The previous chapters attempted to trace and analyze the root causes of the “Egyptian problem” as we see it. Now we shall explore the solutions available in the light of that analysis.

So - what is to be done? Today Egypt finds itself facing one of the most propitious moments for making a choice in its contemporary history. Indeed, with the exception of just such a moment following the success of the 1952 revolution, proffering a chance the ruling regime failed to seize, the present juncture is the best opportunity Egypt has had in recent times for making a choice. Yet, like all choices, this one is loaded with implications.

The difficulty with choice, as a philosophical concept, lies in its very nature, suggesting as it does a decision to take one of several paths. But recognizing the difficulty inherent in making the choice does not negate the existence of a great historical opportunity for Egypt to choose among the available options. If it so wishes, and provided its decision-makers are up to the task, Egypt can rid itself of economic dependence and, consequently, of the two forms of political dependence it has known under Nasser and Sadat. It can harness huge potential and creative powers capable of generating tremendous sources of revenue for its people from agriculture, industry, tourism, mining and oil resources, in addition to tripling or even quadrupling its present income from the remittances of its nationals working abroad. It can streamline the bloated and ruinous bureaucracy engendered by a totalitarian regime and by the absence of freedom and democracy. It can put an end to its tragic and draining involvement in problems outside its own territories, problems which the parties concerned are in no hurry to solve as long as they can continue to feed on the tragedy and make political capital from the wounds of their people.

There is no doubt that the Egyptian public, having learned its lesson from bitter experience, tends not to support Egypt's involvement in such problems. But it is not enough to avoid becoming embroiled in external problems. Egypt should also avoid becoming further entangled in an economic system that has proved to be a total failure and which has led the country to the brink of bankruptcy, a system that has rendered Egypt unable to feed its people without crippling loans which make a mockery of any talk of political and economic independence.

The situation calls for action on two fronts, political and economic, the latter being a function of the former and not the other way round, as Marxists and others—notably military juntas—would have us believe.

A necessary first step towrads solving the problems now besetting the Egyptian body politic is to abolish the present system of parliamentary elections and replace it with one that would serve the goal of freedom and democracy to which the majority of Egyptians aspire. Such a step would be difficult in the present circumstances without a positive initiative from the presidency, led by the president of the republic himself. Until that hope materializes, all the forces of freedom and democracy should champion one of the noblest of national causes: electing their leaders. All the millions of eligible voters should register and to go to the polls at the forthcoming elections for the People's Assembly, scheduled for 1989.

This would allow a wise and moderate opposition to increase its seats in parliament, a natural development expected and, indeed, favored by President Mubarak. That much can be understood from the many speeches in which he has reiterated his faith in the gradual and constant growth of democracy in Egypt, a growth without sudden starts and leaps which may cause imbalance and confusion in Egyptian society. While there is no disputing the validity of this view, it is important to differentiate between the time frame in which the opposition would like to see this process unfold and that contemplated by the government. The ideal probably lies somewhere in between.

Reform also entails the abolition of such mechanisms as the “socialist public prosecutor,” the “court of values” and the “administrative control agency,” which were introduced under the totalitarian regime. These mechanisms cannot co-exist with the Office of the Public Prosecutor (the only mechanism which in a democracy enjoys jusrisdiction over matters under the purview of those extrajudicial bodies invented by a totalitarian system) in a political system based on legality, on the separation of powers and the sanctity of the judiciary as a power equal to the legislative and the executive. We call upon the presidency to set up a committee of the best legal minds in Egypt, men like Dr. Soliman El Tamawy, Dr. Wahid Raafat, Dr. Hamed Sultan and others, who have never been subservient to any regime, to explain to the president that all such bodies operating independently from the Office of the Public Prosecutor make a mockery of the principle of an independent judiciary, the backbone of freedom and the rule of law. How can anyone imagine that employees of a body such as the Administrative Control Agency, none of whom belongs to the judiciary, can accomplish what the Office of the Public Prosecutor is supposedly incapable of doing, although the latter is responsible for representing society as a prosecuting power in all matters involving criminal acts against the rights of individuals or society? And how can anyone understand why the office of the Socialist Public Prosecutor—a title totally devoid of any meaning—is not merged in the Office of the Public Prosecutor? Finally, a text should be introduced to the by-laws of the People's Assembly barring access to the chairmanship of that venerable body to anyone who has not been elected by the people as a member of the Assembly. The selection of the Speaker of the People's Assembly must be made by the assembly itself and not, as was the case in 1957-84, by the executive.

