The People's Assembly and Shura Council will be the scene of intense debate over food price inflation and anti-government demonstrations, Gamal Essam El-Din reports Following the Eid holidays, the People's Assembly and Shura Council will meet to discuss a raft of heated issues. Topping the agenda at the assembly will be 11 interpellations (questions that must be answered by cabinet ministers). The interpellations, directed at Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and ministers of finance and social solidarity, take the government to task for what is being called a dramatic rise in the cost of food and the number of people living below the poverty line. According to insider parliamentary sources, the assembly's decision to at last discuss interpellations came in response to a hostile press campaign which accused speaker Fathi Sorour of manipulating the debates in favour of Nazif's government. Sorour, however, told parliamentary correspondents on Monday that the decision to put the interpellations about food price inflation on top of the assembly's agenda after the feast holidays was not in response to press campaigns but to the fact that "food price inflation is the main concern of millions of poor and limited-income Egyptians and was the assembly's duty to put it into sharp focus." The interpellations, submitted by leftist and Muslim Brotherhood MPs, assert that inflation in the cost of basic foodstuffs climbed by 25 per cent in one month. Mohamed Abdel-Alim, a Wafdist MP, alleges that the rising food prices have had a detrimental effect on the purchasing power of the majority of poor and limited-income Egyptian families. In the words of Abdel-Alim, even a simple fuul (fava beans) sandwich, the staple of the average Egyptian diet, had become too expensive for many Egyptians to afford. Other MPs attribute the dramatic rise in many important foodstuffs to global price inflation in such staple crops as wheat, and that this had carried through into the Egyptian market, affecting millions of poor domestic consumers. "Much worse is that the current government lacks any strategy to address such a global rise in prices other than phasing out subsidies," said leftist MP Hamdeen Sabahi. The 11 interpellations are among a new batch of 29 submitted this week. This brings the number of interpellations submitted in one month to 114. Two of the interpellations are directed at Interior Minister Habib El-Adli by independent MP Talaat El-Sadat, cousin of former president Anwar El-Sadat. El-Sadat takes El-Adli to task for the disappearance of many people, mainly political detainees, while in prison. "The Ministry of Interior refuses to make any announcements about the reasons behind the disappearance of these citizens," said El-Sadat, who also claims that the Interior Ministry is determined not to implement several court orders, especially those urging El-Adli to release many political prisoners. El-Sadat said one of the prisoners is Abul-Zomor, an army office who was sent to jail for life in 1981 after being found guilty of plotting the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat. Two interpellations snipe at Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, charging him with failure to safeguard Egyptian museums against theft, not to mention the loss of many precious antiquities. They also claim that corruption is rampant in the Ministry of Culture and that special funds established for cultural development are being plundered by the minister's close aides. Corruption is the centrepiece of several interpellations. While some speak about the corruption in the three service sectors of health, education and communication, others allege that there is widescale misuse of foreign loans and grants. The last group of interpellations focuses on privatisation polices, singling out the government's decision to sell Banque du Caire to foreign investors as an example of tampering with national banking assets. In preparation for the interpellations, the government and the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) were this week keen to issue a flurry of public statements about subsidies and the rise in food prices. The statements were also a response to a recent unprecedented wave of labour unrest and worker sit-ins. Opposition MPs blamed the unrest to what some are calling the neo-liberal economic policies of an economic team led by the president's son Gamal Mubarak. Gamal, who is chairman of the powerful NDP Policies Committee, emphasised on 13 December that the NDP was committed to social justice policies and fighting poverty. Going hand in hand with the People's Assembly's agenda, the Shura Council will embark on debating a new controversial bill aimed at banning the staging of public protests and demonstrations in places of worship such as mosques, churches and synagogues. The bill, drafted by the Ministry of Waqf (Religious Endowments) and approved by the council's Legislative Constitutional Affairs Committee on Sunday, imposes a penalty of a maximum one year in jail and a fine not less than LE5,000 for those found guilty of organising demonstrations or urging citizens to join them. It also imposes a penalty of no more than six months in jail and a fine of between LE500 and LE1,000 for those found guilty of participating in demonstrations. The bill is expected to cause a storm of protest from opposition and independents when it comes up for debate before the assembly. In particular, many believe that the bill is mainly targeted at the Muslim Brotherhood which takes the lead in organising anti-government demonstrations in Cairo's grand mosques such as Al-Azhar.
