Dina Ezzat looks the glaring face of corruption in the eye Corruption, laxity, decline and mediocrity are four words that a reader is bound to encounter no matter the publication. Day in day out so many stories revealed a high level of corruption being reported not just by the opposition press but -- due perhaps to its severity -- by the national press and on the front pages. A story whose accounts brought these four words together is that of the sudden disappearance of the owner of the Al-Salam 98 ferry from the country as news started to filter through that the information obtained from the recently found black box indicate he had ample evidence that the ferry should not have been carrying thousands of passengers as it was sailing between the Red Sea coasts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia with no basic safety equipment. The ferry sank early last month, killing 1,000 people. The government never bothered to properly interrogate the captain or to at least make sure he does not leave the country -- not to mention allowing his company to allow a sister ferry of Al-Salam 98 to navigate the Red Sea in comparable conditions, to quote the reports of the national daily Al-Akhbar. The same goes for the shocking story of Ehab Talaat, the media tycoon who was allowed to leave Egypt hours before he was sentenced to jail for embezzling millions of pounds off Al-Ahram Establishment. The same words are flagrantly present in reports indicating a thriving prostitution business that according to Al-Wafd is taking Egyptian women in the illicit trade to the Gulf. Then there were the Egyptian pop singers who were caught trying to fly out of the country with forged documents and the 14,000 children who fail to get birth certificates with their father's name because the fathers -- poor and rich alike -- decline to recognise them and the courts decline to force the fathers to take DNA tests. There were disturbing stories about inter-cabinet fighting over the abuse (not the use) of foreign aid funds and the bitter battle within the diplomatic corps over posts to the extent that some diplomats chose to leak stories to the independent weekly Al-Fagr indicating the involvement of a woman ambassador in an alleged sexual relationship with the head of the state she had been posted. There are the many stories of dilapidated healthcare in public hospitals where patients undergoing operations face the risk of death due to an overdose of anesthesia, and the features reporting an increasing number of school dropouts and higher rates of child labour that still challenge all governmental campaigns to stop the abuse. There were also stories indicating that the state coffers sustained close to LE11 billion in loses in the Abu Tartour project -- and the fears expressed that the Toshka project is likely to prove equally catastrophic. Not to mention what the opposition papers call the scandals of the privatisation programme now being criticised for undermining the assets of the number one department store in Egypt, Omar Effendi, which is to be sold off. The best said remarks are always that of Al-Akhbar 's top and most read commentator Ahmed Ragab. "Corruption is all around us. We live in corruption land, Fasadestan, ( fasad means corrupt). But corruption is like bad weather -- you complain about it but cannot do much to change it," Ragab wrote in his daily box on Sunday. Actually, as Essam Kamel noted in a backpage column in the daily Al-Wafd, the contested mouthpiece of the collapsing Wafd Party, "bird flu is nothing compared to corruption dinosaurs attacking society with no mercy." Cultural, economic and social mediocrity was rejected. "Has Egypt yielded the crown of arts in the Arab world?" asked prominent cinema critic Rafiq El-Sabban in an article in the cultural weekly Al-Qahira on Tuesday. In unusually blunt language, El-Sabban spoke in plain Arabic about what he has been subtly indicating for several years. The Egyptian cinema, theatre and TV have deteriorated to the extent that the audience has lost its taste for quality production and is now willing to consume only cheap work. And what goes for culture certainly applies to education. Throughout the week, commentators appealed for a closer look at the quality of education provided in Egyptian schools and universities: the safety of schools, the prices of books, the chronic dilemma of uncontrolled and more than often coercive private lessons and the quality of school teachers and university professors. "The fact of the matter is that even the university mechanism that is in charge of promoting professors is extremely inefficient and unable to help boost the quality of performance in our university," criticised Labib El-Sebaai in Al-Ahram on Monday. The decline is across the board, the papers heralded. There is a desperate need to put an end to mediocrity, commentators stressed. And, as Al-Akhbar 's daily columnist Galal Dwidar noted in his daily column on Tuesday, "it is not enough for us to keep saying that Egypt has a great past and was a leader in many an avenue. What we all have to do is work hard to retain this leadership on the regional and international fronts."