Another major impediment to the instauration of democracy is the close control exercised by the present government over the so-called 'national' press and other mass media, such as radio and television. A model well worth looking into here is the British Broadcasting Corporation, more familiarly known as the BBC. The presidency should place before the president of the republic the example of the BBC, whose organizational structure and method of operation the author had occasion to study at close quarters in the course of several visits to its corporate headquarters. Since its inception, the BBC has been an autonomous body that remains quite independent from successive governments, both as regards its administrative structure and its editorial policy. The Egyptian presidency could draw several important lessons from the experience of the BBC, which is a superb example of a body that, though wholly owned by the state, is totally independent from the government and the party in power. In addition, the BBC is not dependent on the vagaries of the capitalist market for its livelihOod. Unlike broadcasting networks in countrie~ such as the US, BBC radio and television do not broadcast commercials.

As to the press, either we accept the viewpoint of certain members of the present government and the ruling party that the press is an information medium whose function is to support the regime and justify its policies, in which case we must accept the status quo, viz, a press that, though graced with the title 'national', is, in fact, a government organ controlled by the president of the republic, the chairman of the Shura Council (the upper house of parliament) and the minister of Information, who select and appoint the editors-in-chief, or we recognize that a press which serves as the mouthpiece of the government cannot serve as the watchful eye and critical mind of the nation, in which case we must accept that it has to undergo a basic transformation. Without serious efforts in this direction, the standard of the national press in Egypt will continue to decline, both as regards the editorial content of the newspapers and the calibre of their editors-in-chief, who can only be classified as civil servants or managers, never as intellectuals or political writers. This sorry state of affairs has serious implications touching on the very integrity of the press as an institution whose primary responsibility is to the public, a responsibility our national newspapers can hardly discharge while they remain as dependent on the ruling power as a hired hand is on his boss.

It would not be unduly harsh to say that most of those who write in the national press lack any intellectual or cultural depth. Sadly, the general cultural level of most journalists -with the exception of a few veterans belonging to the pre-totalitarianism generation- is most superficial. A quick comparison between the level of writing which graced the Egyptian press in the thirties and forties and that to which we are exposed in today's national press highlights the horror of the situation and the extent of the tragedy. Without going too deeply into the whys and wherefores of the present crisis of Egyptian journalism, another quick comparison may help cast some light on the issue. That comparison touches on the nature of relations between journalists of the pre-revolution era and public figures of the time and the undue deference shown to their counterparts today by journalists of the national papers, who will queue submissively for hours at the door of this or that public official, forgetting that the pens they wield ( are far mightier than any powers vested in these officials.

We should also move away from the pattern of technocratic ministers to that of political ones, bearing in mind that ministers in democratic countries are always political figures not technicians, while in totalitarian countries the opposite holds true. The explanation for this phenomenon lies in the fact that, in countries under a totalitarian system of government, a minister is merely a senior civil servant entrusted with the technical management of his ministry, while in democracies a minister is a political figure placed at the head of a ministry to make sure that the strategy of the government/party is implemented in that ministry's area of competence, a strategy which, more often than not, that very same minister helped formulate. In Eastern bloc countries, headed by the Soviet Union, ministries are teeming with technicians, particularly engineers, whereas in the democratic world ministers are prominent political figures in the ruling party. It is not unusual in those countries for the minister of health, say, to be drawn from outside the medical profession -however, he will be fully cognizant of and committed to his party's medical policy and deploy all the resources of his ministry to serve the party line in this respect. Similarly, the ministers for industry, power or agriculture will not be former civil servants in those ministries as is the case in totalitarian regimes.

For Egypt to break out of the mould of technocratic ministers in which it is presently mired is easier said than done, however. The totalitarian regime which lasted close on thirty years in Egypt naturally destroyed the conditions favourable to the emergence of political figures who can only be discovered and groomed in a political climate based on a multi-party, not a one-party, system. But, despite the bleakness of the present picture, which led the late political writer, Ihsan Abdel Kuddus, to describe the ministerial changes of July 16, 1984, as 'managerial changes', Egypt remains a huge reservoir of untapped political talents. The presidency should make every effort to seek them out, not through its security apparatus in which the Egyptian people have lost all faith, nor through the civil service hierarchy, but by casting a globa] and penetrating look at Egypt's public figures who have long been kept away from the channels of higher executive authority by the wall of totalitariansim. It is depressing to see the kind of ministers hatched by the totalitarian regime. In spite of the great strides towards democracy in recent years, the vast majority of ministers who have held office over the past thirty years do not seem to be intellectually or culturally above the level of a high-school graduate in a country with a flourishing cultural life like, say, France.

