Egypt's Continuing Revolution: Month 13, Week 4, Day 6.

Having been unable to attract the number of protesters needed to achieve their aim of blocking roads and marching on multiple Embassies on Friday's (19/7/13) Second Crossing day of protest the Muslim Brotherhood now seem intent of using the limited of supporters they do have to visit all their targets over a week of protest. So at around midday local time today a group of Brotherhood supporters blocked the main Cairo to Alexandria road. After around seven hours they were peacefully removed by the military/police.

The Brotherhood's main objective for the day though seemed to be to reassert themselves as the government of Egypt and through that add legitimacy to their protest. The main part of this was to assemble the 140 or so Brotherhood members that Morsi appointed to the dissolved Shura Council at the Rabea al-Adaweya Mosque in Nasr city for what they termed and extraordinary session. No details of what was discussed at this totally illegitimate meeting of former council members have been made public. This was followed by a press conference by the Muslim Brotherhood founded and dominated Engineers Syndicate calling for the release and reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi. The main purpose of the press conference though was to give a platform to members of the Morsi family including son Osama Morsi and daughter Shaimaa Morsi. They used that platform to accuse Egypt's military of kidnapping their father and announce that they are taking legal steps both within Egypt and internationally to secure his release and reinstatement. Although they didn't announce specifically what those legal measures are I think they are unlikely to work because Mohamed Morsi is quite reasonably being detained to prevent him inciting violence. The proof that he will incite violence is the Brotherhood's continuing demonstrations and their refusal to accept that he is no longer the President of Egypt. Therefore he will not be released until the Brotherhood end their demonstrations and accept the democratic process.

After the press conference a group of Brotherhood protesters attempted to march on the US Embassy in Cairo. The route they chose took them very close to Tahrir Square in what seems a clear attempt to provoke and intimidate the revolutionaries. Sadly the revolutionaries appear to have risen to this provocation leading to clashes involving stones being thrown and shotguns being fired. The police fired tear gas in an effort to separate the two groups but so far one person has been killed by bird shot fired by the protesters and 26 people have been injured.

I don't want to get too distracted by the Brotherhoods demonstrations and the violence they have caused though because I think it is long past time for me to comment more fully on Egypt's new interim government of national unity. I of course started talking about this focusing on the interim Prime Minister, the interim First Deputy Prime Minister and the two interim Deputy Prime Ministers here; http://watchitdie.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/egypts-continuing-revolution-month-13_18.html

Obviously it will take far too long for me to comment on every appointment individually and a lot of them are simply qualified people quietly getting on with their jobs. For example you have Abdel-Aziz Fadel as the Minister for Civil Aviation. Having joined the Egyptian Air Force in 1972 as an aircraft maintenance engineer Fadel went on to get a bachelors degree in aeronautical engineering and rose to the position of vice-president of safety and quality before moving into the civilian sector with Egypt Air. Therefore he is clearly knowledgeable in all aspects of aircraft design and operation and is more than qualified to cope with the technical aspects of things like the Boeing 777 crash in San Francisco and the ongoing 787 Dreamliner saga. His long military service may come as a worry to some who will claim it as evidence of a military takeover. However I think it is much more benign merely reflecting the fact that under Mubarak the military - especially the Air Force - were given priority in terms of education and funding so if you want to look for the most educated and talented people in Egypt today you really have to look towards people who served in the military.

As I said in my previous post on the subject a major theme of the new interim cabinet has been the reversal of Morsi era appointments with Asharf El-Araby returning to Planning and Atef Helmy returning to Communication and Information Technology. Therefore Ahmed Imam at Electricity, Hisham Zaazou at Tourism, Mohamed Ibrahim at Interior and Reda Hafez at Military Production stand out simply by having bucked that trend. However they all seem to achieved this by being apolitical ministers rather than Morsi cronies. For example Air Marshall Hafez is a long standing military man while the resignation of Zaazou over Morsi's appointment to the Governorship of Luxor helped bring about the June 30th revolution.

Another major theme of the interim government has been the conscious effort to make sure women are included. So we have Dorreya Sharaf El-Din at Information. Sharaf El-Din has worked extensively behind the scenes at the Egyptian Television and Radio Union and has appeared on-screen on both the state broadcaster and on the private Dream channel. She has also served as junior minister in the Information Ministry heading up the satellite channels division. As a result Sharaf El-Din knows the industry inside and out including the censorship dirty tricks that Mubarak used to employ and the negative effect they had on broadcasters. There is also Laila Rashed Iskandar at Environment and Maha El-Rabat at Health. One woman who I'm disappointed not to see in the interim government is Ines Abdel-Dayem who was offered the position of Minister of Culture but refused. This is unfortunate because while it seems insignificant Culture and cultural exchanges have long been one of the important behind the scenes ways that government communicate with each other. Being a classical flutist who trained in France and a former head of the Cairo Opera House Adbel-Dayem strikes as being more than qualified to deal with whatever things like Rihanna's Diamonds World Tour could throw at her. Therefore I hope she will be on hand to assist Mohamed Saber Arab as the history professor takes on the role.

