Egypt's presidency has witnessed a string of unfortunate mishaps this week, raising questions about the competence of its administration, reports Dina Ezzat Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali might not have felt too awkward this week when large quarters of the press, and for that matter public opinion, revealed their fury over a presidential decision last weekend to terminate the mandate of the prosecutor-general, who is supposed to enjoy immunity, and to send him off as head of the Egyptian embassy to the Vatican. Ali, a dermatologist by profession whose friendly face conceals his sentiments, did not announce the presidential decree to the press concerning Prosecutor-General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, leaving that instead to Ahmed Abdel-Moeti, chief of the presidential secretariat. Ali, according to sources speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly, had planned to announce the news when the presidential decision-making body decided to put the matter on hold instead. As he was leaving the presidential headquarters in Heliopolis, the decision-making body then decided to break the news, and Abdel-Moeti was summoned to deliver the message to a hastily assembled press corps. Three days later as the public prosecutor, supported by large parts of the judiciary, including some critics of Mahmoud, declined to bow to the presidential will and to insist on keeping his job, it was not Ali who broke the news, with Mahmoud himself taking care of the matter. It was left to Vice President Ahmed Mekki to explain the presidential position, saying that the matter was subject to consideration and that the presidential aides had made a premature announcement. However, the presidential spokesman had previously told the press that, aside from President Mohamed Morsi himself, only he could be considered to speak for the presidency. Shortly afterwards, he had to deal with a further two presidential mishaps. The first came when he had to offer a charitable interpretation of a statement made by Essam Al-Erian, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) to which Morsi belongs, to the effect that Mahmoud had agreed to accept the job of head of the diplomatic mission to the Vatican before changing his mind and deciding to stay on as prosecutor-general. The second came when Ali had to face the furor over the text of the accreditation letter that Atef Salem, Egypt's newly appointed ambassador to Tel Aviv, had presented to Israeli President Shimon Peres. In both cases, Ali tried to do what Mekki had done with the first case -- to fudge the issue. Mekki, even though vice president, was not part of the original decision-making process that had led the president to order the termination of the mandate of the public prosecutor in the wake of the wide public anger over a court ruling declaring the suspects in the attack of 2 February 2011 against the demonstrators in Tahrir Square during the 25 January Revolution to be not guilty. None of the four assistants Morsi chose last summer, and none of the 17-member advisory board designed by Morsi to provide diverse views on key state matters, was involved in the issue either. Meanwhile, neither Morsi nor his closest aides could have anticipated that Al-Erian would go on record to announce the unspoken but well-known fact that presidential phone calls are recorded. Nor would anyone among Morsi's group of advisors have expected that the traditional and almost standard letter of accreditation that the new Egyptian ambassador to Israel handed over to Peres would have been leaked to the press, according to Morsi's critics. The Weekly sources said that the matter of the letter had been dealt with using "insufficient consideration" on the part of the presidency and that the furor had blown up a few days after Morsi had faced a similar situation when the presidency had denied that Morsi had sent a thank-you note to Peres in response to a letter from the Israeli president congratulating him on his inauguration. First, the presidency denied that the letter had been sent, but later it said, as it did with the accreditation letter of the new Egyptian ambassador to Israel, that the letter had been routinely formulated by the Foreign Ministry. The presidency insisted that it was not responsible for statements made over recordings of presidential phone calls by Al-Erian, a member of the advisory board to the president. The Weekly sources said that the president was in a state of shock when he heard that Al-Erian, a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, had made such statements. "It was impossible for the president to shrug off statements made by a fellow Muslim Brotherhood member, and we waited and waited before Yasser Ali said that the presidency was not familiar with the account given by Al-Erian," a veteran presidential correspondent said. However, if Morsi could not have anticipated the statements by Al-Erian, not the first to reveal a sense of how far the FJP and Brotherhood participate in presidential decision-making, or the Israeli leak of the accreditation letter, he certainly knew about the matter of the public prosecutor. According to Weekly sources, the decision to fire the prosecutor-general was discussed and decided amongst the president and his most trusted aides -- "those who had come with him from the Muslim Brotherhood," as one source described them. A longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi took the presidential oath on 30 June, and on the following day he arrived at the presidential palace escorted by a group of Brotherhood figures who had worked with him on his very short election campaign. Morsi had joined the race almost at the 11th hour as a back-up to the preferred Brotherhood nominee Khairat Al-Shater, vice supreme guide of the popular Islamist organisation. "Since that day, [Morsi] has been for the most part alienating the [presidential] institution in favour of his Muslim Brotherhood aides. This is one of the reasons I think he has been running into mishaps -- because he is not familiar with the way of doing