El-sisi’s mandate; Egypt’s Quagmire

The Egyptians had embarked on a tumultuous uprising that toppled former army man -Hosni Mubarak ending his 32 locust years of kleptomania and draconian rule. But rather than getting a genuine democratically elected government they bargained for, they are now saddled with another army man in El-sisi who may also have embarked on another prolonged […]

The Egyptians had embarked on a tumultuous uprising that toppled former army man -Hosni Mubarak ending his 32 locust years of kleptomania and draconian rule. But rather than getting a genuine democratically elected government they bargained for, they are now saddled with another army man in El-sisi who may also have embarked on another prolonged rule for all we know. In 2011, the Egyptians, seeing what Tunisians had wrought by removing their sit- tight president Zine EL—Abidine Ben Ali, in a Muhammed Bouazizi inspired uprising, also thought they could replicate the same outcome.
But the result of the May 26th and 27th elections which foisted former strongman Abdel Fattah el-sisi on them have turned the 2011 uprising into still-born. For some time, all was going well with the uprising, old and ailing Mubarak and his stay- put henchmen lost power after they had attacked demonstrators at Tahrir square which became the venue of the protests while they lasted. Tahrir square had become some kind of shrine where protesters assembled in mammoth numbers to express their wish for replacing one- man rule with a representative government.
Had everything gone well, some perceptive democrat, some day, could have turned the place into a monument for the transformation of Egypt from a stultifying autocracy into a genuine democratic polity, to serve as a beacon for the Arab world to emulate. For now though it can only be said that Tahrir square provided only the grounds for the expression of Egyptians aspiration. So, the shooting to death of several Egyptians made Mubarak’s hold on power untenable and when he was subsequently carted off to hospital for his ailments, it effective ended his long 32 year rule.
With him out of the way, an interim government supervised Egypt’s first truly, genuinely open democratic elections that precluded no one at all. Along with associations and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Selafists-a radical Islamic group, there were all manner of other parties including secular ones with little religious inclinations, of all these groups the Muslim Brotherhood won one election after the other and became the most dominant party by dint of people’s preference in the emerging putative democracy order. In 2012, a year after the uprising began, Muhammaed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), in a second ballot was swept into power with a sizeable majority.  The MB is an old movement of some 100 years that has hankered after power in Egypt, an aspiration that pitted its members against succession of rulers. The movement had to go underground to survive, where it found relevance in serving the Egyptian people through provision of education, health and other social welfare programmes during its long hibernation in political limbo, and unapologetic of its espousal of Islam as a vehicle of state policy, it was to be expected that the movement would reap the dividend of its past efforts. At election time, the victory of its members became a foregone conclusion.   
Sadly, all the euphoria that greeted the emergence of an elected government at last in the most important Arab country turned into anguish when Abdel Fattah, goaded by a melange of anti-democratic forces that included the military, bad and disgruntled losers seized power. The latter included politically visible individuals like Muhammed el-Baradei and Amr Musa, who saw themselves as the natural heirs to the political throne.
All these renegades as a group ganged up against the Morsi government by engineering economic sabotage and demonstrations. Soon sharp economic downturn caused Egyptians to storm the Tahrir square again, this time calling for the downfall of Muhammed Morsi, barely a year of his coming to power. The anti-Morsi campaign reached a crescendo with the instigations of the oil rich monarchies of the Gulf States who had watched with trepidation that if Egypt pulled off its democratic aspiration they were done for. Hence, they bankrolled the military and egged it on to take back what had always belonged to it. The result was that Abdel Fattah el-sisi’s junta moved against a government that had hardly spent a year in its 4 year term thereby cutting short the infectious euphoria that had suffused Egypt. Meanwhile as soon as military kingpin el-sisi took power he brought back the discredited strong arm rule of yore, clamping Muhammed Morsi and just about everyone that dared to question his legitimacy in jail. In this the secularist parties and their members who joined in the anti -Morsi campaign were taught a lesson of their political lives as they were seized and throne into jail along with everyone else by el-sisi forces.
And so Egypt returned to the situation captured by WB Yeats’ poem that says nothing changes as the man on horse- back with the cudgel in his hand has merely been replaced by another man with the same cudgel but the whipping of the people goes on.
Granted, Morsi did not start well, he committed tactical and strategic blunders by insisting on implementing wholesale MB policies knowing full well that the entrenched groups still had their members in place in government and would resist any onslaught on their positions and privileges. Morsi should have proceeded in a more nuanced manner, mindful of the sensitivities of those who had lost power by taking care to cajole and palliate their bruised egos while at the same time making sure the new democratic ramparts are strengthened and concretised. By embarking on a moral and ethical high horse so early in his tenure, he frightened his enemies, who in turn, moved quickly against him before they were jailed. Still, it must be said nothing justified el-sisi’s coup which he has exploited to foist himself on Egypt.
The election that brought him to power was plagued by low turnout with just about only 40% of the 54 million of eligible voters voting, which compared less favourably with the 52% of the eligible voters that brought Morsi to power in 2012. That he would win in the May elections was never in doubt as he made sure anyone who could beat him had been clamped into jail. Hamdeen Sabahi who stood against him may have been a long standing politician but he stood no chance. Yet the outcome of the elections which gave el-sisi over 90% of the vote cast must not be taken as a right to proceed as his autocratic predecessors had done, especially embarking on interminable rule. If the 2011 uprising means anything at all, it is that Egyptians expressed their yearnings for popular participation in the way they are governed.
And a ruler deserving of his position must respect that aspiration.
At 59, el-sisi is relatively young to be tempted to follow in Mubarak’s disgraceful footsteps and wish to grow old at the helms, which he could re-enact with the help of the army. The risk posed by this is that Egypt would gradually dissolve into social and political strife, now incipient in the killings and bombings going on, that could be worse than what is happening in Syria.
Or be made to suffer Mubarak’s fate.