A website designed to track Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi shows a lackluster performance in his first 100 days in office – a period that ends today (Sunday).
The 'Morsi Meter' website was inspired by an American one that features an 'Obama Meter' which tracks the popularity and performance of U.S. President Barack Obama.
It shows that of the 64 'first 100 day' campaign promises made by the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Egyptian president earlier this year, only four have been fulfilled:
1. Promoting and rewarding police officers who prove to have played a major role in restoring law and order in their areas.
2. The removal of objects blocking roads and pathways.
3. Launching campaigns to spread awareness about a clean environment in the country. One campaign launched by Mursi has been named “A clean homeland.”
4. The beginning, at least, of a clean-up of garbage in the streets -- at least some of the streets. But not all.
On at least one Internet forum where Egyptians chat about their issues, members who were discussing the latest initiatives commented on October 1, "Well, I have seen all those brand new garbage trucks arriving in Maadi and starting to clean up...." to which a second writer responded ascerbically the same day, "Brilliant, but I wish they would send one to my neck of the woods."
The “Morsi Meter” plan was made up of five categories, according to the pan-Arabic Al Arabiya news network -- monitoring the premier’s initiatives on traffic, security, fuel, bread and the country’s environmental cleanliness -- and each included a series of proposed solutions to the problems to be implemented by the end of Morsi's first 100 days in office.
But in actuality, few real concrete changes have been made; the economy is still limping, hospital personnel went on strike over wages and benefits, garbage is piled high in at least some of the streets of the capital, Cairo.
According to the English-language Egypt Independent newspaper, however, at least one person has filed a police report against the president for failing to implement all of his 100-day promises – an act completely unthinkable during the tenure of former President Hosni Mubarak.
Nevertheless, Egypt's experiment in elected Islamic government is not without repressions and violence of its own.
Anti-Christian harassment has not changed; churches continue to be torched and Coptic Christians continue to be murdered. Even Christian children are not safe: Two Coptic Christian children, ages 9 and 10, were arrested and sent to a juvenile detention facility last week for “insulting religion” after the imam of the local mosque filed a complaint against them. The two children allegedly had torn up pages of a Koran they found in a small bag while playing near a pile of rubbish in the street. Neither was able to read, Ahram Online reported.
Late this summer, Israeli Jews were told they could not enter the country to make their annual pilgrimage to the Tomb of the 19th century Sage, Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira, located in the city of Daymouta, 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Cairo in the Nile Delta. Gamal Heshmat, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood warned in an interview with Egypt's daily Al-Ahram newspaper at the time, “Normalization (of relations) with Israel is forced on the people, and the visits too come against the will of the people, and despite popular rejection.”