Late poet Fouad Haddad wrote a famous poem entitled "al-Istimara" [The Form]. It was recited by musician Sayyed Mekawi in an episode of the radio and TV program "el-Mesaharaty", which the two of them presented for many years during the month of Ramadan.
The poem mocks – with some bitterness – the bureaucratic complications that the Egyptians have had to cope so far with while dealing with the State's administrative organs.
In brief, the poem tells the story of a person who goes submitting a form and is said to go from one office to another and one employee to another with no one eventually taking this form. When this person eventually finds someone who does, the form remains forgotten in a drawer.
This week's form holder is a person called Wasim Kamal Eddin Nasir. He wanted to move his 6-and-a-half-year-old daughter Nur from the British elementary school she is enrolled in and to enroll her 3-and-a-half year-old younger daughter Hena to the kindergarten of the same school.
The school, which had submitted a demand to the Education Minister to obtain a license, wrote him asking him to fill in his two daughters' papers and to provide their birth certificates by computer, according to the law on the national I. D. number, which had abolished paper birth certificates.
He went to the school and explained his problem to the director, namely that he could not submit his daughters' birth certificates as required because he was a Bahai and the Civil Status Authority was still refusing to provide Bahais with the ID card. Therefore, this man asked the director to accept two paper birth certificates, at least temporarily!
The director apologized saying this was out of his powers and asked him to go to the Educational Directorate which had jurisdiction over the school so as to discuss this issue. He also warned him that, unless he found a solution before July 31 2008, his older daughter would be expelled from the school and his youngest one would not be admitted.
This person went to the educational directorate in New Cairo, but the director told him that the issue was out of his competence and that his role, as head of an executive organ, was to inspect periodically the schools falling under the Department’s jurisdiction.
The director eventually asked him to go to the Education Ministry, as this was the only organ competent to solve this problem.
This man went to the Ministry. An employee asked him to submit a complaint to the citizen service office. He indeed filed one in which he demanded that his daughters be admitted at school through a paper birth certificate – since it was impossible for him to obtain an electronic one – so as to prevent his daughters from being deprived of the right to education because of their faith.
After a week, Mr. Wasim went back to the Ministry to have an answer. The employee sent him to one of his colleagues, who told him that the Ministry had forwarded the complaint to the Education Directorate and that he would have to go there a week later to have an answer.
When he went to the Directorate, he was told by another employee: "That's not my competence" and was informed that the complaint had been forwarded to the New Cairo Education Department.
Mr. Wasim was astounded to hear this, as it was the Directorate which had apologized in the first place for not being able to solve this problem because it was out of its competence.
Finally, Mr. Wasim, exhausted after going through so many offices, was given a copy of the answer by another employee: "Paper birth certificates are unacceptable, an electronic one must be submitted".
Does any of all these employees feel the crime they committed against two innocent children through all these complications and problems that have nothing to do with any religion, including Islam?
What this man asked for was simple and possible, namely being exempted – temporarily – from submitting an electronic birth certificate and being allowed to replace it with a paper one.
Let us wait for the day in which the Egyptian administrative bodies will implement the judicial ruling that Bahais should have a slash written on their ID card instead of their religion. Otherwise, shall we wait for the day when Obama will slam us in a report in which he accuses us of religious discrimination?
To Minister Yousry el-Gamal: stop this farce immediately!
