CAIRO — After years of controversy surrounding the topic, the Egyptian government made a final decision on Jan. 19 concerning the proposed project to link the Nile and Congo rivers, aimed at providing the country with additional water shares. The government decided to halt any studies on this topic with a private sector company in charge of implementing the project, and officially announced that the project would not be included in its water plan.

This stirred the Egyptian public opinion, especially after farming union leaders announced their support for the project. They had hoped it would alleviate their suffering from the recurrent water crises, which affect drinking water as well. Egypt’s water quota has remained at 55.5 billion cubic meters a year, and there is a crisis threatening a decrease in this amount, as the Nile headwater states are insistent on a redistribution of the river’s water quotas. This is in addition to the threats posed by the new Ethiopian dams, especially the Renaissance Dam, which is expected to deprive Egypt of a large part of its water share when the first stage is completed in 2015.

The Egyptian government’s decision to cancel the project was based on a report prepared by the Ministry of Water and Irrigation and submitted to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in January. The report noted 22 obstacles that would make the implementation of the project very difficult, if not impossible. The report included the obstacles that Al-Monitor discussed in an article in October 2013 titled “Egypt’s 'lost dream' of linking Congo, Nile Rivers.”

According to the government report (of which Al-Monitor obtained a copy) to halt the project, the proposal submitted by the team from the Africa Development Project and link the Congo River (which represents Sarco, a private company in charge of implementing the project) is based on transporting 110 billion cubic meters of water annually from the Congo River Basin to the Nile Basin, by linking the two rivers. This would represent about twice the amount of Egypt’s current Nile water quota. However, the project is not internationally recognized as being feasible and the work presented by the company is still at the proposal stage; the stage of exploratory study has not been reached. Moreover, the proposal lacked essential technical details, and the project would require elevating water from the Congo River 800 meters (2,625 feet) to reach the Nile River Basin. This would be very difficult given the nature of the terrain separating the Nile and Congo basins.