While panicked residents of the nation’s capital fled the streets of northwest Cairo in mid-November, Minister of Agriculture Ahmed El-Leithiyrushed to reassure them that the red menaces posed “no discernable threat to people or to agriculture.”

Far from being ravenous vegetarians, El-Leithy told reporters, the red locusts merely munch on the edges of leaves, leaving the heart of the greenery intact. Crops would not be harmed, he declared, and the beasts hardly pose a hazard to human health.

Offer a locust a nice, plump leaf, the minister seemed to suggest, and the answer would be “No thanks, I’m on a diet.” Cairo-area entomologists agreed in a way. Cutting open samples taken from the swarm that descended on Cairo, the scientists found unusually large fat deposits suggesting the creatures ate so much in the agricultural heartland that stretches between Alexandria and Cairo that they had no appetite left for what little greenery exists in the capital city.

Red locusts generally live for 2-6 months; each can eat its 20-gram body weight in greenery every day and can travel up to 200 kilometers in 24 hours. That’s exactly why, if memory serves, the Muslim, Jewish and Christian Holy Books all describe locusts as a “biblical pestilence.”

As the pests descended on Sinai and dived into the New Valley’s agircultural lands in the 36 hours after arriving in Cairo, El-Leithy seemed to embrace the old saw that one never tells the truth the first time around lest it bring bad luck. Addressing farmers once the “all-clear” was sounded in the capital, El-Leithy angrily dismissed the notion that the state hadn’t done enough to prevent the locust invasion in the first place. The ministry was fully aware that the locusts were heading to Egypt from Libya and Sudan, he claimed, but the two neighboring countries failed to coordinate their eradication efforts with Egypt. El-Leithy stopped just short of suggesting that Libyan leader Mo’ammar Qaddafi ordered the red monsters to pay us a visit.

Enter Mr. Justice Mamdouh Azzam, a senior advisor to Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. At a press conference called the next day, Azzam noted that Egypt and its neighbors have worked together on pest control since the 1940s. In fact, he said, both he and Khalil Al-Malky the former head of both the Central Administration for the Control of Plant Diseases and the national anti-locust taskforce, who was recently dismissed by El-Leithi had warned in late summer that the locusts could invade from Libya in large numbers this year.

Illustration by Karim Ezz El-Din

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Azzam said, had warned Egypt “months ago” that locusts were headed Egypt’s way from the west, but the Ministry of Agriculture failed to mobilize its early-warning stations, which would have helped launch a coordinated assault on the pests by spray planes and vehicles with pesticide delivery systems. The FAO’s own website bears out Azzam’s claim: A release dated August 5th,2004 noted that a locust invasion threatened agriculture in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya and warned that if not controlled, the next swarms would start hatching on a schedule that would see them hit Egypt by November.

Panicked farmers took matters into their own hands when the ministry failed to act, burning rice husks and garbage and using loudspeakers and banging cooking pots in the hope that the smoke and noise might scare the locusts away. (Our crystal ball is already revealing hints of next year’s headlines: “Minister of Environment Says the Annual Black Smoke Descending on Cairo is Due to Farmers Burning Garbage to Ward Off Second Locust Invasion.”)

At press time, El-Leithy was still claiming that his staff had the situation under control even as the local press began calling for his resignation.

Our next-door neighbors may just join the chorus: Israeli Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz said on November 25th that he had sent a message to El-Leithy “requesting that Egypt act against the insects” and offering to supply spray planes, equipment and know-how, according to an Israeli Army Radio report.

“If the issue is not taken care of in Egypt, it will be extremely difficult to block the mass of locusts,” Katz said as the pests invaded the border city of Eilat and nearby areas of the Negev Desert.

Omar Mohsen/Egypt Today

El-Leithy’s office has so far failed to take Katz up on the offer, so perhaps we’ll next hear some Azharite declaring the locusts are halal?

HAPPY RATS

NEARLY TWO YEARS after authorities claimed “rats” snuck into the Cairo Airport’s Customs Authority Office and devoured tons of confiscated Viagra tablets, the hungry rodents have conveniently struck again in Qena.

Last month, a police committee charged with overseeing the destruction of drugs collected in busts in the Upper Egyptian governorate announced that “rats and cockroaches” had snuck into the Qena Governorate Department of Agriculture’s secure storehouse and munched their way through nearly a ton of confiscated marijuana.

Officials said an officer checking on the storage site found cannabis plants and dried marijuana, evidence in some 81 criminal cases, scattered all over the warehouse floor. Bags had been opened, and evidence tape munched through.

Silvia Dogliani/Egypt Today The Supreme Council for Antiquities’ Zahi Hawass sparked controversy in Luxor by ordering King Tut’s mummy to Cairo for DNA testing and restoration work.

Police collected what was left and reportedly burned it at an undisclosed “mountainous area.”

Perhaps the Ministry of Interior needs to invest in an army of cats to protect the nation’s warehouses and cop shops?

Taha Hussein’s Nightmare

AS THE DEBATE over a two-track education system continued last month (see the watch, page 52), the Ministry of Justice stepped into the breach with plans to cure all our ills.

