I’ve been watching the latest TV news reports from Egypt. It seems to me that an exceedingly terrifying, slow-motion implosion is taking place. And it started long before Muhammed Morsi came to power through an apparently democratic election following the January 25 revolution of 2011.
I’m not a political animal, but it strikes me that there is something very seriously wrong going on in this great country that I had for long believed had a relatively tolerant society despite various political upheavals along the decades.
It was, of course, a brilliant holiday destination for anyone even vaguely interested in the history of the pharaohs; but not anymore. And it has for long been a modest but very important oil and gas producer.
Indeed, Egypt’s petroleum industry has been enjoying something of a renaissance of late, largely through the determination of foreign companies willing to explore new areas, including off the Nile Delta, and to apply new technologies and methods to finding and exploiting rich prizes.
Big Oil is a tolerant beast; it is used to working in all sorts of difficult places where political unrest is prevalent, where pipelines are bombed and where personnel are occasionally captured.
However the scale of the slaughter in Egypt is now so great that little wonder some companies are pulling out their most valuable asset … their people.
Given time they will doubtless return when stability of a sort returns. The question of course is: “When?”
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