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A post on “mega-projects on the Nile” can perhaps best be introduced by pointing out the differences between the English and the Arabic versions of the term “mega-project”. The English version is a strange neologism which, according to Merriam-Webster, arose in 1976. “Mega”, literally, is of course a simple multiplication of the unit which follows it by 1,000,000 (or 1,048,576 in the context of data storage). Colloquially, it simply means “enormous” or “gigantic”, but its literal multiplicative meaning should not be ignored. Similarly هائل (ha’il) can also mean “gigantic”, but there is no arithmetic involved, and its other meanings are instructive. According to Hans Wehr, the word comes from the verb هول (haul), to frighten, scare, terrify, appall, horrify, strike with terror. The entry for the adjectival form then reads thus:
هائل—ha’il: dreadful, frightful, terrible, horrible, appalling, ghastly, awful; huge, vast, formidable, gigantic, prodigious, tremendous, stupendous; extraordinary, enormous, fabulous, amazing, astonishing, surprising; grim, hard, fierce (battle, fight)
To blend the English and the Arabic, mega-projects can be seen as the public-works version of “shock and awe”, rendered terrible not by their incalculability, but, in fact, by the enormity of their numerical exactitude, the triumph of rational order over “silent nature.”
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But before I launch into this rant in earnest, I’d like to attempt a more conventional examination of mega-projects. According to Dr. Rick, the signature characteristics of a mega-project are as follows:
- Broad vision
- Large in scale
- Permanent impact
- Environmental consequences
- Political dimension
- “Mega” cost
- Multiple objectives
The shorthand version he mentions is “if you can see it on a satellite image, it’s a mega-project” (I won’t quibble over the increasing ability of satellites to see just about anything of any size above ground and many things below ground—you get the point).
Here are some past, current and proposed mega-projects in Egypt:
El-Fayoum
The Fayoum depression has been the site of Egyptian mega-projects since the reign of Pharaoh Amenhat III in the Middle Kingdom. The latter expanded the natural canal now called Bahr Yusef to allow water from exceptionally high floods to drain into the depression, thus preventing catastrophic flooding on the Nile. The pharaohs of the Ptolemaic period rehabilitated this canal and used it to regulate the area of the lake (now called Lake Qarun) in the depression and reclaim land for agriculture and resettlement. They also built a city called Crocodilopolis. The expansion of the cultivatable land was primarily used to bolster yields of export crops for the enrichment of the Greeks. It coincided with a population explosion, to the point that the population, by contemporary estimates, had reached a level that would not be matched again until the late 19th century.
El-Gezira
The Gezira Scheme is sited by Dr. Rick as the first modern mega-project. It followed the independence of Egypt, declared by Britain in 1922. Previous water management schemes had largely taken the entire Nile river basin into account, but the independence of Egypt pushed Britain to find its own sources of cotton in the Sudan to supply its textile industry. A massive public-private partnership was undertaken between British cotton barons and the nominal rulers of the Sudan to dam up the Blue Nile at Sennar with a barrage and shunt water into a series of canals to irrigate the triangle of land (dubbed “el-Gezira”) between the Blue and the White Niles near Khartoum.
Aswan High Dam
Gamal Abdel Nasser pronounced a loud “King me!” in the grand checkers game between Egypt and Sudan/Britain when he announced the project to build the Aswan High Dam, one of the world’s premier mega-projects of the 20th century. Upstream threats to Egypt’s vital water supplies were met with this project to secure an “over-year” supply of water within the country’s borders. The project also accomplished the coronation of Nasser outside of the game with Britain as well, crowning him leader of the significant Egyptian nationalist movement as well as the Arab nationalist movement generally. Minor details like the forced relocation of 113,000 Nubians and the danger of absolute concentration of power over the country’s most important natural resource were flooded under this political momentum and popular fascination with such a هائل (ha’il) feat of modern engineering.
Mubarak National Project
This is a sort of social mega-project, alluded to in my previous entry on the Desert Development Center, wherein new Egyptian university graduates, workers and farmers displaced by privatization of public-sector companies and fellahin who have lost their land due to Land Reform reform are given land and agricultural subsidies in the New Lands. These New Lands, are, of course, desert lands “reclaimed” through major infrastructure projects (some of which are themselves mega-projects, as listed below).
