Friday, May 6, 2011

On one insignificant day in Egypt's history


On a seemingly insignificant day in Egypt’s history I stopped believing in their ability to conspire against us ..
There was one day that said it all to me. That one day in Egypt’s history that screamed at me ‘’don’t trust in anything they tell you’’ – ‘’they are so much more incompetent than you would ever believe’’.  This was the day when I stopped believing in the system’s ability to protect us, to improve us, even to plot against us. People would sometimes tell me that are some incredible knowledgeable and cunning institutions in Egypt that know exactly what is going to happen, yet somewhere in the year 2004 I lost all faith in the ability of the system.
This loss of faith was not driven by increasing poverty, or people dying in one of Egypt’s many blunders, not a few ships here and there drowning and taking with them thousands of lives and going unpunished. No, it was something so much more trivial than that.
It was the day Egypt got the first Zero in the history of the world in trying to host the World Cup 2010.  Other countries either realize they will fail and do so more gracefully by pulling out, or they make a good run for it and either win or at least obtain a few votes. Libya belonged to the former, and South Africa belonged to the latter. Imagine the Libyan leadership under Gaddafi being wiser than ours, and realizing it should pull out, while our government did nothing but tell us that we stood a good chance for winning the bid.
Just think about the amount of political capital they put behind it, the amount of money and PR, internal PR, which was made around the qualification only to end in denial and loss. Needless to say the man in charge of the campaign was made Minister and stayed Minister till recently.
This was a smaller and lighter blunder in the system’s history that proves how weak, ill informed, incapable, and unwise it really was. Unless they were plotting to show ultimate inefficiency to the whole world so that nobody would ever suspect something smart coming out of them .. then that at least would have been smart.
z

1 comment:

  1. Zizo,

    This is unfortunately very true. We were led by 30 years of mostly incompetent people. I think Mubarak and company should get the Oscars for the best bad leadership example. He is the founder of how not to rule.

    Anything we do now will be better than before, we just need to focus on Egypt's top priorities and put our personal interests on the side for a while.

    Karim Akram

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