Dina Ezzat wonders whether the government is getting the message Is the press supposed to notify the government of the wishes and woes of society? Partially. But does the government read the press? Partially. Then does it get the message? Hardly, a reader is inclined to think. After all, the same messages are repeated over and over but nothing is ever done in return. It is almost predictable that week in, week out the Egyptian press will remind the government that the quality of education is on the decline, healthcare is all but history and the standards of living are not on the ascending side of the scales. Messages conveying the expansion of corruption under the nose of the government are also ample, as are messages on the increasingly challenging state of religious harmony in a country that has in many junctures of its recent history toppled all religious barriers in pursuit of joint national interests. This week, journalists and commentators alike reminded the government that the spread of bird flu has not been met with prompt containment on the side of the concerned government bodies. They called on the government to adopt a new approach to regenerate the much affected poultry industry. At the same time, the press rang alarm bells to warn against the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, blamed on poor veterinarian supervision, which could compound the damage sustained by the poultry industry. Meanwhile, many a paper was busy printing international reports suggesting that malnutrition is on the rise in Egypt. To quote the front page of the daily right-wing opposition Al-Wafd, international reports suggest that a good 40 per cent of Egyptian children are subjected to the effects of malnutrition. If the stories published in this week's press about the need for more attention to the quality of food and drink failed to catch the government's attention, endless stories indicating the need for an emergency plan to reformulate healthcare for the widely disadvantaged public must have caught someone's eye, hopefully the minister of health. "Certainly, something is going wrong", was the headline of a column published in the daily Al-Akhbar over the weekend to remind readers of some of the more disturbing episodes of corruption, not in state hospitals as many papers usually complain about, but in some private hospitals that according to the column, take the liberty to harm their patients' best interests. But if the government chooses to ignore all of these stories and those related to the perplexing cases of power and money abuse, as in the case of the mysterious disappearance of the owner of the dilapidated ferry that sank in the Red Sea in February and killed over 1,000 Egyptians, then it could not have turned a blind eye to the anger that continues to be expressed in the press over the administration of privatisation of public sector assets. The case of the planned sale of the nation's number one department store Omar Effendi at an embarrassingly low price was truly the trigger. "It was absolutely necessary that the funds made through the selling of many of the public sector assets be used to build new national projects... Selling assets worth billions, and I am not saying millions, of pounds is not a simple matter nor should it be perceived as such... It is therefore completely absurd for any minister to get angry when the press debates the details of a privatisation deal... unless perhaps the government does not want to listen to anyone... and should this be the case, then within the framework of privitisation each minister should buy his own ministry." So slammed poet and commentator Farouk Goweida in his Friday weekly column 'Free Margins' in Al-Ahram. And as Suleiman Gouda, the regular columnist of the widely circulated independent daily Al-Masry Al-Yom reminded the responsible Minister of Investment Mahmoud Mohieddin, it is a shame that he, as a member of the so-called reformist camp, failed to accord adequate attention to the critics of the Omar Effendi deal. Omar Effendi was not the only deal that caught the attention of the press this week. Interest was also shown in the possible privatisation of some state media assets. While many argued for continued reform measures to be applied to the state-owned radio and television channels, it was equally if not more forcefully argued that it would be a miscalculation to jump to sell such assets under the pretext of more freedom of expression. "We need to take a close look at the performance of these many satellite channels owned by Arab billionaires... then we need to seriously think of the fate of our Egyptian media assets once put in their possession and ask if this is what we want to do," warned El-Sayed El-Ghadban in his Saturday column in Al-Wafd. And if the government was to frown on Goweida, Gouda and El-Ghadban, it surely could not have shrugged off the words of Mohamed Abdel-Aziz Hegazi in the number one establishment paper Al-Ahram on Saturday when he argued the need for privatisation laws to be amended to allow for more transparency and better studying of future sales of public assets. Serious as all these issues are, one might argue they pale in the shadow of matters related to the exercise of religious freedom in Egypt. Many publications shied away from material related to the on-going efforts of the Coptic community in Canada and the US to draw international attention, and may be even interference, to what they qualify as restrictions on their religious freedom. But not the weekly magazine Rose El-Youssef which continued to deal with the issue head on, reviewing the views of leading migrant Coptic figures, including Selim Naguib, head of the Coptic Agency in Canada, who argued in a letter to the magazine, "religious rights and freedoms are no longer a strictly internal matter subject to state sovereignty; they are now an international matter that trespasses the borders of national sovereignty."