Among the most pressing tasks of the political leadership in a situation such as that prevailing in Egypt today is to stop misleading the public with honeyed words and rosy dreams having no basis in reality. Unfortunately, the two late presidents, Nasser and Sadat, consistently lulled the public with glowing accounts of a present that existed only in the realm of the imagination and a future that had more to do with wishful thinking than with hard facts. One can hardly forget President Nasser's description of an army which suffered one of the worst defeats in military history as "the strongest deterrent force in the Middle East", or his euphoric references to the missiles 'Al Qaher' and 'Al Zafer' (the Conqueror and the Victorious) and to Egyptian industry which, he claimed, could now "manufacture everything", from "a needle to a missile". Nor can anyone forget President Sadat's designation of 1980 as "the year of plenty", when "every Egyptian would have a home with a large living-room" overlooking a "beautiful view"! Equally memorable are his sanguine references to Egypt as a "State of institutions" where "the reign of democracy holds sway" and "the sovereignty of the law" is paramount. He went so far as to claim that Egypt had surpassed Britain in establishing the foundations of democracy, noting that the British monarch could order the dissolution of parliament wllile he could not do so without a public referendum! As it is not our aim here to vilify anyone or to apportion blame but, rather, to draw lessons from the errors of our recent past, we shall content ourselves with these few examples of how the political leadership misled the public.

Another tendency the political leadership should rid itself of is that of glorifying Egypt's history, presumably to instil a sense of pride and to make the dismal reality in which most Egyptians are living more palatable. Rather than feeling that our five-thousand-year history (President Sadat repeated seven thousand so often he nearly convinced everyone it was true!) places us above all other nations, we should feel guilty that we have frittered away the glorious legacy of our ancestors. A history like ours qualifies us for a flourishing present and a promising future. Instead, where our ancestors built beautiful edifices that are still standing after fifty centuries, we build flimsy edifices that crumble into dust after only a few years, not to say months. A nation which gave birth in one single generation to such men of genius as Ahmed Shawki, Hafez Ibrahim, Taha Hussein, Abbas El Aqad, Tawfik El Hakim, El Manfalouty, Mostapha Sadeq El Rafei, Abdel Rahman El Rafei, Mostapha Mesharrafa, El Sanhouri, Saad Zaghloul, Abdel Khaleq Sarwat, Mahmoud Said, Mokhtar, Sayed Darwish, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Ahmed Amin, Zaky Mubarak, El Mazny and scores of others should wonder why it is so barren today and make every effort to get out of the cycle of mediocrity in which it is caught.

It can, of course, be said that honeyed words have not been a hallmark of President Mubarak's regime, which does not go in for falsely reassuring accounts of our present reality or for extravagent promises of a rosy future. However, if it is true that for the past four years the political leadership has displayed a commendable degree of realism and restraint in addressing the public, it is also true that the government in Egypt adopts a defensive posture in the face of any criticism, as though all were well in the best of all possible worlds. And, if any fair-minded observer must admit that official statements in recent years have been free of empty promises, he cannot have failed to notice that they are often made up of a curious blend of facts and hopes. This is particularly evident in the flood of official statements about the high quality of Egyptian goods and about the level of local expertise and know-how being up to the highest international standards. While such positive talk can inspire a spirit of national pride and determination among the masses, which can spur them on to improve performance and increase production, we must not lose sight of the dangers inherent in promoting an attitude of complacency. We believe that the first step towards treatment and reform is to face up to the unvarnished truth, painful though this may be. Unless and until a process of catharsis is institutedand here President Mubarak's administration has a vital role to play- there is no real hope of reform.

We must recognize that we, as a government and a people, have reached a critical threshold of backwardness and weakness which we can only overcome by radically changing many of our systems and patterns. We need to take decisive action in respect of a losing public sector which stands at the root of all our economic problems; we need to bring radical reforms to the agricultural sector if we are to break the vicious circle that has transformed us, in just thirty years, from a nation that was self-sufficient in food production to one that has to import 60% of its food requirements; we need to change the unhealthy relationship between employers and workers and replace it with a normal and productive situation compatible with a free economy based on the interplay of market forces; we must, while not losing sight of the achievements of advanced western societies in the areas of social security, pensions, unemployment insurance, health care, etc., break the fetters of the restrictive labour legislations which are largely responsible for our present backwardness and for the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy prevailing in Egyptian government departments. Once again we repeat that unless we admit how appalling our present reality is and how imperative it is to transform it, unless we accept criticism of the fundamental principles by which we are governed and not only of the secondary symptoms, the chances of breaking out of the present bottleneck are bleak.

