The Sunday Mail
Egypt has a story to tell, a story few other victims of the 2011 so-called Arab spring, beside Tunisia, have lived to tell. Egypt, like Tunisia, has just managed to remain standing after the fall of Mubarak.
Brother Chris and fellow reprobates, thank you for missing my column while I was out. Fellow travellers on both sides of the narrowing political divide, you deserve my apology for my delinquency while I was away in Egypt for more than a week.
I was part of 28 journalists from several African nations including Mozambique, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan. Overall, we were treated very well.
Egypt has a story to tell, a story few other victims of the 2011 so-called Arab spring, beside Tunisia, have lived to tell. Egypt, like Tunisia, has just managed to remain standing after the fall of Mubarak.
The military has had to step in in a big way to maintain a semblance of order in the face of a growing threat of global terrorism.
Libya, nearby to the west, is painful testimony of how inorganic, externally engineered regime change can often lead to so much loss of life, so much grief even for the local instruments of such an agenda.
But life goes on in Egypt.
There we had a glimpse of an economic free zone. We were taken to the small town of 10th Ramadan, some 70 km outside the capital of Cairo. It is one of the country’s manufacturing hubs, producing most of the country’s pharmaceuticals, carpets and edible oils.
Much of this production is left to technology with a skeletal staff for monitoring and maintenance. We were shown into a small complex, the size of most of our warehouses in Msasa and Graniteside. The little contraption in there can fill and package 180 000 bottles of cooking oil in one hour. It employs less than 20 permanent staff. The wonders of technology.
It got me thinking about ZANU-PF promising to create 2,2 million jobs in five years. No doubt the land reform has created immense opportunities for our people and will continue to do so. But the nature and trajectory of modern-day development is such that a lot is left to technology. The very nature of Minister Joseph Made’s portfolio means mechanisation will eventually replace the multitude of farm labourers. They will be made redundant by technology. It is the small-scale enterprises and the informal sector which will dominate the economy for a long time. It is the sole trader and the retrenched artisan who needs Government support to grow.
For all its travails, Egypt remains the industrial hub of the Middle East.
We toured what they call Smart Villages, also outside Cairo.
This is the heart of their computing companies. All the big names are located there.
The concept is that a few investors pool their resources and build office blocks for leasing. They provide all manner of entertainment and child care facilities, a gym, football pitch. Residential accommodation is located outside the enclosed office blocks.
Thus employees have easy access to the workplace and can bring their children and infants to be taken care of at the child care centre while they work.
Government provides incentives for the Smart Villages in the form of tax breaks, full repatriation of dividends, etc.
The beauty of the concept is that investors invest in physical infrastructure which becomes part of the national stock.
All this belies the perennial insecurity haunting the country. The threat of terrorism came alive to us when a scheduled meeting with the president was postponed following the callous murder of 21 Egyptian Christians in war wrecked neighbouring Libya.
President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi ordered retaliatory military air strikes against the bases of suspected terrorist groups on the border with Libya.
But he managed to meet us at a later date. Three issues dominated his address, all of which may soon require the attention of African Union chair: terrorism, the transitional process since the fall of Mubarak, and Ethiopian plans to build a mega dam on the Blue Nile.
Like most of his government officials, President Al-Sisi complained bitterly that the international community was taking a lackadaisical approach to the scourge of terrorism in North Africa. He was clear no nation was safe, citing Al-Shabbab in Somalia and attacks in Kenya, Boko Haram in West Africa.
He reserved his bitterest bile for evil triumvirate of France, the United Kingdom and the United States. He accused them of removing Gaddafi from power in Libya and abandoning the country to marauding militias who recognised no central authority. He said this had created a fertile ground for terrorists. He wondered why the US and its western allies were keen on fighting terrorism in Iraq and Syria but did not display similar interest when it came to Egypt. It was therefore very important, he observed, that Africa acted in concert against the spread of terrorism.
The irony of course is that in trying to dislodge the Syrian president, the US is repeating the same mistakes which have led to the destruction of Iraq and Libya. But then, imperialism always prefers to interface with weakened resource-rich countries in the Third World. That is the logic to the madness.
According to officialdom, the transitional process is in three stages, two of which have already been accomplished, so to speak. That is the adoption of a new constitution and election of a president. The last is the parliamentary elections which were provisionally set for March 27 2015. There is a lot of uncertainty about this date now because of security concerns. This has not been helped by the ongoing crackdown on the residual membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, now officially classified as a terrorist organisation.
Enter Ethiopia
It only took what sounded like the proverbial slip of the tongue to raise the heckles of the Ethiopian members of our team.
During our tour of Aswan Dam, about 2 000 km from Cairo in Upper Egypt, our Egyptian tour guide explained how without the Nile River there would be no Egypt.
They don’t have rainy seasons like we do. Ninety-five percent of the country is a desert. Eighty percent of the country’s 80 million plus people live along the Nile basin. Eighty percent of the Nile water comes from the Blue Nile which has its source in the Ethiopian highlands.
The Egyptians argue that Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam with a capacity to hold about 74 billion cubic metres of water will take about four to five years to fill up.
That means Egypt would be left with just 20 percent of the water from the White Nile.
“Ethiopia wants to close the Nile for about fours years,” said the Egyptian guide.
The reaction was swift and uncensored, “It is a lie; that is not true,” interjected a journalist from Ethiopia. The topic was dropped immediately, with all evident signs of mutual disgust.
Ethiopia for its part claims it wants the dam so it can generate electricity and for irrigation purposes, the same way Egypt generates much of its electricity from Grand Aswan Dam built by the Russians. The two nations are currently engaged in intense negotiations on the issue. The AU chair might soon find himself called upon to mediate a mutually beneficial way out to stave off a complete fallout.
Pyramids
I didn’t get a sensible explanation as to who and why the pyramids were built. They are a wonder to behold. A tour guide said the kings built them as their burial places.
That is to say a pyramid with a base of 220x220m and hitting a peak of 147m was built to shelter the body of one dead man. And the granite stones used to build this structure can be a massive 20 000 tonnes each.
At what point in history then did the Europeans overtake Africa?
