The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) has issued a decision granting its worker’s children some exemptions when applying to a SCA technical school. SCA graduates are automatically appointed to the SCA. “As if it was their own private farm,” says Mohammed Saleh, a young man living in Ismailia.

Saleh and some of his colleagues are angry because they have found that public bodies have reserved most of their vacancies for their employee’s children.

Corrupt anti-corruption bodies

The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) has issued a decision granting its worker’s children some exemptions when applying to a SCA technical school. SCA graduates are automatically appointed to the SCA. “As if it was their own private farm,” says Mohammed Saleh, a young man living in Ismailia.

Saleh and some of his colleagues are angry because they have found that public bodies have reserved most of their vacancies for their employee’s children.

Corrupt anti-corruption bodies

“Even the Administrative Prosecution Office (APO) that is supposed to monitor and combat administrative corruption is hiring its worker’s children,” said lawyer Ibrahim Elias, who was thrilled after hearing the appellate ruling of the Administrative Court in its session held in late June, which fined APO L.E. 800 (US $90) for violating the Consitution with the appointment of some employee children.

The lawyer in the case argued that Article 9 of the Egyptian Constitution stipulates that the state shall ensure equal opportunities among all citizens without discrimination, while Article 14 thereof states that citizens shall be entitled to occupy public jobs on the basis of efficiency without favoritism or nepotism.

Worker’s children have rights

“Some bodies have their own bylaws regarding the conditional hiring of staff’s children,” says counselor Sameh Kamal, former APO head under whom the hiring contest was carried out. “This is neither corruption nor a crime.

We cannot separate hiring staff’s children from the economic situation of the country. With scarce job opportunities, every parent is keen on ensuring his or her children’s future by trying to enroll them in any job where the parent has been working with for tens of years. The issue was non-existent when I graduated from law school in the 1960s because the country had plenty of projects and job opportunities.”

Kamal defends the contest that took place under him, confirming that it was the most honest in APO’s history and it appointed skilled people, including people with disabilities and worker’s children who met the contest’s conditions, which were public and transparent.

“The thing that people do not know is that a law graduate from Zagazig University with an excellent grade is not necessarily better than a law graduate from Cairo University or Ain Shams with a good grade because Cairo’s universities are far better than the others,” says Kamal, “This could cause some people to feel anxiety or even injustice. Life is unjust and all the countries around the world adopt the same approach of favoring worker’s children under special circumstances. People should not request the impossible, fully knowing that the country’s circumstances do not allow for it.”

Serious consequences

Former head of the State Council (SC) Mohammad Hamad Gamal disagrees with Kamal. “The law in the UK states that people cannot work with even their third degree relatives in public jobs, especially judicial ones,” he says. “These are the basic principle of justice in a community. When I was SC head, I was under tremendous pressure from SC counselors and leaders to allow for the recruitment of a percentage of worker’s children, which I rejected outright because it is one of the worst forms of corruption and it leads to serious consequences in the community. Later, when I organized a hiring contest, I chose top university graduates and these now perform all of SC’s functions and they are righteous people who are afraid of no one.”

Gamal underlines that allocating a certain percentage of jobs to worker’s children goes against the Constitution because it places incompetent people in sensitive leadership positions, which affects justice, the judiciary and the entire community.

“The issue is gradually increasing in Egypt,” says Dr. Ibrahim Bayoumi, an economist in the National Center for Social and Criminological Research. “While natural evolution and modernization should end such a dangerous issue, the opposite is unfortunately happening in Egypt, causing a division in the society and feuding psychological and negative feelings among its members due to a lack of equal opportunities.”

Bayoumi maintains that this affects not only the social but also the economic conditions of the country. The child of a successful judge, officer or employee might not be successful. This means that recruiting incompetent people is likely to make civil service deteriorate, causing an economic decline.

Special regulations and circumstances

According to an SCA source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, SCA head Muhab Mamish would sometimes appoint workers’ children for humanitarian reasons like when a worker who is the only breadwinner of his family dies.

The source says SCA’s decision regarding the technical school stipulated that applicants should have high grades. Nonetheless, some workers convinced him to lower the grade level, although hiring is made at the discretion of SCA. The source says there is no quota for worker’s children, quoting a sentence former SCA head Admiral Ahmad Fadel said to workers when they demanded a quota for their children: “This is not your farm to hire your children.”

The source stresses that all the recruitment contests are announced on SCA’s website. Some discrimination however might occur through favoring residents of the Suez Canal area, to the resentment of others from other governorates. This, says the source, is for the benefit of the residents of the area and an endeavor to compensate them for the previous wars, displacement and security pressures they suffered due to the existence of the canal on their land.

A way out

Elias says the issue needs no new solutions and that it can be solved by only enforcing the law, citing the merits of a verdict issued by the Beheira Administrative Judicial Court, headed by SC deputy head Dr. Mohammad Abdulwahab Khafaji.  The verdict, based on the constitutional right to equality, revoked the challenged decision of the administrative authority that refused to accept the enrollment of Ahmad, the son of farmer Mohammad Hussein, in the technical high school affiliated with the Beheira Wastewater and Drinking Water Authority (BWDWA), despite having higher grades than Ali Shaldam, the son of a BWDWA officer, who was enrolled.

Kamal says it is difficult to strictly enforce the law and to achieve absolute justice as long as the economic remains grim. “Once the situation improves, the issue will change significantly,” he believes.