CAIRO - Six months might not be considered too long a period, in which a revolution demolishes the existing regime in order to create a new one. Yet it is still regarded as too much for the very poor people of Egypt, who thought the January 25 revolution would be a lifesaver from the miserable life they long led under a corrupt totalitarian regime. Although the regime kept talking about social justice, it actually followed a policy that widened the gap between the rich and the poor in Egyptian society. Such a regime is unlikely to have a trustworthy institution giving reliable statistics on the poor people in this country. However, their figures, implying that 20 million people are present in shantytowns in Egypt, would mean 25 per cent of citizens are living below the poverty line and lack the basic utilities and services of electricity, clean drinking water and sewerage systems. However, this percentage could be doubled, due to the around 57 per cent of the population found in the rural areas, most of whom are afflicted by suffer poverty and high rates of unemployment. Such conditions had made many analysts predict the eruption of a revolution of hungry people, which they warned would be destructive; causing a nation-wide spread chaos and disorder. Fortunately, Egyptian young people initiated their peaceful civilised revolution at the right time, which toppled the corrupt regime of Mubarak in just 18 days. However, this great revolution, that has stunned the world, suffers from a lack of leadership to ensure its ability to achieve all its goals together with no clear mechanism to fulfill its principles of democracy, liberty and social justice. While sinking in political debates over the ways and means for all demands of the revolution to be fulfilled, the revolutionaries seem to be forgetting the poor people, who supported their movement and cannot now be abandoned to further suffer hardship. Hereby emerges the need to accelerate in adopting a national programme to assist the poor to live a better life, such as the Bank of the Poor in Bangladesh, which helps people, who are poor and unemployed by means of small interest-free loans enabling them to realise income-generating projects. Upper Egypt contains the largest percentage of the Egyptian poor, which fact was acknowledged even by Mubarak's regime when it claimed to be creating a development programme of the poorest 1000 villages in Egypt, most of them located in the southern governorates. Minya Governorate, 241 kilometres south of Cairo, contains a significant proportion of these villages (16 in number), where families live on less than $2 per day according to the Human Development Report of 2009. The report also referred to the high unemployment rate in these communities that can reach 90 per cent of the people who are of working age. “I live with a family of nine persons in a house with a single room, whose roof collapsed because of last winter's rains. I'm afraid that next winter will come before being able to rebuild it,” Azza Qa'oud Salem, the daughter of a rural worker, whose daily income does not exceed LE10, told Al-Wafd Arabic newspaper. Azza, who lives in the Noway village of Minya, wishes that she could learn a craft or have a small business, through which she can earn her living and help her father with the living costs. “I have nine children that all sleep in the same room with my husband, a seasonal worker. I wish that I could build another room to accommodate my children,” said Sayeda Hassan Ali. She is another villager of Noway, which, like many other villages of Minya lacks clean water, a school for the basic stage of education or even a health unit to provide badly needed health service, including that of family planning. These villages also suffer repeated crises in butane gas cylinders and bread because of very limited quota made by successive governments to those villagers, whose populations are continuously rising. “The Government in Cairo and the governor in Minya have dropped our village from the map. For years, we have been deprived of all utilities. El-Shamas hamlet lacks any health services and does not have a single school. Our children have to walk for four kilometres every morning to reach the school in the closest village,” said Mansour Abdel-Sayed to Al-Wafd. “We are the only village in the region that is deprived of a legal building location, despite around 1.5 uncultivated feddans [acres] of land being available,” he added. Abdel-Sayed, like many other poor villagers, hope that the January 25 revolution will make a change to their living conditions and give them a better chance for their children to enjoy education, health services, an appropriate house with basic utilities. However, they wonder when this will happen, if successive transitional governments continue to sink in the files of the toppled regime and events of the revolution without announcing a single project to lessen the rate of poverty in this country or give hope for the future.
