No time to really speculate: a fortnight after having put in place his majority with the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) and the Istiqlal Party (PI), the president of the National Rally of Independents (RNI), Aziz Akhannouch, has already appointed the government that King Mohammed VI had asked him to form on September 10, 2021.
During a ceremony held this Thursday, October 7, 2021 at the Royal Palace in the city of Fez, the new head of the Executive and the twenty-four ministers who will make up his team were received by the Sovereign, in front of whom they took the oath and with whom they took a group photo. Also present were the Crown Prince, Moulay El Hassan, and Prince Moulay Rachid, the monarch’s younger brother, and, according to the Royal Cabinet’s communiqué issued at the same time, secretaries of state should also be appointed “at a later date”, without specifying when exactly, “in certain ministerial departments”, whose names were also not specified.
In any case, the first commitment of Mr. Akhannouch, which had been to ensure that the faces called to accompany him during the next five years are known before the opening of parliament this Friday, October 8, 2021, has been held, and it should be noted that overall he has been well protected from confusing speed and haste.
one will always find fault and one will always ask the question, legitimate, to know if the Akhannouch
government really represents the optimum that a country like Morocco can afford, where even if the skills are not lacking. It is impossible, in fact, to know, but if we stick to certain well-defined criteria, we can only say that many boxes are checked: first, and this thanks, therefore, it must be emphasized, to the very courageous choice to limit itself to a majority of only three parties, a government that is far from being plethoric and where the departments do not overlap unnecessarily -recall, for example, the abracadabra choice of the Saâd Eddine El Othmani government to have four ministerial officials in charge of Water/Water-; Then there is a parity that is not perfect, as we would like it to be one day in Morocco, but we still find ourselves with a third of the ministers who are women, which is not nothing; finally, many skills that, in their respective fields, are eminent.
And it is on this last point, in particular, that Mr. Akhannouch was probably best able to pull his weight, knowing that he had to rely mainly on partisan profiles while satisfying all parties at once, including his own.
He could not leave on the sidelines the secretaries general of the WFP and the IP, namely Abdellatif Ouahbi and Nizar Baraka, who for the first one finds himself Minister of Justice -the National Council of the WFP had itself insisted on September 17, 2021, when accepting the offer of Mr. Akhannouch, for Mr. Ouahbi to take part in the future government-, and for the second Minister of Equipment and Water; a department that the IP had almost fourteen years for. For the second, he will be Minister of Equipment and Water, a department that the PI had already occupied for nearly fourteen years in the persons of Bouamar Taghouane and Karim Ghellab (February 1998-January 2012). But it should be said that the WFP and the PI have also played the game, since instead of trying to impose personalities whose only merit is to be caciques of their parties, they have, on the contrary, put forward the interest of the country and submitted candidates taking advantage of their pedigree first.
the ministers who already have government experience is the new Minister of Economy and Finance, Nadia Fettah Alaoui, who has been Minister of Tourism, Handicrafts, Air Transport and Social Economy for the past two years and who will take the place of the other member of the RNI, Mohamed Benchaâboun -who was said to have been on bad terms with Mr. Akhannouch for some time. This brings her back to her primary area of competence, she who was once the deputy director general of Saham Finances. But Tourism remains in the hands of the RNI, with the arrival at its head of the consultant Fatim-Zahra Ammor, who is also close to Mr. Akhannouch for over twenty years, after having sat until the early 2010s in the board of directors of his holding Akwa.
Mr. Akhannouch has, in this regard, also chosen to entrust Agriculture, Maritime Fisheries, Rural Development and Water and Forests, of which he was himself a minister for nearly fourteen years, to another of his former collaborators, namely Mohamed Sadiki, who was since January 2013 already Secretary General of the government.
Be the first to comment