Sisi: Dollar shortage crisis in Egypt still a challenge for the State

Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, has mentioned again his country hosting about nine million refugees and that hosting them costs over $10 billion per year. He claimed that they “consume water at a rate of 4.5 billion cubic meters per year, which requires the establishment of new desalination and water treatment plants at a very large cost,” in light of the dollar shortage crisis in Egypt, which still poses a challenge for the country, he said.

Al-Sisi said, at the opening of the harvest season of the Future of Egypt project, which is supervised by the army, and is located along the Cairo-Dabaa Road, that the number of Egyptians inside the country is approximately 106 million people, in addition to nine million people from other nationalities, while the average per capita water consumption in Egypt is estimated at about 500 cubic meters per year, meaning that the country “needs to save at least 57.5 billion cubic meters of water annually.”

Al-Sisi added, on Monday, that “the dollar shortage crisis in Egypt was and still is a challenge for the State, and the solution is to make local production very large in order to cover the citizens’ needs for basic goods, and export the surplus abroad,” adding, “I am fed up myself, and the government is burdened with me with huge expenses to build the state; I had no other solution,” he said.