The House of Representatives gave final approval, on Monday, October 12, 2026, to the law establishing “Kayan University of the Armed Forces for Applied Sciences,” after deleting Article 25, which had granted its military students a lieutenant’s salary, in response to an objection from President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, the fourth presidential objection to a law in the history of the Egyptian parliament.
One article was deleted and fifty remained. The law, which takes effect in the 2026/2027 academic year, establishes a university that accepts civilian and military students, whose Supreme Council is headed by the Defense Minister, who appoints its president and the deans of its faculties, determines the categories of its students and their activity fees, and applies the Military Academy’s disciplinary rules to its military division. The university receives funds from the general budget, while the number of its students, the cost of establishing it, and its official tuition fees have not yet been announced.
Objection to a Single Article
The House approved the draft law for the first time on July 22, 2026, and sent it to the Presidency on August 3. On October 1, the House Speaker, Counselor Hisham Badawi, read out the President’s letter objecting to Article 25, based on Article 123 of the Constitution, which grants him the right to refer the draft law back to parliament within thirty days.
The article had granted military division students “a monthly bonus equivalent to the starting salary of the rank of lieutenant and the legally prescribed allowances,” effective from the date that rank was granted to their peers graduating from the Military College, alongside an annual bonus for top-performing students determined by each faculty’s internal bylaws. The President wrote that the university accepts students in both divisions, and that boarding is mandatory for all of them, and therefore he saw fit to “abolish the provision in Article 25 granting the monthly and annual bonus, in further consolidation of the constitutional principle of equality.”
On October 5, the House approved its General Committee’s report accepting the objection, and formed a special committee headed by Dr. Assem El-Gazzar, First Deputy Speaker of the House, which concluded unanimously on October 7 that the article should be deleted in full. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said that keeping the article would have created disparity between students of the two divisions, and between them and students of other universities, “in a manner that contradicts the principles of equality and equal opportunity,” according to Asharq Al-Awsat.
The committee discussed two approaches: the first, put forward by Counselor Hany Hanna, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, holds that students of both divisions share a single legal standing because the university is “a public body of a scientific character enjoying independent legal personality,” so they may not be financially differentiated; the second compares military students to their counterparts in other military colleges regardless of the existence of a civilian division. The committee adopted the first approach, and said in its report that the deletion “reflects an explicit legislative retreat from establishing those bonuses, whether directly or through internal bylaws,” according to Masrawy.
This is the fourth presidential objection to a draft law in the history of Egyptian parliamentary life, after President Anwar El Sadat’s objection to the tax justice law in 1978, and President El Sisi’s objection to the clinical medical research law in 2018 and to eight articles of the Criminal Procedure Law in 2025, according to the General Committee’s report as cited by Sada El Balad.
What the Defense Minister Holds
Article One stipulates that the university is established as a “public body” headed by the Defense Minister, headquartered in Cairo, with branches established by a decision of the President of the Republic based on the Minister’s proposal. The Minister heads the university’s Supreme Council, which includes the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, the heads of its bodies and departments, the university’s president, the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Universities, and only four professors from Egyptian universities nominated by the Supreme Council of Universities, according to the text of the law.
By his own decisions, the Minister appoints the university’s president and determines the term of the position (Article 15), its Secretary-General (Article 18), and the deans of faculties and directors of research centers (Article 19), and forms the university council (Article 11). He determines the categories of students in each faculty (Article 4), decides on the establishment of research centers or the annexation of military centers to the university (Article 5), exempts whomever he wishes among civilian division students from the mandatory boarding system (Article 6), and sets the monetary fee for student activities at no more than 10% of tuition (Article 24). The internal bylaws determine which decisions of the Supreme Council and the university council must be submitted to him for approval (Article 14). That is, the law grants the Defense Minister eleven direct powers over the university, by Zawia3’s count.
Article 23 permits students of both divisions to study courses “of a shared nature” together, and Article 26 permits transferring civilian division students to equivalent civilian faculties. Articles 27 through 35 subject military division students to the disciplinary rules of the Military Academy Law, and allow the university council to dismiss them and determine the cases in which a dismissed student may complete his studies in the civilian division, while regulating a separate disciplinary council for civilians. Articles 36 through 39 regulate mandatory training and the Minister’s authority to determine its location, and the appointment of military division graduates at the rank of their counterparts from the Military College.
