Cairo's gated compounds show rich-poor gulf

By Jonathan Wright and Alaa Shahine

PALM HILLS, Egypt (Reuters) - The four-wheel-drives outside the terracotta villas include a Lexus and a Porsche, and under the shade of the palms and the bright red poinciana trees men in liveried overalls are buffing them to a shine.

Across the road, concealed behind a wall and down a path littered with rubble, Sabri Ali and his fellow gardeners are living five to a small room, earning 18 Egyptian pounds ($3.35) a day for seven hours work tending lawns and pruning trees.

Three sleep on bunks, two share a mat on the floor. In the evening they watch a small black-and-white television set.

The gated community of Palm Hills, about 15 km (10 miles) west of Cairo, is one of dozens that have sprung up in the desert around the Egyptian capital to house upper middle-class Egyptians who can no longer take Cairo's noise and pollution.

Many of them have alluring English names -- Hyde Park, Beverley Hills, Utopia and Evergreen, for example -- and developers advertise them mainly in English, turning their backs on the language of the country and its people.

Some have features harking back to a monarchical age, such as the name Royal Towers and lamp posts carrying the insignia of the Egyptian royal family, deposed more than half a century ago.

But even in these places, built as refuges from urban chaos on land uninhabited 20 years ago, the reality of 21st-century Egypt and all its social inequalities is impossible to escape.

Liberalisation and economic growth, running at around 7 percent a year for the past two years, have swollen the ranks of the wealthy, but over the same time the United Nations says the proportion of people living in absolute poverty has also grown.

OUTPACED BY INFLATION

Hard data on income distribution in Egypt is difficult to come by but recent sharp increases in food prices have hurt the poor because food takes up a high proportion of their income.

Hardship is the lot not only of unskilled manual workers in a country where constantly high unemployment keeps wages low. Ahmed el-Naggar, a senior economist at Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said his studies show that some 95 percent of public-sector employees live in poverty.

"The salary of a general manager in 2008 is less than his real salary in 1978," he told Reuters. "This is because the wage system in Egypt benefits the employer. Wages increase at rates that are much slower than the rise in prices."

Ramadan Ragab, who carries wood for the workers building nearby Safwa City, another guarded, gated community, says he earns 25 pounds a day and spends 10 pounds a day on food.

His recent wage increase of five pounds a day would hardly compensate him for the price increases of the past year, which has seen overall urban inflation hit 19.7 percent and prices of basic foodstuffs rise by between 25 and 51 percent.

Ali and the gardeners have received just a three-pound rise to 18 pounds and the only accessible grocery without transport is an on-site store with high prices.