‘I'm not quitting, I'll stay until I die': Transport minister defends road quality amid uproar after 19 women killed in Monufiya collision
The microbus transporting them to their work on a nearby farm collided with a trailer truck on the regional road on Friday, killing 19 women and girls, aged 14 to 22, and injuring three others. The victims were buried in a group funeral the same day in their home village of Kafr al-Sanabsah.
'Your wish is for me to leave the ministry,' Wazir said, as he fielded widespread criticism of the conditions on the road amid development works he has overseen, 'but I swear I'm staying here until I die.'
The crash was the latest in a series of similar incidents in which workers have been killed on their way to jobs where they have limited state protection or support. As a result, a wave of anger has sprung up over recent days in the media, civil society and Parliament, directed at the government's half-hearted initial response, the danger of absent or haphazard road maintenance and the absence of labor regulations to protect workers, especially minors.
Wazir, the main target of criticism and calls for resignation, lashed out at his critics on Sunday in a visit to the road with TEN News anchor Nashaat al-Deehy, rejecting comments against himself, the performance of his ministry or the quality of the roads established during his tenure.
'Ask my classmates and my university professors about me. Some people are saying I'm an unqualified minister. On what basis do they say that? The Military Technical College taught me to be a fighter. I get upset and absorb any criticism with the spirit of a fighter. This is Kamel al-Wazir, the simple Egyptian peasant, and I work anywhere, whether inside or outside the ministry,' he added.
Yet other ministers, including Prime Minister Mostafa Madbuly, have displayed rare acknowledgment of responsibility. Madbuly stated on Sunday that he and the whole Cabinet 'are sorry for the incident which has caused pain to all Egyptians, as the blow is a blow to us all,' and that words of condolence and sympathy 'do not adequately express this great loss.'
He also noted that, as per the president's orders, families of the victims would be exempted from school fees, receive an exceptional pension and have government buildings and streets in the village named after them.
Madbuly's condolences coincided with Parliamentary Affairs Minister Mahmoud Fawzy's, with the minister going so far as to state that the government is 'not saying we are exempt from responsibility.'
But in the same breath, Fawzy, who was speaking at Sunday's general session in the House of Representatives, defended the government's road development efforts, saying they had contributed to a reduction in deaths and injuries by 18 percent and incidents by 30 percent, arguing that road traffic is a 'collective' responsibility while accusing drivers of not maintaining awareness and upholding traffic regulations.
The ministers' Sunday responses followed weak initial engagement with the news of the crash and the victims' families. Wazir was reportedly travelling at the time of the collision and did not attend the scene on Friday, speaking only the following day and relaying his comments through his favored news anchor, Ahmed Moussa.
Madbuly, meanwhile, attended the opening of a private sector factory on Saturday without making any statement on the incident.
'The government did not stand with the Egyptians during this tragedy or utter a word of consolation. Not a single government official attended the funeral,' said MP Adel Moneim Imam during Sunday's House session.
Calling the Regional Ring Road in Monufiya 'a route to the afterlife' that has cost the state around LE20.5 billion, Imam added that the highway has been 'in the worst condition, with mountains of speed bumps in most areas and tariff points generating thousands, if not millions [in profit], per day.'
MP Hany Khadr echoed the concerns, noting that maintenance works on the road —which were personally supervised by Wazir — began without any precautionary measures to ensure the safety of citizens, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries.
Both MPs added their voices to demands for a fact-finding committee to be formed to investigate the collapse of roads and review new road projects in general, especially the regional road.
As criticism escalated in the wake of the Friday crash, the government significantly increased the compensation offered to the families of the victims.
Adding to an initial set of grants to be paid out to the families of each of those injured or killed by the Social Solidarity Ministry, the Financial Regulatory Authority and the Labor Ministry, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered on Saturday that an additional grant be paid out, worth an extra LE100,000 for the family of each deceased person and LE25,000 for each of the injured.