A Copy of the Military Academy Law
The government says Kayan is an independent civilian university, and El-Gazzar said during the discussions that the special committee rejected invoking the Military Academy’s system and applying it to its students. But comparing the law to Egyptian Military Academy Law No. 149 of 2022 reveals a match in structure and powers: Article One in both laws makes the entity subordinate to the Defense Minister and permits the establishment of branches by a presidential decision based on his proposal, and the Supreme Council in both cases includes professors from civilian universities, five in the Academy and four in Kayan. The cap on student activity fees at 10% of tuition is identical in both laws.
The deleted article itself has its origin in Article 40 of the Academy Law, which permits the Defense Minister to decide financial or in-kind bonuses and incentives for its students “not exceeding the starting salary” of the rank that graduates receive. The fundamental difference runs in the opposite direction: Article 27 of the Academy Law stipulates that the state bears the costs of students’ education, training, clothing, food, medical treatment, housing, and transportation, while a Kayan student bears the costs of study and boarding if he does not complete it at any stage.
Who Pays?
Rifaat Fayad, editor-in-chief of “Akhbar El Youm” and an education expert, believes that Kayan is neither governmental, private, nor a private non-profit university, and that it finances itself from its own revenues “and nothing is drawn from the state budget,” citing Harvard University, whose budget approaches the budgets of some countries, as an example. But Article 20 of the law lists the first source of the university’s funding as “the amounts allocated to it within the state’s general budget,” then payment for its services to others, loans, donations, gifts, and grants, and Article 21 stipulates that it shall have a special budget “following the pattern of the state’s public service bodies,” according to Veto.
Kayan comes amid a governmental expansion in non-free universities. The number of private non-profit universities has reached 32, compared to 28 government, 37 private, and 12 technological universities, according to the Ministry of Higher Education, as cited by El Youm El Sabea. Fayad says the state has, over the past eight years, borne the cost of establishing these universities instead of relying on civil society donations, and last June the government signed a protocol settling the financing of the establishment of 11 private non-profit universities worth 48.5 billion Egyptian pounds (about $863 million) over three years.
Neither the university nor the Ministry of Higher Education has officially announced its tuition fees. News websites are circulating figures that are not attributed to any official source: from 150,000 to 165,000 Egyptian pounds for human medicine (about $2,670 to $2,940), from 120,000 to 145,000 pounds ($2,152.85 to $2,601.36) for dentistry, from 80,000 to 110,000 pounds ($1,435.24 to $1,973.29) for physical therapy and pharmacy, from 65,000 to 80,000 pounds ($1,166.15 to $1,435.24) for engineering, and from 55,000 to 80,000 pounds ($986.72 to $1,435.24) for computers and artificial intelligence, at an exchange rate of about 56.2 pounds to the dollar in late October. Zawia3 contacted Adel Abdel Ghaffar, spokesperson for the Ministry of Higher Education, to verify these figures, but he did not respond.
Mohamed Kamal, assistant professor at Cairo University, tells Zawia3 that Kayan resembles private universities whose tuition has exceeded 400,000 pounds ($7,176.18), and criticizes the absence of disclosure about universities’ revenues and expenditures: “There is no complete and transparent announcement about universities, their sources of funding, and their expenditures in detail, and transparency is needed in all universities, whether government, private, or private non-profit, so that we know whether the financial loss is offset by another gain.” He considers the bonuses granted by the Universities Organization Law to top-performing students, between 80 and 120 pounds ($1.44 to $2.15) annually, “shameful” since the law was issued, and demands they be raised by one thousand percent: “It is not right for an outstanding student to be rewarded with eighty pounds.” As for what Military Academy students actually receive in bonuses, this has not been officially announced.
What Does the University Offer?
The university was established, according to what has been announced about it, based on presidential directives to prepare personnel “with the latest advances in science,” with an educational system “rivaling world universities.” Kayan includes faculties of human medicine, dentistry, physical therapy, pharmacy, engineering, and computers and artificial intelligence, and requires that applicants hold a general or Azhari secondary certificate or its equivalent in the scientific track, be no older than 21, be Egyptian from Egyptian parents and grandparents who hold no other nationality, and be medically, physically, and psychologically fit, according to the admission announcement. The minimum admission threshold starts at 90% for medicine, 89% for dentistry, 88% for physical therapy, 87% for pharmacy, 85% for engineering, and 80% for computers, and study in engineering and computers lasts four years under the credit-hour system. The university announces that it includes “the largest medical simulation center in the Middle East,” and early clinical training in teaching hospitals.
