I have read a book about Abdel Latif Abourguila, emperor of busses in the 1950s. Those who lived those days must remember very well what Egyptian public transport used to be like in the capital at that time under his control and must realize how busses have now turned from a public means of transportation to a tool to torture people. The book is by Mustafa Bayoumi and was issued by a center affiliated to the Ministry of Investment. Through several books on such kind of pioneers, the ministry wants to show how businessmen used to be and how they should be now. Abourguila spent his early years in Esna (governorate of Qena). This city is close to Armant, the town where Abboud Pasha – one of Egypt's great men at the time – was born and lived. Abourguila considered himself a disciple of Talaat Harb Pasha's school and believed that success, as a goal, must come before wealth for every businessman and that money must always flow in projects and not pile up in banks. In 1954, Municipality Minister Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi summoned him and asked him to take up Cairo's public transport. Under his leadership, busses reached an unprecedented and unexpected level of growth, order, cleanness and performance, carrying 13 million passengers a month through a network that included 4,000 employees. Once a month, Abourguila got on a bus on the sly to see how the employees of his company dealt with passengers. When he took on as President of Zamalek Sporting Club in 1959, the club won his first national football championship since its foundation in 1911. All this, though, did not help him at all when he was swept away by the wave of nationalizations at the beginning of the 1960s. He moved to Rome until he came back to Egypt in the mid-1970s. He lived the rest of his life sad about how his experience, as an individual, and the experience of an entire country had been wasted. That experience was still in its first stages at the beginning of the 1950s, when the private sector started to grow and political parties started to move. All this was wiped out, though, and we then lived fifty years blundering once leftward and once rightward. Then, we have found out that we could have a real beginning only through the private sector and political parties, which embody the idea of power rotation. So, we have returned to square one. Nasser believed that businessmen like Abourguila posed a threat to the stability of the ruling regime, so he got rid of them. He also imagined – and repeated time and again – that debtors are stronger than creditors. Instead, he did not realize something very important: businessmen do not threat the stability of any ruling regime, especially in Egypt, but rather the contrary. If Nasser were still alive, he would realize that the more businessmen expand, the more they are hostages of the state and have to obey it. Mahmoud Mohieldin, the publisher of the book, has a very difficult task, as he has to rescue any Abourghila not from this dangerous method of Nasser's, which has now disappeared, but indeed from the state's new method, which hits the main pillars of the economy and, consequently, national security.
