Mohamed Seif Eldin-Cairo

The Ministry of Youth and Sports in Egypt said it will launch a national sports initiative under the slogan "bicycle for every citizen" to be the beginning in the governorates of Cairo and Giza, according to the official page of the Council of Ministers.

The initiative, which will be launched in September, aims to change the culture of daily mobility of citizens, improve their physical and health fitness, and encourage them to use active mobility, rather than relying on fuel-consuming means.

The initiative comes amid repeated criticism by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of overweight Egyptians, most recently during the presentation of the results of the medical survey of the initiative "100 million health" last December.

Occasionally, the president appears to be riding a bicycle on the street, starting when he ran for president on March 30, 2014.He then led it more than once with military college students during training and with youth in Sharm el-Sheikh, South Sinai.

Not only in Egypt, El Sisi, while in Berlin in June 2015, left his residence at the Adlon Hotel on a bicycle with his private escort and toured the German capital.

The prices of bicycles start from 1,000 pounds for simple types and range up to 3,000 for the average. Accordingly, the initiative said it will provide bicycles to the public at an "affordable below market price" in cooperation with bicycle companies, as well as a installment system through banks. .

In a similar vein, tweeters said on the websites that the government may assign the initiative to the armed forces to make profits from the supply of bicycles without competition, similar to other projects and economic sectors controlled by the army.

By God, I know that this is the last Tntitah haste, and here they meet the bikes working by the army and who does not buy them here keeps not patriotic and not athletic.

- Mohamed Hakim (@acc_m_hakim) August 13, 2019

After the tactics in Egypt in a government Fancouch these days under the name of a wheel for every citizen. Our Lord is one of the victims of the wheel in the kofta system

- moustafa ashoor (@moashoor) August 13, 2019

The initiative also comes a month after fuel prices rose 16 percent to 30 percent for the fifth consecutive time in the past four years, as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which granted it a $ 12 billion loan in November 2016.

In July, the Council of Ministers announced the application of automatic pricing mechanism on petroleum materials, to review the price every three months.

Automatic pricing is to link the price of fuel to the price of international oil and the dollar price, allowing to liberalize its price and not provide any support in the future, so that the rate of change to the sale price to the consumer does not exceed 10% of the current selling price.