I’ve written a critique of online activism in Egypt, which you can read in Arabic here.
Tag: nazif
Minimum wage reduced to LE684 in new state budget
The Mahalla workers, on 17 February 2008, were the first to put forward the demand, for raising the national minimum wage to LE1,200 per month, after it stagnated at LE35 per month since 1984. Nazif’s neoliberal cabinet only raised it to LE400 last year.
Following the uprising, Essam Sharaf’s cabinet had announced it’d raise the minimum wage to only LE700, despite condemnations from labor groups and NGOs. But shockingly now the military junta has officially endorsed the new government budget whereby the national minimum wage had been further reduced to LE684, with more austerity measures taken:
Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawy, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has endorsed the 2011/2012 state budget after it was amended and approved by the cabinet.
The total budget expenditure was amended from LE515 billion to LE491 billion, of which 54 percent would be directed to social projects.
The minimum wage was reduced from LE700 to LE684 per month as of July, with an annual total of LE9 billion to be paid in wages for two million government employees.
Expenditure on education decreased from LE55 billion to LE 52 billion, health from LE24 billion to LE23.8 billion, and housing from LE21 billion to LE16.7 billion.
Mubarak, Nazif, Adly fined for communications cut, but what about the rest?
The Administrative court fined Mubarak, former PM Nazif and former interior minister Habib el-Adly LE540 millions for cutting the internet during the revolution. However, the mobile phone operators, which I regard as complicit, are off the hook and will even receive compensations:
Telecoms operator Vodafone said in January it and other mobile operators had no option but to comply with an order from the authorities to suspend services in selected areas of the country during the peak of the anti-government demonstrations.
In February, Vodafone also accused the authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to subscribers.
Communications and Information Technology Minister Maged Othman said his ministry planned to pay compensation estimated at around 100 million pounds to mobile telecoms operators for losses caused by the service disruption, the state news agency MENA said. It said the figure was reached by independent bodies.
The operators have had a moral obligation to say no. And no matter what “national security” obligations they signed onto when receiving their license from the state, they could have sent out warnings to the millions of customers prior to cutting the service, which could have saved lives.
And if Mubarak, Nazif and Adly were found found guilty, what about Mubarak’s minister of telecommunication, Tarek Kamel? Not only is he off the hook, but he’s been rewarded a seat in the NTRA board of directors, where General Rushdi el-Qamari still keeps his position.
The money should not go to the companies. The money should be go to the families of the martyrs and injured whose lives could have been saved if the telecommunication network was up and running during the uprising.