CAIRO - Since the toppling of the Mubarak regime, the Egyptians have dreamt of their revolution becoming the start of a new age of development, in which Egypt occupy its deserved position among the developed countries. Apparently, such progress should be based on some giant economic projects of high financial returns for the entire nation, and not just limited group of businessmen or investors, whether locals or foreign, as always was the case under Mubarak's rule. However, the people were told that building the political and legislative structure of the country should come first to ensure the soundness of the development drive. Thus, the Egyptians accepted delaying their dream for some months, which extended to more than two years and half before seeing their dream coming true, when the Hisham Qandil government announced the launch of the Suez Canal Development Corridor as the engine for the country's development. Strangely, the majority of the Egyptians are showing concern over the project, with some of them even warning of having the project be enforced the way that it could breach the country's national security. So why have the Egyptians not expressed universal joy at such move? Apparently, the cause is the lack of trust in the present government and behind it the entire Muslim Brotherhood (MB) rule. It continues losing credibility and public support in the street day after day, because of their contradictory policies and turning against the goals of the great Revolution of January 25. Since reaching rule around 10 months ago, the Muslim Brothers seem to be concentrating on the task of extending their full control on all the state institutions and governmental departments to abort any chance of rotation of authority in the future. They have also cut all channels of dialogue with the opposition and started cracking down on the revolutionary youth and media people to hush any voice of opposition against the group's policies. In the meantime, the MB is working on passing some critical economic and legislative laws via the Shura Council, the present acting legislature, so as to serve its aims, even if opposed by some noted experts or even prestigious institution such as Al-Azhar that rejected the draft bonds law twice. Nevertheless, the Shura Council endorsed this controversial bonds (sukuk) law, in clear violation of the constitution, which makers it a condition that such laws obtain the approval of Al-Azhar. It is worth noting that the Shura Council had always been a consultative body with no real influence in the process of endorsing any draft laws. That is why the public showed no real interest in participating in elections that took part at the beginning of 2012, especially after the liberal civil parties announced boycott of the elections because of the irregularities they detected during the preceding parliamentary elections. For this reason, the then electoral turn out was no more than 7% to end with the MB Freedom and Justice Party winning some 105 seats from the total 180 elected seats and Al-Nur Salafi party getting some 45 seats to obtain together around 84 per cent of the elected seats. Therefore, members of the Shura Council cannot be seen as real representatives of the Egyptian citizens and therefore should not be the legislature passing laws of vital importance that influence citizens' and their children's lives. Moreover, the Supreme Constitutional Court, which dissolved the parliament because of the non-constitutionality of the then election law, is currently seeing a case question the constitutionality of the Shura Council whose members were elected according to the same law. Consequently, people wonder about this haste to issue some significant economic laws to affect the life of the Egyptians for decades to come, passed by a temporary legislature not representing the entire nation. Meanwhile, we could wait for some months till having an elected parliament representing the real political powers in post-revolution Egypt? Apparently, the MB is not sure of its ability to win majority at the coming parliament and so rushes to enforce certain laws that would serve its political purposes. What adds to the public suspicion is the approach of the present government that seems to be violating the revolutionary goals of obtaining social justice. In addition to the direction of forcing laws lessen subsidy on different basic commodities, the Shura Council has endorsed a new taxation law demonstrating the government's bias towards rich people at the cost of the poor. Although tax exemption has been raised to a level of LE12,000 a year, the high cost of living makes pay of LE1000 per month less than that required for a decent standard of living. The Shura Council has refused suggestion of imposing a tax of 30 per cent on anyone whose income is more than LE250,000 per year under pretext that this would be violating the constitution. So why should the Egyptians trust the MB government when consider launching the Suez Canal Corridor? First we have to clear that this project is not a MB invention nor ever been part of the so called renaissance (nahda) project of the MB candidates. Instead, it was a project been suggested by a former member of the dissolved National Democratic Party and been revived by some Egyptian experts as a mega-project that would help promote the Suez Canal revenues to around $100 billion per year. The aim was to turn the Suez Canal region to another Singapore or Jabal Ali region of the UAE. However, the draft law drawn up for this project scared the public and some law men including the senior judge Tareq el-Beshri who is known of his support to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Beshri wrote an article at the press describing the draft law as a mean that would enable separation of the Suez Canal region of Egypt. It would give the president absolute authority over the new project away from any supervising body of the state including parliament or the Central Agency for Auditing. Such project could be a real boost to the national economy if the regime considered creating an Egyptian share holding company and encourage all Egyptians have shares in it, so as to create such a giant project with national funds. The Egyptians will feel part of their development process and at the same time guarantee national security against domination of foreign countries or multi-national companies. Thus, instead of being part of the national dream for progress, the Suez Canal Corridor is exacerbating public fear of restoring foreign occupation to the canal that the Egyptians struggled hard to liberate.