For its part, the recently-established National Front Party announced the disbursement of LE100,000 to each family of the deceased and LE50,000 to each of the injured. The total value of compensation from state and political bodies could reach LE500,000.
Al-Azhar and the Religious Endowments Ministry also mourned the victims and offered condolences to their families in public statements.
The presidential spokesperson's Saturday statement also noted Sisi's orders to closely monitor road maintenance and repairs and ensure their swift completion, especially on the Regional Ring Road in Monufiya.
A technical committee formed by the Cabinet, including a representative from the National Company for Roads and Bridges and the Engineering Authority, has confirmed, however, that there was no technical problem with the road, classifying the crash as an 'isolated mistake' resulting from a failure to adhere to speed limits, Monufiya Governorate spokesperson Moataz Hegazy said on Saturday.
Beyond that, Wazir is set to hold a press conference in the coming week to highlight road hazards and incidents, with stricter enforcement of traffic rules promised over the coming period. He challenged any media figures criticizing him or pushing to bring in a consultant to review the cost of road construction and maintenance.
No broader investigation into the incident is planned beyond the trial of the truck driver.
The driver was arrested and detained on Friday, with the Public Prosecution saying he had crossed the barrier separating two roads to cause the crash and that a blood test confirmed that he was under the influence of drugs at the time.
Wazir doubled down on the driver's role as the sole cause of the collision. 'He was driving without a license and under the influence of drugs, and in the end, we're the ones responsible? We have a responsibility and we don't shirk it, but where is the crime we committed?' The minister said on Sunday while on a visit to the road in which he offered his first condolences to the victims.
He stressed that his ministry, as well as the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, which he headed during its implementation of the road development works, followed all the necessary regulations.
But workers, including minors, dying in terrible collisions while crammed inside unsuitable transportation, traveling on unmaintained roads to low-paying farming or factory work, is a relatively common occurrence in Egypt. Last year witnessed several major incidents, including 10 who were killed in a ferry accident in Giza in May and 10 factory workers killed on a Daqahlia-Port Said road in November.
Critics outside the media sphere have pointed to major gaps in labor protections as a factor compounding the vulnerability of victims to incidents like Friday's microbus crash.
The National Council for Human Rights issued a statement on Saturday describing the cause of the crash as negligence in providing safe transportation for female workers and an absence of policies guaranteeing the rights to decent work in a safe environment — especially for girls and women in marginalized areas.
'The incident should not be reduced to a traffic accident,' said the New Woman Foundation, a non governmental organization working on public policy, echoing the rights council's line.
The foundation's statement on Saturday placed responsibility for the incident both on the state and private sector companies benefitting from the labor of female workers.
The crash is a clear manifestation of 'recurring structural violence' that sees girls forced by poverty and limited state investment in education to enter the labor market early, the foundation said.
This labor market, in turn, exploits the erosion of social support for poor families and the absence of effective child protection policies, the statement said, pointing to weak state oversight and the Labor Ministry 's 'inaction' in enforcing laws prohibiting child labor.
It also accused private sector companies of exploiting this situation to profit from the labor of girls, without providing social security or safe transportation, let alone decent working conditions.
Labor Minister Mohamed Gebran has said that ministry representatives are currently collecting data at the farm and that 'necessary action' will be taken if errors are found at its facilities.
For his part, the farm owner told the media it was closed on the day of the incident and that the girls do not work for him, placing full responsibility on the personnel contractor that hired them.
