The Ministry of Finance sparked a crisis when he started putting off disbursing the appropriations allocated for Press Syndicate members as allowances for technology and training. This crisis came to an end after President Mubarak - who received a complaint in this regard from the head of the syndicate Makram Mohammed Ahmed – asked the Minister of Finance to disburse the allowances on schedule.
The allowance is part of the complicated problem of journalists' wages. It was decided it would be disbursed and increased, but national, partisan and private press institutions decided not to add it to the basic salaries of their employees because it would result in – or increase - a deficit in their budgets.
Therefore, the Ministry of Finance decided to lift a burden from those institutions' shoulders. But when it opened the file of the national press institutions' debts to the government four years ago, it discovered that these debts reached some LE6 billion. So, it raised the slogan of "Depend on yourselves and strike a balance between your expenses and revenues". Therefore, the ministry began to put off disbursing these allowances, especially after they increased from LE20 in 1984 to LE530 per month for each member in the syndicate, thus taking the required allocation to LE25 million per year (plus possible further increases). The most complicated thing in this problem is that this allowance accounts for the biggest part of the salaries of junior journalists. In addition, some partisan and private newspapers do not give their editors any salary because they get allowances from the Ministry of Finance! The worst aspect in this problem is that this situation hampers the process of liberating the Egyptian press from the government's direct control.
It is illogical to call on journalists to be independent while most of them depend on the government to get all, a third or half of their salaries.
I rule out that the Minister of Finance is putting off paying the allowance due to the campaigns launched against it by some newspapers for different reasons, as some colleagues think. However, the allowance could be used to put pressure on newspapers and journalists at any time. Therefore, a basket of solutions should be reached to ensure full economic independence for the syndicate and the profession and to provide the Egyptian press with the economic resources it needs to be self-sufficient. The liberation of the press and the media from the executive authority's hegemony has so far not been on the government's agenda - or the ruling party's – although the government has completed – or so it says - a plan for the liberalization of the economy. What is left of the public sector is some units to be distributed among citizens in accordance with the new project of public property title deeds. The citizens would then sell them at a loss as was the case with Al-Rayyan and Al-Boushi. Our masters in the government, who have been studying how to liberalize the press and the media for ten years, have discovered that this issue has nothing to do with the program to liberalize the economy! This does not mean, though, that the government should leave the problems of the press unsolved instead of working for the latter's stability and ensuring a minimum of freedom and independence. This way, these problems would not get worse as has been the case over the past thirty years. Therefore, there should be a clear vision of the future!
Perhaps for this reason, I expected the crisis of the allowances to push journalists to have a dialogue among themselves and with the syndicate and the government in order to discuss a futuristic vision of the crisis of the press - as a profession and industry. This vision should include a solution to the problem of salaries, as the "allowance on technology" should be added to journalists' salaries from the budgets of the institutions for which they work instead of begging them every month from the Ministry of Finance! However, a number of colleagues preferred to use the crisis to make electoral gains that have nothing to do with journalists' interests. Therefore, they announced that they would collect signatures to withdraw confidence from the syndicate's board of directors. This showed that they knew nothing about the law of their syndicate.
If they read the law, they would discover that it has no articles allowing the withdrawal of confidence from the syndicate's head and board of directors. They would also discover that this funny step would push some government circles to use the allowance to restrict the independence of the press by changing its name from the "allowance of technology" to "the allowance of insulting"!
