Yes, Egypt seems to be scary! I'Ve heard stories from German expat electricians and they aren't exactly happy with the work of their local colleagues! You don't even have to go that far though. From what I've seen, distribution boards with exposed terminals on MCBs, main switches and main fuses seem to be perfectly acceptable in Russia. The typical block of flats has a metal box with all the meters for each floor, a double-pole main switch for each flat and three MCBs per flat, two in very old buildings. Typical modernisations replace the rotary main switch with exposed screw terminals with a double-pole MCB on a piece of DIN rail and a proper CU inside the flat. That's shoddy even by Eastern bloc standards! I wouldn't want to mess with the guts of a live Czechoslovakian meter cabinet either but under normal operating conditions they're perfectly safe.

That's what I'm talking about (two fools trying to work live on a burnt terminal block in a Czechoslovakian meter enclosure):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRE2vBoAWSs