 |
| AP Photo/Amr Nabil |
He didn’t know it, we didn’t know it, and they
didn’t know it, but Mohamed Morsi planted a time bomb on September 6, 2012,
when he appointed Hisham Geneina as chief auditor. Geneina had plenty of name
recognition and public esteem as a leader of the judicial independence movement
of 2005-2006, but unlike his fellow judges in that movement, he is not thought
to have Islamist sympathies. When the revolution broke out, he did not delve
into its politics, as did Zakariyya Abdel Aziz, who gave rousing speeches in
Tahrir Square, or Mahmoud al-Khodeiry, who was elected to the first and only real
parliament after Mubarak’s ouster. And he was not discredited in office as was Ahmad
Mekky, who frustrated many people as Morsi’s Justice Minister and then, frustrated
himself, huffily resigned in April 2013.
Morsi was fairly easily removed by the longtime
hoarders of state power, but ironically they’re finding it much harder to
eliminate his most fateful appointment. This March, Sisi dismissed Geneina from
his post, but the story is far from over. Today is Geneina’s first trial session,
where he stands accused of “disseminating false news that disturbs the public
peace.” But the coup makers had to take a tortuous path to get to this stage,
and the trial portends the beginning of a second and possibly more embarrassing
phase. Geneina’s shrewd tactics and unassailable reputation have made this a very
costly mess for Sisi and his confederates.
A Dormant Creature
The
Central Auditing Agency (CAA) that Geneina directed is an intriguing
organization. Created by a parliamentary act in 1942 as the “Accountancy Diwan,”
it was designed as an internal watchdog to monitor all government revenues and
outlays. The prime minister appointed the agency’s head with parliament’s
approval, but only the latter had the power to dimiss him. In the Nasser years,
the Agency was given its current name and logo of a wide-open eye atop a scale.
But with the shift from parliament to the presidency as the locus of power within
the state, the CAA was brought under presidential control; now only the
president could appoint its director for four-year terms, and no director could
be dismissed. In 1988, a new organizing law expanded the CAA’s auditing powers
beyond the bureaucracy, enabling it to inspect the finances of political
parties, trade unions, and professional associations.
As long as the president was an unelected
insider and corruptionist-in-chief, the CAA was a tool unleashed on peons in
the bureaucracy and critics in civil society. But mostly it was inactivated. Judge
Gawdat al-Malt, the director of the CAA for the last 12 years of Mubarak’s
rule, repeatedly came in for criticism from opposition parliamentarians and journalists
for sanitizing CAA reports before sending them to the president. When the
unthinkable happened in 2012 and the president was an outsider who appointed
another outsider as chief auditor, many cushy nests were liable to be disturbed.
Geneina did something deceptively simple: his
job. The CAA is one among several Egyptian state institutions that can actually
work well, given enabling conditions. One of Geneina’s first acts was to hold
essentially a public information session
about the CAA, beginning to activate the organization’s fine-sounding role on
paper and inform the public about what it does. After the military coup,
Geneina intensified his media strategy, making it impossible for the coup-makers
to do away with him in the dark after Morsi was ousted.
Realizing what Morsi and the Ikhwan never
appreciated, Geneina systematically and directly courted public opinion as his survival
strategy. He held bold conferences at CAA headquarters and took reporters’ stunned
questions; he gave endless interviews, simplifying complex issues in precise
yet accessible language. And when the government’s smear campaign against him
extended to his wife and in-laws, he invited a Sisi shill to his home for a
two-hour televised interview with
his wife and three daughters.
Geneina did all this well before he revealed in
December 2015 the figure of $76 billion lost to corruption, the ostensible
reason he was dismissed from his post and is being tried. But the government’s campaign
against him started in 2014 and peaked in mid-2015. The reason Sisi and company
couldn’t just wait till Geneina’s term was up in September 2016 is that he made
visible the one government bureau that all of Egypt’s unelected presidents want
to keep unknown and inconsequential.
Entering the Hornets’ Nest
Geneina walked a very fine line between deference
to the military-general-turned-president and airing high-level corruption in
the Interior and Justice Ministries. Carefully working within official
initiatives and the 2014 constitution’s explicit commitment to combating
corruption (Art. 218), he nevertheless shrewdly exploited the constitution’s
ambiguity about publicizing CAA reports by simply taking his facts and figures
directly to the public. Geneina’s first major overture after the coup was a February
2014 press conference that described
high-level corruption between 2011-2013, including financial misdeeds
during Morsi’s
brief tenure to deflect the charge that he was an Ikhwan mole, as the
lunatic fringe alleged.
Forms of corruption long known to Egyptians were
now being publicly certified by the one government official who could do so, at
a time of the coup regime’s maximum power. Three particularly egregious modes
of corruption were highlighted: the astronomical bonuses and allowances
funneled to Ministers for meetings they did not attend and boards they
contributed nothing to; off-budget funds in untouchable Ministries,
particularly Interior; and land sales to top officials and crony businessmen,
the chief perk of high office. From February 2014 to this day, Geneina pursued
a regimen of pretty much constant media exposure, to control the narrative,
frame the issues, and brand himself a bold public advocate on a matter everyone
cared deeply about . “I’ve put my hands into the hornets’ nest but I’m ready to
take the sting,” he said in a long
interview shortly after the press conference, saying that he had turned
down repeated advice to not confront the issues.
A key part of Geneina’s strategy was to address
and cultivate supportive constituencies, especially human rights activists and
journalists, signaling through his language that they could all frame the
common cause as the public’s right to information. “We have to change the
culture of concealment and media blackouts, hiding won’t lead the country to
progress,” said Geneina. Rights lawyer Negad al-Borai messaged
back, “Hisham Geneina, we’re with you.”