Mohamed Kamal believes that the university’s focus on medicine, engineering, and computers is an extension of the experience of the Armed Forces College of Medicine, which was established by Law No. 74 of 2013 and relied on professors seconded from Cairo and Ain Shams Universities. The new law transfers that college’s affiliation to Kayan with all its assets, teaching staff, and workers, and repeals its law, while its current students retain their legal and financial standing, including their monthly bonuses, according to El Youm El Sabea. That is, current military students retain the bonus of which those who will join after them have been deprived.
During the October 12 session, MP Atef Maghawry demanded changing the university’s name “because of its association with the name of an entity hostile to Egypt,” to which Major General Khaled Shehdy, Assistant Defense Minister for Legal Affairs, responded by insisting on keeping the name, saying: “We object to linking the name Kayan to any other connotations,” and that the name is taken from “Kayan” city in the New Administrative Capital, where the university is located, and that it “combines the authenticity of the Arabic language with the modernity of contemporary education,” according to Masrawy. The name remained unchanged.
From the Economy to the University
In a study published by the Carnegie Middle East Center in 2022 titled “Retain, Restructure, or Divest: Policy Options for Egypt’s Military Economy,” researchers observed a “dramatic” expansion of the military since July 2013 into housing, infrastructure, industrial zones, capital goods, media, and agriculture, its control over vast areas of land, and its participation in directing policy in sectors including telecommunications, digital transformation, and automotive manufacturing.
This expansion extended into education, as Assafir Al-Arabi observed in 2022: the National Service Projects Organization oversaw the supply of school meals and the kitchens of Cairo University’s student housing, and the Engineering Authority built the Japanese schools, 257 model schools in 18 governorates in 2016, 225 schools including 98 in Upper Egypt, and 100 schools in 17 governorates with Emirati funding, alongside the military-owned Badr Language Schools at a cost of 90 million pounds ($1,614,639.40) on 30 feddans, the buildings of Zewail University in 2018 at a cost of 966 million pounds ($17,330,462.86), and the Applied Technology School affiliated with the Ministry of Military Production in 2019. Then came the Military Academy Law in 2022, then military colleges teaching civilian specializations in 2026, then Kayan.
There is no official figure for the size of this economy. But Zawia3 reported in 2023 what President El Sisi said in December 2016, that the military’s activity represents between 1.5% and 2% of GDP, adding “I wish” in response to those who estimate it at twenty or fifty percent, while external estimates range between 10% and 40%. Yezid Sayigh, a researcher at the Carnegie Center, believes that the official figures measure only the goods and services produced by military bodies, not the military’s role as a general contractor, a distributor of state contracts, and an owner of land. The Armed Forces budget is entered as a single figure in the general budget under Article 203 of the Constitution, so neither parliament nor the Central Auditing Organization knows its details. The National Service Projects Organization alone controls 32 companies, a third of which were established after 2015, according to the Financial Times. In January 2023, the government pledged to the International Monetary Fund to subject military companies to the state ownership policy, raise their tax exemptions, and publish their semi-annual accounts.
Another Zawia3 investigation in 2025 revealed this expansion’s impact on the private sector: military companies are exempt from taxes and customs, operate with conscripts, and obtain projects through direct assignment. A contractor, speaking under a pseudonym, says the Engineering Authority executes about 90% of projects, and another contractor estimates that about 500 out of a thousand contracting companies have stopped operating. In a research article published by the journal “Current History,” the author held that Egyptian universities were affected by the return of military rule after 2011, and that the expansion of for-profit higher education calls into question the traditional model of the government university whose enrollment the state guarantees.
In contrast, Rifaat Fayad believes the university is the fruit of “academic cooperation” between the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Higher Education, teaching the usual government curricula with a focus on the applied side, and that its affiliation with the Armed Forces resembles, in principle, other universities’ affiliation with the Ministry of Higher Education, and that it may relieve the state of part of the burden of establishing universities. Mohamed Kamal agrees with him that the state wants to repeat the experience of the Military College of Medicine, which he says graduated officer-physicians “at the highest level.”
The law takes effect in the 2026/2027 academic year. As of the publication of this report, neither the university, the Ministry of Defense, nor the Ministry of Higher Education has announced the targeted number of students, the cost of establishing the university and its funding sources, or its official tuition fees.
