While Hamdi Ibrahim has a degree in tourism and hotel management, none of Egypt's many hotels and tourist villages has offered him a job. Despite all his efforts, five years after his graduation he is a parking attendant. He helps car owners - most of them not as well educated as he - park their cars. He even cleans these cars as part of the services on offer in the central Cairo parking lot. "Search for a job in Egypt always ends in vain as long as one doesn't have contacts," Ibrahim said. "But who you know is far more important than what you know," he told Egyptian Mail in an interview. Ibrahim's struggle to land a job, simply because he lacks the ‘right' connections, belittles every talk about citizenship and equality rights in this country. The theoreticians and planners of the ruling National Democratic Party might be stunned to learn that millions like Ibrahim, suffer because of the absence of those very same ‘rights' ��" such as equality ��" that they have been talking about for years. Many of his friends in college have managed to find high-paying jobs, not because they are better, quite simply because they have more contacts. Having failed to find a job in Egypt, Ibrahim even travelled to Jordan, hoping to find there the opportunities he had missed at home. But returning from Jordan, where after much effort no work prevailed, he found a reality much more difficult than that he had left behind. "This was a time when there was no help from anybody," he said. Like millions of young men and women in this populous country, the end of this story is not a happy one: Ibrahim has taken to drugs. And Ibrahim's is not an isolated case. Others like him have been forced to take a similar route. Some observers point the finger of blame at the government, who they say have denied citizens their basic rights and have now put them on a downtrodden path. Ahmed Adel's suffering is another case in point. The 33-year-old lawyer is baffled that after a day of hard work, and often leaving work late in the night, he then has to wait hours for any form of public transport to appear. To some people, this is a violation of the right to a decent life. But the picture is not totally bleak in this country, some people say. So far, millions in Egypt continue to receive free healthcare and free education; yet the nation's schools are reported to be at their lowest ebb, while universities have failed to make the mark at almost every international rankings. And public hospitals are in bad conditions too. Critics are at pains to point out that these ‘benefits' are in actual fact fit for nothing. As Ibrahim the parking attendant sums it up: "What rights are you talking about? There're no rights here whatsoever."
