I visited last Wednesday El-Warraq Real Estate Tax Collection Agency, in Giza, whose employees played a central role in the 2007 strike, led by Abdel Qader Nada who is one of the province’s representatives in the Higher Strike Committee.

The working conditions at the office are not fit for humans, it looked like a barn not a government office. The civil servants are crammed into either tiny corridors that were more similar to a cellar…

“You coming to take a photo of us in our graves?” joked one of the employees in the pic above. It did feel like a grave.

Other employees have their desks located under a roof made of bouss, which do not shield them from the sun or rain…

The roof itself turned into a garbage dump…

And no facilities given to the civil servants, no computers… Nazif’s “E-Government” has no presence… The Tax Collectors have to store all the data manually and work from obsolete notebooks and files…