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By Amr Emam and A’laa Koddous Thursday, May 26, 2011 05:24:04 PM
A planned strike by the nation’s marriage registration officials (called Ma’zons in Arabic) threatens to derail marriage and divorce plans by thousands of Egyptians next month and affect the marriage business in this country, and hotel reservations.
Thousands of engaged Egyptian couples may be forced to postpone their wedding plans because the nation’s ma’zons threaten to go on strike next month.
The Ma’zons have vowed to stage their strike against the failure of the Government to “respond positively” to a list of demands they have been touting for a long time. “We have been expressing these demands for 37 years now,” said Sheikh Islam Ismail, a spokesman for the organisers of the strike. “Despite this, nobody has paid any attention to these demands,” he added.
There are about 6,000 marriage registration officials in Egypt, most of them are either school of law graduates or graduates of one of the schools of Al-Azhar, a prestigious Muslim seminary.
High in the list of their demands is their need to establish their own independent union, something they deem important for making their voice heard in post-Mubarak Egypt.
The Ma’zons say they presented the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces with a plan for establishing this union, but it was a senior Ministry of Justice official, who stopped the whole thing.
This was one reason why the Ma’zons staged several protests outside the Ministry of Justice in Cairo several times before, the last of which was on May 16 when they held placards reading: “We want our rights”.
While the Ma’zons’ need for a union is pressing, their need for better pay and living conditions is more pressing, they say. “Marriage registration officials receive peanuts for registering marriages every month,” said Sheikh Khalid Abd Rabo, a Ma’zon himself. “This contradicts with the huge revenues we bring the government,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview.
Ma’zons are considered Ministry of Justice employees. They do not receive a salary, but a commission of three piasters for every marriage contract they register at the ministry.
They say they bring the Ministry of Justice hundreds of millions of pounds in marriage fees every year, but get nothing at the end of the day.
“If I fall ill, I have to pay for my treatment,” Abd Rabo said. “We have no medical insurance, no retirement compensation, nothing at all.”
The strike of the marriage registration officials might be bad news for the tourism sector’s employees, who are still recovering from the effects of the January 25 revolution, observers say.
Around 2.5 million tourism workers have been hard hit by the security vacuum that followed the revolution, a vacuum that scared tourists away from this country.
Sheikh Abd Rabo concedes that the strike will be disappointing to thousands of Egyptians, who have planned their marriage during June, the highest point of the marriage season because it follows school and university exams, but says the Ma’zons are “human beings too who need care”.
Apart from marriage, the strike will affect divorce plans as well. Some studies say that a divorce happens in Egypt every six minutes. “The Ma’zons’ conditions are bleak,” Abd Rabo said. “We need the whole society to hear our groans, because we cannot continue to suffer in silence for ever,” he added.
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