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Same political
weft and warp
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Sisi (New Suez Canal)
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Presented as a solution to
Egypt's economic issues, about two months after becoming
president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced a huge project dubbed ‘the new
Suez Canal,’ promising a huge boost of income for Egypt and drawing
comparisons in the media to
Gamal Abdel Nasser, when he championed the Aswan High Dam project more
than 40 years ago.
The project promised to upgrade
and expand the Suez Canal, an important trade route between Europe and Asia. The idea was nothing new. Similar canals were
built during Sadat and Mubarak's time.
The first of several promised
‘national projects,’ al-Sisi urged Egyptians to unite completely behind his
vision and support the project. The project was more grounded in politics and
reality than anything else.
People began to compare
general-turned-president al-Sisi to Nasser, the charismatic Egyptian
president who, after following a similar path to the presidency, nationalized
the Suez Canal at the age of 38 and
challenged Western countries’ control of the waterway. This drew strong
support for Nasser and united people behind his promise of economic growth
from the Suez Canal, especially after fighting off a failed invasion by Britain, France
and Israel. Al-Sisi is
fanning similar nationalist pride after snubbing the concerns of the United States
and European Union about
the coup that brought him to power. Both have also begun a nationwide
crackdown against members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Sisi promised that his New
Suez Canal would bring a similar much needed economic boost to the populous
country’s
failing economy. The project promises to create one million new jobs for
Egyptians, who have long suffered from high unemployment.
Mohab Mamish, chairman of the
Suez Canal Authority, promised that the project would more than double the
annual revenue of the waterway, from US $5 billion to US $13.5 billion, by
2023. It would do this by allowing two-way traffic and decreasing the long
waiting time for ships, allowing 87 vessels to transit daily, rather than the
current limit of 49.
Widening the canal does not,
however, necessarily mean that more trade will transit; that will depend on
the volume of international trade. The Panama Canal, which is an important route
for trade between Asia and the Americas, is also being upgraded
to accommodate more traffic.
When Mamish first announced the
project, the plan was to complete the digging of the new canal in three
years. But, during the press event, al-Sisi stressed that they should
complete the digging in just one year. The digging of the new canal and the
widening of parts of the old canal are parts of a complicated process, and
skeptics have raised concerns that shortening the timeline from 36 months to
12 months was unrealistic.
For security reasons, the
military was appointed to oversee the whole project. Several companies
would be involved in the project, but it will all be under the supervision of
the army. The actual excavation was then awarded to a consortium led by Bahrain-based Dar
al-Handasa, in which the Egyptian army’s engineering corps is a partner.
As soon as the announcement was
made, television stations began broadcasting videos of bulldozers digging
around the clock to meet the target. However, the tight deadline promised by
al-Sisi meant that foreign companies had to be contracted to help in the
digging – contrary to the original plan to depend solely on Egyptian firms –
especially as the excavation quickly turned from dry digging into dredging
when water was encountered early on.
Dredging – the removal of underwater
mud and sand – is much more difficult and expensive than dry digging. The
excavation was originally planned to be dry, but water began to seep into the
new canal from the older waterway as the bulldozers began moving material.
The contractors reportedly have to move more than one million cubic metres
daily. This added unforeseen expenses to the project, increasing
exponentially the cost of the new canal.
This has raised concerns about
the quality of studies done before starting such a major project, or whether
the studies had even been carried out. In addition to the unexpectedly high
dredging expense, scientists have raised environmental concerns about the
massive project. In late November 2014, a paper published in the journal
Biological Invasions suggested that 350 invasive species have already made
their way from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through the old Suez Canal. Now, the new project risks doubling that
number, further straining the Mediterranean ecosystem.
The new Suez
Canal project, like the rest of the projects announced by
al-Sisi, is large and ambitious. Skeptics warn that Egyptian presidents have
a history of announcing large projects that never meet their targets, such as
Hosni Mubarak’s Toshka project, which aimed to reclaim millions of desert
acres for agriculture and is often regarded as a huge failure.
