Cairo: Last summer, Egyptians had to switch their clocks forwards and back four times in the space of just four months, creating confusion not uncommon in the previous years as part of the daylight-saving time system, which the country has observe every summer since 1988.
But no more: in yet another sign of radical changes in post-Mubarak Egypt, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf said this week in a televised address that his government will cancel this controversial system.
"A draft bill is being worked out to scrap this system after it was found that it affects air traffic, the stock market and the biological clock of citizens," said Sharaf, who took part in the anti-Mubarak protests before being picked by the military rulers to be prime minister.
Poll findings
The announcement to cancel the system came less than two weeks before it was to take effect. The Sharaf government said its decision was based on the findings of a poll that showed around 88 per cent of Egyptians want the system cancelled "because it was a source of disturbance".
"It was obvious that the former regime, which relied on its characteristic obstinacy to rule the people, was bent on enforcing this unjustified time system in order to harm the health of the Egyptians and distract them from politics by switching the clocks one hour ahead," wrote Riyad Tawfiq in the state-owned newspaper Al Ahram recently, though his logic was not immediately clear.
'Annual torture'
"Halting the implementation of daylight saving time and freeing the Egyptians of this annual torture should have been among the demands of the revolution in Al Tahrir Square," he added, referring to the iconic plaza in Cairo where protests against long-standing president Hosni Mubarak raged for 18 days in February until he was deposed.
Previous governments in Egypt used to say that the summertime system helps cut power consumption. Last summer, Egypt was hit by recurrent outages. A spokesman of the Ministry of Electricity said this week the system failed to reduce electricity use in a country where shops keep open until past midnight.
"Changing the time system is tantamount to tampering with people's brains," said Khalid Abdul Rahman, a psychology expert. "This change negatively affects concentration, and induces mood swings and anger, especially in the first few days of the switch," he told Gulf News.
Confirming that winter time was the "natural" system for Egypt, Ali Qotb, an official of the National Meteorology Authority, cited another reason for dropping the daylight-saving time: "This system is partly to blame for an increase in road accidents in the early morning.
"Moving the clocks ahead by one hour prompts motorists to hit the roads when they are still shrouded in fog. This causes terrible accidents."
