The 25 January revolution has changed political life for good, but it will only be successful if it can link the tremendous struggle over rights and representation with economic growth that provides jobs.
(Ray Bush)
Finally, and only after being pushed hard by permanent demonstrations, Egypt's generals caved in to pressure for serious constitutional reforms as a first step towards the possibility of democratic deepening. Yet the recent overwhelming support for proposed constitutional amendments – 77.2% voted for proposed amendments in March – has not settled fears of counter-revolution or a return to office of erstwhile ruling National Democratic Party cronies. The constitutional amendments limit presidential terms to two each of four years, in contrast to the previously unlimited number of six-year terms. And it will be easier to mount a challenge to run for presidency. However, opponents to the amendments, from the left, Nasserists, youth coalitions and Copts, have argued that they are premature and that the 1971 Constitution should have been abandoned and entirely replaced. The possible continued presence of members of the old regime raises concerns about just how serious the military is in ridding the country of the economic elite that has destroyed Egyptian livelihoods for the last 30 years. These fears intensified at the end of February as the Egyptian interim cabinet approved a decree-law criminalising strikes, protests and demonstrations, including sit-ins that ‘interrupt private or state-owned business or affect the economy in any way’.
After such an historic revolution, this may not be the time to be curmudgeonly. Attending the biggest party I have ever been to in Midan Tahrir in March was exhilarating and joyful, full with expectation and real hope. It has been more than 20 years since I began visiting and studying Egypt's political economy. I have often made annual pilgrimages to Cairo's wonderfully vibrant, yet repressive and challenging city, and I have witnessed attempts to transform the countryside by destroying benefits Nasser gave to tenants and other smallholders, as the NDP decided instead to return land to land-owning allies. Many of the landed elites were in the corrupt parliament, so voting for rural (dis)possession was easy. If tenants have been impoverished, then nouveau riche, mostly young and assertive investors have taken advantage of cheap (and corrupt) land ‘sales’, free water for high-value and low-nutritional foodstuffs for export rather than the promotion of local food security. The destruction of Egypt's environment by agribusiness stripping the country's valuable top-soils became de rigueur. Yet these processes, among many others, have been contradictory in their outcomes. After most of my visits I would usually feel that Egypt would be unable to stay the same for more than 24 hours, and yet simultaneously I would have the feeling that the country would remain the same for a great many more years. Conflict, inequality and injustice were so evident alongside demonstrations of enormously opulent wealth, and struggles for economic and political transformation have always been evident.
The 25 January revolution has changed political life for good. Things will never be the same, even if the military seems unable or unwilling to gauge properly the mood of the country and ensure more swiftly a complete exorcism of the ancien régime. There is a revolution underway and it is a process that will go beyond the removal of Husni Mubarak from office. After 30 years of social and political stagnation that systematised brutal repression of rights and people's dignity, and which helped to sustain intense poverty and the manipulation of religious prejudice, there is now a chance to promote an ambitious and transparent ‘root-and-branch’ reform programme. The 25 January opened a dam of pent-up resentment and frustration. That could easily have been funnelled into violence and envy, counter-brutality and revenge, yet that was only evident when NDP thugs entered the fray as the robber baron regime tried to cling to power. The revolutionaries, from all walks of Egyptian life, young and old, middle class, small farmers and destitute, workers and elderly, demonstrated confident self-controlled maturity of protest. Continued protest until remnants of the old guard are thrown away remains necessary and should receive not only local support, amid an understandable irritation by a few that the ‘normal’ life of tourist trade and small business is disrupted. But these demonstrations need also international solidarity and support. The buzzards of the European Union, United Kingdom and United States are circling, and many have landed, to establish an understanding of just what has been happening in the country of such geostrategic importance and historical ‘stability’. Caught out by the splendour of revolution, Egypt's allies in the international community have been busy playing ‘catch-up’. This applies especially to the United States. Why is Washington's intelligence in the region so poor and outmoded, and why could not the (relatively) new broom in the White House grasp the nettle of real democratic transition rather than elevate concern with stability and defence of its Israeli ally? Tel Aviv is challenged by democracy on its doorstep, and the United States will have trouble in its historical strategy of determining the outcome of political transition without being seen to do so.
The revolution will have lots to say about Egypt's regional presence. It will live with an Israeli neighbour that is peaceful and democratic, that respects Arab citizens of the Jewish state and abides by international law including complete withdrawal from Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. The revolution can legitimately question why the Camp David agreement benefited Israel financially and militarily more than Egypt, and the revolution can certainly question why Mubarak's regime became the jailor of the Gazan concentration camp.
Domestically the agenda is long. Already people have shown greater respect for each other than was much in evidence with Mubarak's bestial regime. The revolution demands a more open and democratic public sphere of mutual respect; this agenda has been driven by all demonstrators, not only the youth that has so captured media imagery. Without doubt, the youth demand and deserve a respect that is at odds with a moribund age set of deference (unearned), which helped structure a non-participatory political culture and at its worst was captured by the patronising stupidity of Mubarak and Omar Suleiman during the height of the revolution. High on the agenda is clearly the establishment of a rule of law, habeas corpus and the removal of systemic torture from Egypt's landscape of law and (dis)order. This will not happen immediately, as the chain of command in all police stations will need recasting in customs that will simply not be understood by many force commanders. The rights debate will need more than just a new minister. The idea of inherent human rights – that people are innocent until due process has found them guilty of whatever they may be charged with – and the complete judicial and civilian oversight of the police, will be just a beginning, but one that is essential to safeguard revolutionary gains. If the police needs reform, new training, skills and knowledge as well as raised salaries for rank-and-file officers (reducing the incentive for bribery and links with local gangs), then the security services need to be closed as announced by the temporary government in March – but what will replace them, how will they be supervised, and by whom? Security services are important in all democracies to ensure that legitimate opposition does not become converted to military insurgency; but security and police forces will need to internalise that they operate to defend the Egyptian people, not the Egyptian regime. Only when the forces of law and order are so reformed will it be likely that political opposition emerges free from infiltration and dirty tricks, and mutual respect unifies people with a security agency that defends all Egyptians. There is thus no role for the aml dowla or muhabarat in the new Egypt, and the sooner this is affirmed the better. After all, it was the awful actions of these forces over more than a generation that partly drove the unprecedented mobilisation to Tahrir.
