Madbouly may go, the questions he leaves behind should not

What was once whispered behind closed doors is now out loud. MPs and politicians with real proximity to power are no longer hinting that Mostafa Madbouly’s government should go. They are saying it plainly after more than eight years of the same prime minister in office. They insist that peoples' patience has run out.

Set aside what’s actually driving Egypt's leadership to reshuffle this cabinet. Set aside, too, the awkward matter of ministers who sit on the boards of banks and public companies they're supposed to be regulating. One fact stands: a government dismissed in less than a year from being formed demands an explanation. How would this be justified? Is there enough transparency in the system to explain why confidence was renewed in Madbouly earlier this year, only for his removal to be treated as settled business by August?

Last February, after a reshuffle that included thirteen ministries and left Madbouly untouched, President El-Sisi handed his government eight directives: hold the line on national security, fix the economy, bring down the debt, plan properly, track performance, and tell the public the truth. Days ago, the state’s minister for information Diaa Rashwan published an appeal to his fellow journalists, which he called, “Necessary Venting,” urging them to make room for public debate and a range of opinions.

The promise

The irony writes itself. A cabinet change, the event that touches the public directly, has been handled as a state secret. Most of the country’s news outlets have looked away from it, abandoning the one duty Rashwan himself just invoked: to tell people what is happening behind the walls and how decisions are actually made. Everyone in Cairo who talks to an MP, a politician, or a journalist already knows the reshuffle is coming.

Every time, the same questions surface and go unanswered. Not which minister is in and which is out, not who gets the corner office, but what the outgoing government actually did with its years in power, and what it leaves behind for the next one to inherit: the crises, the unfinished business, the promises it never got around to keeping.

In 2018, Madbouly promised to cut the debt, tame inflation, and turn the economy around

Any PM is entitled to blame the world for his failures: a pandemic, a war in Ukraine, an assault on Gaza, a war on Iran. Fair enough. But the citizen asked to absorb all of that is equally entitled to pursue the promises made to them when they were first told to be patient.

In July 2018, Madbouly stood before parliament and laid out his government’s program under the title “Egypt Takes Off,” an advance accounting, in effect, of what the country was supposed to look like by now.

He promised to protect national security and defend Egypt’s water rights. He promised that ordinary Egyptians would feel the benefits of economic reform within two years. He promised to cut government debt, bring inflation under control, improve the country’s economic indicators, and deliver energy “of high quality and at a competitive price” to everyone who needed it. To the poorest and most marginalized, he promised a visible, tangible change in daily life within months.

Then he told Egyptians that 85% of the reform program was already done, that the people who had “endured so much, been patient for so long,” had only a little further left to go before they saw the good news for themselves.

The harvest

Eight years later, it falls to the institutions built to hold power accountable (the parliament and the press) to do the arithmetic: what were conditions before, what was promised, and what, in fact, was delivered.

In 2018, by Madbouly’s own figure, real growth stood at 5.4%. He promised 8% by 2021–22. It never arrived. Instead the economy slid into one of the sharpest slowdowns in its recent history, and by the IMF’s latest estimate, growth today sits somewhere between 4 and 5%.

On debt, Madbouly promised to bring it under 90% of GDP by June 2020, and to 80% by the program’s end, with the deficit cut to 6% and a primary surplus of nearly 2%. Debt today still sits at roughly 84% of GDP. The deficit has come down, to 5.3%, according to the finance ministry’s own numbers, modest progress, and the only figure in this ledger that moved in the right direction.

External debt, around $90 billion in 2017–18, has climbed toward $165 billion. Reserves have grown too, from $42.5 billion in February 2018 to more than $56.3 billion now. And in the same stretch of years, the currency has simply collapsed: 17.9 pounds to the dollar in 2018, roughly 50 today. That collapse has moved straight through the price of food, medicine, machinery, cars, education, services, housing, and everything that determines whether a family can get by.

On energy, the one promise Madbouly made in the most confident language, “high quality, competitive price,” the government hasn’t merely raised prices by a factor of nearly four, it applied its latest electricity increase, approved this August, retroactively. Billed people for a price rise before the price had risen.

All this brings us to the number that matters more than any other to the people living through it: inflation, which hit record highs in 2023, eased for a while, and has now climbed back to 13% as of this past July. The citizen who was told in 2018 that “the hard part is behind you, only a little remains” is not simply paying more today. Their income buys less than it did. Their savings are worth less than they were. And by the last official measure, six years old now, with nothing reliable published since to update it, nearly a third of the country lives below the poverty line.

There is also water, which Madbouly’s 2018 program placed squarely inside Egypt’s national security, with a pledge to defend the country’s rights to it. Ethiopia's dam is now a fact on the ground, and Addis Ababa is openly discussing new dams of its own, and new rules for how the Nile’s water gets shared.

The reckoning

It would be unfair to hang eight lean years on one man alone. It would be equally dishonest to let him walk away from them as a functionary who simply followed orders. Madbouly has spent more than eight years at the head of the executive branch, not administering decisions made elsewhere, but shaping the policies that became those decisions, programs, and laws. The responsibility is his to share, and he should be made to share it.

Madbouly’s government staying or not is not the real problem. The real problem is the circle that keeps closing regardless

The bigger failure was never going to end with one PM or one cabinet, because changing the names changes nothing if the way decisions are made stays exactly as it was.

So the problem was never whether this cabinet lives or dies, or which minister replaces which. It is the same closed loop, run again: a new government forms at the same starting line, reaches for the same bright slogans, presents a program to parliament, asks the public for more patience, and then, years later, having failed by most of its own measures, it leaves office without the public ever learning who actually wrote the policy, who made the calls, or who is answerable for what came of them.

The constitution states that the people are “the holders of rights and the source of authority,” and affirms their right to shape their own future. To deny that same citizen the right to know, to scrutinize, to hold power to account, to treat them as someone decisions happen to rather than someone who has a hand in making them, is not a minor flaw in how the state manages its relationship with the society it governs. It is a plain squandering of rights the constitution itself guarantees, and a wager with the country’s future, staked at a moment when the public’s exhaustion is loud enough that it should be keeping people in power up at night.

If the state wants this reshuffle to be more than another round of the same game, if it actually wants to rebuild the trust it has spent and close the cracks widening in its own base, changing faces will not do it. It has to open the room up: let people see who writes the policy, who decides, who carries it out, and who is left holding the failure when it comes. And it has to give parliament, the press, and civil society the room to actually do their jobs, instead of reaching for a cabinet reshuffle as the convenient hook to hang every accumulated crisis on.