As we consider the Egyptian National Youth Conference (ENYC) that convened in Sharm El-Sheikh from 25 to 27 October, it is important to avoid both the overly enthusiastic hyperbole that characterises assessments of the young people enrolled in the Presidential Leadership Programme (PLP) and the hasty dismissiveness expressed in statements issued by young people who boycotted the conference. Any objective evaluation of the significance of the conference must set it in its proper context. Four dimensions of this may be identified. First, young people constitute a huge segment of the country's population. Based on the definition given in the ministerial decree of 4 September 2014 for the appointment of ministerial aides, which cites the upper limit of the youth bracket as being under 40, Egypt has about 36,780,000 young people, according to the annual census of 2014, or more than a third of the population. Politically active young people also played a central role in the revolutions of 2011 and 2013. But in spite of these facts, there are few institutionalised channels of communication between young people and the presidency. For example, the national dialogue held when Essam Sharaf was prime minister supervised by former prime minister Abdel-Aziz Higazy failed to address youth issues and the question of the roles of young people in public life. Second, over the past five years and at an increasingly steeper rate over the past three years, the numbers of young people involved in public life have declined. Fewer young people are now engaged in organised volunteer work or in political parties and other organisations, while fewer opportunities are open to younger employees in the executive branch of government to exercise leadership roles. The reasons for this lie in part in the laws restricting public activities due to the growing security-dominated mentality governing public life and in part in the culture that still prevails in the bureaucratic establishment. Third, in contrast to the cabinet, the presidency is undeniably keen to communicate with young people and to address their concerns. For example, it was the presidency that in September 2015 inaugurated the PLP designed to equip young people for leadership roles. It also launched the Hope and Work Initiative during the annual session of the UN General Assembly in September 2015. At a conference on 9 January 2016, the presidency declared 2016 to be the Year of Youth. By contrast, an examination of the cabinet's actions towards opening up opportunities for young people to participate in national leadership indicates that it has not been very assiduous in promoting the presidency's outlook. The Ibrahim Mehleb government appointed only four aides in accordance with the September 2014 ministerial decree, and this number has dropped to only one under current Prime Minister Sherif Ismail. This phenomenon has been seen in numerous ministries. Yet, the practice of engaging ministerial aides, even if the posts come with no real authority or additional financial perquisites, enables those individuals who are appointed to acquire experience of administration. This process of knowledge-transfer to the younger generations is crucial. Unfortunately, Egypt's 2030 Vision Plan prepared by the government also shows no clear concern for youth and does not create opportunities for them to participate in carrying out the objectives of that vision. Because of the nature of the presidency, it launches initiatives but does not follow through on their implementation by the ministries concerned, the latter requiring a process of accountability. The overall outcome has been a failure to achieve a structural shift in the relationship between the government and young people in Egypt. Fourth, the avenues to upward social mobility have been closed to many young people. Chief among the reasons for this is the inferior quality of the job opportunities available in conjunction with rising rates of unemployment among young people. In addition, it is difficult for young people to shift from the informal sector, which is far more capable of absorbing younger employees, to the formal sector. This has forced many young people to search for other avenues of social mobility, ranging from attempts to launch entrepreneurial projects to migrating abroad by legitimate or illegitimate means. The PLP was presumably designed to contribute to solving this mobility problem. However, in practice it has been characterised by a lack of clarity and transparency in its selection processes. Many of the applicants selected were already employed in government offices, while large numbers of applicants not employed in any leadership capacity in the executive and thus entitled to benefit from the training offered by the programme were excluded from it. It is unclear what criteria were applied in the selection, especially since those excluded met the four conditions stated by the PLP. They were Egyptian in nationality, aged 20 to 30, had a university degree, and were of good reputation and conduct. As a result, the PLP became known among large numbers of young people as a programme for the elite. But in this capacity it is doubly flawed. Firstly, it restricts the avenues of mobility available to the elite. And secondly, it unrealistically raises the expectations of participants since the ministries concerned do not have a clear conception of how to benefit from the young people who will graduate from the programme, at least in its initial phase. Against this backdrop, the ENYC in Sharm El-Sheikh sent further ripples through the stagnant waters of the relationship between the presidency and the country's young people. Perhaps the most positive outcome of the three-day conference was the face-to-face dialogue that took place between the president and the participants, one that addressed not only economic but also political issues.
Five recommendations:The presidency now needs to follow through on the conference in a systematic way, with an eye to opening opportunities to as many young people as possible, rather than just conference participants or those who had their photographs taken with the president. First, the government as a whole should acknowledge that the young people with whom there should be closer and more effective communication are far more than the number of conference participants. After all, we are talking about over a third of the population. It is also particularly important to communicate with the boycotters of the conference, perhaps even more so than with those who participated in it. It is crucial to avoid actions that might deepen the polarisation between segments of the young people concerned with the conference. This polarisation has taken two forms. One, although perhaps less widespread, has been to promote the notion of a dichotomy between those who are “with the regime” (the participants) and those who are “with the Muslim Brotherhood” (the boycotters). This type of categorisation is unwarranted. For one thing, it ignores the fact that the actual process of deciding whether or not to participate is a form of taking part in political life, as guaranteed by the constitution and the law. Perhaps the fear of this type of branding was why the major private-sector newspapers did not carry opinion articles on the conference and confined themselves to merely reporting news of the event. The second type of polarisation is that which existed between the participants at the conference who were part of the PLP or who took part in the activities of the Ministry of Youth, collectively known as the ENYC youth, and the rest of Egypt's young people who did not take part in the conference either because they were not invited to apply or because their applications were rejected. This type of polarisation could be observed during sessions of the conference, especially that on the relationship between civil liberties and political participation. Perhaps the way the president greeted reports on the polarisation between the PLP youth and other participants worked to confirm the impression among some participants that these young people were being accorded preferential treatment. Second, an independent team should be appointed to evaluate the PLP with an eye to developing its activities, application and selection processes, placing of PLP graduates, and systematic evaluation and feedback. In addition, the relationship between the PLP and the National Council for Youth needs to be more clearly defined so as to facilitate the formation of the youth leadership forces that the president spoke of at the end of the ENYC Conference. Third, it is important to establish the rule that participation in forthcoming ENYC conferences must not be restricted to the groups of young people who took part this year or to the participants in the PLP in the event that it reaches its target of producing 2,500 graduates. If action is taken to apply the president's decision to make this conference a regular annual event every November, it is important to ensure that the basis of participation is broadened, instituting a rule that states that previous participants will not be eligible for future conferences. Fourth, the ENYC Website (https://egyouth.com) should be overseen by a permanent secretariat under the presidency, and its officials should be listed on the Website with links to enable the public to contact them. The secretariat must operate in accordance with public criteria regarding the participant selection process. The third and fourth recommendations are necessitated by the sheer numbers of young people under the age of 40 in Egypt and the consequent impossibility of reducing them to the group of 3,000 who took part in the conference or to a single homogenous entity. There are many different sectors of young people, each with its own ambitions and expectations and each with its own mode of relationship with the state. Moreover, these sectors are fluid by their very nature, with adolescents moving into the youth bracket and older ones moving out of it every year, a dynamic that brings varying numbers and different faces with it. Finally, a committee charged with following through on the decisions announced by the president during the workshops, the conference sessions and the closing session should be created. The membership of this committee should reflect the robustness that characterised the conference sessions, meaning that it should consist of a representative from the ministry concerned and representatives from the major sectors of the young people represented in the conference. In the course of its work, this committee should also remain in regular contact with the office of the president. The writer is a senior researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