While all these reforms are essential, the need to enhance freedoms and consolidate democracy should head our list of priorities, coming even before the need for economic reform. For, as the prominent thinker Mr. Khaled Mohamed Khaled pointed out, democracy will lead to reform in all areas, including economic reforms, while the opposite is not true: economic reforms will not necessarily lead to democracy. Even though the author has completely given up on the civil servants who are passing themselves off as writers in the national newspapers, he has boundless faith in the ability of a number of independent writers of the pre-totalitarian generation, such as Mostapha Amin, Ahmed Baha El Din, Khaled Mohamed Khaled, Zaky Naguib Mahmoud, Abdel Rahman El Sharkawy, Ihsan Abdel Quddus and Galal Hamamsy to defend freedom and democracy and to stand up to all attempts to curb or violate any public freedoms, in particular, freedom of thought and expression.

Moving now to the economic front, we are faced with a curious situation in which two divergent economic systems are coexisting in an uneasy alliance. On the one hand, we have an entrenched economic system whose cornerstones are rooted in socialism: public sector; limited agricultural holdings; state interference in all aspects of production; labour relations governed by socialist legislations; compulsory delivery of agricultural output to the State, etc. On the other, we have economic systems of a capitalist nature trying to establish themselves in a hostile environment. Obviously this attempt to accommodate two irreconcilable, indeed, mutually exclusive, economic systems is doomed to failure and the sooner we face up to this the better. None of the makeshift repair operations launched by successive Egyptian governments, particularly over the last four years, can succeed unless we candidly acknowledge that the real reason for our economic decline lies in the socialist economic options to which Egypt has for too long subscribed. Blaming Egypt's economic woes on a shortage of financial resources is a feeble excuse that all the opposition parties should reject. The shortage of financial resources is the inevitable result of specific political and economic options. The opposition should point out to the government that the latter's main function is to generate resources, or at least to create the proper climate in which they can grow. At the end of the day, it is the government alone that can be held accountable for the lack of financial resources.

The government should also stop its vain attempts to create an artificial rate of exchange for foreign currencies, particularly the US Dollar. The real price of the dollar or of other convertible currencies is their price on what is wrongly termed the black market, which is in fact the only real market. By following the rules of the free market in this regard, Egypt can effectively multiply its revenues from two main sources, namely, tourism and the remittances of expatriate Egyptian workers. It is frustrating to see the present government shy away from taking this essential decision. Many people, myself included, believed the appointment of as able an economist as Dr. Aly Lotfy at the head of government would hasten the adoption of such a decision, especially in view of the campaign he launched early in 1985 against the irresponsible economic decisions taken by Dr. Mostapha El Said at the time, decisions from whose repercussions Egypt is still suffering and which, in our opinion, were tantamount to serious crimes against the nation.

Foremost among the problems besetting Egypt today and which successive governments have avoided coming to grips with are those of housing and education. Unless the root causes of these problems are addressed and serious efforts made to solve them, we cannot look forward to a better future.

The housing problem is highly complex, not so much because its causes are hard to understand, but because the many ineffectual attempts to solve it have created such an intricate web of relationships and conflicting interests that any attempt to bring about a radical solution today is bound to create victims. In fact, the problem is closely connected with the two aspects we have been discussing: the political aspect and the economic aspect. An analysis of the problem that does not address its root causes and historical development would fail to achieve our purpose, which is to diagnose the disease and prescribe the effective cure.

The onset of the disease can be traced to the early fifties, when the government decided to interfere in the contractual relationship between landlords and tenants of housing units, ostensibly to protect tenants from exploitation by landlords. Government interference was directed at two areas: term of lease and value of rent. Until then, lease contracts for residential housing units were based on the classical legal principle of 'sovereign will', as represented essentially in the freedom of the parties to agree on the term of the lease and the rental value payable for the leased premises. However, the July 1952 revolution, or, more particularly, its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, decided to cast the landlord in the role of exploiter and the tenant in the role of the victim of the former's greed. Having thus assigned roles, the revolution sided with the weaker party, i.e., the tenant, whom it decided to release from any commitment as to the agreed term or value of the lease. Obviously the revolution did not look at the issue from an economic point of view, in the sense that it did not take into account the long- term effects of these measures on the construction market, the housing market, urban planning, etc. Rather, it saw it in political, not to say demagogical terms, as borne out by the fact that the regime sought to make as much political capital as possible by having the President himself announce the freezing of rents and all subsequent reductions thereof. It is irrelevent here to discuss the real motives of the revolution and its leader in this matter. We are even willing to concede that they were well-intentioned and that their desire to protect ' the week' was sincere. All that is water under bridge. Today we must judge the experience in terms of results, not intentions.

