One day in 1990, Sheikh Yousef Abdel-Salam Saleh, one of the most respected figures in the Omar family, went to a light-vehicle factory on the edge of Kerdasa. Abdel-Salam Saleh gave a speech to the workers there, in which he claimed that the owner of their small factory was intending to expand one of his construction projects at the expense of the village's cemetery. He warned them that such an act is forbidden in Islam, reminding them that everyone would eventually die and might not find a burial place if they did not prevent this. Abdel-Salam Saleh also went with a delegation to the police station in Imbaba (Kerdasa at this time did not have a station, but rather a police post) and filed a complaint against Ahmad Abdel-Wahhab Mahjoub, the head of the sheikh family and the then head of the local council. He accused him of facilitating the exploitation of a plot of land by a Cairene entrepreneur that was in fact state property.

In the towns of the Greater Cairo peri-urban fringe (and perhaps throughout the whole country), people owe their sense of ‘communityness’ more to cemeteries than to any other place. In Kerdasa, as with any other community in Egypt, local people are as afraid of being buried alone as they are of living alone. But as Abdel-Wahhab Mahjoub denied the accusation and claimed that he, as the head of the local council, was using a voluntary donation from the businessman to build a wall for the village cemetery, this story may reveal a different side of local politics. As this chapter suggests, this may also reflect the contestation of two generations of local NDP leadership who had different understandings of public work.

The previous chapters addressed the process of upgrading the system of local governance. It has been argued that although the structure of authority, represented by the system of local administration, was immune to reform during the era of Mubarak, the upgrading process was accorded to the structure of power represented by the regime networks, which led to intergenerational conflict among the NDP grassroots.