Neo-Liberalization of Egypt Continues

By Danish Khan

The ruling elites of the world have subjugated the average mind through their propaganda media which feeds manipulated and selected information. I personally feel that corporate news and generally the whole of corporate media has been used by the dominating sects of the society to keep folks under the magic spell of capitalistic illusions, and they have been successful in shaping the political and social consciousness of an average person according to their needs and interests. As when Arab Spring was hoping to take over the long lasting socio-economic season of autumn, immediately the thing that struck me was the 24/7 coverage of Arab Spring ,especially of Egypt by the corporate media in United States. Frankly speaking, I don’t depend or trust on the corporate news-channel for my daily dose of information, but I do tune up to them to find out the capitalists/corporations take on the current issues. So when the uprising in Egypt was telecast on the corporate news channel, I knew it from that day, something fishy is in the air, and now it has been all clear and transparent to us.

 

To get to the depth of any argument, one needs to scientifically analyze the argument from different perspectives, usually folks tend to derive their analysis from the surface based inferences, I know it is convenient and popular thing to do, but it can be very misleading. As portrayed in corporate media that the Arab-spring has liberated the suffocated masses, and their suffocation and oppression was due to few individuals, thus if they get rid of their faces, things would turn around all of the sudden. On contrary, the whole socio-economic system is oppressive, as long we have same socio-economic policies, nothing much is going to change. 

 

Recently I encountered a paper ”Egypt’s Orderly Economic Transition?” by Dr. Adam Hanieh who is a professor at “School of Oriental and African Studies London”, in this paper Hanieh has shed some very needed light on the Arab-spring and particularly on the real socio-economic situation of Egypt. Dr. Hanieh points out that there were some concrete socio-economic realities which have forced the bulk of Egyptian people in to streets to demonstrate their anger and frustration on the socio-economic policies of Mubarak’s regime. For example, the inflation has been more than 10%, and it has been more than 20% for the food products. According to the official estimates of national income threshold for poverty, 40% of Egyptians are living in poverty. As the animosity among the common Egyptians have been creeping up, to slow it down, the dictatorial regime of Mubarak came up with a plan of increasing the wages of public employees by 15%, and it cost government around 1.2 billion of US dollars. Similarly the government increased its expenditure on health and education to facilitate people in order to calm them down, and put to sleep again. Egypt has been a net importer of oil, and the oil subsidies by the government accounts for $16.6 billion annually. So overall the government was in severe crisis and under huge debt at the time of uprising. Furthermore, the political instability in the country damaged the tourism industry, and interestingly it was accounted for 5.3% of total GDP in 2010 by generating an income of $12 billion.  

 

So a new government after Mubarak has a huge task in hand if they really want to improve the ground economic reality of the common people of Egypt. But in the meantime, the International Financial Institutions (IFI’s) have regarded it as an opportunity to further prolong their financial agenda of neo-liberalization of the Middle East. As we all know about the IFI’s and western powers love and admiration for democracy, (although one would disagree with this delusionary abstraction on the fact that they have been supporting Mubarak for last few decades), but besides that, now as democracy is coming to Egypt, it will come on some conditions, any aid or forgiveness to Egypt is linked with its commitment to further privatize all the public owned enterprises through the medium of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP’s).  The President Barack Obama promised Egypt that United States will forgive $1 billion of Egypt’s loan payment to US, but that money has to be used under the dictation of US. Similarly the World Bank and IMF made an announcement to grant a loan of $6 billion, but Egypt has to do following, Egypt has to open up all his markets for foreign investment, reduce tariffs, and do large scale privatization of state owned enterprises.

 

The uprising of the Egyptian people was a pleasant change for the country, and for the region, and at grass-root level people were demanding very radical changes. They were protesting not only against a dictatorial rule of Mubarak, but also against the whole socio-economic system. But the ruling establishment of Egypt with the help of western powers has portrayed it as an up rise against one man known as Mubarak. On contrary, it was a movement against the putrefying system which was spearheaded by Mubarak. Western powers through IFI’s are imposing neo-liberal economic policies on the people of Egypt, and these policies will only benefit the IFI’s and the military and the business elites of the Egypt, but a life of a common Egyptian will not improve much. The neo-liberal policies of privatization and deregulations have nothing good in them for a common Egyptian, instead these policies are just another tools in the hands of International Financial Institutions to appropriate more wealth out of the working people of the Egypt.

 

Although, things are not going to change much for the average Egyptian under the economic policy of neo-liberalization, but we should expect a much higher social, political and economic consciousness among the people of Egypt in the coming days, as the real face of IFI’s and the ruling elite of Egypt will unveil, a hope and aspiration for the better alternative will eventually  lead the masses in to the streets of Cairo to get rid of these neo-liberal policies, and free themselves from the military and the capitalist control.

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