15% of us represent all of Egypt

They are shocked every time they see people other than themselves, whether the occasion happens to be the Rashid Boat calamity, or the popularity of the Muhammad Ramadan TV series and the festivals, or the crowds celebrating Eid along the Cairo corniche. We are here talking about the affiliates of a big section from within the middle and upper classes in Egypt who bear distorted conceptions about the “Egyptian people”.

Over the past couple of months, the Central Body for General Mobilisation and Statistics issued two of its most important publications: “A Research about income, expenditure and consumption” and “The Annual Book of Statistics”.

Let’s discuss some myths:

The myth that:

All the people have money and are jamming the malls

If your entire family has a total monthly expenditure of 4,160 Egyptian pounds ($468), then a thousand congratulations to you. You happen to be part of the richest segment of Egyptians who spend 50,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,629) and more annually. This segment does not exceed 15.7 per cent of the population.

Yes, 4,160 Egyptian pounds is insufficient for a family to rise above middle class. As for all the remaining Egyptians, they are sunk in poverty or are at its edge.

This is the first basic piece of information. We are the minority and the exception in a huge sea of poor people. We, the ones who have become accustomed to stating that we are “Egypt” and that our morals, ideas and dreams are the morals, ideas and dreams of the Egyptian, ought to humble ourselves considerably.

If there is such a section that can be called “the Egyptian people” then it is those others and not us; it is Nassir Al-Dusuqi and not the champions of the Grand Hotel.

When you see crowds like you jammed inside the mall, and then assume that those are the Egyptians, this points to nothing apart from your silliness.

The myth that:

No one goes to sleep without having had dinner

The poorest 10 per cent of Egyptians, who each spend 3,332 Egyptian pounds ($375) annually, that is 277 Egyptian pounds ($31) monthly, on their entire livelihood – including food, clothing, housing etc; this amount of money is definitely not sufficient, whether for dinner or for lunch.

The millions who buy the bones and feet of chicken and cattle do not do this out of a desire to modernise.

The food is not enough for ther children either. The rate of dwarfism (shortness due to malnutrition) among Egypt’s children below the age of five reached 21 per cent in 2014. One quarter of the children between the age of six and 59 months suffer from anaemia.

The percentage of the poor rose to 27.8 per cent in 2015 compared to 26.3 per cent in 2013. Within two years, 1.368 million new Egyptians fell under the “Egyptian poverty line”, which is the monthly average income of 482 Egyptian pounds ($54) per head. The international poverty line will add more gloom to the picture.

The reason, simply, has been the rise in prices without a corresponding rise in wages. The annual inflation rate in August 2015 reached 10.6 per cent and then in August 2016 it jumped to 16.4 per cent. This means that we will know by the time the next census is conducted that more and more people would have fallen.

The myth that:

The country has had a strong infrastructure since the days of Mubarak

My dear, if, when you enter the bath, you do not have to think about how to drain the water, then you are lucky because 42.2 per cent of houses are not connected to a sanitary sewage disposal network.

According to the statistics provided by the current government, only 15 per cent of Egypt’s villages have sanitary sewage disposal networks. The government’s ambition is to expand this so as to cover just 50 per cent of all villages.

What infrastructure, what investment, and what development are you talking about when people cannot take baths?

The myth that:

The country is so crowded because there are too many cars; and all these people have money

This is one of the most ignorant expressions ever. Families that own a private car do not exceed 7.9 per cent of the total population; smaller than a minority.

By December 2015, the number of licensed privately owned cars across the Republic did not exceed 4.1 per cent. As for the overwhelming majority of Egyptians, they are those who are crushed in the metro, on buses and in minibuses.

When you see the traffic jams, with so many cars like your own, if you assume that these are the Egyptians, then this points to nothing apart from your own silliness.

The myth that:

The Egyptians switch on the air conditioning all day long and that this is the cause of the electricity crisis

And the myth of: “Look how much they are providing for their children in terms of equipment and furniture”

Only 11.1 per cent of the population own air conditioning units. Around 90 per cent of those you are blaming, while sitting in your air conditioned room, do not have access to air conditioning.

Even washing machines have only entered the homes of 26.3 per cent of Egyptian families.

If these were the figures for the main appliances, it goes without saying then that luxury appliances are almost non-existent. For example, only 5.8 per cent of families own a microwave or a grill while only 1.7 per cent own a dishwasher.

The myth that:

I looked for a driver / labourer but could not find; this means the country has no unemployment

In 2015, unemployment rose to 12.8 per cent, with 3.7 million unemployed. Some 24.8 million people were employment including 5.9 million in the public sector while the rest were employed by the private sector.

Our problem is that you, your Excellency, did not search well for a driver.

The myth that:

The Egyptians are a lazy people

The number of weekly work hours for Egyptians employed by the investment sector is 50. That’s 48.9 hours in the private sector and 47.1 hours in the public sector. These are considered to be high numbers from a global perspective compared, for instance, with London (33.5 hours), New York (35.5 hours) and Tokyo (39.5 hours).

The levels of production and precision can be discussed, but in terms of the pure number of hours, Egyptians are definitely not lazy, not at all. This is logical, since the majority of people need to work in more than one location, otherwise they would starve, vocationally speaking.