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The likely appointment of former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy as next chief of the Arab League promises a new lease of life for the pan-Arab organisation. It is only a matter of time before Cairo makes the official announcement of the nomination of its former top diplomat, Nabil Fahmy, as the next and ninth Arab League secretary general for a term of five years possibly renewable for a successive term. On Saturday evening, the Saudi magazine Al-Majalla quoted a diplomatic source as saying that Fahmy, foreign minister of Egypt from 2013 to 2015, will be the next chief of the close to 80-year-old Arab organisation. The news came after much speculation about the fate of the position that is set to be vacant shortly as the current League chief, Ahmed Abul-Gheit, is wrapping up his mission after two terms that started in June 2016. Like Fahmy, Abul-Gheit and almost every predecessor since the start of the organisation under King Farouk of Egypt in 1945 was a top Egyptian diplomat. The only exception to this de facto rule was Chedli Klibi, who headed the organisation upon the transfer of its headquarters from its home in Cairo to a temporary base in Tunis between 1979 and 1990 during the Arab boycott of Egypt over its signing of the first ever Arab-Israeli Peace Treaty. According to informed diplomatic sources in Cairo, the nomination of Fahmy was a guarantee for Egypt to maintain the de facto practice that has kept the seat of secretary general for the country that hosts the League's headquarters. 'Fahmy was the only candidate in Egypt that could be sold to all the Arab capitals at a time of increasing debate over the concept of rotating the position of the secretary general,' a source said. The call to rotate the League's secretary general among other Arab countries started in 2000, when several member states proposed the need for different operations of the organisation following a decade of turmoil that had challenged the basic concepts of pan-Arabism due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent US-led war to liberate Kuwait launched in January 1991. There was also a growing realisation of the changing mandate of the organisation in view of the changing regional dynamics following the Madrid Peace Conference held in October 1991 to pave the way for a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli struggle, with the Palestinian cause at its very heart at the time. 'Despite the clout that [Egypt's former president Hosni] Mubarak maintained at the time, there was a push, jointly designed by some in North Africa and some in the Gulf, for the first non-Egyptian secretary general,' said a former Egyptian diplomat privy to the consultation. A former Yemeni prime minister was initially proposed as a candidate to take over from Esmat Abdel-Meguid who had served two terms starting in May 1991. 'At the time, several Arab countries declined Egypt's proposal for a two or one-year renewal for Abdel-Meguid pending further consultation on his succession,' the same diplomat said. The diplomat recalled that to avert an inter-Arab dispute, on the one hand, and an abrupt end to the de facto policy of keeping the organisation's top job for the country hosting its headquarters, on the other, Egypt decided to nominate the prominent and widely popular top Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa. Once the nomination of Moussa came out in mid-February 2000, the Yemeni prime minister notified Cairo and other capitals that he was not going to run. This week, sources said that the nomination of Fahmy had come with a similar scenario. With Egypt not wanting to lose the de facto right to the seat, it acted to accommodate two things: the first was the rotation of the top League job, and the second was coming up with a candidate who would be hard to decline or contest. The same sources said that Fahmy was not necessarily the first choice. However, he emerged as the best and most consensual candidate. 'Some capitals indicated that it was only if Fahmy was nominated that they would condone the continued Egyptian de facto right to the seat of secretary general, at least for this upcoming term,' they said. F AHMY'S TENURE: It was not immediately clear when Fahmy will be appointed. Technically speaking, Abul-Gheit's second term ends in mid-May 2026. However, given the fact that the standard practice is for the new secretary general to be approved by an Arab summit, the end of Abul-Gheit's tenure and the beginning of Fahmy's might have to wait for the next regular Arab Summit in March 2026. At least three sources said that this would be the case. A couple of others said that the nomination of Fahmy might be passed through either of two ways: the first would be the ordinary autumn foreign ministers' meeting due to convene in the first week of September; and the second would be at a possible emergency Arab summit over developments in Gaza. The situation there seems slated to deteriorate as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems determined to move on with a plan to displace half of the Gaza population into the southernmost part of the Strip. For his part, Fahmy has declined to make any direct comments. Answering journalists' questions that started upon the publication of the story in Al-Majalla, the former top diplomat said that the issue was the prerogative of the Egyptian Foreign Service. However, unlike Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli, speculated about as the leading nominee, Fahmy did not deny the news of the nomination. A source at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that there was no room either for speculation or anticipation. 