'Tis the season for media speculation and obsession over an expected cabinet reshuffle: Will Ahmed Nazif, the youngest serving prime minister in Egypt since the founding of the republic, go or will he stay? If he goes, who will replace him -- former businessman and current Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid? Will it remain a government of "technocrats" and neo-liberals? If not, what will it be? And could it be anything else? It's been three years since President Hosni Mubarak invited the then 48-year-old Nazif to form a cabinet and by doing so we got the "richest" government in the history of the republic. With wealthy businessmen at the helm of executive authority, Egyptians got a taste of liberal capitalist economic policies as the privatisation of the once powerful public sector swung into full force. Three long years later, there is a sudden realisation -- or so we are told -- that the Nazif cabinet was not sensitive enough to the poor and that a government of technocrats is incapable of sensing the "pulse" of the "street", that it lacks the necessary "political vision" to detect the repercussions of its policies in the long term. Suddenly, we are faced with a deluge of carefully worded editorials by pro-government pundits criticising the Nazif cabinet for its failures. That half of the Egyptian population has no water supply is now Nazif's fault. So are soaring prices, daily public protests, the hasty and often corrupt- ridden privatisation of public assets and the decline in the health and education sectors. The Nazif cabinet certainly deserves criticism. Its policies invite anger and frustration from the vast majority of the country. But so was the cabinet that preceded it, and the one before and the one before that. Atef Ebeid, Kamal El-Ganzouri, Atef Sedqi and Ali Lutfi, too, took the blame for Egypt's economic, social and political woes. But placing the blame on senior government employees who implement the president's policies is simply a futile exercise. The solution to Egypt's many economic, socio-political crises and collapsing infrastructure begins with a brave democracy. Without it, all we have is talk about democracy, and the more we talk about it the more it becomes hollow. The expected cabinet reshuffle could be an opportunity to change that. It should not be an occasion for exhausted political gossip. Egyptians are fed up and judging by the frequency and variety of public demonstrations, they will not be silenced by yet another change of faces within the government. The people are trying to take matters into their own hands. Isn't it about time the political establishment introduced meaningful change too?
