CAIRO — For years the shantytown grew in the shadow of a limestone cliff, its wooden shacks and shoddy brick apartments creeping up and spreading over the hill. The whole time, the limestone was cracking inside from the slum’s own sewage.
Last weekend, the cliff finally gave way. It rained giant boulders onto the poorest of Egypt’s poor, killing at least 80 people in the Dweiqa slum, with whole families still thought buried in the rubble.
The disaster left many Egyptians furious at what they already considered a corrupt, inept government for failing to protect the slum dwellers from a calamity that experts had long predicted.
“No one cares about us; they dump us here and forget about us,” said Wael Abdel-Ghani, who lives with his wife and daughter in a one-bedroom brick hovel at the top of the cliff overlooking Dweiqa.
People in the slum on the edge of the capital threw stones at officials at the disaster site, protesting that the government was not doing enough to help them.
“Everyone knew this mountain is dangerous,” said Abdel-Ghani. “But because it’s us living here, they don’t care.”
Wealthy businessmen dominate the government. Forty percent of Egypt’s 80 million people live on about $1 a day.
The Dweiqa shantytown both grew up and, in the end, collapsed on corruption and incompetence.
Dweiqa is a part of Manshiyet Nasr, one of Cairo’s oldest slums, which cropped up in the late 1960s in a wasteland between a centuries-old Islamic cemetery and the Muqattam plateau. Manshiyet Nasr swelled to more than 1.2 million people squeezed into 2 square miles of narrow lanes and ramshackle apartments.
The growth was paved by corruption. Residents unable to afford homes elsewhere bribed city authorities to build illegally, as did developers looking to rent to migrants.
Mustafa Mahmoud Sayyed, a tailor, said he paid a city council engineer about $60 to let him put up a one-bedroom shack on the edge of the cliff overlooking Dweiqa. Now, after the collapse, he sleeps in the mosque with his wife and their newborn daughter.
“It became very dangerous to live here,” he said.
In the late 1990s, the government’s National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research issued a report to the government warning of the danger in the shantytown. Sewage was soaking into the rock, dissolving limestone and swelling veins of shale, weakening the cliff face.
The planned solution came in 1999, when construction began less than a mile away on the Suzanne Mubarak Housing Project, built with a donation from the United Arab Emirates to house the people of the slum. It was named after Egypt’s first lady, who is touted by state media for her charity projects for women, children and the poor.
But most of the 10,000 apartments are empty. One reason, residents say, is that administrators demand heavy bribes to allow anyone to move into the complex.
