Egypt's Morsy is falling behind on ‘100-day plan’

After 85 days in office, Egyptian leader has fulfilled only four pre-election pledges, according to "Morsi Meter."

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
Mohamed Morsy supporters in Tahrir 390 (photo credit: Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters)
Mohamed Morsy supporters in Tahrir 390
(photo credit: Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters)
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.