With less than three weeks to go before his first 100 days in office are up,
Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsy has only fulfilled four out of the 64 major
pre-election pledges he vowed to achieve within this time, an Egyptian
monitoring website showed on Thursday.
Under his 100-day plan, Morsy
promised to improve Egyptians’ lives by solving 64 key problems in five main
areas: security, traffic, sanitary conditions, bread shortages and fuel
shortages.
The pledges are based on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Nahda
(Renaissance) Project, which aims to rebuild Egyptian society from the ground
up.
The Morsi Meter monitoring site, created by activists to keep tabs on
the president’s pledges, shows that Morsy has succeeded in implementing a system
of performance-related incentives for police officers.
He has also put a
scheme in place to remove objects blocking the roads, slapped penalties on fuel
smugglers and raised awareness of littering, including via a media campaign and
speeches during Friday prayers.
While Morsy has started work on 22 of his
remaining pledges, the overwhelming majority have not been addressed, the site
says.
Morsy has yet to fully achieve any of the 13 promises he made
regarding bread shortages, which include improving supply by subsidizing Egypt’s
large collective bakeries, providing incentives for “model” bakeries, and
facilitating the transition to using natural gas in bakeries.
Shortages
of subsidized bread, which have been a problem for years, peaking during the
last years of Mubarak’s term, remain a pressing issue. During last month’s Eid
festival, Egypt’s Arabic- language al-Ahram website reported that
poverty-stricken people in the country’s Kafr el-Sheikh governorate, were left
hungry after bakeries ran out of subsidized bread.
As of Thursday, the
president has begun to work on some of his bread pledges, according to Morsi
Meter, including introducing harsher penalties for bakeries producing
substandard bread.
Also as part of Morsy’s 100-day bread plan, the
governor of Alexandria agreed to implement a new project to distribute bread to
150,000 families in the city, Egypt’s Arabic-language Shorouk News reported this
week.
Regarding public security, which has eroded since the popular
uprisings of the Egyptian revolution, Morsy has yet to tackle the major issues
he promised to solve.
The president pledged campaigns to restore
confidence in the police force, and encourage cooperation between police and
civil committees to deal with illegal activities in neighborhoods, police
stations and municipalities.
Morsy has, in fact, begun to tackle six
security-related pledges, including installing surveillance cameras to monitor
crime, and maintaining street presence via stationary and mobile police
patrols.
As far as Morsy’s 20 traffic pledges are concerned, the
president has fulfilled only one, with another two in progress.
Arabic
newspaper al-Ahram reported this week that there is an “unprecedented state of
traffic chaos” in Egypt, especially in Cairo, one of the world’s most congested
cities.
The al-Ahram report also noted that Egypt is also ranked by WHO
as among the 10 highest in the world for road traffic fatalities, with a rate of
42 deaths per 100,000.
Morsy is apparently faring better on his
sanitation pledges, according to the Morsi Meter, with one pledge fulfilled and
the remaining seven in progress. However, Morsy’s “clean homeland” campaign has
its critics, not least the country’s Zabbaleen – Cairo’s Coptic Christian
informal garbage collectors, who have dismissed the scheme as political
propaganda.
Zabbaleen naqib (chief) Shahat al- Muqadas told el-Fagr
newspaper this week that so far the president’s 100- day “clean homeland” scheme
has offered only temporary solutions to a wide scale problem.
Cairo
disposes of around 17,000 tons of garbage daily, of which the Zabbaleen collects
8,000 tons. International companies collect 3,000 tons leaving around 6,000 tons
of garbage on the streets every day.
Al-Muqadas said that local Cairo
garbage workers have had problems with the international contractors, including
the Spanish company FCC, because of very low pay that makes it difficult for
them to scrape a living.
Another problem for Cairo is that while the
Zabbaleen recycles up to 80 percent of the trash it collects, the foreign
contractors only recycle around 20%.
In July, Morsy’s spokesman Yasser
Ali said the president planned to work on a long-term solution to collect
garbage and transfer it to landfill sites and recycling plants, but details of
that plan have not yet emerged.
“Will the president find a clear plan and
a radical solution to the spread of garbage during the remaining days [of his
100-day plan], or will the status quo prevail”? el-Fagr asked.
Morsy’s
narrow victory over his rival, former general Ahmed Shafiq, was a major victory
for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement, whose Freedom and Justice Party
Morsy represents.