Prime Minister Atef Ebeid's government found itself being pummelled in parliament again this week, Gamal Essam El-Din reports The government found itself being called to account in parliament this week for both the tragic collapse of a multi-storey residential building in Nasr City, as well as the nation's economic woes in general. The People's Assembly has lately been the scene of increasingly vociferous opposition to Prime Minister Atef Ebeid's government; this week, it implored the government not to circumvent the assembly's supervisory role. According to parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour, a good government is always ready to answer parliament's questions, and exonerate itself of the opposition's charges. During a stormy session on Monday, Muslim Brotherhood MP Mohamed Mursi accused Ebeid's government of negligence and irresponsibility. In his confrontational interpellation (a question that must be answered by the cabinet ministers at whom it is directed), Mursi used the tragic collapse of the Nasr City building to launch a scathing attack on the government. Just two years ago, he said, a third- class train bound for Upper Egypt just a few days before the Eid Al-Adha holiday burst into flames. "At the time, we all rang alarm bells that not only are such tragic incidents born of government irresponsibility, the government's reactions to them are also usually provocative and feature a lack of respect for public opinion." Two years later, continued Mursi, on 26 January -- again just a few days before the Eid -- the country found itself mourning yet another major tragedy, the downed Nasr City building. "Again, Ebeid's reaction was provocative," Mursi said. "He [Ebeid] said Cairo governorate was able to begin dealing with the incident in just five minutes." Mursi, who used several verses from the Qur'an to support his anti-Ebeid accusations, said tragic accidents would "continue to increasingly proliferate under Ebeid's government". The government, he said, had no sense of responsibility -- even if it did, it would not respond in an appropriate manner. Mursi said the government's way of dealing with these types of incidents only "breed more and more disasters and calamities". The MP accused the government of allowing landlords who commit construction offences to pay fines without having to go to court. Mursi also blamed the fire-fighting equipment in Cairo and other governorates for being out-of-date, "which led to the demise of 15 policemen who tried to fight the fire with dilapidated equipment". In light of Ebeid's absence from the parliamentary session, three cabinet ministers responded to Mursi's accusations instead. Local Development Minister Mustafa Abdel-Qader praised the government's sense of responsibility. "No sooner was news of the fire reported than the Cairo governor, the housing minister and 35 ambulances and fire trucks mobilised. This rapid response helped evacuate residents safely. The injured, estimated at 25, were quickly taken to nearby hospitals, while the families of policemen who died fighting the fire were given generous compensations," Abdel-Qader said. The minister argued that there were several obstacles preventing municipal authorities from stemming the tide of shoddy construction. "The major obstacle is that landlords always resort to courts to prevent municipal authorities from countering construction offences. A case in point," he said, "is that on 29 December 2003, the Administrative Court ruled that the additional floors were legal," thus preventing the municipal authorities from eliminating them. Housing Minister Ibrahim Suleiman said two draft laws aiming to both combat construction offences and help establish residential associations would be presented to the assembly in the next two weeks. "Penalties for construction offences will be stiffened," Suleiman said, in order to deter offenders. Meanwhile, Suleiman also said, the prosecutor-general was still investigating the cause of the Nasr City building collapse. Mursi, however, insisted that governmental negligence and irresponsibility were the true culprits. "The fact that the government [previously] failed to intervene to stiffen penalties on construction offences is mainly to blame for the fall of the [Nasr City] building and several others." Also on Monday, parliament released a 90-page report responding to Ebeid's 28 December policy statement. The report was highly critical, taking the government to task for not responding adequately to the dramatic surge in the prices of food and services. "We have indicated that the government lacks a clear-cut strategy on wheat production which would ensure that poor citizens have easy access to good quality bread," the report warned. It was also critical of what it called the government's failure to combat the serious deterioration in the vast majority of citizens' living standards, which had also generated grave social inequalities. "As a result, Egypt's ranking on the UN human resources development index backtracked from 105 in 2001, to 120 in 2003." The report also criticised the rise in the inflation rate (from 2.7 per cent in 2002 to 4 per cent in 2003), the net budget deficit (which topped 6.5 per cent of GDP in 2003), and domestic debts (which hit 69.4 per cent of GDP), blaming the government for the drop in foreign direct investment in Egypt. "Egypt is desperately in need of a new package of economic policies to raise its competitiveness on the foreign market," it said. The report also called for judicial and administrative reform, expressing hopes that new liberal-oriented laws on elections and the exercise of political rights would be passed. In response, Ebeid said political reform was one of his government's priorities. He said the ruling National Democratic Party was placing much hope in the upcoming national dialogue with opposition parties serving to catalyse increased democratisation and greater political reform. Ebeid said his government had helped Egypt survive the harsh repercussions of world recession and achieve a growth rate of 3.2 per cent. "We have even been able to raise this growth to 4.2 per cent in the first quarter of the new fiscal year (July-September 2003), and there are expectations it will end up rising to 4.5 per cent by the end of July 2004." Ebeid also said that although providing social subsidies to the poor was a basic government policy, the country's runaway population growth was simultaneously posing a very serious threat to development efforts.
