Most if not all the luxurious housing compounds on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road have been built on land allocated for reclamation. The owners of these compounds purchased hundreds of acres from the Ministry of Agriculture for only LE50 per acre, to be sold by the square metre for huge sums of money to the nation's elite, who now live there in palaces and villas worth many millions of Egyptian pounds. Despite this appalling violation, no-one in the Ministry of Agriculture or the Reconstruction and Agriculture Development Authority has ever spoken out against those corrupt investors or ordered the demolition of these buildings and the cancellation of these deals. So why has Minister of Agriculture Amin Abaza suddenly started bothering the owner of the Solimaniya resort, asking him to give back the land given to him by the Ministry many years ago? The Minister has accused the owner of violating the conditions of his contract, turning the 700 feddans (acres) offered to him for reclamation into a big housing compound composed of villas, chalets, golf courses, restaurants and shopping centres. The Ministry of Agriculture reportedly sold this one man 700 feddans for reclamation for only LE35,000, without ever checking on the work in progress, until, one day, the Ministry woke up to discover a huge compound, housing hundreds of people, had suddenly appeared there! To settle the dispute, the owner has suggested paying LE2,000 per feddan to the Government. Meanwhile, his land is now worth LE3.5 billion! El-Solimaniya is a glaring example of the squandering of State land. There are many other such projects, whose investors have bought vast swathes of land for trivial prices and turned them into very expensive housing compounds, inhabited by very rich Egyptians. These tycoons are able to do this, with the help of some corrupt governmental officials In the meantime, the Government is perceived as being unfair towards the young people who want to buy some feddans for reclamation or a piece of land to build a home of their own. This injustice in the distribution of wealth is helping widen the gap between the haves and the have nots in this country.
