Farouk Hosny on Budgetting

Source: "Farouk Hosni: Politics of Temperment," Interview by Nevine El-Aref, Al Ahram, September 2005.

In 2005, there was a fire in an Egyptian theater that killed 48 people. In a storm of criticism of the Ministry of Culture, deemed responsible for the condition of the theater, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny submitted a resignation to President Mubarak that was not accepted. Shortly before the fire, a budget request from the Ministry of Culture to maintain and restore the Egyptian "culture palaces" had been rejected, but funding was restored after the fire.

The article states:

The regime must prioritise, Hosni points out. And even though the president fully appreciates the importance of the Cultural Palaces and the neglect to which they have been subject since the 1960s, it is not always possible to increase budget on demand -- "bread takes priority." A programme of renovations has in fact been underway for a whole decade, "but there are 450 of them and many are in pretty bad condition". To the charge that the ministry's funds are squandered on whimsical activities to which the vast majority of Egyptians cannot relate -- the Experimental Theatre Festival, for example -- Hosni angrily pointed out that to favour one kind of culture over another is to patronise and ultimately paralyse the initiative and creative impulse of the people: "it is not as if I transferred the Cultural Palaces budget to the Experimental Theatre Festival. They want to discontinue the festival? Sure, send me a petition signed by 400 -- no, 200 -- intellectuals approving this and I will do it."

Comment: Farouk Hosny is apparently the front-runner to be selected this month as the next Director General of UNESCO. He seems in this interview to be defending a decision to allocate funds to the Experimental Theater Festival instead of to the maintenance of a theater which burned down killing 48 people. Admittedly it is not really clear what he meant. Now he wants to be put in charge of the budget of UNESCO in order to lead in the drafting of budgets that make decisions between support for freedom of the press versus support for the promotion of creativity in the arts, not to mention oceanographic reseach, primary versus higher education, and indicators of development of the knowledge society. JAD