Ahmed Tharwat
By Ahmed Tharwat
On a local road in Egypt, a minibus carrying laborers collided with a big lorry truck killing 19 people, most of them teenage girls as young as 14, according to local officials. The accident happened in the early hours on a regional road in the city of Ashmoun in the Nile Delta province of Menoufia, north of the capital Cairo.
The young girls were on their daily trip to pick grapes on a farm, an hour and a half drive from their village of Kafr al-Sanabsa. Egyptians and local media dubbed the crash victims “martyrs of the daily living.” Trying to make a living in Egypt now is a struggle, a sort of modern jihad.
Officials often point to drugs and alcohol use among drivers as a major factor and blame them for accidents. “We’re the ones who get the backlash every time something happens,” said Islam Awad, 39, the lorry driver who handed himself in to police, fearing abuses, claiming he has been driving for over 20 years. “But accidents will continue until the roads are fixed, no matter how many drug tests they run,” he added. Awad denied both speeding and the use of drugs charges. “I wasn’t speeding, and I wasn’t reckless,” he told investigators, “I was only driving 50 kph, but the steering slipped out of my control.”
A huge funeral took place in the village where the 19 victims once lived. Thousands of people descended from all over Egypt to mourn the road accident victims. Families refused to allow the governor of Menoufia to attend the joint funeral for the 18 girls held in the city of Menouf. Videos of the families turning their backs to the governor and shouting at him to leave were widely circulated.
This accident has captured the hearts and minds of millions of Egyptians, not just from Presdent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s opposition but from his loyalists, supporters, state mainstream media and social media.
The Guardian reported that almost two million minors are working in Egypt, without oversight to protect them. According to state statistics, in 2024, there were 5,861 road accident fatalities. On this road alone there have been 304 recorded accidents since mid-2022, resulting in 239 deaths. A few months ago, a train crash caused 23 people to be burned to death. Buses falling into the rivers have been brushed away by officials with empty promises and excuses. This time, because of TikTok and social media culture, people know the stories of those young girls who were killed in the lorry accident, their names, where they were from, and the dreams that were crushed in the crash. Millions of Egyptians can see themselves in the faces of those victims; they see them in their sisters and daughters. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. My heart aches for the victims – I have daughters their age,” the driver lamented to investigators.
Political and economic corruption, neglect, and incompetence are behind all these tragedies, as globalization and consumerism destroy communities’ traditional lives. As globalization spreads and Western material lifestyles are imposed on poor countries, people’s dreams have shifted from a more traditional, simple life to a global, market-oriented lifestyle. People’s hopes and inspirations are commercialized, which takes them away from their families and communities, and leaves them alone in a heartless marketplace.
“Under open economic conditions, the conflict between the realization of external economic equilibrium and that of internal economic equilibrium is a great constraint on the macroeconomic policies of developing countries, weakening their capacity of macroeconomic control and regulation,” Our World in Data reported. Villages have moved from the self-sufficiency of growing their own food to becoming dependent on the outside city market, which is devoid of a local social network. Villagers now import their food, live in rented housing, and the old self-sufficient bartering system has vanished, replaced by cash-based trade; so, young villagers need to work to earn extra cash to help their families. This accident is not an aberration, reported Egyptian Independent, but rather part of a pattern of neglect of the working conditions of women and girl daily workers, especially in the sectors of agriculture, where women and girls are transported in ramshackle and overcrowded vehicles, without insurance, control, or responsibility from either employers or government.
One of the victims, her name was Esraa, was working to earn more money for a new iPhone to use for her engineering studies, another, Marwa, was trying to get enough money to buy sneakers for her brother, and another wanted to buy medication for her ill father who had no national healthcare program to protect him from the greedy healthcare industry.
Growing up in a small village in Egypt, my elementary school took a month off in May-June so young students could go to the farm to help in cotton pest management, mainly removing leafworm from damaged leaves. It was festive, and it was a great experience to grow up and feel connected to the community. Now, what began as a community pest control scheme in the 1960s has evolved into a massive exploitative child labor system. According to human reports and the US state department, children in Egypt worked up to 11 hrs/day for 7 days/week, earned around $1-3 each day, suffered routine beatings, lacked proper water breaks and restroom access, and were exposed to intense heat and hazardous pesticides.
If you are looking for the cause of this tragic accident, it’s not a drunken lorry driver, its blind Globalization!
Ahmed Tharwat is the Host/Producer of Arab American TV show Bel Ahdan. He blogs at Notes from America.
WWW.ahmediatv.com
