When Alice was in Wonderland, she pondered over how things were getting curiouser and curiouser. She could have been in Egypt recently, where food riots were getting rowdier and bread lines longer, an image reminiscent more of pre-revolutionary France than a modern-day nation.
Earlier this month, President Hosni Mubarak, with much fanfare, launched a family planning campaign to reduce his country's youth bulge. Egypt's predicament? Well, there are seemingly too many Egyptians and too few resources to meet their needs. When Mubarak came to power in 1981, Egypt's population was 40 million. This has doubled since. The country has the world's worst employment rate, a broken-down infrastructure, a woeful educational system, and an autocratic approach to the rule of law.
This remains, sadly, the case for most of the poorer countries of the Arab world, all the way from Morocco to Jordan, where up to two thirds of Arabs there are under the age of 25, and one in four are unable to find gainful employment. Moreover, these countries are home to 65 million illiterate adults, most of them women.
This explosive situation has already been broached by institutions as diverse as the World Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations which have repeatedly claimed that these countries - just to avert economic disaster, let alone push an increasingly disaffected youth toward destructive radicalisation - must create 80 million jobs in the next 15 years. As analyst Isobel Coleman put it rather colourfully: "This youth bulge is surging onto the labour market like a massive demographic tsunami."
But the problem does not derive, as leaders in Egypt and elsewhere in these countries would believe, from a simplistic correlation between population density and economic prosperity. And surely the series of Arab Human Development Reports that began to appear in 2002 attest to that - reports that received a lot of attention in the European and American media not only because of their notable frankness but also because they were sponsored by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, and written by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals who had put their societies under sympathetic but critical examination.
A country where an indifferent, paper-pushing, often semi-literate dominant elite directs its destiny, defines its identity, and consolidates its unjust modes of social existence, where a dissident is denied a hearing and a citizen the right to inquire and speak without fear of retribution, is not one that can thrust itself beyond its fixed place any time real soon.
Everywhere in these countries, including Egypt, the most populous and not long ago the most influential nation in the Arab world, a process of socialisation continues to instill in the individual, from cradle to grave, with the need to accept orthodoxy, dependency and submission, which in turn triggers in that individual a sense of fear - fear of originality, of innovation, of spontaneity, fear of life itself. Thus a man, and more tellingly in this case, a woman, actively participates in perpetuating a broken-down society by accepting its stringent rules of self-discipline and its definition of the individual as a bane of creativity, not its source.
Killing innovation
All well and good for Egyptian leaders to control population growth, as President Mubarak's campaign appears to aim at doing, but controlling population growth for the sake of controlling population growth will remain a forlorn enterprise without social, econ-omic and political reform.
"Economic reform without political change is a deadend for the Arabs", editorialised the Financial Times earlier this month. "The dominance and vested interests of the military and the intelligence services ultimately kill innovation and entrepreneurship in the same way the education system inhibits critical thinking and initiative. Importing technology is fine but ultimately these countries need the educational rigour that produced it."
Egypt has received billions of dollars in foreign investment in recent years, and billions more in aid from the US since the signing of the Camp David agreement, yet 40 per cent of Egyptians live in poverty or close to it.
Najeeb Ahmad, a father of five who tends a watermelon stand in a Cairo street, was quoted last week by Ellen Knickmeyer, a Washington Post correspondent, as saying: "It's not our fault for having the kids. It's the government's fault for not providing. This country is full of resources, but the government wastes it all".
That, in a nutshell, puts paid to the claim that the advent of more Egyptian kids into the world will, in and by itself, retard the nation's prosperity. Folks, there's surely more to it than that.
- Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
