Judging by the headlines this week, Dina Ezzat finds little reason to believe the new government is at the helm or that the opposition parties offer any alternative It must have been a hard first three weeks for the new government. Day in and day out, the dailies and weeklies appearing in Cairo reflecting an image of distress and decay. The bad news might have been prominently featured on the banners and across the front pages of the opposition and independent press but they were still there in the generally qualified semi-official papers, albeit on the inside pages rather than the front. Healthcare, staple supplies, social security and education were all bad news subjects. Among the week's headlines across the press were: "Government planning to cut down subsidies on basic food staples"; "Government hospitals going under: government report highlights grave mistakes"; "Serious shortage of basic medicines expected to aggravate"; "New case of HIV/AIDS diagnosed by sheer coincidence"; "Prominent member of the ruling National Democratic Party accused of selling expired kidney dialysis equipment to government-owned dialysis centres"; "Retirement funds used to cover up for national budget deficits"; and "Over LE1 million embezzlement from funds allocated to provide university students with inexpensive personal computers". To judge by the news and opinions offered across a maze of dailies and weeklies on the newsstands in Cairo every morning, the gloomy picture was not just related to poor public services. Worse was offered in relation to the efforts of the government to privatise some of the state-owned banks with serious question marks being raised about the vested interest of some cabinet members in pushing and facilitating some deals. Question marks were also raised in relation to the privatisation of big state-owned companies that the press warned is being sold to Israeli businessmen among others. Moreover, the reader was offered conflicting reports on an incident concerning Swiss intervention in the Foreign Ministry's system of exchanging information with its missions overseas. Readers learnt that the nation's architectural heritage -- or the little left of it in view of years of plunder -- was again put at risk after the constitutional court -- this time not the government -- knocked down a 1998 decree by the prime minister preventing the demolition of buildings of unique architectural style. Egypt's hopes for reaching a free trade agreement with the United States were shattered and the administration of the International Cairo Book Fair was in conflict with Egyptian publishers as the annual cultural event was just starting. The most troubling part, however, was that the avenues for alternatives were just as bleak. The key opposition parties, especially the Wafd, were also in painfully bad shape. News of inter-Wafd conflict and the bitter dispute between its toppled (or not necessarily so) president Noaman Gomaa and his vice-president Mahmoud Abaza overshadowed press attention with the dispute in Kuwait between the expected heir to the thrown, the long-ill and almost crippled Crown Prince Sheikh Saad and the not so ill but still old and unwell Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah. As Hassan Nafaa, prominent political scientist, noted in his regular article in the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm on Sunday, the crisis within Al-Wafd is similar to the crisis of almost every other opposition party in Egypt: it is suffering serious structural problems. "We know very well that the state, especially its security apparatus, has deliberately induced some structural splits within some opposition parties, starting with the now defunct Labour Party and up to the Ghad Party, to render them weak and unable to compete with the ruling NDP," Nafaa argued. "In the case of the Wafd, however, there are enough indicators that the regime is simply not responsible for the current state of decay that it suffers from." The Wafd, according to Nafaa, is suffering the results of years of mistakes, family control and iron-fist rule. As such, he argued that the problem would not be simply solved with an agreement between Gomaa and Abaza. "What the Wafd needs is a new spirit that can turn the party into a living body that is capable of being the nucleus of liberal transformation in Egypt." This needs a revival, argued Makram Mohamed Ahmed in his weekly column in Akhbar Al-Youm, something which is needed by all opposition political parties including the left-wing Tagammu and Nasserist parties. "It might well be true that these legitimate opposition parties were not offered the right atmosphere required for the healthy performance of opposition, but it is also true that the humble performance of these parties has undermined their credibility and their popularity... to the extent that they failed to catch the momentum of the political mood on the street... allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to make gains at the expense of these legitimate parties during the recent legislative elections and may be even at the expense of Egypt's democratic future."
