The president is in the dark!

Amid Egypt's mid-1990s push for privatization and public sector dismantling, a critical deadline approached for a law that would liberalize the relationship between landowners and tenant farmers. Nationalist and leftist opposition groups were confident that the people, especially farmers, would stop the law from taking effect.

Their belief was rooted in the simple assumption that the agrarian reform laws, which empowered landless peasants and poor rural workers by redistributing farmland, were among the most significant achievements of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime for the non-urban half of Egypt.

These reforms were considered as transformative as the nationalizations, the industrial revival, the construction of public housing, and the creation of the public sector—developments that altered the lives of workers and the lower-middle class. Accordingly, there was no way Egyptian farmers would allow Mubarak’s regime to destroy the most vital accomplishment that had changed their families’ lives.

Small opposition meetings and activities began. Committees formed in various areas in preparation for what many believed would be a massive rural uprising—one that, at the very least, would derail the law and disrupt the course of privatization.

Just as the dwindling opposition prepared for this moment, so too did the regime. In a period when state security operations were still relatively precise, before the era of complete arbitrariness, the police preemptively arrested several opposition figures deemed capable of mobilization, holding them until the law passed and a new status quo could be enforced. One of those arrested was Hamdeen Sabahy.

A conference was called to reject the law, express solidarity with the detainees, and defend Nasser’s legacy. It took place at the Nasserist Party headquarters on Talaat Harb street, even though the detained Sabahy did not have a good relationship with the party at the time.

Sabahy maintained some independence from the party through the Nasserist Thought Club that he led. That student and political organization emerged in Egyptian universities during the 1970s to preserve and develop Nasserist ideology among students and young intellectuals.

I recall two of the speakers at the meeting: a firebrand communist activist and an opposition member of parliament. The communist was due to speak first, stirring up the small audience, followed by the MP delivering a well-documented, calm address to an already agitated room.

The communist began his remarks by focusing on Sabahy, his former comrade in the student movement at Cairo University in the 1970s. Calm at first, he then declared, “I want to say this right here: Hamdeen Sabahy’s shoe is cleaner than Mubarak.” He then listed an endless series of government figures, contrasting their cleanliness with that of the opposition’s shoes.

The audience was flustered. Only a few knew how to react. Most were young Nasserist and communist university students—reckless by virtue of their age and largely unconcerned by the threat of detention, which would likely last only a few weeks if it came. For them, the only viable responses were clapping or chanting—either for the speaker, or for the imprisoned Sabahy, or for Nasser, or for the left’s return via a sweeping farmers’ uprising.

“Dear Egypt, what did you win?.. When Nasser passed and died?.. From Menoufiya, with traitors in… Sadat and Hosni, side by side!” they chanted.

The opposition parliamentarian and others fidgeted in their seats, in the knowledge that Mubarak’s name specifically—unlike other politicians—was off-limits for direct attack or insult. The open linking of his name to treason—and the cleanliness of shoes—instantly made the hall and its chairs deeply uncomfortable.

The communist ended his speech and sat down. The MP took the podium, steadying himself and masking his discomfort. He knew the line that would rescue him and anchor his speech in “political realism.” He delivered it straight away: “The president is in the dark!”

The minister doesn’t tell the president

Fast-forward 30 years. On July 1 of this year, just days after yet another deadly accident on the regional ring road—tragic but now routine, and, as always, claiming the lives of the poor—Parliament witnessed a flurry of reactions. Outside its halls, pressure mounted to dismiss the minister whose name the president had made iconic by repetition: “Kamel… Kamel… Kamel.”

The poor do not and will not waste Parliament’s valuable time. They only get brief moments of attention, as a formality. After all, they are merely side effects of a grand modernization project underway since 2013: highways, overpasses, canal expansions, the concession of strategic islands, sales, and leases of assets and land, a monorail, new cities, a new capital, a tribal union, and more.

It’s as though we were not just building a new regime, but inventing an entirely new country and a new people—untouched by the Egypt spoken of for millennia. This is a shiny, sterile Egypt that hides its poor behind walls, so no one sees them, even as they die on the roads.

Inside Parliament, in a rare move, the speaker and some pro-government MPs publicly rebuked the government for submitting a deeply flawed draft of the old rent law—a legislative time bomb. Indeed, its gradual detonation will begin just one month after publication in the “Official Gazette,” culminating in a massive explosion seven years later, when millions of tenants will be literally evicted onto the streets. They will either have to find new homes or sleep under the very bridges built by Minister Kamel Al-Wazir.

The ruling party’s MPs reprimanded the government, demanding updated, credible data on the number of people affected before any discussion of the law, particularly its explosive second article. A prominent MP and media figure even tweeted praise for the decision to suspend debate.

Naive observers, like me, thought this meant the president had realized, at the last moment, the severity of the issue—that his administration, already besieged by wars and militias in the south and west, genocide and looming Zionist displacement schemes in the east, an erratic US administration, cooling Gulf ties, and mounting European loans, couldn’t afford another crisis.

Surely, I thought, the president knows—through the security services, intelligence agencies, and media monitoring—that a large segment of his people struggle to put bread on the table, literally. How could he risk this law unless he planned to step down before the seven years elapsed?

That was July 1. For a few hours, people relaxed. Those harmed by the law, as well as the last vestiges of the opposition, felt a fleeting sense of relief. We momentarily forgot our aging parents, facing eviction in their 80s after decades of living in the same homes. But on July 2, without warning, Parliament voted to pass the law—adopting its most terrifying provisions: astronomical rent hikes, arbitrary equalization between unrelated areas, and a complete severing of the tenant-landlord relationship after the seven-year transition, as dictated by the infamous Article 2.

What happened? We don’t know. Where were the numbers and data? We don’t know. Suddenly, the law was passed, and once again, all eyes turned towards the president.

Does he know? Does the president realize that one of his laws demolishes the legal foundation of millions of rental contracts? That it guts the principle of binding agreements? That its victims are not slum dwellers or the poor, or some buildings cleared to widen one of Minister Kamel’s roads—but the entire country: its homes, stores, businesses, clinics, workshops, and bakeries? Or is the plan for the president to swoop in during the final act, to amend the law and defuse some of its bombs—thus restoring the “savior” image he so desperately needs?

Mubarak did know

“The president is in the dark!” I was amazed by this phrase in the 1990s, though it was both silly and untrue. I associated it with a man trying to escape a rebellious room, claiming ignorance on the part of the president about the most pivotal law his own government and party were advancing—one that served a handful of landowners and remnants of the old feudal elite trying to reclaim what they saw as rightfully theirs.

To me, the scene was a sharply ironic contrast: one dissident comparing Sabahy’s shoe to Mubarak’s entire being, while another claimed the president knew nothing, ignoring the smirks and whispered insults around him. His only concern was getting out of that room with as little damage as possible.

But the president did know. And everyone knew he knew. The people, the loud opposition, the frightened opposition—they all knew how the scene would end: the radical dissident would be jailed for a few weeks; the opposition MP would return to his district and his seat in Parliament. The cheering youths would fade into obscurity, lost in a slow erosion, with no political forces strong enough to stop Mubarak, his policies, his party, or his generals.

Still, it was a pivotal moment—one that simmered quietly for years, taking 15 to reach a boil. It was no longer about a single law targeting farmers; it became about the regime’s entire approach. And that’s how we reached January 25, 2011. On that day, maybe—just maybe—Mubarak realized that everyone had always known that he knew.