What are the results we are reaping today from this misguided policy? The revolution wished to protect the tenant from the landlord -did it actually succeed in doing so? Did it achieve its purpose of making homes available at prices accessible to ordinary people of the middle and working classes and to small farmers and peasants? In fact, a direct result of its decision to release the tenant from his obligation to observe the term of the lease or the rental value agreed upon has been to discourage investment in the area of housing, as prospective investors realized that they could derive higher returns from trade or even from interest accruing on bank deposits than from building and letting housing units. All aspects of the problem stem from that fact. In the context of restrictive legislations, investors were left with one of two options: either to steer clear of the housing market -and the enormous discrepancy between supply and demand in this area attests to the predominance of this option- or to build housing units for sale or rent in exchange for large sums of money paid under the counter as key money or non-refundable 'advance rent'. Thus the three major problems in the housing sector (a severe shortage of supply as compared to the ever increasing demand for units for rent, an abundance of housing units up for sale and a dearth of those available for rent and, finally, the exorbitant sums demanded by landlords outside the contract) all result from the fact that government interference in lease contracts removed the incentive of profit which alone can induce an investor to move into a given area of investment and rendered the construction of housing units for rent a losing proposition yielding a return far below that accruing as interest on money placed in the bank, not to mention the problems of dealing with tenants, whom the new housing laws considered to be victims of greedy and exploitive landlords. To go back to our question: did the housing legislations introduced by the revolution succeed in protecting tenants? There was a time, before the revolution, when an Egyptian citizen could always find a home for a reasonable rent within his means. Today, he wastes years of his life looking for a home, having already spent years saving up for the price or the key money to be paid to the owner, the only one to profit from the new formula. Who then is the ultimate beneficiary? Can the 1952 revolution claim to have achieved its objective of providing reasonably-priced housing for the people? Or would it not be fair to say that tenants are the main, indeed, the only, casualties of a misguided housing policy?

So complex has the issue become, so far-reaching its ramifications that, although we are in absolutely no doubt that the disastrous housing situation is the direct result of a blithe disregard of free-market laws, we cannot condone a solution based on deregulating rents and allowing landlords to fix them at their sole discretion. Such a solution would deal a death-blow to the millions of Egyptians whose incomes are not market-compatible: scraping by on their government salaries or pensions, they can certainly not afford free-market prices. No self-respecting regime could ever take such a step.

The only viable solution is to deal separately with two categories of existing housing units: old buildings used for residential purposes on the one hand and old buildings put to commercial use and newly-built units, whether put to residential or commercial use on the other. In respect of the first category of old units inhabited by individuals or families, rents could be raised by no more than 5 to 10%, a rate of increase that could definitely be met by the salaried class while giving landlords, usually belonging to the same class, a slightly better income that may encourage them to undertake some minor repair and maintenance works to prevent the dilapidation of old buildings that we are witnessing.

As for leased premises that are put to commercial use, such as doctors' clinics, lawyers' offices, offices for financial or trading activities and shops, a new system should be devised to double their rent annually. It is absurd to pay a niggardly rent for premises that are put to commercial use and which bring in thousands of pounds every day. It is equally absurd to consider the landlord here to be the exploiting party and the tenant his victim. The rents payable in new buildings should be left entirely to the laws of the free market, with no interference whatsoever from the state to impose indefinite lease contracts or set up committees to determine the rent, which should be exclusively subject to the laws of supply and demand. This is the only way out of the housing tragedy that successive governments have failed to resolve effectively, because they disregarded the true causes and could not, for political reasons, face the painful fact that the government itself had sown the seeds of the housing tragedy in the fifties.

If the problem of housing casts a long shadow that promises to stretch well into the future, so too does that of education. There can be no hope of a better life for the coming generations of Egyptians unless serious attempts are made today to find a radical solution to this problem. Any such attempts must depart not from doctrinaire political givens but from an in-depth analysis of the crisis and its causes. Like the housing problem, the problem of education needs to be carefully diagnosed so that it may be effectively treated.

