For many Egyptians concerned with unemployment, red tape, fuel shortages and harassment of women, life is getting worse
When Egyptians ejected a head of state for the second time in little over two years this month, much was made of the political and religious reasons for the revolt against Mohamed Morsi. But underlying the street fury were profound everyday frustrations that have mounted since the autocratic era of Hosni Mubarak – economic, social, bureaucratic and law and order problems that have convinced many Egyptians that life is getting worse.
From the poverty of the slums to the red tape of the business world, from fuel shortages to a lack of jobs for young people and the ubiquitous sexual harassment faced by women, conversations with ordinary Egyptians build up a picture of a country in crisis.
"We have been suffering," was the simple conclusion of Ali Eissa, a farmer, one of five Egyptians who shared their frustrations with the Guardian.
Souad Mohamed Ahmed, bread seller
Souad Mohamed Ahmed last ate meat three months ago. She cannot afford it. With her husband dead for 20 years, the 64-year-old bread seller is her family's only breadwinner, and so her earnings of 15 Egyptian pounds (£1.50) a day are all she has to feed herself and the two of her four children who have not yet left home.
The family are among the nearly half of the Egyptian population who live at or below the poverty line. When a thief stole 100 Egyptian pounds from her street stall last month, she effectively lost a week's salary.
"A year ago, life was a bit better," Ahmed said. Food cost less, with meat a third cheaper. The baker whose bread she sells on a street in central Cairo would give her a bonus. Her eldest son's care at the mental hospital was free. Friends and passers-by had more money to give her. "But then came the economic crisis," Ahmed said, "and people stopped helping."
As Egypt's foreign currency reserves dwindled over the past year, the value of the Egyptian pound fell fast. This meant it became more expensive to import goods, and in an import-dependent economy this was catastrophic. It became more expensive for farmers to buy fertiliser, and more expensive for the government to subsidise imported fuel. This made it harder for farms to grow and transport produce, which in turn forced consumers – whose salaries had stayed the same – to curb their spending on food.
People like Ahmed were affected worst. Now the only food she and her sons can afford to eat most days is a single bowl of koshary, a staple Egyptian dish of mainly rice and pasta. She says their poor diet leaves her sons – studying economics and engineering at university – increasingly bad-tempered.
After the outlay on koshary at three Egyptian pounds a bowl, Ahmed is left with six Egyptian pounds to pay for her journey by microbus to central Cairo from her home in the Moqattam slums in the east, and any other living expenses. This includes a contribution towards the fees for her son's treatment at the Abbassiya mental hospital, where she visits every Friday after prayers, bearing juice.
"A year ago it was free," said Ahmed. "Then a year ago they started started charging 200 Egyptian pounds a month for him to be there." Her daughter's husband pays the fees she cannot afford.
The price hike came just as her own income started declining. A year ago Ahmed would sell 500 loaves a day; now she is lucky if she offloads 300. Her weekly bonus evaporated as a result, and she struggles even to sell enough to earn her daily base salary. Months ago she would have sold her quota by the late afternoon. These days she can be seen at her stall as night draws in, trying to sell her last few loaves before returning to the bakery.
Lyla el-Gueretly, teacher and women's rights activist
The man who harassed Lyla el-Gueretly as she crossed a bridge over the Nile in April was not doing anything unusual. According to a UN report published that month, 99.3% of Egyptian women reported being sexually harassed, and 91% said they felt insecure in the street as a result.
But the way Gueretly responded was almost unheard of. Not only did she shout back but she ended up being one of not more than half a dozen Egyptian women to take their harassers to court – and win. The obstacles placed in her way at every stage of the process highlight how social norms and state legislation have made harassment a largely unquestioned part of everyday life.
It began as she passed a crowded bus on Cairo's 6 October Bridge. "I heard the sound of catcalling," recalled Gueretly, a 30-year-old teacher, "and I looked up and saw the face of this man." Forty-year-old Ahmed Yousef wore a beard that supposedly denoted religious devotion, and he was making lewd sexual gestures. "Shame on you," she replied. "Shame on your beard."
Outraged, the man called her a whore, got off the bus and started slapping her with both hands for three minutes. (Gueretly would not be able to sleep on her right side for three weeks afterwards.) Though traffic was at a standstill, no one intervened. "So that's when I started shouting: you are harassing me. You are a harasser."