The ministry floated a trial balloon announcing it had just finalized a draft law to establish a National Authority to Guarantee the Quality of Education just what the country needs, another national authority.

Associated Press Egypt’s team captain Gehad Sayed (11) celebrates after scoring against Taiwan during the opening game of the FIFA Futsal World Championship, Sunday, Nov. 21st 2004. Egypt defeated Taiwan, 12-0.

According to a justice ministry official, the authority would be affiliated with none other than the presidency itself. The ministry expects the bill to win Cabinet approval this month before heading to the People’s Assembly for debate.

When he declared free education a national right, the Revolutionary-era thinker Taha Hussein said “Education should be free for all just like air and water.” If he could breathe today’s air and taste its water, he might have second thoughts.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

ANOTHER GOVERNment minister appears to have been spurred into action lest the rats infest his warehouse: Last month, Minister of Supply Hassan Khedr (known on the street as the minister of breadlines) announced a new initiative to burnish his image among the grumbling poor.

As the nation’s subsidy system sinks under mounting debt and crumbling infrastructure, Khedr announced that the World Food Program has agreed to fund a year-long study at a cost of LE 4 million to examine new ways of ensuring those most in need have preferential access to the ministry’s storehouses of subsidized goods.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today Al-Wafd’s Noaman Gomaa

Under the deal, foreign experts will accompany ministry staffers on a tour of 11 governorates, looking for “unconventional” and “non-bureaucratic” ways of delivering aid more efficiently, cutting waste and preventing state employees from diverting subsidized goods onto the open market.

The study’s authors also plan to ask subsidy recipients how they think the program could be improved, Khedr said, while simultaneously coming up with a concrete definition of who really needs subsidization.

Last we checked, Khedr had promised a few months back that new “smart” subsidy ration cards would solve all the system’s ills, but we have yet to see one on the street. What happened? Cherchez les rats, we bet.

Luxor to Tut: You’re Grounded

KING TUT ISN’T leaving home without a parental permission, and it has nothing to do with the fact that the boy king died before reaching the age of majority, and everything to do with turf wars.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today CAO report clearing Ezz Steel of monopolistic practices sparks PA debate.

The latest tempest in a teapot in the world of antiquities made headlines last month after Supreme Council for Antiquities chieftain Zahi Hawass ordered Tut’s mummy transferred from Luxor to Cairo for forensic tests as part of an investigation into why the pharaoh died at such a young age.

Enter Montasser Abu El-Haggag, first deputy minister for local governance and former head of the Luxor administrative office, who declared that the mummy’s condition was too fragile to allow it to travel from Luxor, where it has rested since being discovered by Howard Carter 82 years ago. Any checkups on the mummy have to be carried out where it presently rests lest the tests present a “threat to Egypt’s national heritage.”

Not content with a war of words in the media, El-Haggag promptly filed a complaint with the South Qena State Attorney’s Office, demanding the General Prosecution Authority obtain a court order to save the young pharaoh.

Hawass has yet to announce when he expects restoration work on the mummy to finish, but has said results of the DNA testing will be released “soon.”

Abu Al-Arabi Frowns

IT APPEARS THE people of Port Said never get the message that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Last month, the Port Said town council’s Culture and Information Committee ordered committee chair El-Sayed El-Tawargy to file a complaint with Minister of Information Mamdouh El-Beltagui demanding that the Ramadan serials Bakkar and Mahmoud El-Masri not be allowed to have iftar.

According to El-Tawargy, the cartoon Nubian boy and the Alexandrian charmer both portrayed characters based on Abu Al-Arabi in a way that defamed the “reputation and history of the governorate instead of portraying a political struggle in Port Said that has been recognized around the world.”

Both series finished their complete run as scheduled.

Here comes Noaman

JUST AS SHREK will always be an ogre and a leopard can’t change its spots, Noaman Gomaa can never be anything other than, well, Noaman Gomaa.

The latest installment in the Wafd leader’s nationalist sermons to the nation appeared in his party’s daily newspaper last month front page and above the fold as usual, but this time in Al-Wafd’s trademark garish green ink instead of his customary red.

Among the highlights: “To the nation’s opposition, the [ruling] NDP and all national forces [sic] in Egypt: This is a critical time for all of us! At the Abdeen conference, we would have pled for the president to be chosen through direct elections from a list of candidates. To do so would require changing only one clause in the constitution, and I would bet my life that everyone would approve of it since it’s a huge step on the path of political reform and stability.

“In point of fact, we denounce [today] the cheap way the hypocrites are already singing their slogans and pledging allegiance to the president. The president shouldn’t be chosen through a ‘festival of allegiance’ that amounts to nothing more than intellectual terrorism and [national] embarrassment. The presidency shouldn’t be decided through a premeditated nomination from the People’s Assembly and then a fake referendum.

“Winning 70 percent [of the popular vote] in an election contest with real candidates would be a thousand times stronger than winning 100 percent in a referendum without competition.”

