On the Competence of the Egyptian Military: What Road Building Teaches Us About Governance

There’s a reason why engineering companies build roads, why politicians govern, and why militaries run wars. It’s because these are complex, specialized, tasks, not to be undertaken lightly, requiring specialized training and skills in order to succeed.

Egypt’s military may (or may not) be good at its core task, that of protecting the nation. This, however, is not the topic at hand, though much that has taken place in the last few weeks (as well as the last few decades) may lead to radically different conclusions. The question I would like to pose here is what makes Egypt’s military think that it has the slightest idea how to govern or to organize elections? Or for that matter to build roads? In Egypt, the military has an abominable case of mission creep. Not only does it play a serious role in domestic industry, building cars and bottling water among other things, it now also serves as the highest executive power in the land (showing no indication of wanting to give up this privileged position), and for the last few years has been one of the nation’s most prolific road builders.

The road building example is useful because it gives a useful glimpse into how the military undertakes activities outside of its core area of expertise. Between five and ten years ago, the military built a new highway connecting Cairo with the Red Sea coastal area of Ain Sokhna. This access road is important, particularly to Cairo elites, as Ain Sokhna is the closest beach access to Cairo, thus attracting significant weekend traffic, and is also on the way to Hurghada, Marsa Alam, and many of the other spots along Egypt’s spectacular Red Sea coast popular with Egyptians and tourists alike.

The road, initially, was a great success. It was built quickly and with little fuss, up to high standards. The toll you paid to drive along it was five Egyptian pounds, less than a U.S. dollar, by most accounts a reasonable fee to pay. The speed limit was 120km/h, more than most other roads around the country, and limits were dutifully enforced. The road allowed Cairenes to access the beach in just over an hour of largely stress-free driving. Locals and tourists alike were happy. This led many to support the decision to award the road-building contract to the army, and to reconfirm their belief in the army as a competent, trustworthy institution. This belief has evaporated with astonishing speed over the past 10 months, in particular over the past few weeks during Cairo’s latest revolutionary uprising.

Soon, however, things starting getting sloppy. The road was continually under construction. Sections that were perfectly adequate, better than most other roads around the country, were torn up and started again for little apparent reason. The road works were sloppily implemented. Sharp edges separated fixed from unfixed lanes, jagged enough to tear the axles off of some of Cairo’s aging fleet. Piles of sand were left unmarked, causing horrendous crashes after dark, when the piles were invisible along the unlit road. For a period of five years, I can remember only a handful of times actually driving through the elaborately built toll stations at either end of the road. Rather, we would drive around the far outside, where a man at a wooden desk sitting next to the toll booth (planners hadn’t thought through the need for the toll taker inside the booth to actually reach a car window) would take your money. These toll stations were rebuilt, and rebuilt again.

Later, things went from sloppy to absurd. Statues to military commanders, pointing vainly into the distance, popped up at regular intervals. Bizarre murals to imagined military successes were built into the freeway siding, leading some to wonder exactly how much of a mural you were meant to take in whizzing past at 120km/h. In recent months, a sculpture of a complex wildlife scene, apparently inspired by a safari scene from the savannah of Kenya, has popped up in the middle of the road, surrounded by a fountain. Do they hope for you to stop to admire this admittedly attractive sculpture garden? No parking is provided, so you’d have to walk across dangerously passing traffic to do so. Do they hope for you to admire the sculpture as you drive past, thus taking your eye off of the road, while cars passing the same spot at the same time and speed are presumably doing exactly the same?

Worse, at the end of the road coming back into Cairo, a multi-acre sculpture park that a kind person would describe as ridiculous was installed and subsequently expanded, a panalopy to Egypt’s modern-day heroes. Sure, there are some legitimate figures, like Oum Kolthoum and Adel Halim Hafez. But there was also, until recently, the enormous visage of former first lady Suzanne Mubarak smiling down patronizingly, and an even more enormous portrait of a youthful looking Hosni, surrounded by space ships whizzing past, happy peasants working in the fields, and other myths of competence from his stultifying three-decade reign. Lest you were tempted to speed right past this aesthetic, cultural, and emotional affront, you are (and still are to this day) forced to stare at it by a bizarre conglomeration of about 10 massive speed bumps forcing you to crawl along as this interminable artistic disaster spills along to the right. The first of these speed bumps, until recently, appeared unannounced, unexpected, leading many a car to spectacular, axle-shearing, implosions.

The whole thing smells of massive corruption. For tens of kilometers, as the road snakes out of Cairo into the barren desert, the ample median strip is filled with grass (now drying and brown), palm trees (still alive, but for how long?), and flowers (irrigated with exactly what water in this country that is currently claiming to its upstream neighbors to be desperately water short?). I have no proof of this, but I would suspect that the contract for provisioning these verdant gardens has gone to a military owned nursery, and, a result, money is no object, in fact the more ridiculous the better. Likewise, parts of the road are literally dotted with street lamps, packed much closer together than you would ever expect to see on a road in the West. While these could certainly be useful, particularly at night when visibility is limited, their impact is significantly constrained by the fact that they are never turned on, in fact they don’t appear to have bulbs installed. Again, I have no proof, but I imagine that someone did quite well out of the procurement. The road seems to have inspired a need to continuously burn through money, perhaps more quickly over the past few months. When the military feels the need to spend money massively and continuously, and when its ex-generals and the massive industrial conglomerates they control stand to benefit, I get suspicious.

The entire road system is massively inappropriate for the task. When building roads, consumers demand a quality transport corridor, full stop. They have little interest in staring at long irrelevant generals, or gazing at frolicking Kenyan wildlife. They wish to be transported, safely and efficiently, from point A to point B, end of story. The military road builders invested little thought in integrating the road into the Cairo road network into which it feeds. On returning from the Red Sea on this military highway, when you arrive on the outskirts of Cairo you are forced to improvise a U-turn around a sewage pipeline, snake your way along a decrepit, rubble strewn road, select without the assistance of road signs the correct path among many equally dubious options, and hope for the best among dangerous potholes that could swallow a late-model Fiat.

The tragedy of the Ain Sokhna road, much like tragic and lethal farce the military is currently playing as the midwife of Egyptian democracy, is that it could have done an excellent job, thus justifying the faith that many had in the military as a competent, trustworthy institution. Instead, vainglory and horrendous mission creep have sullied the army’s reputation as road-builders and government administrators alike. If you want a glimpse of what Egypt, under military administration, may look like, look no further than the Ain Sokhna road. There’s a reason why specialized tasks are taken on by specialized people. The military in Egypt, like their counterparts around the world, should return to their barracks post-haste, get out of business of governance, road-building and whatever other interests they have taken on, and instead concentrate on tasks for which they have some level of competence and training.

Before concluding, it’s worth remembering the wise words of former U.S. President Eisenhower, himself a former military man:

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

John Harris is a writer living in Cairo, Egypt. This post was originally published on his blog on 27 November 2011.