President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reacted Saturday to a major power outage that affected several parts of the republic on Thursday, urging Egyptians to remain patient, and stressed that the electricity crisis would not be solved within a short time.
The wide-scale outage on Thursday was “a major crisis that Egypt experienced for the second time in its modern history since 1990s”, Sisi said in a TV address.
Sisi revealed that Egypt needs “huge investments worth at least US$13 billion to solve the electricity crisis over the coming five years,” warning that investors won’t be eager to come to Egypt unless the electricity problem is solved.
Sisi urged Egyptians to stand by the government in face of challenges, most notably the electricity problem. “I and the government cannot work on resolving those issues and addressing the existent challengers without the people’s assistance,” the president said, stressing that the crisis “won’t be overcome within two or three months.”
The president also criticized the media coverage of the outage. “The media did not handle the crisis from the perspective of its long history,” suggesting that electricity problems have existed for a long time.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