'Fahmy is the consensual candidate. He has the support of most Arab capitals, including one that was considering running a candidate itself in order to start the practice of rotation,' the source said. He added that it is a formality for the nomination to be endorsed and for Fahmy to find his way to the office of secretary general at the League's Tahrir Square headquarters. Several sources, including some close to Fahmy himself, said that Egypt's former top diplomat, who was born in New York in 1951 and graduated from the American University in Cairo, was not expecting the nomination. Throughout his career in the Egyptian Foreign Service that started in the 1970s, Fahmy has seemed eligible for certain posts, including for his long-term post as Egypt's ambassador to Washington that started in 1999 and ended in 2008. When he came back from Washington, with an impressive performance in containing one of the highest periods of tension in Egyptian-American relations under the rule of former president Mubarak and during the two terms in office of US president George W Bush, Fahmy was expected to be appointed as foreign minister to succeed Abul-Gheit, who served as foreign minister from 2004 to 2011. However, with the January Revoulution things took a different path and it was only in June 2013 that Fahmy found his long-anticipated path to the office of Egypt's foreign minister overlooking the Nile prior to the move of government bodies to the New Administrative Capital. T OUGH MISSION: Fahmy came to the office at a crucial political moment, with considerable international speculation about the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi after the 30 June 2013 revolution and the suspension of elements of Egyptian-American military cooperation and also the holding up of Egypt's membership of the African Union. At the time, Egyptian diplomats were saying that the country's diplomacy was on 'thin ice' following the political changes in 2013. During his almost one year in office, Fahmy told his aides that the key aim was to relaunch Egypt as a major regional power following two years of internal hiccups that had started with the 25 January Revolution and been followed by the 2013 ouster of Morsi in June 2012. One of Fahmy's closest aides at the time said that 'it is a very tough challenge that Fahmy is facing, since our foreign policy has been on the decline for a while. It did not start with Morsy. It had been this way during the last few years of Mubarak.' In his memoir, published originally in English in 2020 under the title Egypt's Diplomacy, in War, Peace and Transition and later in Arabic in 2022 under the title of Fi qalb al-ahdath (At the Heart of the News), Fahmy details the complexities of the 2013 moment that went beyond the international perception of the nature of political change in Egypt to include pending challenges and especially the dispute between Egypt and Sudan, on the one hand, and Ethiopia, on the other, over the construction, filling, and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Fahmy used his 12 months in office to remove the suspension of Egyptian membership in the AU, impose a ban on the financing of the GERD, and maximise the use of the support offered by some Arab Gulf capitals to open doors that were being shut in several world capitals. In conducting his mission as Egypt's top diplomat, Fahmy also kept an eye on some crucial files that he was very well informed about, especially as a member of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Geneva, and notably with regard to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He was also very much aware of the centrality of the Palestinian cause, which he had worked on extensively during his years as political adviser to foreign minister Amr Moussa in the 1990s and during which he took part in the Egypt delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference and followed a sequence of Palestinian-Israeli talks from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords onwards. Reaching out for international cooperation was also a top priority that Fahmy was well aware of owing to his two ambassadorial terms in Tokyo and Washington. However, unlike the previous steps in his diplomatic career, Fahmy was working under very stressful conditions. He kept in close contact with then minister of defence Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, whose political rise was already charted. The coordination between the Foreign Service, on the one hand, and security and economic officials, on the other, is referenced in his memoir as part of the national sharing of responsibility regarding top foreign policy and national security issues. U PHEAVAL: 'Upheaval in the Middle East' is the title that Fahmy chose for the section of his book on the Arab-Israeli struggle. The starting point of the story, as perceived by Fahmy, was the devastating defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 War that allowed Israel to occupy all of historic Palestine, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and large parts of Syrian and Jordanian territory. A second equally unsettling moment that Fahmy's book moves to after the 1967 War is another war and a 'moment of tectonic change in the Arab region [that] came with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.' This war, Fahmy, then a diplomat at the Egyptian mission in New York, had earlier seen signs of and had feared its overwhelming impact on the region. 