Citizens should have the right to sue the government for repeated power outages, National Association for Consumer Protection President Zeinab Awadallah told Al-Masry Al-Youm in a recent interview. Awadallah, who also heads the economics and public finance unit at Alexandria University's law faculty, went on to point out that taxpayers had the right to expect regular access to basic public services. She called on the government to notify the public before power was cut in a particular area. "They have the right to know beforehand," she said, "especially given the government's longstanding refusal to explain its insistence on exporting natural gas to Israel--despite local shortages." According to Awadallah, the indiscriminate power cuts--which have plagued both the capital and provinces in recent weeks--indicate poor planning on the part of the government and have led to a number of adverse knock-on effects. She described the government's current energy policies--by which locally-produced energy is exported to the detriment of domestic demand--as "irrational" and "a mess." She asserted that that the government's policy of cutting power intermittently--with the stated aim of lightening the load on the national electricity grid--should have first been applied to roads and government institutions. Awadallah also said that Egypt's power stations had been neglected and were "falling apart ," which, she said, had also led to wasted electricity. She went on to make several suggestions, such as reducing working hours for government employees when there was in reality little work to be done. Awadallah concluded by noting that soaring electricity prices had forced citizens to cut back on domestic electricity in an effort to reduce their electricity bills. The use of energy-efficient light-bulbs, she added, had proven useless, since these bulbs burn out too quickly. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