Finally passers-by were stirred into action and began to beat her assailant. But when Gueretly told them to stop and said she wanted to take Yousef to the police, their attitude changed again. She was repeatedly told not to pursue charges. "They said: what did he actually do? They said I should just let it go. If you're a 'decent' girl, you're expected to leave it."
A study by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights in 2008 reported that 53% of men thought women who were harassed brought it on themselves. But Gueretly refused to give in to this narrative and managed to persuade three witnesses to accompany her and Yousef to a police station.
Once there, officials belittled her. Charges were filed but Yousef was released on bail, never to return to face further proceedings. "You think I'm going to lock up every man who beats someone in the street?" one official told Gueretly.
Surprisingly, Yousef was eventually convicted, in a landmark moment for women's rights in Egypt. But even then, the specifics of the sentence showed how flawed the Egyptian legal system is in dealing with sexual harassment cases. The conviction was a legal fudge, for mere physical assault rather than anything sexual, and her harasser was sentenced to jail in absentia, having been allowed to leave custody. Police have made no serious attempt to track him down.
Egypt's National Council for Women has submitted plans to the government to amend existing laws to make it easier to prosecute harassers. But with Egypt's administration in flux, such amendments are unlikely in the near future. Besides, Gueretly is adamant that the problem goes deeper than legislation: society needs to stop viewing harassment as the fault of women. "Harassment is not their fault. Harassment is the harasser's fault," she said. "Of course you need to change the law, but that's not the root of the problem. It's a social disease."
Ali Eissa, farmer
Ali Eissa has had a bad year. His wheat crop fell by 50%, his oranges and peaches by 20 or 30. The reason was simple: a national fuel crisis. With little diesel to power his tractors, Eissa – chairman of Nahdet Misr, a farm company that grows fruit and vegetables on 3,000 acres across Egypt – had to cut the time his farmers spent irrigating their crops from eight hours a day to two. "I had a disaster," Eissa said.
Eissa's predicament is linked to the rapid devaluation of the Egyptian pound last December, which raised the cost of imports including diesel. The Egyptian state has subsidised diesel (along with goods such as bread, cooking gas and fertiliser) since the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser. But with those subsidies now accounting for more than a fifth of the Egyptian budget, and with a budget deficit of 13%, the state cannot afford to support the population at the level it once did. As a result there are daily shortages at pumps across Egypt, long queues – and at times fatal fights.
Eissa had to turn to the black market, where fuel prices are between 40% and 80% higher than the legal rate. "The worst thing is that most of the black-market quantities are mixed with water, which is breaking a lot of our machines. We have to change the filter, get them maintained, stop the irrigation, stop the tractors."
In recent weeks Eissa has solved his own fuel crisis by dealing directly with a private contractor who allows him to bypass both the government and the black market. But he said his business still faced other profound difficulties.
The first concerns land rights. Like many farmers, Eissa grows some of his crops on land he has reclaimed from the desert. But due to bureaucratic restrictions, Eissa has not been allowed to legally register the land as his own, which affects the amount of support he can legally receive from both the banks and the state. "There are hundreds of thousands of feddans [acres] that have been reclaimed," said Eissa, who owns 1,500 of them. "But they haven't got official documentation, so they can't get credit from the bank, or [subsidised] fertiliser from the ministry of agriculture."
Not that there's much of the latter, anyway. High import costs mean fertiliser is scarce at the moment. "I'm taking all that I need from the black market, which means that our cost is dramatically increasing."
Then there's security, or the lack of it. Since the fall of Mubarak there has been a rise in crime, and farmers like Eissa are vulnerable. "We are under the mercy of the Bedouins in this area. We have to pay them big amounts of money, and many, many farmers have been punished for not going with them. They are entering the farms and preventing the labourers and farms from doing their jobs." Eissa said four leading farmers had been kidnapped in recent months, with one still negotiating his ransom.
For Eissa, a lack of ministerial gumption is the main reason all these problems have been allowed to fester. "No one was taking any decisions, because everything in Egypt was in chaos and they preferred their personal safety than to take tough decisions that not everyone will like. Now that there will be a new minister of agriculture, we hope that we will start to see some answers to our problems."
Jalal Abu Ghazaleh, entrepreneur
With 300 Egyptians on his payroll, Jalal Abu Ghazaleh, the CEO of Gourmet Egypt, a group of high-end food shops, runs the kind of business the country's politicians often talk of wanting to attract. But in practice his company has been strangled with red tape over the past two years, a microcosm of why foreign investment in Egypt has fallen by 84% in the last five years.
