Gamal Essam El-Din reports on Prime Minister 's attempts to make the policy statement he'll be presenting to parliament next week reflect the NDP's "new way of thinking" Prime Minister has finally set a date -- 29 December -- for the fourth policy statement his government will present to parliament. Unlike the previous three years, Ebeid has recently been under pressure to make sure this statement adopts concrete action plans aimed at turning the reforms and policy changes introduced at the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP)'s eighth congress in September into realities on the ground. These reforms, falling under the party's "new way of thinking" rubric, generally aim at democratisation and the liberalising of the national economy. A major element of the NDP's ideas on reform -- as outlined by Gamal Mubarak, the 38-year- old son of President Hosni Mubarak who is currently the party's central figure -- is that the relationship between the government and the NDP must be governed by the fact that "the government is the party's government and not vice versa." To meet that objective, Ebeid has been closely coordinating with Mubarak's Higher Council for Policies, both on the new legislative agenda to be submitted to parliament, as well as the policy statement the prime minister is set to deliver next week. Mubarak said that it is now mandatory that Ebeid and his cabinet ministers attend the council's meetings "to ensure that the government's policies will reflect the NDP's platform and its conception of major national issues". Over the past month, Ebeid has been in several meetings with leading members of the NDP's Secretariat-General. Safwat El-Sherif, the party's secretary-general, said these meetings were meant to ensure that Ebeid's policy statement indicates that the government's legislative agenda for the current parliamentary session will include six major bills. "These bills deal with banks, taxes, labour, telecommunications, small-scale enterprises, and the Egyptian- European Partnership Agreement," El-Sherif said, emphasising that the bills will first be scrutinised by Mubarak's Policy Secretariat, the Higher Council for Policies, and the NDP's newly-formed Parliamentary Committee. The government will then "take note of the NDP's remarks on [the bills] ahead of submitting them to parliament", explained El-Sherif. Addressing the NDP Parliamentary Committee's first meeting on 14 December, Ebeid said his policy statement will stress the fact that the new package of six bills is targeted at modernising the state apparatus, raising the national economy's competitiveness, and globalising Egypt in accordance with the principles of a market economy. Ebeid also said the new policy statement will include a parallel set of social targets, "aimed at materialising the NDP's strategies on reducing unemployment, alleviating poverty, improving public services and modernising education." Amongst these plans, said Ebeid, was the government's attempt to create jobs for as many as 500,000 young graduates in 2003. "150,000 jobs will be created in government offices, another 150,000 in the private sector, and the remaining 200,000 will be available via training centres," he said. The prime minister also indicated that his policy statement will include new programmes designed to help farmers reschedule their debts to the Principal Bank for Development and Agricultural Credit (PBDAC), improve rural services and provide squatter communities with better facilities. Ebeid said that his policy statement will set key performance targets for a number of the government's ministries. "These include boosting exports, reducing public debt, achieving monetary stability and [controlling] the budget deficit," he said. Many were initially sceptical of Ebeid's ambitious policy targets. Gamal Mubarak said both the NDP and the government's main challenge would be in translating the party's new thoughts, ideas and objectives into realities which positively affect the man on the street. Other leading NDP members, especially those who are part of what is now called its "new generation" camp, hinted that the government's response to NDP policy reforms has been feeble at best. Hossam Badrawi and Mahmoud Mohieddin, two younger members of the NDP's Secretariat- General, surprised the audience at a roundtable discussion organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Cairo by agreeing that the government has been caught up in a vicious circle of competition over priorities. According to Mohieddin, "this could lead the nation into a dark tunnel." Badrawi said the government's weakness is revealed by its reluctance to take the bold initiatives needed to address some of the nation's chronic problems and put Egypt on the road to modernisation. "Take, for example, the education sector," he said. "The government boasts about pumping millions of pounds into this sector, even though it knows quite well that the existing education system has ended up being hell for students, families and society as a whole." Many NDP members think Ebeid should tone down his list of seemingly endless targets and promises. They cite President Mubarak's 14 December comment regarding the policy statement -- that it must commit the government to a fixed number of targets with clear deadlines for their implementation. After delivering last year's policy statement, Ebeid found himself being fiercely attacked; this time will probably be no different. Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour, the liberal-oriented Wafd Party's parliamentary speaker, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Ebeid has been bogged down in a quagmire of rosy promises and unfulfilled targets. "I think [the government failed to achieve] almost 85 per cent of the targets it set in its first policy statement [in December 1999] and has failed -- or is on course to fail -- to meet another 85 per cent, or even more, of the goals it set in its last statement [January 2002]," said Abdel-Nour, who urged the government to be more realistic and adaptive to the times. Opposition MPs will probably be asking Ebeid to provide parliament with a balance sheet indicating just how successfully the government was able to deliver on the promises and targets of its previous policy statement. While Ebeid was delivering last year's statement, Kamal Ahmed, an independent MP with Nasserist leanings, shouted at the prime minister "to respect MPs' intelligence". Ahmed was outraged by Ebeid's announcement that the government would be creating 500,000 jobs for young people in 2002. "It will be disgusting if he decides to repeat this target in his new statement," Ahmed said. A number of opposition MPs also aim to hit Ebeid with at least six interpellations (questions that must be answered). These will mainly deal with corruption in the banking sector, the government's failure to address the foreign exchange problem, and the proliferation of private-sector monopolies.
