Adel Al-Sanhoury
A country of "donations" and "villas and chalets" .. Correct
Saturday ، 02 July 2016 - 10:00 am

The scenes are prey to the "torrent of ads" during Ramadan
Throughout the holy month and on satellite TV, the viewer of the Ramadan series fell prey to a torrent of advertisements that exceeded the number of hours of the series itself, as if you were watching a lot of ads and a few series. Generally this is the season or month of advertisements that production companies or producers are waiting for. It is noteworthy that the majority of advertisements have been taken over by real estate companies that market luxury housing, including villas, chalets, and "compounds", associations, charitable foundations, and heart, cancer and liver hospitals in order to motivate viewers to donate. I do not know the secret to focusing this mass of advertisements on the month of Ramadan, is it a holy month, and therefore the opportunity for the abundant religious and humanitarian feelings of Egyptians must be seized in this month?

If it is this way, then we are faced with a provocative scene and opportunism par excellence. Advertisements for luxurious chalets on the northern coast or in the Red Sea or in Cairo and its suburbs make you feel that you are in a society that lives in a state of complete luxury, and does not suffer from any problems or worries, or perhaps his only concern is to choose a "villa in Geneina" in the first, second, or third floor, or sell His apartment and house are in Cairo, to get a chalet on the sea or an apartment that summarizes all the advantages of the global cities in New York, Paris and London, and not in a society that suffers from extremely difficult economic conditions and a large percentage of it lives below the poverty line and in the slums.

On the other hand, and immediately after announcing the chalets, the ads shock you on the feelings and display the scenes of the sick, the poor and the needy, to urge and push the viewers to donate via the numbers written on the screen or via a representative who will arrive quickly to obtain the donation.

This amount of advertisements from foundations and charities pushes you to ask or also ask whether we are a country of donations or a country of chalets and compounds. It is not reasonable for luxury real estate ads to occupy this space on all satellite channels in a country where living conditions are difficult. Whoever believes that the Egyptian people are not interested in any kind of Types of real estate except in luxury housing without talking about the unspoken question about "Where is the money to buy villas and chalets?" Is there a lot of random money in the local market outside the legal frameworks, the answer is indeed yes, and the evidence is hundreds of people queuing at one of the famous companies to buy villas and chalets. These funds are outside the banks and the government does not know anything about them. Former Investment Minister Ashraf Salman estimated it one day at about 350 billion pounds.

We are facing a contradictory scene between a community that lives on donations and "shehata", and another society that has nothing but to search for chalets, villas and luxury apartments, and there is no middle ground between them. There are no studies or data showing us the amount of money in terms of donations, or the volume of sales for apartments and villas. Transparency is definitely absent from the volume of donations to charitable foundations, the financial resources available to them, and their spending items, which is referred to by the "Partners for Transparency" organization, which called on institutions to adopt a more transparent approach and justify the intensity of advertisements not out of skepticism about intentions, but rather to entrench values and practices of transparency and accountability regarding Concerning its financial affairs, there are many evidences that there is huge spending on advertising for charitable organizations, especially during the month of Ramadan, and with what is known of the high cost of advertising during this month due to the intensity of viewing, it becomes necessary for donors to know the percentage of what is being done Allocating it from their donations to the advertising item, and the revenue from the advertising campaigns that are launched.