CAIRO, 11 July 2004 — New Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif made his first Cabinet appointment yesterday, telling the ambassador to the United Nations that President Hosni Mubarak wanted him as foreign minister. Ahmed Aboul Gheit takes over the Foreign Ministry from Ahmed Maher, 68, who held the post since May 2001 but has suffered from bouts of ill health.
The official Egyptian news agency MENA said Nazif called Aboul Gheit yesterday afternoon to tell him that Mubarak had asked him to take the Foreign Ministry job. “Ambassador Aboul Gheit expressed his profound thanks to President Mubarak for this valued trust,” the agency added.
The choice of Aboul Gheit did not imply any shift in foreign policy. The ambassador to the United Nations, like Maher and other foreign ministers before him, is a veteran diplomat imbued with the traditions of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry.
On Friday evening, Mubarak asked Nazif, at 52 a relative youngster in the outgoing Cabinet, to form and lead a new government, replacing the one led by Atef Obeid since 1999.
Nazif, a computer engineer educated in Canada, had been communications minister since 1999 after many years working behind the scenes on computerizing the Egyptian government.
Mubarak has been working on a Cabinet change for many weeks and will probably not give Nazif much latitude to choose ministers on his own, analysts say.
A change in government was postponed last month when Mubarak left for Germany at short notice for a slipped disc operation. Mubarak came back on Wednesday after a 17-day absence and may have gone ahead with a quick government change, they add.
Opposition figures have called the Cabinet reshuffle an attempt by Mubarak, who has cautiously led the most populous Arab country for the past 22 years, to give the impression of change at the top without committing to substantial reforms.
Aboul Gheit joined the foreign service in 1965, serving in Cyprus, Moscow, Italy and the United Nations, with a term in Cairo as assistant foreign minister for Cabinet affairs. The Egyptian agency said he was leave New York last evening to come to Cairo and take up his post.
Egyptian state newspapers have said 14 of the outgoing 32 ministers and junior ministers are likely to lose their positions in the Cabinet change. Nazif has meetings yesterday with several possible candidates, including Mahmoud Mohieddin, a reformist economist deemed close to Mubarak’s son Gamal.
Mohieddin is chairman of the economic committee in the ruling National Democratic Party and a member of the party’s policies committee, which is chaired by Gamal Mubarak.
Nazif also met Ismail Serageldin, a development specialist who spent 28 years at the World Bank and now runs the Bibliotheca Alexandrina library in Alexandria, and outgoing Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, officials said.
Maher, 68, came out of retirement to take the Foreign Ministry job in May 2001. He was expected to leave the job in this Cabinet change because of occasional poor health. He has had heart surgery and missed Mubarak’s visit to the United States in April because he was in hospital.
