Face the consequences of your actions.

[gurey25]

They killed all the pigs, put the rubish collecters out of business and they thought that they could give the job to big multinationals and get some bribe money as well..

they just fokked up..

rubbish is piling up and the poor christian rubbish collecters are saying we told you so.

Garbage piles up in Cairo after swine-flu pig slaughter
When the government killed all the pigs in Cairo this spring in a misguided attempt to combat swine flu, the rotting garbage that those pigs used to eat is piling up on the streets of middle-class as well as poor neighborhoods.

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

The New York Times

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SHAWN BALDWIN / NYT

Goats feed on trash in Cairo last week. Pigs were the champion garbage consumers in Cairo. Goats just don't seem up to the task.
CAIRO, Egypt — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to Cairo and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.

"The problem is clear in the streets," said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. "There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue."

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public-health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. The pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods such as Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities such Imbaba.

Ramadan Hediya, 35, who makes deliveries for a supermarket, lives in Madinat el Salam, a low-income community near Cairo. "The whole area is trash," he said. All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground."

What started as an impulsive response to the swine-flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world's most populous nation.

It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials.

"The main problem in Egypt is follow-up," said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious-disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture. "A decision is taken, there is follow-up for a period of time, but after that, they get busy with something else and forget about it. This is the case with everything."

Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt. The government system and the do-it-yourself system. Instead of following the channels of bureaucracy, most people rely on an informal system of personal contacts and bribes to get a building permit, pass an inspection, get a driver's license — or make a living.

"The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety security or meet his needs," said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community-development organization in Cairo.

Cairo's garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.



For more than 50 years, those collectors were the zabaleen, Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs, which they slaughtered and ate.

Killing all the pigs, all at once, "was the stupidest thing they ever did," Kamel said. "This is just one more example of poorly informed decision makers."

When the swine-flu fear emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed to prevent the spread of the disease.

When health officials worldwide said the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about the flu, but was about cleaning up the zabaleen's crowded, filthy, neighborhood.

That was in May.

Today, the streets of the zabaleen community are as packed with stinking trash and as clouded with flies as ever before. But the zabaleen have done what they said they would do; they stopped collecting most of the organic waste. Instead, they dump it wherever they can or, at best, pile it beside trash bins scattered around the city by the international companies that have struggled in vain to keep up with the trash.

"They killed the pigs, let them clean the city," said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the zabaleen. "Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration."

The recent trash problem was compounded when employees of one of the multinational companies — men and women in green uniforms with crude brooms dispatched around the city — stopped working in a dispute with the city. The government says the dispute has been resolved, but nothing has been done to repair the damage to the informal system that once had the zabaleen take Cairo's trash home.

The garbage is only the latest example of Egypt's struggle to meet the needs of its citizens, needs as basic as providing water, housing, health care and education.

The government last week announced that schools would not be opened until the first week of October to give the government time to prepare for a potential swine-flu outbreak, a decision that could have been made anytime in the past three months, while schools were closed for summer break, critics said.

Officials in the Ministry of Health and other government ministries said they had not made this decision and had counseled against pre-emptive school closings.

It appears to have been ordered by the presidency and carried out by the governors, who also ordered that all private schools, already in class, be shut down.

"We did not propose or call for postponing schools, so the reason is not with us," said an official in the Ministry of Health who wouldn't give his name.

The heads of three large governorates, or states, in Egypt said Wednesday that their strategy for keeping schoolchildren safe was to take classes, which on average have more than 60 students, and split them in half and have children attend school three days a week, another decision that was criticized. There have been more than 800 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Egypt, and two flu-related deaths.

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting

[AbdiWahab252]

Again, poor thinking and whipping a minority group to appease the majority.