"This guy's good, the problem is the ones around him". This has become one of the main sentences in the government and indeed in Egyptian employees' culture. I do not know how officials can be good while the ones around them are bad. After all, these officials are the ones who choose their assistants. I think there is only one explanation: Egyptian employees refuse to criticize those who are in charge and prefer to slam the second or third in command. I have never heard of any Egyptian official punished or held responsible for their choices. Even when some issues were dropped like bombshells against some senior employees – such as Youssef Abdel Rahman, Mohamed el-Wakil, Mohamed Fouda and others – no one called for booking those who had chosen or recommended them or had given them the authority to carry out their crimes. There is a famous story about a Soviet spy appointed by US intelligence. They agreed with him to send him his wage and forbad him meeting them under any circumstance. In return, he would choose the worst option wherever it would be up to him to call the shots. The agreement proved how smart the Americans were to sabotage their competitors. People unanimously agree that many officials in Egypt are not enough skilled for their positions. According to many rumors, they are relatives of a higher official, and no one denies these rumors, defends these choices or gives the people convincing justifications. Even more strangely, some criticism against those unsuccessful officials comes from people belonging to the ruling regime. I once asked my press professor Mahmoud Khalil at the Faculty of Information why his exams were difficult. "Teachers need to be good at preparing exams" he told me. I did not understand the value of that answer until I took an exam with another professor whose method was: "Just write down what is in the curriculum". All questions were "Write what you know about…" followed by the titles of the chapters included in the curriculum. All the students at that higher study course protested and Dr. Magui el-Helwani and Dr. Layla Abdel Maguid decided to annul half of those questions. Yet, we needed more time. Dr. Layla, though, said we would only have three minutes. One of the students erupted and we though he would ask for at least half an hour. Instead, he said: "We want five minutes". I looked at my friend Mahmoud Ma'rouf (a sarcastic writer and a nice person) and we started laughing. Dr. Khalil's words kept echoing in my mind: "Assessing is a skill that not everyone has". I have understood that setting criterias for choosing is a skill that senior officials do not have. I do not know when choices in Egypt will not be made on the sly. People are shocked to see officials not being dismissed in spite of their many periodical failures, something which makes people wonder why these officials were chosen and why they are not removed. Some people may believe that changes are against stability. This may be true if change were for the sake of change. But when the non-change is for the sake of some people or is due to the incapability to take decisions, this is something serious, if we assume high-up officials have good intentions. Keeping officials where they are in spite of their failures can be due to three possibilities. Decision-makers are not able to assess, they have personal or business relations with the unsuccessful official, or they run the system as if it were a fief: they choose as they want because no one will ever be able to hold them accountable.