Knowing full well the government’s age-old
stratagem of imploding organizations from within, Geneina spent his first year
in office cultivating a positive, team-building ethos within the CAA. He messaged
a morale-boosting professionalism to the CAA’s 12,00 staff members, calling
them “arbiters of public funds” in internal publications
while being careful never to rubbish his predecessor, Gawdat al-Malt. He acted
not as a crusader come to sweep out all that came before, but a can-do,
collegial manager intent on professional development and non-divisive
leadership.
In language that nods to the criticisms of
Morsi during his time in office, Geneina wrote to his colleagues,
“Our goal is reform and inclusion, not division…to make the Agency a renowned institution
built on enlightened thought.” To my knowledge, the government has not been
able to find disgruntled employees or opportunists within the CAA to agitate
against Geneina and make his ouster look like a popular demand.
The Hornets Sting
Geneina made a beeline for the the police and
judicial sectors as two of the most graft-ridden enclaves in the state, and
that dredged up an old conflict with Ahmad al-Zind, the bulldog head of the
Judges’ Club, former Justice Minister, and a frontline figure in the campaign
to oust Morsi. Back in 2009, Geneina and Zind faced off in internal elections
to the Club; Geneina represented the dissident judges who linked up with
activists for clean elections and judicial independence in 2005-2006, and Zind
represented judges who conciliated the government and received ample material
rewards. Zind defeated Geneina and his slate in a close election, and that
history now resurfaced, with Zind all-too-happily slandering
his nemesis while filing
complaints against him for noting financial misdeeds in Zind’s management
of the Club.
Geneina was not intimidated, easily deflecting
the attempts to portray his work as score-settling with Zind or revenge on
behalf of the Ikhwan. When he showed no inclination to back down or scale back
his media strategy, a fierce campaign using the courts
and newspapers
targeted his integrity and motivations. He did not flinch from using the
government’s anti-terrorism rhetoric, spinning it to say terrorism
flourishes in the de-development spawned by corruption. When that didn’t
work, the government dipped into its reservoir of dirty tricks.
At the peak of the anti-Geneina offensive in
summer 2015, the military’s minions in the media disseminated that he had
accompanied his half-Palestinian wife to Gaza to visit his Hamas in-laws. Rather
than buckle, Geneina granted more interviews
in which he warned of an espionage
case being concocted against him, and invited a top pro-Sisi television anchor
to his home, where Geneina’s wife unapologetically informed the presenter that she had
returned to Gaza after an 18-year absence to grant her deceased father’s last
wish to be buried among his ancestors.
It was at this juncture that Sisi issued a terse
decree-law
on July 9 granting the president the right to dismiss the directors of
independent regulatory agencies, including the Central Bank. A model of elastic
language, the law enables the president to remove directors if they “affect the
security of the state,” “fail to carry out their duties in a manner that harms
the high interests of the land” “lose confidence,” or “lose any of the
qualifications for office for non-medical reasons.” The law was inked a full
five months before the rapid chain of events culminating in Geneina’s sacking
and trial.
Encirclement
On December 7, Sisi issued a decree
appointing two deputies to Geneina, the first of whom is leading State Security
prosecutor Hisham Badawi, who prosecuted the most politically-sensitive cases
during the Mubarak era. On December 23, 2015, Geneina gave an interview to al-Yawm
al-Sabe’, a broadsheet with deep ties to security agencies. The journalist
quoted Geneina saying the cost of corruption was $76 billion in 2015. In fact,
the figure covers the years 2012-2015 and is drawn from a CAA report
(still-unpublished) commissioned by the Minister of Planning to coincide with
the UN’s International Anti-Corruption Day (December 9). Facts mattered little,
however. The ideal pretext to sack Geneina had just revealed itself, and the
machinery was set in swift motion.
On December 26, Sisi formed a fact-finding
commission to investigate not corruption, but Geneina’s contention, placing
Badawi on the commission. Two weeks later on January 12, it issued its findings
that Geneina inflated the cost of corruption, “lost credibility,” manipulated
figures to put positive developments in a negative light, and misused the word “corruption.”
The commission concluded with the line, “One's word is a responsibility,
accountability is a necessity, and knowledge is a right of the people.” Sisi
issued his decree dismissing Geneina on March 28, the state security prosecution
began questioning him in May, and in early June referred him to trial for disseminating
false information that “disturbs the public peace,” a misdemeanor that carries
up to a year in prison and/or fines.
Till the end, Geneina sought to make his case as costly
as possible for the government. He refused to post bail and legitimize the
bogus charges, and was taken into custody with a suitcase of clothes and medication
until today’s first trial session. Only when his youngest daughter ended up in
hospital from shock did he allow his lawyers to pay the money so he could go
see her.
* * *
As a chapter in the story of the Egyptian
revolution, the saga of Hisham Geneina and the institution he briefly steered is
not just about creative leadership under unbearable constraints. I don’t doubt
that Geneina’s acumen and even heroism will become clearer as time passes and
more details emerge. There’s another dimension further below the surface. Beneath
entrenched powerholders’ fury at Geneina’s audacity is the fear commanding
every power-grabbing clique, the fear of open, protracted controversies before
all eyes, away from the closed rooms and scripted settings where they prefer to
do business. The counter-revolution is dedicated to refurbishing ideas and
practices of political guardianship, convincing some and crushing others to accept that open conflict, loud fights, accountable public officials, and
other ways and means of doing politics are not the ‘appropriate’, ‘efficient’
or muhtaram way of doing things. Above all, that holders of state power
are an insulated caste who can’t be subject to the impertinent meddling of
ignorant commoners. Hisham Geneina’s conduct was a particularly dramatic challenge
to the idea that the public has no business concerning itself with public
affairs.
