Vivian Yee
NY Times, Jan. 23, 2023
“This I.M.F. deal is preventing them from failing, but they’re imposing a lot of conditions on that in a way they hadn’t in the past.”
Around the time Egypt’s currency hit an all-time low, an article this month on the country’s sharp economic downturn quietly slipped off the front page of one of its flagship newspapers. As the editors knew, Egyptian censors can be touchy about any public hint of crisis, especially when the government shares in the blame. The article was buried inside.
Yet Egyptians hardly needed to read it to learn that the rug was being yanked from under their feet. Grocery prices are stratospheric. Money is worth half of what it was a year ago. For many, eggs are now a luxury, and meat is off the table. For others, burdened with school fees and medical expenses, the middle-class lives they had worked doggedly to sustain are slipping beyond their grasp.
“Right now, we see nothing on the horizon. Nothing,” said Mai Abdulghani, 30, a Cairo-based communications officer at a development nonprofit. Her husband, a design engineer, is working four jobs to cover the necessities, and the car and children they had planned on are out of the question this year. “All I do is think about how we’ll survive on our budget just to feed ourselves,” she said. “Every time we visit the supermarket, my blood boils.”
The crisis stormed into view last February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, shaking countries around the Middle East. In Egypt, the war’s fallout laid bare profound flaws in the way President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his lieutenants had run the economy, exposing their authoritarian leadership to dangerous levels of heat from the public and overseas partners alike. Under pressure, the government has been forced to commit to far-reaching changes that, if carried out, could eventually generate growth, but are already tormenting Egyptians.
When the war erupted, the Russian and Ukrainian tourists who once made up a third of Egypt’s visitors largely disappeared, along with most of the imported wheat that feeds its population. Foreign investors fled, taking about $20 billion with them. In a country that depends heavily on foreign goods, the combination of factors — scarce dollars, high import prices and payments coming due on enormous government debts — spelled disaster. For the fourth time in six years, Mr. el-Sisi’s government turned to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, receiving $3 billion over four years, far less relief than before and with far sterner conditions. … [To read the full article, click here]
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