Hamed, twenty-four, a worker at an advertising agency in
Cairo, made her views clear as she demonstrated in Tahrir
Square: “We are suffering from corruption, oppression and
bad education. We are living amid a corrupt system which
has to change.” Another in the square, Mosaab El Shami,
twenty, a pharmacy student, concurred: “I hope that by the
end of this year we will have an elected government and
that universal freedoms are applied and that we put an end
to the corruption that has taken over this country.” The
protestors in Tahrir Square spoke with one voice about the
corruption of the government, its inability to deliver public
services, and the lack of equality of opportunity in their
country. They particularly complained about repression and
the absence of political rights. As Mohamed ElBaradei,
former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
wrote on Twitter on January 13, 2011, “Tunisia: repression
+ absence of social justice + denial of channels for
peaceful change = a ticking bomb.” Egyptians and
Tunisians both saw their economic problems as being
fundamentally caused by their lack of political rights. When
the protestors started to formulate their demands more
systematically, the first twelve immediate demands posted
by Wael Khalil, the software engineer and blogger who
emerged as one of the leaders of the Egyptian protest
movement, were all focused on political change. Issues
such as raising the minimum wage appeared only among
the transitional demands that were to be implemented later.
To Egyptians, the things that have held them back
include an ineffective and corrupt state and a society where
they cannot use their talent, ambition, ingenuity, and what
education they can get. But they also recognize that the
roots of these problems are political. All the economic
impediments they face stem from the way political power in
Egypt is exercised and monopolized by a narrow elite.
This, they understand, is the first thing that has to change.
Yet, in believing this, the protestors of Tahrir Square have
sharply diverged from the conventional wisdom on this
topic. When they reason about why a country such as Egypt
is poor, most academics and commentators emphasize
completely different factors. Some stress that Egypt’s
poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact
that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate