Egypt is on the brink -- not of something better than the old Mubarak dictatorship, but of something even worse.
BY MOHAMED ELBARADEI
Two years after the revolution that
toppled a dictator, Egypt is already a failed state. According to the Failed
States Index, in the year before the uprising we ranked No. 45. After Hosni
Mubarak fell, we worsened to 31st. I haven't checked recently -- I don't want to
get more depressed. But the evidence is all around us.
Today you see an erosion of state authority in Egypt. The state is
supposed to provide security and justice; that's the most basic form of
statehood. But law and order is disintegrating. In 2012, murders were up 130
percent, robberies 350 percent, and kidnappings 145 percent, according to the
Interior Ministry. You see people being lynched in public, while others take
pictures of the scene. Mind you, this is the 21st century -- not the French
Revolution!
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The feeling right now is that there is no
state authority to enforce law and order, and therefore everybody thinks that
everything is permissible. And that, of course, creates a lot of fear and
anxiety.
You can't expect Egypt to have a normal
economic life under such circumstances. People are very worried. People who
have money are not investing -- neither Egyptians nor foreigners. In a situation
where law and order is spotty and you don't see institutions performing their
duties, when you don't know what will happen tomorrow, obviously you hold back.
As a result, Egypt's foreign reserves have been depleted, the budget deficit
will be 12 percent this year, and the pound is being devalued. Roughly a
quarter of our youth wake up in the morning and have no jobs to go to. In every
area, the economic fundamentals are not there.
Egypt could risk a default on its foreign debt
over the next few months, and the government is desperately trying to get a
credit line from here and there -- but that's not how to get the economy back to
work. You need foreign investment, you need sound economic policies, you need
functioning institutions, and you need skilled labor.
So far, however, the Egyptian government has
only offered a patchwork vision and ad hoc economic policies, with no steady
hand at the helm of the state. The government adopted some austerity measures
in December to satisfy certain IMF requirements, only to repeal them by morning. Meanwhile, prices are soaring and
the situation is becoming untenable, particularly for the nearly half of
Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day.
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The executive branch has no clue how to run
Egypt. It's not a question of whether they are Muslim Brothers or liberals -- it's
a question of people who have no vision or experience. They do not know how to
diagnose the problem and then provide the solution. They are simply not
qualified to govern.