El-Salam Canal Project
This is a large canal project, proposed and initiated by Anwar el-Sadat. It was finally completed in 2002 and brings water from the Damietta branch of the Nile, close to its mouth, to the east, under the Suez canal and a good distance into the Sinai. In addition to the usual goals of reclaiming desert lands for agriculture and settlement, it was also a way to encourage settlement in the Sinai in particular, under the notion that Israel would have no interest in re-taking the Sinai if it were populated with Ay-rabs (not a particularly convincing argument, given current events). Interestingly, Ethiopia strongly objected to this project on the grounds that it would bring water from the Nile—an African river for African people—into Asia.
Toshka Project
This massive and—like all mega-projects—controversial project would create a “New Delta” in the Western Desert. It involves a series of canals carrying water pumped from Lake Nasser (the lake formed behind the High Dam) to irrigate desert land. The project is notable for being one of the first post-revolution projects to specifically aim at cultivation of crops for export (mostly fruits and vegetables headed to Europe). Desert agriculture is more suited to mechanization than that of the Delta, which is considerably more labor-intensive. Development in the New Lands around Toshka relies upon private-sector investment financing (hence the Sheikh Zayed Canal, which carries water from the Mubarak Pumping Station—picture at the top of this post—at Lake Nasser), which is generally more interested in mechanized agriculture as it obviates the need to deal with troublesome living people. Very few of the latter are interested in living in such a remote location anyway.
East Oweinat Project
Related to the Toshka Project is this project to irrigate an even more remote desert depression several hundred kilometers east of the nearest notable landmark, Gebel Oweinat in the southwest corner of the nation’s borders. Unlike the Toshka Project, which is to use a mixture of surface water pumped from Lake Nasser as well as deep well water, East Oweinat uses only deep well water from the Nubian Sandstone aquifer. No one knows the extent and the capacity of this aquifer, but there is general agreement that it is not being recharged. Estimates range from a supply of anywhere from 50 years to 3,000 years of Nile-equivalent flow. Libya has already tapped this aquifer in a massive way with its own “Great Manmade River” mega-project. In any case, East Oweinat, similar to Toshka, is aimed at large investors and intended to serve the export market in fruits and vegetables to Europe.
Desert Development Corridor
The Desert Development Corridor is a mega-project that Farouk El-Baz, a former NASA employee, among other marks of distinction, has been trying unsuccessfully to convince the Egyptian government to implement for two decades. It consists of a massive investment primarily in infrastructure (including a superhighway, high-speed rail, water pipeline and electrical lines) stretching from west of Alexandria to the Sudanese border along a corridor just west of the Nile floodplain, apparently operating on the “build it and they will come” model. But, what worked for Kevin Costner is not likely to work for social engineers catering to owners of non-existent farms in Toshka in the Western Desert.
Other alternatives
Rushdi Said, who I mentioned briefly in my last post, criticizes El-Baz’s plan for just this reason. He believes that industry and settlements should be moved in tandem out of the floodplain gradually, based on judicious use of existing water and energy resources, with massive transportation infrastructure built specifically to serve those areas, rather than covering the desert with an abstract grid. But, as much as he concerns himself with catering to “average Egyptians”, such creatures only seem to appear in his plans in the aggregate. The reader may find it of interest to read through a May 2006 special issue of Al-Ahram, where several of these ideas are flushed out and posed one against the other.
Another proposal, the “Basaisa Model” (spelled Bassaysa in the aforementioned Al-Ahram Special), is also represented therein. It operates on a fundamentally different principle that, unlike every other project mentioned above, involves the active consultation and participation of residents themselves. Beyond this even, the aim of the project was
to educate and train the local inhabitants to become well aware of their environment and their own potential, and to foster and support cooperative and active participation, in a free democratic manner, in a sustainable community development process. (from “Sustainable Community Development with Human Dimensions: The Basaisa Experience” by Salah Arafa in Ecological Education in Everyday Life, edited by Jean-Paul Hautecoeur, p. 203)
The project was started by Salah Arafa, a professor of Physics at AUC, and involved the participation of Cynthia Nelson, an anthropologist also at AUC (after her death a few years ago, the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies was named in her honor). In fact, Arafa suggests that such a project should always involve an anthropological perspective. In the project, which began in 1974, residents were encouraged to identify their problems and needs in the village and were given education and consultation to help them formulate solutions to those problems. The identification of unemployment as a major community problem eventually led to the establishment of the desert development of New Basaisa in the Sinai. A rotating community credit system (جمعية) was established to help the men pay for the land. One might consider this an eminently successful example of a “micro-project” in Egypt.
