Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi called on Tuesday September 5 to “organize the freedom to have children” in the most populous of Arab countries, citing China’s one-child policy as an example. “We need 400,000 births a year,” pleaded the leader of the country of 105 million inhabitants, while Egypt recorded nearly 2.2 million births in 2022.
While his Minister of Health and Population, Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, had just considered that “having children is total freedom”, al-Sissi intervened. “I do not agree with your idea that having children is a matter of total freedom. To leave their freedom to people who potentially do not know the magnitude of the challenge? In the end, it’s all of society and the Egyptian state which will pay the price”, launched the head of state, accustomed to long diatribes in front of an audience of officials and often ministers interrupted during a presentation.
“We must organize this freedom otherwise it will create a disaster,” al-Sissi pleaded again, while Egypt is going through the worst economic crisis in its history. “The Chinese made this decision in 1968” and in 2015 Beijing officially abandoned its so-called “one-child” policy, allowing all married couples to have a second child, “they succeeded in their population control policy” , he said again.
The president – who observers say is set to run for a third term in the spring of 2024 – regularly takes aim at the 2011 “revolution” that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Again on Tuesday, he mentioned this popular uprising. “Why did people walk out in 2011? Because they felt the state wasn’t providing for them, but they didn’t understand the state couldn’t, not because it didn’t want to but because he didn’t have the capacity,” he said.