Mohamed Nour Farahat, legal expert and secretary General of the advisory council to the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), on Sunday demanded "a speedy transfer of power."
In a press statement, Farahat said the priorities of the transitional phase must be reconsidered and presidential elections must be held soon.
Farahat went on to say that the Egyptian armed forces “are not qualified to deal with the events on Qasr al-Aini Street” from either a security or political perspective.
"The armed forces should have handed over power to someone qualified to govern, then gone and defended the homeland,” said Farahat. He also called on the SCAF to exercise “wisdom and restraint in dealing with the current situation.”
“If the advisory council ever meets again, the first issue to be put up for discussion will be how to speed up the election of a president so that the SCAF can return to its main duty,” he said.
Meanwhile, security expert Major General Sameh Seif al-Yazal cited "repeated mistakes in dealing with the recurrent crises, which are the result of a lack of clear, practical policies and the presence of temporary solutions."
"I cannot pass judgment on the management of the recent crisis as the facts are not complete enough to ascertain who is at fault,” Yazal explained. “In any case, everyone needs to put Egypt’s interests first."
In a speech on 22 November, SCAF head Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi vowed to hand power over to civilians after the presidential elections are held in late June.
Protesters during November demanded that power be handed over to a civilian presidential council, putting an end to military rule. A number of politicians, experts and presidential hopefuls criticized the SCAF for mishandling the transitional phase.
Hassan Nafea, a political sciencist at Cairo University, told Al-Masry Al-Youm on Sunday that he attributes the current crisis to "a continuous series of errors committed by the SCAF which prevented any progress in building institutions capable of taking over power."
Translated from Al-Masry Al-Youm
