Linking the Nile to the Congo river has always been the lost dream of Egyptians to achieve water security and provide necessary water allocations for the development of projects, be they agricultural or industrial.

The idea was first seriously explored in 1980 during the administration of the late Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat. Sadat sent an expedition to the Congo to prepare a conceptualization of the project. However, the idea had first emerged in 1902, and was mentioned in a book written by Apata Basha, Egypt’s former chief irrigation engineer in Sudan.

However, this idea died with the death of Apata, as did the conceptualization of the project with the 1981 demise of Sadat and the arrival of President Hosni Mubarak to power in Egypt. Moreover, successive governments have always found excuses to shun the implementation of the project.

This dream kept recurring from time to time in the minds of Egyptians. Yet, crises have intensified between Egypt and Ethiopia and the countries with the rest of equatorial headwaters of the Nile, either because of the redistribution of water allocations, or because of Ethiopia's set of dams to control the Blue Nile, which provides Egypt with 85% of its water.