'The Iraqi invasion entailed drastic and traumatic regional repercussions in the Arab world. It divided the Arab world, but most importantly it also prompted the Arab Gulf states to focus on sub-regional cooperation and become fully dependent on American security,' Fahmy wrote. 'For them, this was not simply a territorial disagreement between neighbouring Arab states but a fully-fledged existential invasion from within the Arab world itself, which was an anomaly in contemporary political relations.' Theories about connections between the October 1973 War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are neither overlooked nor embraced by Fahmy. He writes that 'some Middle East experts suggest that after being shocked by the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the United States intentionally encouraged [former Iraqi president Saddam] Hussein to invade Kuwait in order to decimate the burgeoning Iraqi military capacity and emerging nuclear programme.' 'This was perceived by them as an attempt to preempt the emergence of a strong, more independent Arab regional player with control over substantial oil reserves and the potential to pose a security threat to Israel.' However, Fahmy's book is more about dissecting what happened on the ground than what the experts thought at the time. According to this part of his book, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait crushed whatever semblance of pan-Arabism had survived the crushing military defeat of 1967. Consequently, he argued that a new regional order was in the making along with the pursuit of a political settlement to the Arab-Israeli struggle, with the participation of all the countries that had boycotted Egypt after former president Anwar Al-Sadat's peace-making with Israel. Today, as he prepares himself to enter a new chapter in his diplomatic career, Fahmy is only too aware of the crucial moment that the region is passing through. In an article published on the opinion pages of the Egyptian daily Al-Shorouq on 5 August under the title of 'The Necessary Choices for the Arab World,' Fahmy wrote that 'the Middle East is not stable and is going through a reshuffle moment.' Some of the changes that are unfolding today, he argued, are inevitable due to the natural evolution of political and economic dynamics, while others are being forced on it, especially as the aspirations of non-Arab members of the region, especially Israel, assume a dominating role. This, he wrote, is happening as the world order is going through a transition towards an undefined destination that may or may not take it from a single-polar to a multi-polar regime, with many countries building their policies on a zero-sum approach. With such changes happening, Fahmy wrote, the Arab World needs to live up to the challenges it is facing and to pursue development and reconstruction. Given the date of the publication of his piece, it is not hard to conclude that these are going to be the defining concepts that Fahmy will have in mind for his overall agenda for the future of the Arab League. It is no secret that he will need to use all his expertise on the Palestinian cause to help reconcile the conflicting views of the Arab capitals on the way forward in view of the genocidal war that Israel is conducting against the Palestinians in Gaza along with the resumption of aggressive and illegal settlement policies in the West Bank. In so doing, Fahmy will lean on his long years of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, especially his close-to 10 years in Washington where he built solid ties in the capital of world politics. Meanwhile, there are also many other pressing challenges that he will need to attend to, including the current armed conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Syria, inter-Arab tensions in North Africa and the Gulf, and the expanding weight that non-Arab neighbours have taken in the Arab countries. In his piece, Fahmy spoke clearly against attempts to water down the Arab identity of the region. In an article published earlier this summer in the Saudi-owned Independent Arabia, he wrote about the need to fully re-integrate Syria into the Arab world and for a coordinated Arab position to face up to Israeli plans against Palestinian rights. According to diplomatic sources informed on the dynamics of the secretariat of the Arab League, one of Fahmy's tougher missions will be the creation of a sense of collective ownership, away from any sense of entitlement, towards this pan-Arab organisation that has come under much criticism, especially as a result of the genocidal war on Gaza. Those who know Fahmy well say that he will not just seek harmony but also innovation and creativity. His years as founding and long-serving dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, they say, testify to his commitment to promoting modernisation. They also say that as much as Fahmy was very keen during his career to be credited for his own work rather than for being the son of a renowned foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, he will be also keen in his new post to dispel concerns that his Egyptian nationality could impose an Egyptian perception on the agenda of the collective Arab regime. * A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
