It’s election week in Egypt. This Thursday morning, after the most narcoleptic campaign in living memory, we will learn who is to be the country’s next President. But in an act of uncanny prescience, I, along with everyone else, can exclusively reveal that, failing divine intervention, the successful contestant will be Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who in 2013 seized power from Mohamed Morsi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is said that incumbency is half the battle in an American election. In Egypt, short of a military coup, it is everything.
Morsi, an Islamist of sorts, had been in office for just over a year. Elected in the wake of the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak after 31 increasingly tyrannical years, he proved so appalling, and clueless, a leader that the resulting coup was accepted as almost an act of mercy.
Mubarak and Morsi are both in jail now (though the former, as an ex-Army man, is said to be held under house arrest in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh). Sisi, by contrast, lives in the phaoronic splendour of the Heliopolis Palace, a former grand hotel, opened in 1910, that was billed as the most opulent of its kind in Africa.
The President’s sole opponent in the election is Moussa Mostafa Moussa, a political nobody who until January of this year busied himself gathering pledges of support for Sisi and was drafted in solely to make up the numbers (i.e. two). Genuine opposition candidates were all silenced, or imprisoned, months ago – one of them for allegedly making an obscene gesture outside a court house – leaving the field clear for a Putin-style landslide.
So not an election, then, more of a celebration. So what is there to celebrate ?
Last week, I spent a day in what they call Garbage City in Cairo. Insalubrious is not the word for it. It would be an estate agent’s worst nightmare. An estimated 300,000 people, nearly all of them Coptic Christians, work in the district, which has neither running water, sewers nor electricity. Their job is to sift through the bones of Cairo’s rubbish, looking for objects or materials that can then be sold on, often to China, for reprocessing. A few rich men dominate the district, pocketing the bulk of the profits. All of them support Sisi. The people, mired in squalor, are of no account.
But the garbagees are not alone in their distress. As many as half a million of the desperately poor occupy the City of the Dead, a sprawling necropolis dating back to the seventh century. They live among the tombs, making way when family members come to pay their respects. There is, I was told, a section of the cemetery that has become popular with artists, and tourism is reportedly a source of revenue for the residents – those, at any rate, that are still alive and kicking. But I have to say, I saw nothing of this. All I saw was beggars, wild dogs and exhausted-looking women.
Slums are everywhere in Egypt. Most of the new housing projects, jerry-built from local red brick and crammed together for mile after mile along the highways leading out of town, could be marketed under the slogan, “The slums of tomorrow, available today”. The bulk are left unfinished to save the landlords from having to pay property taxes, giving them a look of incipient abandonment. Cairo has an estimated population of 22 million, soon to be 25 million, and I would guess that going on for 10 million of these live in conditions that in the West, outside of the Warsaw Ghetto, have not been seen since the Dark Ages.
But I mustn’t jump to conclusions. Most Cairenes I was told over and over again are happy with their lot, and maybe they are, given that it is all they know. Having a roof over their heads and fava beans on the table is apparently the summit of their ambition. As Muslims, they are said to be preoccupied not with money, but with observance of the faith, which promises them a better life in the next world than the one they currently enjoy. For their sake, I hope this is true.
Nearly all of the wealthy are also Muslim, of course. But in their case Earthly comforts trump spiritual enrichment every time. The rich in Egypt are like the rich throughout Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America and – let us be honest – the U.S. and UK. The only difference is that in Egypt they do not pretend to care about the poor. Cairo’s Downtown area, lining the Nile, is studded with five-star hotels, international banks, corporate headquarters, car showrooms and and luxury shopping malls. Favoured suburbs are awash with western-style apartment blocks and mansions, where underpaid servants do all of the heavy lifting.
Businessmen are 100 per cent behind Sisi, just as they will be 100 per cent behind his eventual successor. Every main street in Cairo last week was festooned with pro-Sisi banners showing the great man flanked by whoever happened to be the local Mr Big. If there was a single banner in support of Moussa, I must have missed it.
