At least once a day, the hum of every fan, air conditioner and refrigerator throughout Egypt is quiet. The lights go out and some nonsense is muttered or hurled into the rapidly heating air.
Elevators stop, jobs are canceled and meetings are delayed for as long as the power is out — hopefully an hour or two, but recently even longer.
It is now a year since energy and foreign crises led Egypt’s government to institute planned blackouts known as “load shedding.”
But the measures were not equally felt across the country.
In the southern city of Aswan, where temperatures neared 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade earlier this month, “the lights are off for up to four hours a day and with them the water,” resident Tarek of western Aswan, he told AFP.
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“Especially in the villages, there’s no program of any kind. Food spoils in the fridge, people get heatstroke and nobody seems to care,” he said, asking not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
In June, Aswan MP Riham Abdelnaby said dozens have died from heat-related illness.
He called for the southern government to be exempted from the blackouts, which he said “threaten the lives of citizens”.
High tempers and temperatures
Amid three heatwaves in June, the blackouts became more frequent — and with them frustration across the country, including from talk show hosts who have been staunch supporters of the government.
“Electricity is not a luxury, it is the most basic right,” prominent journalist Lamis al-Hadidy wrote on the X social networking site on Monday.
“Power going out takes out water and phones and internet and destroys electrical appliances, who’s going to compensate the world for all this?”
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A decade ago, Egypt faced similar blackouts, which fueled popular discontent and protests against the short-lived presidency of the late Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi.
Today’s blackouts come as Egyptians face the worst economic crisis of their lifetime, with inflation and currency devaluations destroying savings and leaving families struggling to make ends meet.
Since 2022, the Egyptian pound has lost two-thirds of its value, and last year inflation reached a record 40%.
Amr Adib, host of the popular talk show Al-Hekaya, addressed the officials directly on Sunday, saying that “they failed to set a proper schedule and did not keep the hours you promised. And all this, while we know that the price increases of power is coming”.
Electricity prices last rose in January and the government has signaled it wants to raise them again this year.
This week, as temperatures in Cairo hovered around 40C, parts of the capital suffered additional blackouts at midnight for up to two hours — on top of the existing lunch break.
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On Tuesday, as public anger peaked, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly held a news conference in which he “expressed the government’s apology to the citizens” and said Egyptians should expect the three-hour holiday to continue this week.
The increased power outages, he said, were due to a “gas field in a neighboring country”, which supplies natural gas to Egypt, “out of service for more than 12 hours”. He did not name the country.
The prime minister also said Egypt would spend $1.2 billion in July, 2.6 percent of the crisis-hit country’s precious foreign exchange reserves, to boost its fuel supply.
“We will be able to completely end the blackouts for the summer by the third week of July,” Madbouly said, signaling that blackouts would resume in the fall.
The government remains committed to its plan to end load shedding entirely by the end of the year, he said.
Death toll
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In his apology, Madbouly said his government was “fully aware” of “how difficult the holidays are for citizens”, including “the elderly, those with health problems or other humanitarian concerns”.
But the measures have already claimed lives across the country.
While there has been no official death toll from heat-related illnesses in Aswan, MP Abdelnaby told local media that there were “about 40 heat-related deaths” in four days in June.
On the other side of the country, in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, a musician named Mohamed Ali Nasr died earlier in June after falling down an elevator shaft in which he was trapped during an outage, his brother told local Al-Nahar channel. .
Across Egypt, people plan their lives around official timetables to avoid getting stuck in lifts. However, similar deaths have claimed at least four lives since last year, according to local media reports.
Source: AFP