We Will Not Pay Your Bills

Statement by the Revolutionary Socialists

In a new attack on people experiencing poverty, the Sisi regime has raised household electricity consumption rates across all brackets by up to 40%, continuing its pressure on Egypt’s poor and middle classes, who have nothing left to give after the regime has placed the entire burden of the crisis on them.

The new electricity bill increases come on top of inflation rates not seen in seven years, with overall inflation reaching 14.8%. Food and beverage prices have risen by over 18%, while healthcare and medical service costs have surged by more than 23%. Worse still, this is happening while the regime freezes wages, with allocations for salaries in the new budget increasing by only 4.5%. This means that the real wages of more than six million employees have effectively decreased by over 10%. These employees now face further persecution under the Civil Service Law, which seeks to push millions into early retirement, adding to an unemployment rate of 12.5%.

The regime’s policies, which have driven more than 27% of Egyptians below the poverty line—according to the state’s statistics, though the actual percentage is likely much higher—are the same policies that lavish benefits and grants on members of the military, police, and judiciary to buy their loyalty. Meanwhile, the regime squanders public funds on arms deals with significant powers to secure external support for itself, as well as on its illusory projects aimed at building false legitimacy by depleting Egyptians’ savings and wealth.

While the regime burdens the poor with the crisis, it has reduced taxes on the wealthy from 30% to 22.5% and frozen taxes on stock market transactions. It then complains about revenue shortfalls and shifts the crisis’s burdens onto the poor instead of holding major investors and the wealthy accountable for their social responsibilities. For example, food subsidies have been cut from over 100 billion Egyptian pounds in the 2012–2013 budget to only 30 billion pounds in the current budget, exacerbating the wave of inflation already overwhelming people experiencing poverty.

The real crisis afflicting Egyptians stems from the biases of the counter-revolutionary regime, which spares no expense in supporting the pillars of its authoritarian system. It buys loyalty domestically and approval internationally while creating a favorable climate for major investors to continue exploiting Egypt’s poor.

As the regime negotiates with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the increase in electricity costs for the poor is only the beginning of a fierce assault on Egypt’s working-class citizens. They now have no option but to resist these impoverishment and marginalization policies and to refuse to shoulder the costs of the counter-revolutionary regime’s policies. We, therefore, call for resistance at all levels—legal and popular—within neighborhoods to boycott electricity bill payments.