By: Ahmed M. EL NAHAS – Castelfiorentino January the 3rd 2012
Is a new President and Government the emergency? Could it be the electoral laws? Maybe even it could be the Nile water accords with sharing countries? What about reviewing the Gas agreement terms with Israel and Jordan?????
There is a lot of topics and interrogation marks that could be listed as “Urgent Priorities” which any governing body should confront with determination, will and courage. However I’d chose none of them!! I say that the real structural emergency - in which Egypt has been tightly entrapped for almost six decades, and if not radically resolved none of the pending urgent issues could be properly dealt with: from public debt to employment, from taxes to growth, from giant projects to security and welfare – has only one name: LEGALITY.
Legality.. The “Big Dismissed” from every political address and collective conscience.. The “Giant Absent” from any government action, media information and intellectual public debate.
For decades we’ve been fed with words and slogans like “Tax Evasion and Corruption are intolerable practices”.. But they remained only hollow words and slogans orated by profiteering professional politicians while campaigning their electoral rallies.. They were never translated into practical actions and mechanisms that the “Executive Authority” could use to reform anything whatsoever.
Take another great word used in every occasion and everywhere, from the football stadium to the parliament: “Growth”. Practically it involves public works and projects, incentives, liberalisations and privatisations.. But we know that one kilometer of railway or highway costs at least three to five times its real cost, obviously due the missing legality.
Throughout the years every public property was sold off far less than its real value, thus conjugating impoverishment of the state, new inefficiencies, indecent enrichment of friends of the friends…etc. And also that is due to the imposed destitution of legality.
It would certainly become rhetoric, and even risk to appear insulting, the mere pronouncing of a word like “Equity”, if not in the context of a real and proper “Revolution of Legality”; for they are two sides of the same coin same as “Justice” and “Liberty”. The revolution of legality is the only reform at zero cost, even quite the opposite: it procures secure progressive cyclopean return.
Each year of the past sixty, between tax evasion, organised crime and corruption; a substantial treasure equivalent to ten folds our country’s national financial budget plan (the everlasting “Tighten the Belt” type of plan), is being subtracted and removed.. And that is also a direct consequence to that “Giant Absent”, because the politics in command have constantly done everything to favour “Villainy” instead of “Legality”.
The main, and only, path to a better future with a committed government to rule a free democratic sovereign state in a Parliamentary Republic, is nothing else than “LEGALITY”.
Pass On The Word.
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