptian government wishes to show the people that democracy was the right choice, they must quickly act to remedy these critical shortages. As Egypt’s new government grows, it will need to firmly address the role that corruption and inefficiency has played in influencing the allocation and supply of water. If it fails to correct these past injustices it will deminish the legitimacy of the current and future governments.
There are those who will (rightly) point out that the Muslim Brotherhood in fact has a good record of providing social services to those in need. They largely built their political power on their ability to bring relief to those who needed it. However, some observers such as Sarah Carr have noted that this success has been hard to scale-up to national policy. She described them as "a glorified soup kitchen with excellent logistical skills that end at distributing foo to the poor and organizing large rallies...a charity organization with a militia that finds itself in charge of a country." Solving this problem will be the key to estiblishing legitimacy.
As Gamal Eid, a prominent activist and rights lawyer said "To me, as an Egyptian citizen, I am only concerned with what impacts on daily life." While the press considers the machinations of the judiciary and the Muslim Brotherhood, it is equally important to watch underlying issues such the provision of social services such as sanitation and water. Currently it does not appear that under President Morsi there has been a significant improvement of these services. Hopefully, for the legitimacy of Egypt’s democratic government and for the people themselves, this situation will change soon.