Of course Egypt's revolution will only be successful and more easily defended if it can link the tremendous struggle over rights and representation with economic growth that provides jobs. Egypt's economy has grown by about 5% in real terms each year since 1980. It is the ambition of all developing countries to achieve such a level of growth, especially where it outstrips the increase in population. Yet sustained economic growth singularly failed to deliver employment and poverty reduction. The NDP robber barons were successful in rewarding themselves – real estate, land, cement and steel, and of course the military too – after all, did not the military get its ‘toys for the boys’ to a value of US$1.3 billion per annum from the United States, as well as guarantees for its own enormous business ventures in land, real estate and manufacturing? But urban and rural poverty – the abjection of the majority of Egyptians from the wealth that they have produced – is the biggest indictment of the last 30 years. At best, Egypt has developed but Egyptians have not! Unemployment levels might be as high as 50%, food inflation of 20% accelerates poverty and child hunger, and bread riots around the bakeries of Cairo in 2008 were an early indicator of tipping points to come.
It is no longer popular to talk about ‘class’ in the Middle East (or anywhere else perhaps), whether the working class or the peasantry or fellahin, but it is these social classes that produce Egypt's wealth. The financial and service sectors may have grown in the last 30 years, but the wealth generated from speculation remained in the hands of the economic elite and not with the country at large. The NDP not only ignored structural impediments to growth, namely the high dependence upon rent – from Suez, labour remittances and oil and gas, but it ensured that its cronies would benefit from kickbacks from contracts linked to construction and land deals often in the rentier sectors. And revenue that accrued from such skulduggery was used only for conspicuous consumption or more real-estate construction that the vast majority of Egyptians could not even dream of occupying. It is one thing to say that market capitalism and economic liberalisation has given Egypt the greatest opportunity to boost livelihoods and well-being – the mantra of Gamal Mubarak, especially after Ahmed Nazif's administration in 2004. It is quite another to provide evidence of how the market economy has ensured the trickle-down of growth rather than the funnelling up of wealth to the already mega rich.
If and when the dust begins to settle down around the political transition, it is in the economic arena of sustained economic growth with justice that the revolution may stand or fall. More than 40% of Egyptians live on less than US$2 a day. It is probably a much higher percentage than that, and possibly even as high as 80% in some rural areas. That would make Egyptians poorer than Zimbabweans – not a comparison many would immediately consider. But this is the depth to which the NDP and the Mubarak tribe took the country. The way they set thugs on Egyptians and destroyed their own party offices suggests there was also an orchestrated plan to ‘burn Cairo’, legitimising perhaps a more aggressive military intervention to defend the country.
It is going to take great care to dig Egypt out of the pit of economic crisis and to do so with justice and equality. The first step will require Egyptians to see that there is indeed a crisis, and to construct a genuinely national participatory political system. The World Bank and other international agency love-affairs with headline growth figures veil inequality, uneven development and accelerated social unrest. The long-term crisis began with economic reform in 1991 (1987 in the countryside) – reform heralded by the international community that fostered robber-baron capitalism. The medium-term crisis lies in the pivotal working-class and trade union unrest that has provided strong roots for the revolution. More than a million workers and their families have been involved in industrial actions since 2004, and the Mahalla revolt in 2006 involving 28,000 workers was a clear signal to all but the most illiberal government that kefaya (enough) really was kefaya. The vibrancy of worker unrest and the challenge to confront nineteenth-century working conditions has not been lost on the fellahin. It is likely that at least 300 farmers have been killed in 2010, with 1500 injured and 1700 arrested following rural struggles over access to land, boundary demarcations, struggles against dispossession, and other disputes with landowners and police. The politicisation of land is at a level greater than any time since Nasser, and it is an issue that the future minister of agriculture will have to address with care and attention to redressing rural poverty and how it has been sustained by dispossession of smallholders and accumulation by land owners.
Addressing all these themes will depend on the revolution being sustained, on the coalition of youth continuing to broaden their excellent and profound grasp of the realities underpinning wealth and inequality, and building links between urban workers and rural smallholders. This will require permanent revolution, permanent dissatisfaction with the status quo and of course vigilance against counter-revolution. It will also need to be underpinned by a new system of education in Egypt that values not only the core principles of literacy and numeracy, and their delivery in the classroom without violence or sexual harassment. And the challenge of promoting a gendered politics of equality and critique of patriarchy was exemplified in March. As the military cleared Midan Tahrir, female protesters were seized, incarcerated in the nearby cellar of the Egyptian museum, and subjected to ‘virginity’ tests and other torture. If the revolution has begun to legitimise the importance of challenging all information and to question everything that is presented especially by government, it clearly has a long journey still to travel, and debate about that journey will need to go beyond shuffling of political chairs to the construction and permanent revolution of social and economic transformation.
Note on contributor
Ray Bush is Professor of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds, and author of Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt (Westview, 1999) and editor of Counter-revolution in Egypt's Countryside (Zed, 2002). His most recent book is Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South (Pluto, 2007).