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Egypt Spent Billions on Highways While Its Trains Keep Killing Its People

8 November 2026

Seven people are dead. More than 112 are injured. And the cause, once again, is a train on a route that carries the ordinary people of Egypt to work, to school, and to their families.

On Sunday, a train heading from Cairo toward Aswan was struck from behind by a train coming from Giza on its way to Fayoum. The impact sent carriages off the rails and onto a countryside road in al-Ayyat, on the outskirts of the capital. Egypt's Health Ministry says more than 70 ambulances were mobilised to haul the wounded away. Somewhere in those hospitals tonight are families who left home believing a train ride was the safe choice.

We have to ask the question that every Egyptian is already asking. How many more times does this have to happen in the same place before someone in power is forced to answer for it?

Al-Ayyat is not a stranger to tragedy. This is the district that saw Egypt's worst-ever rail disaster in 2002, when a fire tore through a train carrying holiday travellers south of Cairo and more than 370 people burned or suffocated. Seven years later, in 2009, a cluster of crashes in the same area killed dozens more. Those were not acts of God. They were the predictable result of old rolling stock, weak maintenance, and a safety culture that treats human life as an afterthought.

Now consider the scale of what Egypt is trying to move. Egypt is home to roughly 110 million people, and most of them depend on rail to get around. The national network is one of the largest in Africa. It is the spine of the country's economy, the lifeline for workers in Upper Egypt, and for millions of families who cannot afford to fly or drive. Yet the trains that carry them are, by the government's own admission, outdated.

Here is the contradiction that should make every citizen furious. Over the past decade, Cairo has poured billions of dollars into new highways, new cities, and high-speed rail projects. Glossy ribbon-cuttings have followed one after another. Contractors have been rewarded. Procurement contracts have been signed. Meanwhile, the ordinary passenger carriage that a farmer's daughter rides from Minya to Cairo is still running on equipment that should have been retired years ago. The money went to the spectacle. The people got the wreckage.

This is not just a Cairo problem. It is a pattern that runs across our continent. Governments love the photo opportunity of a new megaproject, because it can be announced, financed by foreign lenders, and blamed on no one when the costs spiral. What they neglect is the unglamorous work of maintenance, inspection, driver training, signalling upgrades, and independent safety oversight. Nobody cuts a ribbon for a signalling system that works. Nobody gets a medal for replacing brakes before they fail. So the work gets skipped, and the bill arrives in hospital wards and in funeral homes.

We should be honest about who pays for the failure. The bill is never paid by the minister who approved the contract. It is paid by the mother who waited at the platform, by the student who was headed to her exams, by the labourer who will never walk again. When institutions fail, the poor are the first to die, because they are the ones with no alternative.

So what must change? The answer is not complicated, but it requires courage.

Egypt needs a genuinely independent rail safety authority, with the legal power to shut down unsafe lines and publish findings without ministerial interference. Every derailment and collision must be investigated by a body whose report is made public within a fixed timeframe, and whose recommendations are binding. Egypt needs transparent public procurement, with every rail contract, maintenance schedule, and inspection record published online so that parliament, journalists, and citizens can see where the money is going. Egypt needs a rule that says a contractor who delivers substandard work is barred from future public tenders, regardless of his political connections.

Egypt also has examples close to home to learn from. Morocco modernised its rail network through the Al Boraq high-speed line, linking Tangier and Kenitra, and it did so with a clear regulatory framework, competitive tendering, and a state rail operator that answers to independent audit. Botswana, whatever its own challenges, has built a reputation for fiscal discipline and public accountability that makes it a model for how states can manage large public investments without bleeding them dry. Mauritius has shown what rule of law and transparent institutions can do for a small economy that punches far above its weight. None of these countries are perfect. All of them prove that better is possible when institutions are built to serve citizens rather than to shield those in charge.

The lesson for Egypt is simple. A train network is not a showpiece for a president's legacy. It is a public trust. Investments in new routes mean nothing if the carriages on the existing lines are killing people. Priority should go to replacing the oldest rolling stock on the most heavily used routes, installing modern signalling and automatic train protection, and training a driver corps that is paid well enough to stay and skilled enough to be trusted. This is not glamorous. It is what a serious state does.

And the public has a role to play too. Egyptians should demand that the government publish the preliminary cause of Sunday's collision within weeks, not months. They should insist on compensation that reaches the families of the dead and the injured quickly and without humiliating paperwork. They should press their elected representatives to hold hearings, call the railway chiefs to testify, and ask why the 2002 and 2009 lessons were not learned. Civil society organisations, engineers' unions, and the independent press must be free to ask these questions without fear of arrest. A country that cannot report its own train crashes honestly will never fix them.

We are Africans. This is our continent, our railways, and our dead. Egypt is not a country that lacks engineers, workers, or money. It lacks accountability. Until the people who sign the contracts and oversee the tracks are forced to answer for every derailment, the next crash is already on its way.