A whiff of corruption swirls around a grandiose plan…
Cairo, Wednesday,
The City of a Thousand Minarets, Egypt's sprawling capital, is set on the Nile River. At its heart is Tahrir Square and the vast Egyptian Museum, a trove of antiquities including royal mummies and gilded King Tutankhamun artifacts. Nearby Giza is the site of the iconic pyramids and Great Sphinx, dating back to the 26th century BC. What not to like!
Yet, it seems Egypt has set its heart on a new capital.
What is being called a huge "New Administrative Capital" is currently springing up 45km (28 miles) to the east of Cairo, on a swath of desert equal in size to Singapore.
Today, according to Mustafa Menshawy, a Research Fellow at the University of Lancaster in the UK, if you take a walk or drive across Cairo, you may be tempted to think that the Egyptian government embarked on this multi-billion-dollar project to meet an urgent need. Indeed, he says, the current capital is hardly functioning. "Ministries and embassies surrounding Cairo's Tahrir Square are clogging the city's arteries. With many streets blocked to ensure the security of these buildings and their occupants, it is at times impossible to go from A to B in the city. Moreover, the already overcrowded capital's 22-million population is expected to double by 2050."
So the military government are describing the project as primarily an effort to tackle pollution and make Egypt "greener". The new capital will have a central "green river" a combination of open water and planted vegetation twice the size of New York's Central Park.
However, Menshawy and others think that if you look below the surface, the real reason for this $40 billion pharaonic project is less virtuous.
The military dictatorship that runs Egypt today is the major shareholder in a company - the Administrative Capital for Urban Development - that is hoping to reap enormous financial benefits from it too. The profits come from the many luxury housing estates - and also from selling off (or re-renting) the buildings in Cairo that will be freed up after agencies, ministries and embassies move to their new locations. Some of these buildings are in the very heart of old Cairo, overlooking Tahrir Square and have significant value. Additionally, the military has the capacity to provide much of the steel and cement needed to complete the construction of the new city. Finally, it has access to cheap manpower in the form of low-paid conscripts. Best of all - for the junta - there is next to no independent control of the vast amounts of money swirling around for the project.
One of the slogans of the Arab Spring protests that toppled the previous regime of Hosni Mubarak (himself an officer in the Egyptian air force) was "social justice". But this project offers no solutions to Cairo's problems while diverting resources into the hands of the elite, both civilian and military. It even seems to be risking a repeat of the mistakes that led to Mubarak's downfall.
Capital Investments?
Many other countries have also changed their capitals…
• Brazil: The capital swapped from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960 partly to reassert its independence from Portugal.
• US: The capital was moved from Philadelphia to Washington D.C in 1790.
• Kazakhstan: Post-independence Nur-Sultan took over from Almaty, the town of apples.
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