It is the same elsewhere. Alexandria, Egypt’s second city, with a population approaching seven million, is perhaps better run than the capital, but looks tired and withdrawn these days. A terrorist explosion last Saturday was probably the most exciting thing to have happened in years.
The Nile delta, famously Egypt’s bread basket, remains productive, much as it was at the time of Moses. Donkey carts are a commonplace, as are battered Toyota trucks and motorbike-powered taxis belching out fumes as they weave in and out of the rubbish-infested roads.
I won’t dwell on the extravaganza of ancient monuments, save to say that I much enjoyed the Egyptian Museum (much better organised than I was led to believe) and even managed at one point to observe the Pyramids up close with no one to bother me. The Old City – Islamic Cairo – was another highlight, though how the owners of its thousands of businesses, who seem to spend 95 per cent of their time sitting on chairs sipping Turkish coffee or plugged into hookahs, contrive to make a living is beyond me.
At least they are good-natured and possessed of a no-doubt-necessary sense of humour. “Welcome back, Sir,” said one, meeting me for the first time. “I have everything you need”. Another was more direct. “Welcome, Sir, how can I take your money?”
Such, then, is the Egypt that President Sisi will govern in his second term, and no doubt, insh’allah, his third and fourth. No one could deny that he has his work cut out for him, but while he will approach the task ahead with a certain languid goodwill, it is hard to believe that he will achieve much of note. There is, after all, the security issue to consider, centred on an ongoing battle with Jihadists in Sinai and Islamist attacks on churches. Then thre are dissidents to be spied upon, rounded up and, if necessary, tortured. There are journalists to be arrested and potential opponents to be imprisoned or put to death. There are also all those visits by foreign leaders as well as trips abroad to show the flag. Finally, when time permits, there is money to be made, for himself and his family.
On the economic front, life for the President is made easier by the fact that the Army controls some 80 per cent of the nation’s infrastructure, plus a large number of factories making mainly bricks and cement. Senior officers live extremely well. Their subordinates are provided with free housing and guaranteed wages. Ordinary soldiers, including conscripts, know their place and do their duty without complaint. The formula is a simple one: keep the generals and the colonels happy, and the national plan is half way there.
I don’t doubt for a second that Sisi would like to improve the lot of his fellow Egyptians. Why would he not? He would like to see the poor lifted out of poverty and to preside, literally, over the expansion of the middle class. Most of all, he would like to encourage growth in the largely moribund manufacturing sector. But the truth is, he has no real plans to do anything that might bring any of this about. I mean, where to start?
Instead, like Mubarak before him, his chief focus, other than his own and the country’s security, will be the creation of New Cairo, a vast enclave between the main city and the airport that when finished will house just about everything that matters, closely guarded by the military and the police. This is where the President and his government will live and work. This is where the bribes will be offered and received. It is where the embassies will be located, as well as the six-star hotels, gourmet restaurants, international schools, air-conditioned malls and exclusive boutiques. The trop brass will occupy the finest new homes; their acolytes will live in tasteful, if unimaginative, villas along avenues lined with trees. The only ordinary Egyptians allowed in will those who do the work that keeps the show on the road. Needless to say, there will be no slums.
If New Cairo turns out to be a success, Old Cairo faces an uncertain future. The main tourist hotels will probably remain along the Nile, but the rapidly emerging capital area, with its distant view of the Pyramids, will be a state within a state, closed off to the great mass of the people, whose number, crowded into the floodplain of the Nile, is expected to top 100 million within the next ten years.
Knowing all of the above, how many Egyptians this week will turn out to vote? Apathy and abstentionism are expected to be rife. If so, it will make no difference to the result. Most of the electorate, of all classes, are looking not for inspired leadership, but for a period of peace and stability, and with this in mind, Sisi is probably as good as anyone.
