Among Egyptians of all political stripes, there is a pervading conviction that talented and top-notch specialists who know their jobs well can help fix the nation’s myriad problems. The interim government installed by the military after the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist-dominated government has begun a flurry of appointments of so-called technocrats to key government posts.
It has appointed economist Hazem Beblawi as prime minister and named another noted economist, Ahmed Galal, as finance minister. It has begun assembling a constituent assembly that will be filled with experienced judges and legal experts. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief and Nobel laureate, has been sworn in as a vice-president for foreign affairs.
But the belief that a government of competent, cleverly-placed and politically neutral technocrats can solve problems as deeply entrenched as those Egypt faces is at best questionable and at worst fantasy.
“This is one of the myths in Egypt: that if you put the right people in the right place you will solve everything,” said Omar Ashour, lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Exeter.
Mr Ashour notes that Egypt’s first deposed president, Hosni Mubarak, also tried to appoint technocrats, who were promptly undermined by entrenched figures within the so-called deep state. “He had very high-caliber personnel in high positions but they were not calling the shots,” says Mr Ashour. “The people who were calling the shots were the military-security complex, usually generals who ended end up in police and military academies.”
As under the Muslim Brotherhood, the root of Egypt’s problems are more political than technical. Appointing the best and brightest hardly resolves the country’s fundamental problem: the lack of a broad political and social consensus to challenge vested interests and implement substantive reform.
Egypt’s problems are multiple and deep. Its highly politicised, allegedly corrupt and brutal security and judiciary figures manipulate public life from behind the scenes, vetoing reform efforts that hurt their vested interests or those of their allies. Its public education and health systems have all but collapsed. The critical agriculture sector still uses wasteful and unsustainable farming methods. Expensive fuel and food subsidies eat away at diminishing foreign currency reserves, while a lack of taxation and increased salaries widen the budget deficit.
The most gifted technocrats may be able to tinker with this or that government agency — for example by providing police with human rights training or dredging a canal or two. But even the most accomplished expert in his or her field, can achieve little when sitting atop a government bureaucracy filled with teachers who refuse to teach without bribes or doctors who collect public salaries while spending their time working in private clinics.
Mr Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood saw the challenge of reforming institutions as a struggle to replace holdovers from the previous regime with their own cronies, a quest which exacerbated the country’s polarisation and sabotaged any effort at reform. The current government, having sidelined the Islamists by partnering with the armed forces, now seems to believe it can avoid Mr Morsi’s mistakes by appointing apolitical technocrats like Mr Galal, a western-educated former World Bank official.
Leaving aside the question of how politically neutral these appointees are — many have social and political ties to the secular and liberal parties that openly colluded with the military to push for Mr Morsi’s ouster – by marginalising the Brotherhood, the interim authorities have fallen into the same trap as their predecessors.
In the two-and-a-half years since they rose up against former president Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians have never been as dangerously polarised as now and the chances of winning broad support for reforming institutions has never been so low. Incoming planning minister Ashraf al-Arab acknowledged as much on Monday when he said Egypt was too volatile now to implement subsidy reforms and tax increases needed to improve the country’s financial health and secure a loan deal with the International Monetary Fund.
“Any policies that remove some of the corrupt officials or that attempts to allocate spending in a different direction will upset some of the well-connected employees and will be vetoed,” says Mr Ashour. “This has been the story of Egypt of public bureaucracy reform since the 1970s.”
Source: The Financial Times
