Last week what on paper might appear an unimaginable crime occurred in broad daylight. A 71-year-old retired civil servant was repeatedly run over by a 17-year-old bus driver in busy Batal Ahmed Abdel-Aziz Street, a major thoroughfare in the central Cairo district of Mohandessin. The victim -- Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman, former first undersecretary at the Information Ministry -- died instantly as his skull was crushed beneath the wheels. Minutes before he was killed the microbus driver had crashed into Abdel-Rahman's car. When the retired civil servant got out of his vehicle to remonstrate, he noticed the microbus had no number plates and that the driver was probably underage. Abdel-Rahman's complains were met with insults. It was when he threatened to go to the police that, according to eye witnesses, the bus owner, who was sitting with the other passengers, ordered the 17-year-old driver to run over Abdel-Rahman. The same witnesses say the driver then ran the bus over the victim several times. It is a particularly horrific crime, and yet it is far from being an isolated incident. After 28 years of martial law it would appear that Egypt is increasingly dominated by a state of lawlessness. How many Egyptians feel empowered by their citizenship or confident they enjoy the protection of law? We go about our business secure only in the knowledge that the state does not protect its citizens. Corruption, incompetence, indifference -- it is hard to say which contributes most to the chaos that governs our daily lives. News that someone died in hospital -- whether private or public -- due to negligence or gross incompetence, barely raises an eyebrow. That an unlicensed, underage driver should have been charging around Cairo's streets for more than a year in a microbus lacking number plates is par for the course. Muggings take place in broad daylight. Innocent people are murdered in their homes. Thugs can take over a school because of a dispute between its owners. A police officer and his two assistants are shot by a drug dealer in Suez. We read the stories in the newspaper and then turn the page, where more likely than not more horrors will be reported. Yet where in the streets of Cairo, apart from around important embassies and the homes of senior officials, is there a police presence? Is the Ministry of the Interior so completely focussed on securing the regime and its leading figures that it alone has failed to notice Egypt is no longer safe for ordinary citizens? Perhaps we should not be surprised that a government that has repeatedly failed to provide Egyptians with the most basic services should now have abnegated its responsibility to protect even their lives. Exactly a year ago a rockslide in the informal area of Dweiqa killed hundreds of people, many of whose bodies are still trapped beneath the rubble. Only last week a 15- metre wide crater appeared in the historic Bab Al-She'riya district, caused by drilling work for the construction of Cairo's third metro line. Officials seemed to accept the collapse in their stride. The real surprise is not the series of calamities that beset Egypt: we have become accustomed to those. The only thing now capable of shocking the public would be if someone actually took responsibility, that a minister turn around and say yes, this happened on my beat, it is unacceptable, I take responsibility and resign. It is the public purse that finances the government. It is our taxes that pay for the police, for the security apparatus, for schools, hospitals, transport systems, rubbish collection. Yet if the smallest, hole-in-the-wall business operated with the incompetence of the current administration it would be forced to close within a week for lack of custom. In which obvious truth there may well be a message for a government that regularly broadcasts its faith in liberal economics.
