The situation is as follows: A stalled road map, stalled subway stations, stalled power stations, stalled investments, stalled hospitals, stalled universities, stalled facilities and stalled services.
People have been dissatisfied for two years, particularly since the eve of the June 30, 2013 revolution. It was not enough to bring down the Muslim Brotherhood, just as it was not enough to bring down Mubarak, simply because the challenge of building is far greater that the challenge of demolishing.
The country needs creative and innovative political engineering to redesign, rather than restore, the whole political and social structure. It is a religious-military structure that was imposed on us during the first period of tyranny (1952-2012).
Both parties began as allies, then ended up as enemies from the time of Nasser through to Sadat and Mubarak.
And here we are now still simultaneously pushing the brakes and the gas, with the forces of acceleration fighting against the forces that pull back, leaving us uncertain of whether we are moving forward or backward.
When King Farouk was ousted six decades ago, Mohamed Naguib and the Free Officers asked the people to stay calm and quiet while the Armed Forces marched them to safety. But what did the people harvest when they did so? They reaped the bitter harvests of June 1967, January 25, 2011 and June 24, 2012.
But the people were not calm and quiet all the time. They protested against the fake trials of 1968 after the defeat, then again on January 17 and 18, 1977 against lifting the subsidies of goods and services. And in the last ten years of Mubarak, they protested against everything, culminating in continuous protests against the Muslim Brotherhood between January 25, 2011 and July 3, 2013.
The two hundred days in which the people, whether youth, women, far left or far right, protested against theocracy were indeed the beginning of the civil spring.
The military was not in the picture. It was the civilians who confronted the religious rule. They just wanted the army to side with them like it did on January 25, nothing more. But they could not imagine that they would move from a religious tyranny that they can oppose, to a national tyranny that they can not. Though opposing religious despotism may be heroic, opposing a national tyranny is considered betrayal.
Unfortunately, the wrong mandate of July 26, 2013 has brought us back to square one, which is the state of calm and quiet. And here we are two years later continuously reaping the mess.
The question remains: Who is responsible for this mess?