These grand projects capture
the imagination of Egyptians, who have a long history of nationalist
movements and strong support for the military. But, with al-Sisi’s strong
backing by unquestioning media and the majority of citizens, he might not be
held accountable should his grand projects fail to measure up to their ambitious
promise.
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Mubarak (Toshka)
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Presented a the solution to
Egypt’s demographic and economic issues, and the Arab World’s largest and
most expensive engineering enterprise, the Toshka New Valley project has now
very little to show except for evidence of ill-informed political decisions.
Toshka’s premise was simple yet
grandiose: to dig a 240 kilometer canal out in the Western
Desert feeding off Lake Nasser’s
water. The bid was to reclaim land and relocate up to 20 percent of Egyptians
to this “new valley,” thus easing the country’s serious overpopulation,
unemployment, and food security problems.
The idea was nothing new: it
was proposed as part of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s original plans for the High Dam
in Aswan, but
it was abandoned in 1964. When work started at Toshka in 1997, Hosni Mubarak
was only reviving Nasser’s scheme.
Toshka was less grounded in reality
than in politics, and this has played into its failure, according to Emma
Deputy, a doctoral student from the University
of Texas at Austin, who has been researching the
Egyptian mega-project as part of her dissertation. She spoke about her
research at Nahdet al-Mahroussa on Wednesday night.
A look at some technical
requirements show that not everything was taken into full consideration
before the first ploughs started digging, and to this day, the Water
Resources and Irrigation Ministry — responsible for the project — does not
make public the different studies related to Toshka it may have conducted
over the years.
For one, the Western Desert’s
high saline levels and the presence of underground aquifers in the area act
as a major hindrance to any irrigation project. As the land is irrigated, the
salt would mix with the aquifers and would reduce access to potable
water.
The clay minerals found in the
soil are also posing technical problems to the big wheeled structures moving
around autonomously to irrigate the land. Often their wheels will get stuck
in a little bowl created by wet clay that dried, and the irrigation machines
would come to a standstill.
The aura of secrecy extends to
the financial aspects of the project. Toshka’s total budget has been
estimated from as low as US$83 million (according to numbers from the
Egyptian government) to a whopping US$87 billion (according to the US State
Department).
The publicly available state
budget does not mention the Toshka project.
According to some figures
aggregated by Deputy, less than 25 percent of the original budget has been
spent already, but the results are piecemeal. The only objective met so far,
she said, is the diversion of water from Lake
Nasser into what little of the Sheikh Zayed Canal
was built.
The canal is currently 60
kilometers short of the first of the oases through which it was supposed to
run, Baris.
“It’s unfortunate, because
Baris would have benefited from the canal,” said Deputy. Strict water
management in most of the western oases has the water shutting down after 9
pm.
Deputy estimates that, as of
2010, Toshka has irrigated about 16,500 feddans, but she concedes that her
numbers might be too high. Conflicting government figures show that about
1,000 feddans have been reclaimed in all of Egypt from 1996 to 2010.
Toshka’s original objectives
were set in two phases: in the first one, the Sheikh Zayed
Canal would be
completed and 550,000 feddans would be reclaimed. At the end of the second
phase in 2017, a total of two million feddans would have been recovered from
the Western Desert.
In 2005, the government
announced that it was abandoning the second phase entirely and that the
deadline for the project’s completion was extended to 2022.
According to Deputy, canceling
the second phase did not increase the project’s chances at becoming
successful, because so many initial targets had not been met.
“(Toshka) was failing so badly
in the first place that it didn’t make a difference to cancel the second
phase,” she said.
Conservationist Mindy Bahaa
Eddin considers Toshka an example of “disaster planning” in Egypt. She said that there is a
greater need for stakeholder consultations when working out details of such
large-scale projects, so that potential problems can be understood and
resolved ahead of time.
For example, she said, Toshka
would have caused great damage to the many ancient sites found in Kharga
Oasis, in a similar way that water is currently creating problems for sites
in Fayoum.
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Conclusion
1) Both projects were politically motivated.
2) Cost is too high to afford under the economical circumstances then and now.
3) Egyptian nation has always been the victim. |
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