Morsi's ouster was inevitable

Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were bound to be ousted.

They did not comprehend that Egypt is still gripped by rolling revolution and the people of Egypt are not prepared to allow another autocratic regime to rule for long.

All that was needed to get Egyptians in their millions back into the streets was an idea and an organisation. At the end of April, the idea sprung from the minds of five young people who launched a campaign to secure signatures on a petition calling on Morsi to stand down and the organisation, Tamarod (Rebel, was born). By June 30, the day Tamarod had called for mass protests against Morsi, 22 million signatures were on the petition.

In the run-up to that day, the first anniversary of Morsi's inauguration, Tamarod announced the formation of the June 30th Front, an umbrella for major opposition parties and named Nobel laureate Muhammed ElBaradei as its spokesman.
The pro-Morsi camp attempted to fight this effort by claiming 26 million signaturesfor its own petition supporting Morsi’s right to rule until 2016 and mounting its own rallies. The combined rival demonstrations on June 30 - which drew 14 million - were far larger than all the gatherings that brought down President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and were said to have been the largest political protests the world has ever seen.

Tamarod/June 30th triumphed on Wednesday when the military, which provided the muscle to oust Morsi, locked him in his quarters in the presidential guard headquarters, surrounded pro-Morsi demonstrations with troops, tanks and armoured vehicles, and proclaimed a road map to return Egypt to the path of the revolution. The announcement was made by overall armed forces chief General Fabel Fattah al-Sisi, flanked by ElBaradei, Shaikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, theSunni world’s senior cleric, Coptic Orthodox Christian Pope Tawadros II, and Muhammad Abdel Aziz of Tamarod.

Political process

Under the deal, reached after a day of protracted negotiations and last minute troop deployments, the chief justice assumed the interim presidency, a national coalition government is to be formed, and youth brought into the political process. The Brotherhood-drafted constitution will be amended and new parliamentary and presidential election held. A national reconciliation committee will be established to deal with the deep polarisation of the society between religious fundamentalists and secularists.

Sisi pledged that the armed forces, which ruled Egypt from 1952-2012, would not, again, take power. The army’s decision to oust Morsi in order to install a civilian regime demonstrated that the country’s current military leadership has discovered that it cannot effectively rule this vast, populous, country which is on the verge of economic collapse.

Morsi was bound to fail as president because he was not up to the job and not in charge. A rather simple soul, he was the front man for the Brotherhood's deeply conservative old guard leaders who were determined to fill key positions with loyalists and implement their plan for the "Islamisation" of Egypt.

Egyptians demanded security, better wages, cheap bread, electricity, fuel, education and health care. Instead of meeting those demands, veteran analyst Hisham Kassem told Deccan Herald, and, “Morsi alienated everybody: the army, secularists, Christians, neighbouring countries, friendly Gulf countries [which provide financial aid] and the IMF.  He did not do anything right. The Brotherhood, which sincerely believed god had decreed its assumption of power at this time, thought, ‘god will see us through.’”

Unfortunately for the Brotherhood, since the 2011 uprising Egypt's poverty rate has risenfrom 40 to 60 per cent; the murder rate has ballooned by 130 per cent, kidnappings by 140 per cent, and robberies by 300 per cent. Although Morsi and the Brotherhood are not to blame for this downward slide, many Egyptians charge them with doing nothing to slow, halt or reverse the country's rapid collapse.
Ahram Online analyst Dina Samak made the point that demonstrations took place everywhere. "People who wanted to remain in their home territory or could not afford to go to main rallies went out to their local squares in their dozens and hundreds here in Cairo and all over Egypt...

“Morsi and the Brotherhood made the fatal mistake of taking power alone and now alone bear all the responsibility for failing to deliver on chronic problems that cannot be solved in a year such as shortages of power and fuel and soaring prices. The Brotherhood committed suicide. If you don’t take radical steps and make radical changes you get radical opposition.

“When Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt (a Brotherhood stronghold) goes out into the streets, you know Morsi and the Brotherhood are in trouble,” she asserted, predicting that Egypt could “for many years” face a “cycle of revolution and counter-revolution. It's all about economics.”