Egypt’s reformers target red tape

CAIRO — Looming 13 stories above the chaotic streets of Cairo, the concrete facade of the Mogamma is about as blank as the faces of the bureaucrats inside. Clerks stare from behind glass screens at the crowds of Egyptians desperately pushing and shouting, many on their second or third visit in quest of some document that makes their lives go round.

In one office in the vast Stalinesque building, four civil servants in charge of issuing visas to foreigners sip tea, gripe about the asthmatic air conditioner and share a single phone, desultorily stretching its grimy cord from desk to desk.

When it opened in the 1960s, the Mogamma, or Complex, was supposed to revolutionize the lives of Cairo residents by providing one-stop shopping for their every bureaucratic need — birth certificates, passports, electricity bills, driver’s licenses, import licenses and permits to change children’s schools.

Instead, its lethargy and cumbrousness have made it the problem. It epitomizes the challenge faced by Egypt’s unusually youthful government as it sets out to push the country into the 21st century.

The ruling National Democratic Party says a priority is to change the bureaucracy’s “bokra, inshallah” — “tomorrow, God willing” — instincts and to address high unemployment, industries ill-equipped for the global marketplace and rising demands for political reform.

The trappings of a new, outward-looking government are there. Ministers give press conferences and hand out their cell-phone numbers. The new political star is the president’s 40-year-old son, an investment banker who heads the ruling party’s powerful committee on reform and might become Egypt’s next president. The government has a new Web site, www.egypt.gov.eg, and promises to replace those Mogamma bureaucrats with an online service.

But many of Egypt’s 70 million people are likely to be skeptical: For one thing, only one in 100 has Internet access. For another, they have heard the promises before.

Still, there is a sense of urgency never felt before — a conviction that unless Egypt moves fast, it will miss the global boat, and its government will become ever more squeezed — by Islamic fundamentalism feeding off poverty and despair, by reformists demanding real democracy now, and by a Bush administration with a stated ambition to plant democracy throughout the Arab world.

Egypt’s future matters hugely to the region, even the world. It is the most populous Arab country and the biggest Arab recipient of U.S. aid (about $2 billion a year). It is the only Arab country with the clout to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians — Israel’s plans to pull out of the Gaza Strip next year depend heavily on Egypt’s help. It has produced the Arab world’s only Nobel literature laureate (novelist Naguib Mahfouz), the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel (Anwar Sadat) and the lead September 11 hijacker (Mohamed Atta).

Despite the installation on July 14 of a Cabinet with a fresh-faced, technocratic look, real power still rests with 76-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in office for 23 years and shows no intention of stepping down. The severely circumscribed electoral system guarantees the overwhelming dominance of his National Democratic Party, and if his son, Gamal, succeeds him, reformers fear Egypt’s future will look a lot like its past: a virtual one-party state led by a Mr. Mubarak.

Still, parentage aside, the younger Mr. Mubarak would seem a good choice for a 21st-century president — a Western-educated man of finance who says he knows what it takes to whip a Third World country into shape for the global marketplace.

Likewise is the 34-member Cabinet, whose 14 new ministers are mostly in their 40s or 50s — two decades younger than the norm.

Typical of the fresh look is Ahmed Darwish, 45, the minister in charge of the civil service and the computer specialist who designed the government Web site.

Until he was brought into party policy-making in 2001, “I used to read; I used to have my own opinions. But I never got involved in politics,” he said.

Now he is an enthusiast — struck, he says, by the brainstorming atmosphere at party policy meetings and the willingness of older, established members to “accept opinions from the younger generations.”

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