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Blackouts in Egypt Prompt Accusations

Kareem Fahim and

CAIRO — Facing the most severe summer power shortages in recent memory, with blackouts shutting factories, crippling small businesses and darkening some homes for more than 12 hours a day, Egyptian officials blamed supporters of the deposed Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, for sabotaging the electricity grid.

The accusations, by the government of Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, were murky. But they neatly mirrored the reaction last summer by officials in Mr. Morsi’s government, who faced a similar crisis and pointed fingers at shadowy opponents within Egypt’s bureaucracy.

In reality, though, there is plenty of blame to go around, and a long history of successive governments neglecting Egypt’s energy problems, analysts said. The photographs of a darkened country that were splashed on the pages of the country’s newspapers — including pictures of doctors performing surgery by flashlight — appeared to be simply the latest indictment of Egypt’s leaders, perennially overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the nation’s challenges.

Experts have been warning of a looming energy disaster for more than a decade, saying there was little long-term planning to accommodate the country’s galloping growth. In the last few years, as shortages of natural gas and government funds became desperate and as the aging power infrastructure failed, policy mistakes and postponed decisions made everything worse.

During the summer, electricity use soars as Egyptians deploy air-conditioners against the cruel heat. That overwhelms power plants, and officials respond with regular blackouts.

The power cuts have left Mr. Sisi facing the first real domestic headache of his presidency, undermining his repeated pledges to provide stability, and diverting attention from high-profile megaprojects he has championed, including an expansion of the Suez Canal.

And for the first time since he took office this year, Mr. Sisi’s government has appeared on the defensive. The anger did not break out into the open with the kind of protests that Mr. Morsi faced — a reflection, partly, of the intolerance of dissent under the new government. In smaller ways, though, the flashes of impatience were impossible to mistake.

There were reports of citizens refusing to pay electricity bills, and whiffs of scandal as journalists investigated the role of government corruption in the crisis. Even Mr. Sisi’s loyalists seemed uneasy. One columnist, Mona al-Ragab, wrote last week that the authorities needed to purge ministries of Islamist “sleeper cells,” if they were indeed the problem.

But she added, “The government must have enough transparency to say the real reasons behind the power outages that last hours, and are repeated in almost all neighborhoods during the past two months, and if this will continue or if the problem is on its way to being solved?”

The explanation that Mr. Morsi’s supporters were responsible was something officials “hang their failures on,” said Mohamed Khaled, a manager of a dairy shop in downtown Cairo. The blackouts had cut business in half in the last few months, forcing him to sometimes throw out entire refrigerators of spoiled yogurt and desserts.

“There is no difference” from one leader to the next, said Mr. Khaled, 21, adding that he faced the same problems last summer, and expected to be plagued by more blackouts in a year.

In recent days, officials seemed to acknowledge the danger from popular anger over the power cuts, which had fed a broader backlash against Mr. Morsi before he was ousted by the military last July. And, quietly, the officials seemed to back off the notion that Islamist saboteurs bore responsibility, suggesting that the case against them was thin.

“To be honest, this is a big problem, and it is a complicated issue,” the prime minister, Ibrahim Mehleb, said at a news conference this week as the headlines turned more hostile. He outlined the scope of what he called an “accumulated” mess caused by factors like the lack of maintenance at energy plants. Unplanned growth during Egypt’s transition had not been met with a corresponding increase in energy production.

He promised small improvements by Sunday, and greater progress by the end of August. “We admit that it is an acute problem, but we are truly facing it,” he said.

A day after he spoke, business owners and residents in several parts of Cairo noticed a marked, and even somewhat miraculous, reduction in blackouts. There was a feeling of relief, but also a nagging sense by some that the state had more control over the problem than it had let on.

The causes, though, are deep and destined to persist unless drastic measures are taken, analysts say. Egypt faces a “triple attack,” according to Ahmed Heikal, the chairman of Qalaa Holdings, an investment holding company in Cairo that has extensive energy assets in Egypt. To begin with, there was a severe shortage of natural gas used to fuel electricity plants, caused in part by the government’s failure to pay arrears to international oil companies operating in Egypt that would allow further development of oil and gas fields.

Egypt’s gas production had dropped from about 6.1 billion cubic feet of gas per day two years ago, to 5.4 billion last year under Mr. Morsi, until it hit the current rate, at 4.7 billion cubic feet per day, he said.

Finally, existing electricity facilities have not been properly maintained. And new plants have not been built to keep up with escalating demand.

Egypt’s longtime autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, who was deposed during the uprising of 2011, has been faulted for the chronic shortfalls. His failure to scale back a generous fuel subsidy system encouraged energy-intensive industries and distorted the market, Mr. Heikal said. And Egypt’s transitional leaders shied away from making the necessary bold reforms.

“It’s self-inflicted pain of the first degree,” Mr. Heikal said, adding that Mr. Sisi had taken a positive first step, by sharply reducing fuel subsidies.

Yet actual relief was most likely still far away. For two years, there have been unsuccessful efforts to select a company to provide an offshore terminal that would allow Egypt to import natural gas to meet its shortfall, said Thomas Strouse, a Dubai-based analyst with the Energy Intelligence Group, which analyzes the global energy industry.

Mr. Sisi’s administration had not yet selected a company. As the weather cooled, and demand for energy subsided somewhat, “the sense of urgency to get it done is receding,” Mr. Strouse said.

Mr. Sisi will surely face a sharper test next summer, Mr. Strouse added. In the meantime, the crisis seemed to have prompted warnings to the government about keeping the Egyptian public, literally and figuratively, in the dark.

Complaining about the “information blackout” from officials in a column last week, an Egyptian writer, Mahmoud Khalil, invoked the public’s increasing willingness to dispense with leaders who failed them.

“There is one outcome of the waning patience of Egyptians, known to anyone who has witnessed the events of the past three years,” he wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Blackouts in Egypt Prompt Accusations. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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