Fiddling with Egypt’s clocks

As winter drawsDSTDST to its dreary end, many Egyptians look forward to spring. But they are less keen on their parliament’s recent approval of a law to bring back daylight saving time () designed to ensure that darkness falls later in the day. It hopes that doing so will curb the country’s electricity usage and free up natural gas for export, since it generates about 60% of Egypt’s power. But Egyptians are rolling their eyes. was first brought in as a fuel-saving measure in the second world war. Since then, Egypt’s governments have chopped and changed. None has been able to determine definitively the nature of its effects on energy consumption. In 2014 President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi confused matters still more by announcing that the clocks would change four times that year to ease the burden on those fasting during Ramadan. Egyptians had to resort to social media to ask the time. Some Red Sea hotels ignored the changes in favour of “resort time”, thus creating a rival time zone.