But I draw this parallel between mega-projects and micro-projects to make a particular point. It is not simply the terrible enormity of mega-projects that makes them suspect; it is also the urge to quantify development and make it subject to the calculus of a rational plan that is external and prior to the project itself. I would like to quote again from Arafa’s article to illustrate the point:
The question that has occupied my thinking since 1973 concerns the role educated intellectuals could play to actively participate in sustainable community development. The question was: Can we so-called intellectuals, technical experts, thinkers, etc., be involved in and play an active role in the process of sustainable community development. If yes, then how? It was clear that this could only be achieved with clear goals, effective plans, and commitment to the implementation of this process. (p. 202)
So, while the project may have involved considerable community participation, the process was already established, perhaps even before the site itself was. The project, indeed, seems as much to meet the need of an intellectual to feel useful as it does the needs of the residents of a small Egyptian satellite village. Arafa lists the rules and approaches which guided his “intervention” (his word) at Basaisa:
- Our role as outsiders to the community was to teach, train, direct, sponsor, and support grass-roots initiatives, but not to do anything without the active participation of community members.
- Our on-site activities were to elaborate plans concerning what the villagers decided and expressed as needs, and to do it in a scientific way based on self-help.
- Our main objective was to identify, train, and support local educated leaders from the community itself. (p. 203–4)
The invocation of “self-help” should not pass without comment. Many of us will associate this term with a tedious, but seemingly-benign, pop-psychology wave of the 1980’s, but in Egypt, a full century previously, the book Self-Help by Samuel Smiles was translated into the Arabic. This influential book initiated a great deal of Egyptian navel-gazing—which is to say a great deal of upper-class, Western-educated Egyptians gazing down disparagingly at the navels of their “indolent” brethren and ruminating on ways to improve the “Egyptian character”, to make it more “industrious” (credit is due to Timothy Mitchell for this analysis). Unfortunately, a 100-year-thick veneer of NGO-speak is insufficient to cover up this condescending attitude:
Other questions came to mind, as well. Is it enough to teach people to read and write? Is it enough to provide them with information on how to protect the environment or increase productivity? Are people in the Egyptian countryside willing to learn? Do they know what they need from adult education? Do they possess an ability to read and write? What can motivate them? Are there new factors, new techniques? (p. 202)
But I am surely being unfair to Arafa. I tend to think this is more the NGO speaking than himself, for this is the language and the method of NGOs and “non-profits”: the language of grant applications, which must prove the feasibility and replicability of a model that proceeds its implementation in order to justify the project to its funders. Unless one is content to operate “under the radar” (and it’s a very low radar, here in Egypt), this is the channel into which one is forced to conduct one’s work. This is the consequence of a state bureaucracy as obsessed with micro-management as it is with mega-projects.
This should be considered an object lesson in the pitfalls of “community development” bereft of any broader analysis of—and struggle against—political and economic authoritarianism. “Cooperative and active participation, in a free democratic manner” is meaningless if circumscribed within isolated pockets in the context of absolute, arbitrary power and exclusion. For another example, take the innovation in Egypt of Water User Associations (WUAs): nominally-democratic organizations set up with funding from the U.S., Holland and the E.U. to involve water users in the management of their own water systems through subscription fees. The idea that motivates this plan is that water users who effectively own their water systems will manage them with greater care than a bureaucrat in Cairo. True enough, but any democratic participation in these WUAs will be completely wiped out and overwhelmed the moment a bureaucrat with the Ministry of Agriculture, or, higher up in the Ministry of Irrigation, decides to cut the water supply upstream (which they do with some regularity, and without notice). As long as there is the technical ability to exercize this total power over people downstream, literally or figuratively, it will most assuredly be abused. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the most fundamental problem with mega-projects.
