British administrators genuinely believed in freeing Egypt from overgovernment.

Evidence

No more devout believers in the ideas of self-help could have been found in this period than the British administrators in Egypt. The British considered their task to be to relieve Egypt of the evil of overgovernment, so that the productive capacity of the Egyptian peasant could be realised to the full. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 353

Categorization

• CANDY: A delicious irony: the colonizers arrived to ‘relieve’ the colonized of overgovernment while themselves administering the country — a one-line cocktail party observation.