Honesty knows no compliments, and I have previously sent gradual advice to Prime Minister Hisham Qandil.
I spoke about management by objectives, I spoke about crisis maps and I spoke about many other issues with the purpose of nothing else but reform, even if partial, so we could all traverse this critical juncture until the formation of an elected government.
But it would be naive to use painkillers for stopping the constant and mounting bleed of human and material losses.
I would never let myself fall into rebuking someone for a defect like a stutter or a slip of the tongue because making fun of people for their defects is not a manly thing to do.
If this famous clip of the Prime Minister being circulated was anything close to this pattern I would have overlooked it right away.
But the problem is in the fact that behaviour reflects thought, and the behaviour of Dr. Qandil in this video reflected nothing but trivial thinking.
And yet, the old Arabic proverb says, “Talk so I can get to know you.” I hesitated a lot before I allowed myself to pick this particular proverb as a base for judging the man.
But when I watched the clip more than once, I dared, after much hesitation and fear, to take this short video to represent the level of thinking of Egypt's second man.
Dear sir - just how can I trust you to take the right decision in something so crucially important, whose impact will last for years to come if you don’t manage to wrap it up successfully, like the IMF loan, if your bird’s eye view can’t grasp the connection between “personal hygiene” “diarrhoea in children” and something that happened to you on a personal level, in an extremely limited geographic area, and the economic policies which you and your government are to be held accountable for?
Let me put it to you simply. You wanted to speak about problems that are deeply rooted in Egyptian society like ignorance in general – particularly “hygienic ignorance” - dilapidation of infrastructure, and the deterioration of health care.
But you expressed all this in the worst possible words and you failed to make any kind of link that can give us a good impression about a real vision, something we could count on, for reform.
Sir, just hand in your resignation, because this is the least you can do for the sake of respecting the trust. If the trust is given to the undeserving, this is a sign that we are approaching the end of days.
So hand in your resignation and do something that the President himself has been avoiding for so long without any apparent justification.
Claiming that the time is not right is an invalid argument. The reshuffle that took place eight months ago included eight ministers, all in one go, most of them were in charge of the most sensitive positions in the state and no one (at that time) argued with you about how suitable the time was.
As for the approaching Parliament, no need to take that as an excuse as well. If the new government turns out to be promising, I believe that Parliament can simply affirm its trust in it.
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