Attending a memorial is not easy, especially for the family of the lost member. However, the Younes family made of the Nadia Younes Memorial Lecture, celebrated year after year at the American University in Cairo (AUC), an event to contemplate the past through the parameters of the present, and to leap into the future intellectually through the moments we live. This journey was a unique one this year when Nabil Fahmi, Egypt's foreign minister, paraded with skill from the present to the past and looked into the future.
At the outset Fahmi said: “The Nadia Younes lecture series is in commemoration of a woman of exceptional integrity; one who gave her life for the cause of peace, in a region that has long suffered from its absence. Therefore, it is to her legacy that we dedicate tonight's lecture and I am proud to participate in this occasion, especially that she was also a personal friend.”
“Much has changed since Nadia was tragically killed while serving as part of the United Nations mission in Baghdad in August of 2003. In those 10 years, the Middle East has changed, the global context has changed, and of course Egypt itself has changed … and changed profoundly,” said Fahmi.
The lecture was important for the many data listed. Fahmi said: “If current demographic trends continue to hold, Egypt will cross the threshold of 100 million sometime around the year 2030.”
Today, Fahmi said, 750,000 people on average join the labour force annually. This makes for an unemployment rate of 13 per cent with youth unemployment hovering around 25-30 per cent. Absorbing the new entrants to the labour force will require a sustained annual growth rate of at least 6-7 per cent. Reducing unemployment to below 10 per cent will require our economy to grow at eight per cent continuously for the next decade.
What was extremely positive about the lecture was Fahmi's commitment to democracy and the spirits of the two revolutions.
Fahmi stressed that governments will be required to build a political consensus for difficult policy decisions. Egyptians will make sacrifices if their expectations for transparency and accountability are met, and the fruits of reform are distributed more equitably.
“This then will be the outlook for the new Egypt; a country whose future will be driven increasingly by the absolute imperative of sustained economic growth; increased resource and demographic pressures; and all of this against the backdrop of greater pluralism and political openness,” Fahmi noted.
Food, energy, and water security he said, will increasingly dominate Egypt's foreign policy agenda, in a context in which resource politics are becoming increasingly globalised.
“Egypt's leadership role is therefore neither a matter of choice it can decide to abandon, nor merely a source of national pride it has the luxury to forego. It is an imperative born of the exigencies of history, geography, and most importantly, the yearning for a better future; one in which those aspirations at home are intertwined with Egypt's interests abroad.”
Fahmi said that by 2030, Asia would host 64 per cent of the global middle class, and account for over 40 per cent of global middle class consumption. This could fuel an unprecedented surge in global demand for resources.
Turning to the Middle East, he said conflicts are no longer framed as being between nation-states, but between Sunni and Shia, or Muslim and Christian, or Kurd or Persian against Arab.
“By 2050 the Middle East will witness a drop in the amount of water by more than half. And while the region still holds more than 50 per cent of the world's oil reserves, it is projected to become more vulnerable to energy security risks given that on average regional economies are 60 per cent more energy intensive than the economies of the OECD,” said Fahmi.
Fahmi added that as Egypt looks east, it must also look south. For too long we have allowed our relationship with Africa to atrophy.
“We cannot afford to allow this state of affairs to continue. Egypt's immediate neighbourhood; Libya, the Sudan and by extension the Sahel, will always top our priorities,” said Fahmi.
Egypt's foreign minister stressed that his country cannot afford to turn away from the historic conflicts of the Middle East. Fahmi noted that the issues of Gulf security, Lebanon, regional non-proliferation and disarmament, and of course the Arab-Israeli conflict have long been the focus of Egypt's diplomacy.
To these, he said we must now add the civil war in Syria, the implications of the Kurdish issue, and the overarching Sunni-Shia divide — all of which are inextricably linked to Egypt's national security.
It was a nostalgic two hours broken by the seriousness of the discourse. A young AUCian, Mariam Mohsen, handed me the new edition of the Caravan, the student paper of which she is the editor-in-chief. Bringing back to me nostalgic moments of the Arabic edition of the Al-Kafela. What was most impressive is that the Caravan of today is a replica of the past, fully engaged with developments. The lead story: AUCians hope for a more efficient government. AUCians were looked at in the past as an isolated group from society. But then as today, they have proven to be very engaged. The writer is a veteran journalist.
