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Following is an excerpt from an interview with Egyptian geologist Dr. Farouq Al-Baz, which aired on ON TV on June 17, 2009.
Interviewer: Did you say that Egypt has a glorious past and a bleak future?
Dr. Farouq Al-Baz: Not in so many words, but it is more or less what I said. We are an ancient country with a respectable past. I lived through part of this past, as a student at high school and at university, but when I look at our future, if we continue on the same path, I see nothing.
We do not take any initiatives, we do not conduct any reforms, children are being born and the population is growing, and we build over the Nile Valley, wasting agricultural lands. If we continue on this path, within 100 years, we will eat one another. There are no plans for cultivating the land, there are no plans for educating the people, and so on. How can we emerge from this? It requires great initiatives, it requires full support, it requires people who believe in this, and it requires someone who will say to the people: "follow me" – and we will follow him to amend the current situation. If we go on like this, things will not be good.
Interviewer: You said that Egypt is in decline, while in the past, it was on the rise – during your school days.
Dr. Farouq Al-Baz: In our days, Egypt was much better off than Turkey, Iran, Korea, Libya, and all the large countries around us... Malaysia, and so on. Where were they in comparison to us? Today, you can see how countries like South Korea, Malaysia, and all the countries have soared to the sky. They export the computers that we buy here, and so on, while we march in place.
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