Abdullah Hamed - Cairo

The Egyptian government is racing against the time to finish within days of the arrangements for transporting the employees of the main government bureaus from Cairo (the current capital) to the administrative capital, located 60 km east of Cairo.

Last Sunday, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli presided over a meeting to follow up on the final arrangements for housing the government district in the new administrative capital, and the Ministry of Planning for Administrative Reform and Planning has finished housing 31 ministries and their affiliated destinations within the administrative capital, as well as 12 independent bodies, according to an official statement.

The administrative capital project itself remains controversial, as there is an official vision that sees it as a cultural transition point for Egypt that does not overburden the state treasury but is funded entirely from the proceeds of the sale of land in the region.

On the other hand, opponents assert that many of the chronic files in education, health and basic facilities are the first of these expenditures that can lift millions of Egyptians from misery, disease and death.

They view the walled capital with very thick concrete fences and walls as a fortified castle for the escape and protection of the ruling class.

Fear of staff

Employees fear that the move will be the beginning of the plan to dispense with millions of government employees, especially as the government uses an international company in the field of management consulting to expedite the completion of the implementation of the structure file for the administrative apparatus, before moving to the new administrative capital.

And employees are not the only ones expressing concern about the start of the implementation of the plan to move to the new capital. Citizens in the capital and governorates are concerned about the difficulty in obtaining government services in the distant capital, after most of the bureaus were concentrated in central Cairo easily accessible.

According to the transfer plan, the relocated employees will have to travel over long distances, similar to daily travel via buses designated to connect the main fields and declared assembly points and the new headquarters in the administrative capital.

And the officials chosen to transport expressed their concern over the long distance, which would double the exhaustion of moving to and from the new headquarters of the government, without this being reflected positively on alleviating Cairo's crowds.

Nashwa, who is an employee in one of the ministries, said that she lives in the Haram area, west of Cairo, and it takes about an hour and a half to reach the ministry’s headquarters in central Cairo, given the extreme crowding when the employees go to their work and return from it.

It is added to the hour and a half of the same hour to go to work in the administrative capital from the assembly point at the ministry, i.e. three hours from home to the new ministry’s office, and the same when returning, meaning that “a quarter of the day is lost on the road alone, so what effort can be made to work at home or after all of this?" Nashwa says.

The government is considering spending eight pounds a day (half a dollar) as a transportation allowance for employees, or providing apartments for employees who want to move to live in the new capital, provided that the high price is paid in twenty years.

As for the residential alternative, it is the city of Badr, facing the administrative capital, which Khadija - an employee nominated for transportation - considered "more and more appropriate", as it is the closest geographic to the administrative capital.

The government does not compel employees to move, according to employees, but it does provide them with temptations for rapid promotion and financial incentives.

The privileged

The decision to move quickly to the administrative capital comes to cast a dark shadow on the workers' community in Egypt on the one hand, and on the public receiving the services on the other hand, according to the opinion of the former parliamentarian Ahmed Gad.

In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Gad expected that selection of "the favored and knowledgeable people will take place, to accompany the ruling group in their fortified castle and not others", while leaving other employees to ask them to "demobilize, separate and refer for retirement", as statements by officials revealed their intentions in this regard.

The total number of employees who will be transferred to the administrative capital from the beginning of 2020 to the middle of it is about 52,585 employees.

Gad added that this decision creates a fait accompli with a intended message, in light of reports and speculation that it is not possible to proceed with the completion of this project as a result of "the deterioration of the state of the Egyptian economy."

As for the audience of the service recipient, it will pay a high price as a result of this decision, according to Jad, represented in increasing the economic cost of receiving any service through the entities that will be transferred (as a transportation allowance) due to the dimension of the new capital, as well as increasing the cost of the service allowance that is expected to be imposed The government has to finance citizens for their operations, and perhaps also the security difficulties that will surround their entry.

Staff qualification

He reviewed an official report that was submitted to Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly a few days ago, the procedures for evaluating employees, pointing out that the total number of employees who have been evaluated so far amounted to about 36 thousand employees, and the evaluation and delivery of evaluation data to the ministers in 30 ministries and 40 agencies affiliated with the ministries were completed. .

The report revealed that the procedures for contracting with international companies to archive all ministries documents to start electronic work in new government buildings began.

The official report dealt with the plan of housing the ministries, the rates of implementation of each ministry, the position of the implementation of projects by the executing companies, and the remaining works for implementation in preparation for delivery and transition, without clarifying how long it ended and how much is left in numbers.

A contractor working in the facilities of the new city of Al Jazeera Net said that the work is in full swing to finish the capital in record time, but the city still has a lot to become suitable for housing and work in full, as described.

However, a spokesman for the new administrative capital, Khaled Al-Husseini, stressed that the focus of work in the capital during the last period related to the government district, noting that the implementation rate of the district reached 73%.

The professor of constitutional law, Dr. Salah Fawzi, and a member of the Ten Committee for the Drafting of the Constitution, published a legal research entitled "The Capital and the Constitution", in which he explained that the parliament’s transition to convene in the new administrative capital requires amending the constitution, which stipulates that Cairo is the seat of the House of Representatives, and it may not be held in others except by building On the decision of the President of the Republic or the approval of a third of the members of the Council.

There are those who oppose the idea of ​​establishing any alternative capital for Cairo based on scientific visions, referring to the statements of the late Egyptian and geographic thinker Jamal Hamdan in his book "Cairo" in which he emphasized that the genius of Cairo's average site for all its regions is indispensable to any site, and any alternative capital for it will fail By virtue of the geography and the nature of the population distribution in Egypt.

They infer the failure of the idea of ​​Sadat City, west of Cairo, which the late President Anwar Sadat wanted for an alternative capital with the same vision of the administrative capital.