To say that the challenges facing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s likely presidency look insurmountable is a huge understatement. As the next president, Sisi will have to contend with a sluggish economy, an energy crisis, a water crisis, vanishing tourism and foreign currency reserves, political instability and political violence. All the while, he will have to deal with voter expectations like those US President Barack Obama faced in 2008, and a potentially fatal backlash if he doesn’t deliver on them. It doesn’t help that so far, there have been very little specifics shared as to what his program will actually entail, with what’s released so far seems an over-ambitious plan that can not possibly be followed in the current economic realities. The truth is that while the Egyptian presidency has always been a poison pill, at no moment in recent history has the position been less enviable than it is today.

The best starting point for Sisi to tackle all of these issues is the operational reform of the Egyptian state. A bloated bureaucracy, the state's over 6 million employees are not known for their efficiency, work ethics or financial honesty. It is powered by a labor law that makes it virtually impossible to fire anyone who works for the state, by-laws that guarantee the delay of any project or urgent decision for months, if not years, if one official simply fails to sign a piece of paper and an operational structure that allows, if not outright supports, bribery. Each of the ministries acts independently, and in very few cases has there been successful inter-ministry cooperation of any kind. The Egyptian bureaucracy is an unmoving and unmovable behemoth, an albatross around the neck of every government that the previous regimes appointed.

The last government appointed by deposed President Hosni Mubarak, that of former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, tried to side-step these issues by having every minister create a mini-ministry inside his office that would expedite matters, circumventing the bureaucracy by letting the private sector deal with them directly. While this plan yielded results and drove the 7% annual growth rate that marked the Nazif government, it also created a new layer of corruption on the ministerial level and made the ministers the enemy of the state employees and agencies who had benefited from the old way of doing things and no longer received their usual cut. It also aggravated the military, which saw the Nazif government as a bunch of businessmen who were treading on the economic interests of the armed forces, and made sure to delay or prolong any procedure that required their approval for any government initiative. 

The intergovernmental infighting between the military camp inside the Nazif government (including former Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, former International Cooperation Minister Fayza Abul Naga and former Oil and Gas Minister Sameh Fahmi), and the camp of Mubarak's son Gamal and other businessmen (including the ministers of finance, investments, telecommunications, external trade and industry and the prime minister himself) led to the delay and sometimes stoppage of many foreign and local investment projects that would have been a boon to the Nazif government. In other words, on every level, the Egyptian state has actually acted against the economic interests of the country by promoting its own interests.