After the collapse of Mubarak's regime and his National Democratic Party, in January 2011, there was a wave of firings of party affiliates from public administration institutions with cases filed against many in Egyptian courts on corruption and illicit gains charges. Senior positions in public administration were taken by Muslim Brotherhood elites, convinced of their reformatory mission and the need to serve society by taking up positions in public institutions. However, they did not have prior experience in administration, nor relevant qualifications. The same story has been repeated after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. Another wave of firings of senior government officials, many members in the Muslim Brotherhood or its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, was launched. The logic behind the two waves was to stop the politicisation of public administration and to free the government and its resources from the control of politicians and nepotistic practices exercised by the two parties concerned. These two similar scenes raise the issue of the relationship between politics and public administration in Egypt. This issue first emerged in public administration and the political sciences in the late-18th century. The core of the debate is the politics/administration dichotomy and administrative neutrality. A considerable body of literature calls for a separation between politics and public administration. According to this literature, politicians are responsible for framing and responding to value-laden questions, and making policies, while public administrators are charged with implementing those policies. Public administration should be kept as a self-contained world, with values, rules and methods divorced from politics. Administrative neutrality requires public managers to stay out of politics, maintain a neutral stand on issues that divide the community, be non-partisan, and void of any particular policy agenda. Public administration neutrality is the ability to do the work of government expertly, and to do it according to explicit, objective standards, rather than personal or party or other obligations and loyalties. However, these convincing arguments cannot deny that public administrators are powerful players in the policy process, because they participate in critical decisions. The fact that laws, in general, are not specific and clearly bounded provides public administrators with much discretion to decide which courses of action to take. They become policymakers as much as policy implementers. The political nature of public administration, whether it is based on the role of the public administrator in policymaking, or on the foundation of guaranteeing the loyalty of the public administrator to the regime in power, makes senior public administration positions powerful and desirable. In Egypt, politics is over-expanded, endangering the development of autonomous public administration. Ruling political parties aim to preserve supervision over public administration in order to subordinate it to narrow political interests. As a result, official appointments have their source in political patronage instead of professional qualifications. Moreover, promoted officials serve the interests of their patrons, even if these are opposed to the public interest. This situation leads to the appointment of family members or colleagues, or those giving favours or bribes. The fabric of the political system in Egypt makes ministers, instead of fulfilling political roles, engaged in administrative actions. They concentrate on their branches and there is a lack of coordination on common policy to be conducted by the government. This situation puts them under pressure to recruit loyal and highly educated advisors in their offices to manage sectors of their ministries and to guide the whole administrative body. Although employment in public administration of contract personnel, who are directly responsible to the minister, can lead to an increase in administrative performance, it can also increase its politicisation. The selection of these advisors is subject to political considerations more than professional ones. Experts and practitioners perceived this approach as creating a parallel system to the formal public administration one. Senior bureaucrats in the government, mainly the first undersecretary and undersecretary, often feel marginalised as they are working under advisors to the minister rather than the minister himself, in violation of their job descriptions. In Western European countries, which have long and uninterrupted democratic traditions, mechanisms guaranteeing the autonomy of public administration and stable and professional civil service structures were gradually formed. The formation of an efficient and politically neutral civil service in Egypt, following more than six decades in which administration was subordinated to one dominating political party, suggests the adoption of a solution based on separating politics from public administration to a large extent. However, this solution also assumes that public administration should be located in the organisational structure below the political sphere. To allow for such a solution, many steps should be taken. First, the hierarchical structure of public administration in Egypt should be stopped at the level of head of sector, which follows the general manager level. Public administration should be a closed system in which all jobs are permanent. Public administration or bureaucracy should be a career. Promotion in public administration should be based on merit systems and capacity building through education and training. Second, the positions of first undersecretary and undersecretary in ministries and the position of general secretary in local administration should be defined as political, and as political, officially appointees would automatically hand in their resignations with the collapse of a government, although the new government would not have to accept their resignations. The holders of these positions should have specific technical and professional competences although the positions are political. The holders may also be asked to complete specific educational programmes. If any of the public administration senior staff needs to serve in any of these political positions, he/she should not be allowed to return to the public administration career again. Third, since the ultimate objective of the proposed solutions, in addition to building a neutral public administration, is to enhance the performance of the government, there is a need to build a professional academy of public administration like exist in most European countries. Although this idea appeared in Egypt in the 1970s, and it was the reason behind the establishment of Sadat Academy of Administrative Science, it has yet to be fully harnessed or trained cadre for administration produced. Fourth, obligations to ensure a professional, diligent, impartial and politically neutral public administration should be set in the new constitution of Egypt. Then a law for public administration autonomy should be written and enacted. Creating neutral public administration in Egypt and working to eliminate political influence over it is the core task of building a democratic state. Separating politics and public administration should not be perceived as a dream. The dream is to talk about a democratic state in Egypt without reshaping dramatically the relationship between politics and public administration.
The writer teaches in the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University.