The picture was not always so bleak -in fact, quite the contrary. In the twenties and thirties, Egyptian education enjoyed its golden age, thanks to a generation of outstanding Egyptians who were pioneers in their respective fields, such as Dr. Mesharrafa in mathematics, Dr. Hussein Fawzy in the sciences, Dr. Aly Ibrahim, Dr. Mahmoud Mahfouz and others in medicine and scores of illustrious names in literature and law, as well as many others in all areas of scholarly achievement, all of whom benefitted from the best that western education had to offer.

We might well ask what has befallen education in Egypt since and why it has sunk to its present sorry level. The answer is that education at all levels received a crippling blow when it became subservient to the orientations of Egvpt's new rulers following the success of the 1952 revolution. The seeds of the tragedy were sown when the victorious revolution placed an officer at the head of education in the country, a military man with no experience in this area and whose own educational and cultural background was very modest. The reference for the reader interested in that particular detail is the study published by Dr. Anwar Abdel Malek, Research Master at the CNRS, Paris, under the title "L'Egypte, Societe Militaire", in which he analyzes the educational and cultural background of the revolutionary council in general, and of the man fully entrusted with the supervision of education in Egypt in particular.

It is from the moment education was placed in the hands of someone who knew nothing of education or culture, from the moment politics became the prime mover of all educational policies and programmes, that education in Egypt began its downward slide . From the peak level it had attained thanks to outstanding Egyptian pioneers in different branches of knowledge, education dropped into an abyss of backwardness thanks to those who should never have been entrusted with its fate in the first place. Nor did the crippling blow strike secular education alone. It also affected the ancient centre of religious learning, Al-A2har university, subjecting it to political currents and placing it in the hands of men whose mastery of Arabic and of Islamic culture was far inferior to the level of the original Azhar primary school certificate.

The great man of letters, Dr. Taha Hussein, left us with a profound and accurate study, "The Future of Culture in Egypt" in two volumes of 550 pages, which he wrote in 1938. Today, the extent of the tragedy which has befallen Egyptian education is such that to try and diagnose it, let alone to propose a remedy, would require many more volumes. All we hope to achieve with the present study is to show that a problem of this magnitude cannot be solved by the haphazard and stop-gap solutions the present government is experimenting with and which have led nowhere.

The problem of education in Egypt today is closely linked to the basic production process: as long as no radical solution has been found for the agricultural problem, as long as the state continues to play its present patriarchal role in the areas of economics and industry and to pursue its current employment policy, Egyptians will continue to struggle through years of learning, from school to university, only to end up as government employees and petty clerks. The government seems incapable of instituting radical reforms, whether because it lacks vision or because it adopts a politically biased, often demagogical, view of all matters. No doubt it is this which prevents the government from putting an end to free education for all, from limiting the number of students entering universities, from expanding in the area of technical education, from allowing private universities to be set up and from continuing to impose its own views on institutions of learning.

Having said that, we should not overlook the connection between the crisis of education in Egypt and the absence of democracy from our life for a long period of time. A climate of freedom and democracy encourages the growth of culture and intellectual creativity and allows the development of a better and healthier educational system. Conversely, in a climate of totalitarianism culture and intellectual creativity wither and fade, and a backward educational system, subservient to the whims of the regime, imposes itself. In a situation of this kind, we come across such inexplicable phenomena as the political decision to stop the teaching of French in Egyptian schools, in retaliation for France's participation in the tripartite aggression of 1956. This example graphically illustrates how education can suffer when it is used as a political tool by people who epitomize ignorance and backwardness.

Of paramount importance at this juncture is that the people of Egypt should realize that policies can only be judged by their results, not by the intentions behind them. A ruler is like the captain of a ship who is expected to carry his passengers safely from shore to shore. He is responsible for calculating the speed and direction of winds and waves; he cannot claim that unexpected winds or waves caught him by surprise because a ship's captain, by definition, is supposed to know such things. We must not accept excuses about unexpected circumstances and events from the people in charge, whatever their position. It is precisely to optimize results in unfavourable circumstances that they were placed in positions of responsibility in the first place. If we apply such a criterion in judging policies, we can also judge the success or failure of public figures. In countries where democracy and public freedoms prevail, public figures are judged on the basis of the results they achieve, not of their intentions. Established democracies do not differentiate between good and bad excuses when judging the failure of public figures to do their duty. A case in point is the 1968 crisis in Paris, responsibility for which was laid at the door of no less revered a personage than President Charles De Gaulle. This example should serve as a lesson to us all.