things and they are not familiar either," said one long-term presidency source. The source did not deny that a good part of the way Morsi has been operating has been prompted by a sense of unease -- and at times lack of trust -- regarding the bureaucratic presidency. "In his eyes, we are all the men of [ousted former president Hosni] Mubarak. Yes, we all worked with Mubarak, and yes some of us have liked and still like him and wish him well, but at the end of the day we serve the nation and not the president," the source said. It is not unusual to hear older presidential staff members suggesting that the new president and "his team of aides coming from the Muslim Brotherhood" are neither sufficiently aware of the rules nor willing to solicit the advice of those who do know them. According to one source, "even the vice president is sometimes not aware of key decisions," adding that "sometimes he is informed, but often enough he is neither informed nor consulted. He does not have much to do, and everybody knows the president declines to delegate his authority to him during overseas missions." The same thing goes for Morsi's four assistants and the advisory board, aside from the Brotherhood members of the board, including Al-Erian. "I think it is fair to say that this whole concept of a presidential team giving advice to the president is a new exercise that is still under development. It is something we have not worked with before, and we are still trying our hands at it," said Mohamed Esmat Seif Al-Dawla, a member of Morsi's advisory board. Having admitted that the board was not consulted on any of the three presidential mishaps that occurred this week, Seif Al-Dawla insisted that this was not to say that the board was useless or just cosmetic. "This rather goes to show that we are still beginning with a process that will take time before it properly falls into place," he said. According to Seif Al-Dawla, it is understandable that the president should be taking decisions that look radical, like the change of jobs of Mahmoud, without indulging in an elaborate consultation process. "Let's call a spade a spade: we are still going through a process of eliminating the anti-January Revolution pockets of influence from the system. The account of removing the prosecutor-general from his job -- apart from any assessment of the details of the story -- is part and parcel of this purification process," Seif Al-Dawla said. Many of the reactions towards the president's decision to remove Mahmoud and then later to keep him were merely ways of resisting the president, rather than of contesting his decisions, he said. This resistance, he continued, was not strictly from the anti-Revolution quarters, but was equally from some of the revolutionary quarters who fear the short and longer-term effects of the rule of an Islamist president. "A careful observer cannot miss the fact that some of those who protested against the decision to remove the prosecutor-general had before accused the him of being corrupt and had later expressed dismay at the lack of resolve on the side of the president when he decided to bow to the judiciary's wish to keep Mahmoud in his job." Seif Al-Dawla does not share the fear of those who say that the state system is being hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. He said that the president's position was still not secure enough, and that once his position was more smoothly integrated he would be able to use the bureaucracy better, which in some quarters was still resisting presidential authority. Government officials insist that they have not been obstructing the president. According to some of these officials who spoke to the Weekly, they are duty bound to assist whoever is president. Foreign Ministry sources insist that they were not consulted on the letter of accreditation that was issued to the new ambassador in Tel Aviv, adding that had they been they would have presented an alternative letter that would have been no less courteous but that could have been more becoming for a president from the ranks of the opposition to the former ousted regime. Sources at the presidency insist that they were not offered alternative drafts of the otherwise standard letter. "I think that what we are seeing is a confused administration. This is not a problem of any one side -- it is more a shared problem that shows that the system is not working efficiently and that the president and his immediate aides are not privy to the knowledge needed to bypass the system," said political commentator Amr Al-Shobaki. According to Al-Shobaki, the mishaps of the past few days are not necessarily an attempt by the president and the Brotherhood to exclude everybody else from the decision-making process. "It is a pure lack of political experience," he said. Al-Shobaki did not deny that the president was under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which aims to have a share, even if indirectly, in the decision-making process. In the eyes of many commentators, the statements made by Al-Erian on the recording of the calls of the public prosecutor with the presidency are only one indication of the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. That said, Al-Shobaki does not subscribe to the calls made by some for the new constitution to adopt a parliamentary system instead of the semi-presidential system that has been proposed in the first draft. "It is one thing to insist on the elimination of the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood over the president and quite another to devise a ruling system made to control the prerogatives of a president just because he happens to be Islamist," Al-Shobaki said. Egypt needs a semi-presidential system in order to make sure that the head of state is empowered enough to deal with a state of political fragmentation that could get worse if the country enters into a parliamentary system's endless political tugs of war, Al-Shobaki said. "The president needs to streamline his decision-making processes, but he should not be denied what it takes to make him effective," Al-Shobaki concluded.
