Martoons

Egypt’s Future After the 2011 Revolution by the Enlightened Tourist.

Introduction: Egypt doesn’t think about the future. For Egypt, its future is its PAST. Egypt goes to incredible lengths to preserve its past. The biggest event on TV last year was the moving of the mummies from the great Egyptian Museum to the new Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

Some Egyptians say the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ Revolution in Tahrir Square didn’t achieve its goal of making this legendary ancient country a freer society. One man, who sells tours from his shop, commented about this during a 40-minute drive around Sharm el Sheikh, a tourist town on the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. He is driving the Enlightened Tourist on an errand. As they head along the main street for several minutes, he points out that the road is under construction and being widened. “That is obvious, as you can see, but what you don’t know is that this is the second time around for this project. The government made a mistake the first time and forgot to put in a bicycle lane. So that was a big waste of time and money. Egyptian government does that. They have no plan so things like that happen.”

Compared to Cairo (insane), Sharm is like a paradise. It is a tourist and diving mecca. The sprawled-out municipality’s population swells by the millions (truly) during the high season. “But ordinary Egyptians cannot visit here. If you are in Cairo and you wanted to go for a drive down here, you could not. You need a special permit to enter the region and you have to show the police why you’re here. If not, they can tell you to go out. They can even come to your home to check. No one can come here who doesn’t have a reason to be here.”

The Enlightened Tourist (ET) flashes back several days to his bus trip down here and now it all made sense: Check point after check point, and at two of them anyone with a bag down below had to disembark and open the luggage for inspection. It was all done routinely but left ET wondering why it was necessary. Now he knows.

His driver continues: “No problem for you. You are a tourist. Some Egyptians who lived here before, leave and go to Europe to live. They get a visa in their new country and then they can come back here and visit. It’s funny, isn’t it? They cannot visit their country until they become a foreigner.”

Gated community? This is a gated region. Back to the road under construction: “With government wasting money like that, there is no future for this country,” the driver says. “The future is education, and the government must put money into that.” He’s the second person who’s lambasted the education system. A week ago, the front desk man at ET’s economy hotel in Cairo heaped his scorn upon the school system. He explained that there are teachers who show up for work, sign a log and go home because there’s nothing to do. He knows this because his wife’s a teacher. “The pay for teachers is terrible. Only if you work in a special school – a private school – is it okay. Students in the normal schools learn very little. A bit of singing, some dancing, and that’s about it.” He laughed.

Back to the Sharm driver. “Egypt society is getting worse. There are two levels here. The high one is taking off into the sky, and the lower level is sinking. The answer is education. Then people learn how to think, plan, organize and improve things. The government does not want that.” He thinks the 2011 revolution failed.

And it’s unlikely that there will be a second chance any time soon. Cairo’s Tahrir Square was where the revolution’s main protest happened that we all saw on TV. It succeeded in deposing President Mubarak after 30 years in power, but that may have been its main event. Tahrir Square is very different these days. It has no visitors, only security, police, and army. Citizens and tourists are not permitted to even sit down in the area. Is that what the revolution would have wanted?

Back from his visit to Sharm El Sheikh, the Enlightened Tourist goes to ride the Metro subway in Cairo. He consults an outdated subway map from a tattered old guide book and at the ticket window tells the attendant, “Mubarak Station”. The attendant grumbles something as he issues the ticket. ET heads down to the platform and checks the big newer map on the way. He does a double take. There is no longer a Mubarak Station! The stop is still there but the name has been changed and ET realizes that the new name is what the ticket clerk was mumbling a moment ago! Mubarak’s name has been erased from history, like something out of Orwell’s 1984. (Cairo, May 3, 2022.)