Background
Sayed Gaballah was born in October 1916 in Egypt.
Sayed Gaballah was born in October 1916 in Egypt.
Educated at Cairo, where he graduated in agriculture from the university in 1938. He subsequently resumed his studies in the USA to obtain a doctorate in economy from the University of Wisconsin in 1953.
As a lecturer at Cairo University he taught in the faculty of agriculture for several years, then was promoted head of the Department of Agricultural Economy. In 1963 he was appointed Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Planning. From 1964 to 1967 he was a member of the board of the United Nations Institute of Economic Development and Planning for Africa and was a delegate to many international economic conferences.
After entering the government in 1968 he was made a member of the central committee of the Arab Socialist Union and elected to the National Assembly. Nasser trusted his judgment on agricultural development and this reputation of Gaballah’s was acknowledged by President Sadat, who kept him in government when he dismissed all but nine ministers in January 1972 and when he reshuffled the cabinet and took over as Prime Minister in March 1973.
One of Gaballah's secrets of political survival is that he is not a man of overweening ambition. He allows intellectuals like the Marxist Dr Abdallah as Minister of State for Planning to have their head and draft impressive 10-year development programmes.
Pillar of successive governments because he knows what he is talking about in handling the problems of a basically agricultural economy. A man highly esteemed for his academic and administrative experience in the theory and practice of planning agricultural development.