One of our worst shortcomings is the lack of future planning. Why do we always wait for a disaster to strike before dealing with the causes, instead of thinking ahead to prevent it from happening in the first place.
We don’t build flyovers, for instance, until the roads become unbearably congested, at which point the construction process itself goes through so many phases and leads to so much over-crowdedness that the bridge hardly seems like the best solution.
The first of these phases is when the government denies there’s a problem in the first place and blames the citizens for not adhering to traffic laws and the population explosion for the chaos in the street.
However, this phase is futile and the government – represented either by the relevant minister or the Prime Minister himself – finds that denying does nothing at all towards solving it. On the contrary, it adds to the public’s discontent.
Only then does the government start thinking of building a flyover, which would take no less than two or three years to plan. When the project is ready for implementation, it would be presented to cabinet where the issue will be fiercely debated in the newspapers with supporters, who think the project will solve a chronic problem, and detractors who object that the bridges have penetrated their bedrooms and split the city in two, one on top of the other, which only adds to the ugliness of the city.
Following several months of uncalled-for – though, apparently necessary – procrastination, the government will finally approve the project and embark on a series of statements about how it is preoccupied with solving public grievances like traffic (not poverty, unemployment, the housing crunch, slums and the bread crisis). The statements would usually be accompanied with a huge media campaign in the government press enumerating the millions that will be spent on the project to ease the burden of the daily life of the citizens.
The execution phase would usually begin with closing off the street over which the flyover is to be built and the arrival of bulldozers and a plethora of other equipment whose names people do not know, but whose noises they will become increasingly familiar with throughout the years of construction.
At that point, the congestion would have reached unprecedented heights – perhaps to the point of total road blocks, and so the traffic would be diverted to nearby streets which have become home to security check points to protect embassies, foreign institutions or ministries. And if on rare occasions the street doesn’t house such buildings, destiny will dictate that some high-ranking official would choose to live on it which guarantees that the road will be blocked off completely and the traffic diverted to a third street.
At this point, a mysterious phase of the project begins. We know nothing of its details, but all we can do is monitor its symptoms at the forefront of which is that some of those directly associated with the project suddenly strike it rich – starting from the minister (the former one, of course) to the contractor and finally the supplier of the tiles used to finish the nearby pavement.
Years later, the bridge would be ready for its grand inauguration, which, more often than not, is done in the presence of the PM and a significant number of ministers, MPs, and members of the party that will take the credit for the grand achievement.
On the big opening day, the official delegation would make an appearance on the said bridge, surrounded by reporters and cameramen and the PM would cut the ribbon. As soon as he does so, the traffic that has been piling up for years and is hence ten times what it was before, would start flooding through, only to bring down everything that stands in its way, from the governor and the party delegates to the Prime Minister and his cabinet – a cue that another bridge must be built and the whole cycle is set in motion once more.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writer’s Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
