News now

April 14, 2017

The French News Agency said that the scourge of corruption is still rooted in Egypt, adding that every procedure in this country is only carried out with bribery.

The agency met with a citizen named Hassan (a pseudonym), who assured her that when he wanted to start a new real estate project without paying bribes, employees of the local administration threatened to stop the procedures, and even went so far as to say that the plot of land on which he wanted to build is archaeological treasures. .

The man could only submit to their requests. "Every procedure costs money," said Hassan, who preferred to use a pseudonym.

Corruption is a daily scourge that Egyptians face. It is not uncommon for them to pay bribes in government departments to obtain official papers or permits. They also used to put money in the hands of the policeman to avoid traffic violations.

A situation in some cases is due to the very low salaries, sometimes reaching 1,200 pounds, which is the minimum wage for employees in Egypt. But the phenomenon of corruption also exists at the highest levels.

Protesting against corruption was one of the reasons why millions of citizens took to the streets in 2011 and toppled Hosni Mubarak, who was accused of profiting, along with his sons, from rampant corruption.

Hassan believes that since the revolution against Mubarak, nothing "except the faces" has changed.

- Fixes awaited -

Despite this, several corruption cases received great media attention and were finally referred to the judiciary.

Since coming to power in 2013, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has been stressing that fighting corruption is one of his priorities, stressing that "no one is above the law."

In April 2016, the former Minister of Agriculture, Salah Hilal, was sentenced during his tenure to 10 years in prison for receiving a bribe.

Almost every week, the Administrative Control Authority announces the arrest of two employees accused of corruption, including two employees of the Ministry of Awqaf, who were arrested last January on charges of receiving bribes in the process of selling lands.

Wael Shalaby, a judge in the State Council, committed suicide last January after his arrest in a financial corruption case.

The Administrative Control Authority rejected AFP's requests to conduct interviews with its officials.

Walaa Jad al-Karim, an official at the NGO Partners for Transparency, acknowledges that "the political rhetoric is very strong with regard to corruption, as the president always talks about it."

But he adds, "However, this should be reflected more quickly in legislation."

Experts are calling for reforms related to freedom of access to information, protection of whistleblowers, independence of oversight bodies, and a greater role for civil society.

- Silenced civil society -

Pending these reforms, Egypt lost two points in 2016 compared to 2015 on Transparency International's corruption scale, which measures perceptions of corruption in the government sector.

Kinda Hattar, consultant for the Middle East and North Africa administration at Transparency International, said that this decline is due to "the restrictions imposed on civil society and government oversight bodies with regard to talking about corruption."

These restrictions were revealed by the case of Hisham Geneina, the former head of the Central Auditing Organization. After Geneina made press statements about the extent of corruption in the country, he was dismissed from his post and sentenced to a suspended year in prison, as he was accused of publishing false news that included an "inflated" cost of corruption.

Geneina said at the end of 2015 that the cost of corruption in the government sector amounted to 600 billion pounds, based on the sum of the estimates contained in the reports prepared by the Central Auditing Organization between 2012 and 2015.

Osama Diab, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a non-governmental organization, says, "Geneina crossed a very important red line, as the independence that was granted to the Central Auditing Organization was always conditional that the data and numbers it obtained remain confidential."

As for the impact of corruption on Egyptians, it takes many forms.

Hattar points out that "Egypt is known for the collapse of buildings over the heads of its residents due to the building's violation of technical conditions." She explains that manipulative contractors do not hesitate to pay bribes to employees to buy their silence on building violations.

There is another common image of corruption. After Dania paid a fine of 500 pounds for driving her car with an expired driver's license, she received valuable advice from an officer: “If you had given 50 pounds to the policeman in a moment, you would not have to pay the fine.”