"It's impossible to comply with the regulations," Abu Ghazaleh said. "And when you can't comply, solving the problem sucks so much energy out of you that you're not creating opportunities, you're sitting there putting out fires."
Chilled meat has been the focal point of Abu Ghazaleh's quagmire. He wants to import gourmet Australian beef, which is transported in vacuum packs. Under Egyptian regulations those packs must not contain any liquid, which Abu Ghazaleh says is impossible given that meat will always leak a certain amount of juice in transit.
In early 2012 the government rejected three shipments of Abu Ghazaleh's beef. It took six months before he managed to persuade anyone in government that the regulations needed a review. "Nobody wanted to do anything because there was no incentive," he said. "If they made a change, people were worried that someone would say that we'd bribed them. People weren't doing the right things even if they knew it was something they should be doing."
Eventually Abu Ghazaleh was given the go-ahead to organise a conference in Cairo to help explain the scientific justification for allowing vacuum packs containing liquid into Egypt. In autumn last year he flew scientists over from Australia to help state his case. But afterwards the government still did nothing.
Then in February he went to Egypt's investment authority and said he was thinking of moving his business out of Egypt because the bureaucracy was too difficult. This meeting led to another pow-wow at the ministry of trade and investment, and finally things seemed to be getting somewhere. Officials agreed to invest in new research involving the Australian government and leading scientists from the field. But then the research was rejected by the ministry's arcane technical committees.
Fresh hope came at the end of June when the government announced a new review of the legislation. But almost simultaneously the ministry of supply announced an investigation into the company because of the same issue. They were back to square one.
"The potential in Egypt is so spectacular that all you need is a bit of stability and clear rules," said Abu Ghazaleh. "The rules are out of date, and are unclear. You're fighting for 14 months on something that is so obvious and stupid."
He added: "That's one of the biggest problems face in Egypt. The big message to the new government is that serious reform is needed to make it easier to do business in Egypt."
Salah el-Din Ashraf, jobless graduate
Like many young Egyptians, 26-year-old Salah el-Din Ashraf saw the 2011 revolution as a chance for a fresh start – in a personal sense as well as a national one. Shortly afterwards Ashraf, who studied mechanical engineering at Helwan University, started training part-time for the job of his dreams, a career in the civil aviation industry. But two years on Ashraf is unemployed.
A record 13.2% of Egyptians are without a job, eight in 10 of whom, like Ashraf, are under 30. "It doesn't feel fair at all," Ashraf said. "I'm in my own country, I was part of the revolution from the beginning, and I can't find a job. I see other people who have less capabilities, but who get jobs in civil aviation because of their connections."
Before the fall of Mubarak, Ashraf saw civil aviation as elitist, an industry where the pilots were lauded but where engineers such as himself were given low salaries and little respect. After the revolution he hoped engineers might be given an equal footing, and that it might be a more welcoming place for him to build a career.
But in practice Ashraf could barely get his foot in the door to find out whether such a cultural change might have taken place. The revolution killed off tourism, which in turn ruined the private airline industry. "Around 15 companies closed down," said Ashraf, leaving around half a dozen firms and very few jobs. "The market became full of very experienced flight engineers, so it became very difficult for me to get work."
In September 2011 Ashraf won an apprenticeship with Memphis Airlines. But that ended in May 2012, and since then Ashraf, despite his qualifications, has been unable to find work. He gets freelance work here and there in computer programming and graphic design. But the civil aviation career he thought was his for the taking back in February 2011 is at the very least on hold. Ashraf has made at least 20 applications for the few openings that emerge from time to time, but to no avail. And a career overseas is not possible since his Egyptian aircraft qualification is not recognised internationally.
Nor is he alone among his friends in their mid-to-late twenties. "We're 50-50 employed-unemployed," he said. "Some of us are upset, some of us are depressed, and some of us are trying to find whole new careers." His brother Hamza trained as a pharmacist but cannot find work, so is grudgingly thinking of turning to event management instead following a successful stint in the field in Qatar.
Ashraf sees two ways out of the crisis. "There needs to be more help for young people trying to start up their own businesses. And more help for big companies to employ more people. And that will come from economic stability and political stability. The number of protests during the last year made business owners very worried about expanding their business."