The teacher who leaves school only to work as a private tutor, the doctor who leaves his job in a government hospital because he will work till dawn in a private hospital, and the employee who sleeps while in office because he works as a driver (at night) etc., can be described as anything but lazy.

The myth that:

The people are already well educated and well aware

Do you know how to read and write?

If so, then you are lucky, because 23.7 per cent of Egyptians above the age of 15 years are illiterate. One quarter of your people have never been to school.

Some people may imagine that these belong only to the old generations and that the situation has now changed. It should be known that the percentage of those registered in primary education for the academic year 2013-2014 was 89.6 per cent of males and 91.3 per cent of females who were of school age. This means that about 10 per cent, perhaps more than one quarter of a million children, never entered a school to start with.

Among those who have been to school, the rate of truancy has reached 6.5 per cent, according to a statement made by the minister of education in February 2014. In other words, the number of children who left school due to poverty or because their families needed them to work reached two million, according to a statement made by the chairman of the Central Department for Tackling Truancy.

Have you reached secondary school?

If so, then you are lucky because those who remain in school until the age of secondary education are about 77.7 per cent, according to the population health census conducted in 2014. This percentage includes 56 per cent who, in turn, join technical diplomas immediately after middle school. So, the majority never reach the general secondary level of education.

The number of those accepted by universities during the academic year of 2013-2014 was 299,000 students. This represents an exceptional minority, no more.

While working as a medical doctor in one of the Al-Qalyubiyah villages, which is quite close to Cairo and not in Upper Egypt for example, I discovered that villagers considered entering a university an uncommon occurrence in itself. The families whose children attained such an extraordinary ambition are known by name.

The myth that:

All the people can afford private education and we should therefore cancel free education

In fact, 85.3 per cent of students go to government run schools. Some 7.3 per cent receive Azhari education while no more than 7.4 per cent receive full private education, which makes them an absolute minority.

The average annual expenditure of an Egyptian family on education is 3,699 Egyptian pounds ($417), that is 308 Egyptian pounds ($35) per month, for all the children in the family. This covers everything, including private lessons, transport and educational tools.

It is not our problem that you and your friends spend tens of thousands of pounds on private education and then imagine that you represent all Egyptians.

The myth that:

People in Egypt receive free medical care

And the myth that: “The country is full of hospitals”

The total number of beds in public and private hospitals across Egypt declined from 149,900 in 2004 to 108,300 in 2014. This is the same period during which the population increased from 70.5 million to 90 million.

The deficit is more horrifying when it comes to the departments providing care for children or providing intensive care where the number of available beds in both public and private sectors is estimated to be between 4,500 and 7,000.

Spending on health care is the third most costly item with Egyptians spending nearly 10 per cent of their income on it compared to spending 34.4 per cent on food and 17.5 per cent on housing.

We are not here talking about the quality of the service or its cost but merely about whether it exists or not. Go to any government hospital and you’ll see patients sleeping on the floor. Some people may easily interpret this as a sign of incompetence on the part of the doctors but the real interpretation is that there are simply no places.

When I worked at Imbaba General Hospital and at Asyut University Hospital, as well as at others, I repeatedly saw patients sharing beds with others or patients waiting on the floor. I even accompanied patients driving for hours inside an ambulance in search of a vacancy until they died without finding them a place. By Allah, the Almighty, there are no places.

The myth that:

All Egyptians have purchased expensive mobile phones in order to access Facebook

Mobile phone ownership is indeed quite high, reaching about 88.1 per cent. But this is not a luxury. Rather it is an alternative to landlines. However, in contrast, the rate of possessing a modern smart phone that would make it possible to access the internet does not exceed 22.1 per cent. The number of people who own an iPad or tablet does not exceed 3.7 per cent.

A large segment of the middle and upper classes in Egypt, and this includes supporters and opponents of the regime, do not understand the meaning of the phrase “Egypt is a very large country”. The local population has already exceeded 91 million while about nine to ten million live abroad.

Such numbers allow the existence of scores of completely disengaged worlds, communities and peoples and allow us to have huge numbers, hundreds of thousands and even millions of all categories, of the rich and the poor, of the educated and the uneducated, of the decent and the indecent, of the Islamists and the secularists, of those who support the revolution and those who support the state, and of those who have nothing to do with anything.

It is perhaps true that the educated middle class leads politics at the global level and that it produces the ruling and opposition elites too. But in the world such elites never claim that there is no one but them in the country. They do not hide their heads in the sand so as to avoid seeing the figures and so as to blame their opponents, whether such blame is directed by those who support the state claiming that the people are lazy and passive, or directed by those who support the revolution claiming that the people are a population of slaves.

The fact that the policy making class in Egypt is a pure numerical minority will have to have its own impact on the method of political action and on political discourse as well as on governance and opposition.

The first rule in creating social and national peace for all the population would be for the millions to see the millions, to know of their existence in the first place, and then to acknowledge their economic, political and social differences and motivations.

We must learn about each other. The first step will be to stop trusting in any sentence that begins with the claim that “the people are like this” or “all Egyptians are like this”.

Translated from Al-Masry Al-Youm, 28 September 2016

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.