And, for better or worse, the same issue of Al-Wafd carried the same reform program as it has suggested a dozen times in the year since Preisdent Hosni Mubarak turned a deaf ear to Gomaa’s front-page plea that the government of Atef Ebeid be dissolved and replaced with a “government of national unity” under none other than Noaman Gomaa; that the president and his immediate family be required to give up their membership in political parties once he’s elected; that a national authority be established to run the media in all its forms; that constitutional reforms be enacted by a national committee that represents all Egyptians; that the president be directly elected; that term limits be imposed, and that the powers of the presidency be curbed.

We can’t help but wonder, though: What will Al-Wafd do for lead stories if Gomaa were to win election?

CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING

ANOTE TO AYMAN NOUR, the MP, founder and (newly elected) president of El-Ghad: We’re pleased you have a party to call your own, but if you really have your heart set on having your own newspaper, learn from Noaman’s mistakes.

After a long and difficult labor, Nour’s El-Ghad is finally alive and kicking (see the watch, page 50), but even as the forty-something MP was announcing plans to open a newspaper, he was girding for yet another battle with PA Speaker Fathi Sorour.

Sorour, it seems, has declared that El-Ghad cannot form a parliamentary caucus because it has never taken part in elections this despite the fact that Nour and a handful of others elected as Independents (most of them Al-Wafd dissidents) now belong to the new party.

“Why is it so, Mr. Sorour?” Nour countered, “Because I was too busy winning court rulings against the [Shura Council’s] Political Parties Affairs Committee’s decisions to reject our party!”

Drawing on history, Nour noted that the ruling National Democratic Party was itself established in 1978 and drew members into its caucus in the PA from MPs elected in 1976. The Labor Party followed suit when it was formed a few months later.

Save your breath, Ayman: By now, you should know that all roads lead to court.

THE NAKED TRUTH

WRITERS ARE USED TO fighting to tell their stories. Some of them have even died doing so. But to get stripped naked for it? Well, that’s a new one, at least in Egypt.

But it happened, if Abdel Haleim Kandil, the controversial writer and acting editor-in-chief of the Nasserist Al-Arabi weekly, is to be believed.

Last month, Kandil announced that he had been kidnapped by “four thugs” from his apartment in Cairo’s Al-Haram district. Bundled into a car, he claims to have been taken to the Cairo-Suez Road, beaten, stripped naked and then left by the side of the highway.

Kandil stopped a passing police patrol to ask for help and for something with which he could cover himself. At press time, police were still investigating the incident.

It seems telling the naked truth can cost you your own clothes these days.

MIND YOUR MANNERS

DR. GAWDAT EL-MALT, head of the state’s Central Auditing Organization (CAO), would like to interrupt this news bulletin for the following public service announcement: Dr. El-Malt does not buy, sell or otherwise trade in steel; he is not related to the family of Mr. Ahmed Ezz by marriage or by blood; and he does not do favors for anyone, particularly anyone with ties to the iron and steel industry.

What’s eating the nation’s top fact-checker? Look no further than the usual suspects on the PA’s Industry Committee, some of whom were so displeased by the CAO’s investigation into the steel industry particularly allegations that Ezz Steel has engaged in anti-competitive tactics and influence peddling à la Microsoft that they declared the report “could have been prepared by Ahmed Ezz himself.”

Ahmed Ezz being, of course, the oft-embattled MP and chief of the Ezz Steel group of companies.

Committee members summoned El-Malt to testify before the full panel, claiming that by clearing Ezz of wrongdoing, his agency’s report failed to provide an adequate explanation for a spike in steel prices that sent shock waves through the construction industry over two years ago. Members of the committee complained that El-Malt’s staff had failed to “pinpoint the danger posed by the monopoly” and accused the Nazif Cabinet of deliberately ignoring the drafted (but long-dormant and un-debated) anti-monopoly and fair competition law “for the sake of the usual big fish.”

While he agreed to send a CAO team to explain the report to MPs, El-Malt warned that none of his staff would be made scapegoats for high steel prices, let alone be caught in political crossfire between MPs and told his staff that they should leave the floor of Parliament the first time a deputy used insulting or derogatory language toward them or the authority.

We’ll keep you posted on this one.

That’s how the flag should be

ANOTHER PUBLIC FIGure had respect issues last month, although of the national kind.

In his newspaper’s latest campaign, Al-Akhbar Editor-in-Chief Galal Duweidar declared it was time the nation got serious about the flag. Too often, he said, flags hung in public buildings and offices are torn and bleached colorless by the relentless Egyptian sun to say nothing of variations in size, quality and color.

“How dare we show disrespect to our own symbol of nationalism,” Duweidar wondered.

Samy Zaghloul, secretary-general of the Nazif Cabinet, offered a quick solution in an open letter to Duweidar reassuring the editor and his readers that Cabinet has ordered the Ministry of State for Military Production (MSMP) to come up with a set of flags in standard sizes with strict quality and design requirements.

Cabinet has since sent a memo to all government ministries and authorities asking them to immediately forward their flag needs to the Ministry of Defense, the MSMP’s parent ministry, so it can schedule the delivery of replacements.

Having solved that problem, perhaps Cabinet is ready to tackle bureaucratic reform now?  et