Palace petitioners highlight Morsi's task If Egypt's first freely-elected president needed a reminder of the magnitude of the country's problems or the huge hopes pinned on him, he merely has to walk out of his office - an ornate Arabesque palace in a Cairo suburb. There Mohamed Morsi would find hundreds of people like Sumaya Ismail and her 26-year-old son Mamoun, formerly a blacksmith but now unable to work. Clutching a folder of medical reports, Mrs Ismail explains that Mr Morsi is her last hope to pay for an operation for Mamoun who lost use of his legs after an operation on his back went wrong and failed to secure redress. "I am a poor woman and my husband is dead," she said. Where can I get the money for surgery? I just want him to be able to stand on his feet. They tell me he could walk again if he had an operation abroad. The row of police guarding the gates parted occasionally to let in one of the petitioners - an eclectic mix of people seeking jobs, affordable homes, medical treatment or rights swallowed up by a corrupt bureaucracy. Frustrated by the long wait, some factory workers who had lost their jobs blocked the road, stopping traffic briefly and getting into arguments with motorists furious at the delay. Mr Morsi, a former official of the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood group, has been waging a fierce power struggle with army leaders trying to circumscribe his authority through court decisions and unilateral constitutional changes. But another danger to Egypt's fragile democratic experiment are the public's high expectations. Many Egyptians see in the election of Mr Morsi, who was sworn in two weeks ago, the beginning of a new era in which entrenched ills will be quickly eradicated. "We have been aware of the expectations from even before his election," said Ashraf Serry, a Muslim Brotherhood economist. When people emerge from a long period of deprivation, they expect that the president will fix all problems fast. It is not clear to them that no one person has the ability to deal with all these varied expectations and with so many problems accumulated over decades. Outside the palace gates, Mohamed Fawzi Abdel Aziz, dressed in the robes of a farmer, said he and 10 other villagers had come from the oasis of Fayoum to ask Mr Morsi to give them back farmland "stolen" by a local police officer in 1998. "We sued him, but he has influence and he managed to get some of us arrested," said Mr Abdel Aziz of the officer. We now have no land and have to work as hired agricultural hands. Also there, waiting to present a complaint, stood three unemployed geology graduates who said they represented 500 of their colleagues. They have been staging protests since the beginning of the year because the oil ministry did not hire them. "We want jobs and it is our right," said Mohamed Abdel Hakim. We are geologists and we can only work in the petroleum industry. The ministry should either appoint us or find us other opportunities. The new president, still grappling with the generals and without even his own government in place, has already set up two complaints offices which received 10,000 petitions in five days. The challenge now, Mr Serry said, was for "every citizen to feel he was the focus of the president's attention." He was confident that Mr Morsi would be able to inspire hope in Egyptians when they see that at least some complaints have been addressed. Despite the petitioners" continued presence, it is Egypt's faltering economy where Mr Morsi needs to produce concrete results quickly. With the nation hobbled by continued political tension, facing the threat of currency devaluation and limping along at less than 2 per cent annual economic growth, the president faces an uphill battle to deliver on hopes for a swift turnround that delivers jobs and prosperity to a population of some 85 million, 40 per cent of whom are poor. Mr Serry is adamant that improvements will be felt soon. He said the Brotherhood has received offers of $150bn in inward foreign investment. But others are far less optimistic. "The key to restoring high rates of economic growth remains the economy's ability to attract investment, especially [foreign direct investment] to cover a shortfall in the domestic savings rate," said a report this week by EFG-Hermes, the regional investment bank. The investment recovery remains uncertain, in our view, given the political uncertainty [in the coming period].