MICHAEL TOTTEN: Egypt Wants To Junk Cairo. “Roughly half of Egyptians earn less than two dollars per day, so you can imagine what the slums look and smell like, but even the ‘fancy’ neighborhoods like Zamalek are drab and depressing. So it’s easy to understand why the nation’s rulers want to pick up and leave and start over. Cairo will sink even further if that ever happens, but what do they care? They use a crooked military dictatorship to lord over the country like it’s their own private plantation.”

This is basically what Nigeria did with Abuja, or Brazil with Brasilia.