Egypt’s Parliament will look Tuesday into a cabinet reshuffle after Prime Minister Sherif Ismail revealed in a media statement on Monday evening that the reshuffle will include nine ministries from the economic and public service ministries group.
The Egyptian PM said that the new reshuffle would include merging two ministries into one.
Ismail said that the cabinet plans to appoint four deputies for each minister, following the success of a similar experience at the Ministry of Finance.
Ismail did not reveal which ministries will witness a change in leadership or which will be merged.
The statement said, “The philosophy of change adopted by the cabinet depends mainly on continuing the social and economic reforms.”
The much-anticipated cabinet reshuffle was planned to be presented to the parliament on Sunday, but was postponed due to the Lebanese President Michael Aoun’s visit to Cairo.
In the same context, at an earlier time, it had been announced that the cabinet reshuffle would be presented to parliament on 1 February.
However, sources said that the reshuffle had been delayed mainly because some figures approached to take charge of ministry portfolios had declined.
In an interview with Egypt’s state-owned Middle East News Agency (MENA), Sherif Ismail admitted that “some figures turned down the job because of the critical economic conditions the country is currently facing.”
He added that “this made the choices available to us more limited, and so we needed more time to finish the reshuffle.”
According to Article 147 of Egypt’s 2014 constitution, the president is entitled to conduct a cabinet reshuffle in consultation with the prime minister and with the approval of an absolute majority of attendees of the house, or no less than a third of its members.
This will be the sixth cabinet reshuffle since al-Sisi came to power. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the military coup in 2013 against the first democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, has failed until now in solving Egypt’s crucial crises.