Another Ministry that seems insignificant but is actually very important on the diplomatic level is the Ministry of Antiquities. For example Egypt's cultural heritage is world famous and a major tourist attraction. Also today's discovery of a Sphinx belonging to Mycerinus in northern Israel seems much like an attempt to open a discussion between Israel and Egypt in the wake of Morsi's ouster. Being a professor of antiquities and a former minister of antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim seems well qualified for the role although he has been severely criticised by fellow archaeologists and Egyptologists including many of his own employees. However the criticism from his employees seems to stem mainly from his abilities as a personnel manager rather then from his knowledge of the subject. This is of course something civil servants at the ministry and other members of the cabinet can help him with. The criticism from other archaeologists seems to stem mainly from his ministry's failure to prevent the looting and destruction of artefact's following the fall of Mubarak. Rather than being a particular fault of the minister this seems to be more a part of the general collapse of law and order in the post-Mubarak period and something he should co-ordinate closely with his namesake at the Interior Ministry to resolve.

The biggest spilt within the interim government reflects the biggest choice that Egypt faces at the moment - whether to continue with the outdated and failing centrally controlled economic model of the Mubarak era including subsidies for food and fuel or to reform to embrace the free market economic model recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As the current economic model is so clearly failing it is hard to find any member of the interim government who will endorse it publicly. However I am concerned by any member who has extensive experience serving under the Mubarak government such as Adel Labib at Local Development, Ayman Abu-Hadid at Agriculture and Sherif Ismail at Petroleum. This is not because of anything that they've specifically said or done on the issue it's just that having been involved in one way or working for so long they may find it difficult to adapt to a new way of doing things. I am also slightly concerned about government members who are either serving or former members of the military and Reda Hafez at Military Production in particular because under Mubarak the military were heavily involved in the economy and they may be resistant to giving up that privileged position. The only minister who has gone on the record to express a desire to keep the economy as it is has been Osma Selah the minister for Investment who has stated that he is confident that foreign investment will return to Egypt once the political situation has settled. This to me indicates that he doesn't quite understand the underlying economic problems and the urgent need for reform.

There is though a much larger faction within the government that understands the need for reform led by the interim Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi who is an economist by training and the Finance Minister Ahmed Galal who is not only an economist who spent 18 years working for the World Bank but is an expert on privatisation and the regulation of markets and monopolies. They seem supported by the Minister for Planning and International Co-operation Ziad Bahaa El-Din who worked under Mubarak to set-up free trade zones, Ashraf El-Araby the Minister for Planning who has worked extensively negotiating with the IMF and Ahmed El-Borai the Minister for Social Solidarity who helped get Egypt off the International Labour Organisations short-term blacklist by arguing that Egyptian workers should be allowed to set up independent rather than state run trade unions. They should also be able to count on support from Laila Iskandar the Minister for the Environment and Kamal Abu-Eita the Minister for Manpower. Although Iskandar's background is in social enterprises she represents the sort of independent entrepreneurship that Egypt needs to embrace if it is to succeed economically. As the President of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions Abu-Eita embodies the independent trade union movement that El-Borai espouses and Egypt needs to embrace in order for both economic success and for democracy to flourish as I discussed in my objections to Article 53 of the constitution.

This conflict over the economic path that Egypt will take means that the man with the toughest job in the new government is Mohamed Abu Sahdi. As the Minister for Supply it is Abu Sahdi who will be responsible for distributing subsidised food and fuel. If the rest of the government decide to do away with or scale back food and fuel subsidies it will be Abu Sahdi who has to implement the plan and justify it to the public. Fortunately Abu Sahdi is a former police general so should be well equipped to deal with any protests that follow cuts to subsidies and despite what some members of the government suggest Egypt will need to cut subsidies because the aid money from the Gulf states won't last for ever. The general economic consensus is that the fuel subsidy will have to be scrapped or at least significantly restricted. That is because it is the difference between what fuel costs on the open market and what Egyptian consumers are paying that is absolutely destroying Egypt's foreign currency reserves and the fuel subsidy disproportionally helps the middle classes who can afford to pay the market rate for fuel.

(Originally Posted) 20:55 on 22/7/13.