Sunday, January 15, 2012

Oil Shortage : Another sign of failure

It seems that there is currently a huge oil crisis inCairo starting from this weekend.
People can’t find oil in gas stations except in very rare areas and if they do , they find it very limited. Now tweeps are sharing information on which stations got oil in certain area through hashtags like Tweetbanzeena and #Egygas
There is also a hashtag on twitter making fun from the crisis :#Oilshortage
An example of the tweets about oil shortage and gas stations Of course some accused SCAF and the army of standing behind the crisis pointing to the fact that the army got its gas stations “Wataniya” and there could be some sort of monopoly here but according to drivers the “Wataniya” gas station also suffer from oil shortages.
If you follow this blog from long time , from more than a year ago , you will know that shortage crises are not something new in the country , it is an old technique as well well old problem.
Political administration since the 1960s created the shortage crises to divert people attention from political issues that matter but oil shortage in few weeks away from January 25th revolution will just make things worse for them and will even bring the silent majority to the square , the same silent majority is trying to win.
Of course the high middle class will come to the square if they raise the price of the high quality oil “95” and remove the subsidy !!
Tweep Marwan Katamish who works in international oil company claims that there were two loaded oil tankers in some port in Egypt and that the general oil authority did not pay for these tankers the money and thus the tankers left.
I do not know how the General Oil authority did not pay or why it did not pay because from what I understood that was the golden mine of Mubarak regime’s ministries , or may this is what they wanted us to believe. Needless to say the corruption in the ministry of oil is as a deep as a coal mine !!
Whether it is a conspiracy or not , it is another sign of failure of this government and SCAF when it comes to the essential needs of this country whether you support them or not. In battle you do not wait till you have some sort of energy crisis in one of your units or your sectors for God sake.
I know the answer of SCAF will be , we do not have an experience and this is the problem of the government plus we are in interim period. The government from its turn will blame the crisis on the protests and strikes !! There is no relation but I know Ganz will do this in his weekly speech.
You know what will be fun ,to have a crisis in any essential supply after the start of the parliament.

4 comments:

  1. we locally produce about about 70% of our oil needs, do u believe that we are now unable to subsidize the rest?!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes we are unable to subsidize because we are running out of foreign reserves. We need such, however, to import food. So we save on the oil and energy subsidies.

    Btw oil is ridiculously cheap in Egypt because of heavy subsidies. May be there is some good in this shortage as it creates some public awareness.

    And it is true that the General Oil Authority owes hundreds of millions of US-$ to foreign oil companies, who have now pulled the plug. Needless to say that we lose every day 5 million US-$ of income from our MOPCO facilities as long as the protests in Damietta persist.

    ReplyDelete
  3. High octane variations are hardly subsidised since produced locally, actually they include a profit margin, they might want to increase the price but that has nothing to do with subsidies, only diesel is subsidised. Perhaps if they have reserves problems they should remove the subsidies from natural gas that is sold ridiculously cheap to private sector companies for a 15 years contract. Increase the price to industries that can afford it not on the working class.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Egypt's economic crisis will accelerate into a downward spiral and the authorities are doing nothing about it.
    The Canadian.

    ReplyDelete

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