For thousands of years, Egyptians have known that when a mummy encounters life it disintegrates. This is what happened when President Hosni Mubarak fell apart in the face of an Egyptian people full of life and youth.

For years, whenever I saw Mubarak, he reminded me of a mummy. He spent a considerable time each day to “prepare” himself. That meant dying his hair and eyebrows jet black, and applying rouge to his cheeks to make them look rosy, in more or less the same way Egyptian mummy makers did with dead pharaohs.

He also wore heels to look taller and used a corset to keep his belly in. Despite declining eyesight, he shunned glasses in public. Even in his 80s, he wanted to appear alive and young, just as pharaohs had done.

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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Egypt.

Mubarak’s attempts at securing eternal youth were faintly comical and ultimately harmless.

What was not comical and certainly harmless was the mummification of his regime.

The first sign of mummification was Mubarak’s unwillingness or inability to change the top echelon of government, ending up as the head of a geriatric club.

Cabinet ministers could remain in their posts for 20 years. A who’s who of courtiers, perhaps numbering around 100, rotated in top government positions in a nation of 82 million with great reservoirs of talent.

This led to the emergence of a medieval system in which ministers and heads of major public corporations acted as semi-independent princelings in their fiefdoms.

Policies were also mummified.

Economic policy was still driven by the “Infitah” (opening) project launched by President Anwar Sadat in 1974.

This encouraged a Wild West-style economic system with few rules to protect public interest. Immense fortunes were made, breeding immense poverty in their wake. With high rates of economic growth, there was no reason why any Egyptian should live on less than $2 a day. But at least a third did.

One trick was to buy government-owned land at derisory prices and then sell it to people for real estate development at exorbitant ones. This drove prices through the roof.

Millions of young Egyptians cannot leave their parents’ homes and build families of their own because they cannot afford the cost of housing.

Education policy was also mummified. Sadat had launched a crash program to produce graduates in law and economics to serve in his expanding civil service. Mubarak turned that policy into another mummy.

As a result Egypt has produced a vast army of men and women with university degrees but no prospect of employment. They provided the backbone of the Tahrir Square crowd.

At the start of his presidency, Mubarak had declared a state of emergency, for three months. Thirty years later, when he was leaving, the measure was still in force. The mummified gimmick, which banned meetings of even five people in public, was still law when public gatherings of half a million had become part of Cairo’s daily life.

In early 1990s, to counterbalance pro-democracy groups, Mubarak started wooing Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood.

State-owned media gave much airtime to religious propaganda. Government money helped build thousands of new mosques and financed hundreds of Koranic schools and theological colleges. Though technically illegal, The Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to extend its tentacles throughout society, including the armed forces and police. In the previous general election, the “outlawed” Brotherhood was assigned 80 seats in the parliament.

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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Egypt.