President Sisi’s Canal Extravaganza |
With spectacle and ceremony, Egypt’s president unveiled an unnecessary infrastructure project in a country that is falling to pieces.
BY SARAH CARRAUGUST 7, 2015 Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/07/sisi-dredges-the-depth-egypt-suez-canal-boondoggle
CAIRO — How apt that Egypt’s latest “gift to the world,” the “New Suez Canal,” makes a two-lane freeway out of the conduit that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Everything else in Egypt is going in two opposing directions. The response to the Canal has been no different; polarized and circling round the real issue, like demented frigates.
In 2014 while on a visit to the United Nations, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that Egypt intended to dust off plans for a project to expand the Suez Canal area that had been buried since the Hosni Mubarak era. A new canal, some 25 kilometers long, has been built parallel to the original canal. In addition, 23 kilometers of the original canal have been widened and deepened. The Egyptian government claims that this has “eradicated” waiting time for up to 50 vessels per day.
Initially, the project had a three-year timeline, but in a prime bit of theater Sisi enthusiastically demanded that this be reduced to a year while Suez Canal Authority head Vice-Admiral Mohab Mameesh was in the middle of delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the project to military and government bigwigs. “One year! One year and it’ll be finished!” a grinning Sisi said, holding up a finger and then brushing the palms of his hands together. “A year and it will be implemented, sir,” Memeesh replied.
And now it’s happened.