It is more likely than not that Al Sissi will be able to pull together the Egyptian “State” structure after the period of upheaval that almost collapsed state institutions. Some Egyptians question the wisdom of keeping the rotten state structure together to start with, but any other option would have raised catastrophic scenarios for Egypt and the Middle East.
Reforming this structure must indeed be on top of Al Sissi priorities. But the Egyptian President was faced from day one with a mission impossible: a collapsing economy, chaos, domestic and foreign terrorism, and a relentless campaign by the deposed Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the military regime and reinstate Morsi.
While Al Sissi succeeded, relatively, in stabilizing the situation, he is still faced with enormous challenges, some of them coming from within his own camp. He recently fired his chief of the General Intelligence Service, Mohammed Farid Al Tuhami, and replaced him with his deputy, General Khaled Fawzi. The official story circulated by the Service was that the decision came about because of health reasons, but there have been speculations in Cairo about the real reason for Al Tuhami’s abrupt dismissal.
Some pointed to the recently leaked tapes of sensitive conversations inside the office of Al Sissi’s Chief of Staff. The conversations were related to changing the nature of the building where Morsi was kept in custody after he was arrested in the presidential palace and putting him under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior instead of the Army as the law requires. The conversations themselves sound worthless, as it was indeed irrelevant where Morsi was kept in custody. Rather, protecting his life was extremely important at that juncture. But the fact that someone planted a microphone in the office of the President’s chief of staff was indicative of a bigger issue.
The discontent with Al Tuhami, however, is actually deeper than that. There have been continuous flows of information, collected by the Agency itself, that the director has been meeting with some old time, old regime friends of his to “explain” how they can conduct their public discourse and enhance their relative weight under the new regime.
Al Tuhami rejected many views, inside his service, that he should slow down the return of figures perceived by the population to be loyal Mubarak cronies. He refused to provide information collected by the service to incriminate notoriously corrupt officials in the Mubarak clique. He is said to have discussed with Saudi officials certain issues that he should not have revealed.
In any case, if Al Tuhami’s departure were merely a change of personnel it would not mount to something important in itself. If it is indeed the beginning of a general plan to overhaul the state machine, it should be more than welcomed.
Al Tuhami was too cozy with Mubarak’s circles to envision that needed overhaul. He was in fact too traditional to even see the need for change. The Egyptian General Intelligence Service has sufficient data on the corruption of figures in the highest echelon of the public service and their foreign bank accounts and shady deals with private businesses. If indeed it is time to clean the mess of the bureaucracy in Egypt, this information can come in handy.
Yet, the more urgent need is to formulate a plan to influence how the population perceive the regime and to raise the public understanding of the sensitivity of this phase in the country’s history and magnitude of the real problems it is facing. It is not helpful to the stability of Egypt to view the current regime as an extension of the Mubarak era or to delay the needed reform in bureaucracy, the advertising agencies called media and the police force. These are the “points of touch” that “actualize” the State in the view of the population.
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