Mubarak’s Promise. Social justice and the National Housing Programme: affordable homes or political gain?

Abstract

Even in the absence of a constitutional article declaring the right to adequate housing – first introduced in the 2012 constitution – the Government of Egypt has taken it upon itself to build subsidised housing, which has made up nearly a third of all housing production in its heyday (World Bank 2007). But despite the billions in public funds spent on such programmes, hundreds of thousands of people risked their lives to overthrow the Mubarak regime in early 2011, mostly on grounds of unmet social goals. If these large investments in public housing programmes did not achieve their advertised social goals, were there other unadvertised goals that they did achieve? This paper assess the most recently “completed” programme, the National Housing Programme (NHP), or “Iskan Mubarak” ( 2005 to 2012), in light of the track record of clientelism that post Infitah regimes have been known for, using pragmatic parameters such as the International Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ seven mandates on adequate housing (ICESR Article 11 and general comment no. 4/1991), to find out whether the NHP was indeed meant for the poor, or if it was another large High Modernist project ‘designed to deceive’, where its importance for the regime lay more in starting it rather than in completing it (Deputy 2011).