April 6 Youth’s Conference Lashes Out at Mubarak’s NDP

April 6 Youth’s Conference Lashes Out at Mubarak’s NDP

 Speakers at the 3rd Conference was held by the April 6 Youth Movement under the slogan "In the Occupied Egyptian Territories", parallel to the Conference of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), have launched a scathing attack on Mubarak’s NDP government. The speakers said that President Mubarak has reneged on his promises.
 
Ahmed Al-Sayed al-Naggar from the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, maintained that President Mubarak has pledged in his platform to build 1,000 factories in Egypt and to provide 250,000 jobs annually, and to reclaim one million acres of desert land to allow for 70,000 jobs in the agriculture sector. What has already been reclaimed due to official data until 2008 was 12,000 acres, which means that this program was just blatant election propaganda.
 
According to a study conducted by the World Health Organization in Cairo, El-Hami Al-Mirghani stated that stunting rates among pre-school children is 16%; severe anaemia is up to 4% and 14% of children under five years of age, the infant mortality rate has increased and weak vision is present in 20% of primary school students.
 
Director of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, Khaled Ali, criticized Hosni Mubarak‘s Labour Day speech in which he said: "If workers’ productivity increases then wages will automatically go up," adding that it is clearly designed to cause confusion and deception among the public.
 
Dr. Mohamed Hassan Khalil, Cardiologist and General Coordinator of the Right to Health, has revealed that Health Minister, Hatem El-Gabaly, is a shareholder in 5 major investment projects in the health sector costing more than one million pounds and he is also a partner with Saudis in a medical insurance company. "They are cutting back from diseases covered in the state health insurance system for free in order to increase their profits," said Khalil.
 
Mona Mina, an activist from the Doctors without Borders movement, said that Egypt’s public spending on health is about 3.5%, unlike the situation in France where health spending is 22 % of France’s yearly budget, adding that Egypt as a poor country must increase spending on the essentials, notably health and education. "The living conditions of physicians are negatively affected by inadequate spending on the health sector and the pay of doctors who work in remote rural areas of Egypt is sometimes delayed by 5 months," he added.