In Vietnam, it costs just 11 cents to ship a case of Coca-Cola via river barge from Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong River in the South, according to the company's Middle East and North Africa president, Curt Ferguson, in a recent television interview. "It is the most efficient system in the world," he said. Coke uses around 1,000 trucks to ship soda from its Nasser City bottling plant to elsewhere in Egypt and the African continent. "One of these days we would like to use the Nile," said Ferguson.

He's not the only one. In recent years, as Egypt faces rising fuel prices and its roads become ever more congested and dangerous, the government has repeatedly paid lip service to the goal of expanding river transportation in Egypt, which is woefully underutilized, with sporadic plans to attract investors to the sector and make use of the Nile to move imported goods throughout the country. At the moment, some 97 percent of commodities are transported by truck. Just 1 percent of cargo is moved via river, meanwhile--despite the fact that Egypt happens to have one of the world's earliest natural transportations systems, which is far cheaper and safer than the country's congested, perilous roadways.

In April, Minister of Supply Khaled Hanafy announced that he was working with the transportation ministry at "integrating a multi-modal transportation network with our grain and commodities storage facilities across Egypt." With the government moving millions of tons of imported grain every year, "This will save us billions," said Hanafy, who also outlined a plan to transport imported sugar and livestock via the Nile beginning later this year.

Minister of Transportation Said Galal says he wants to more than double the amount of commodities that are shipped via river in Egypt by the end of 2016, ultimately increasing the percentage of goods moved via the Nile to 10 percent. Experts say it's an ambitious goal, given that the country's river transport infrastructure has suffered decades of neglect, with rundown, barely adequate ports. Still, with Egypt strapped for cash and suffering from a chronic natural gas shortage, officials and businesses can't ignore the dramatic potential of river transport for long-term savings. Moving goods on the Nile is around five times as efficient as trucking, says Ahmed Soltan, a former transportation ministry aide who worked on river and maritime transportation. "A common assessment is that five liters of diesel can transport one ton of goods for 550 kilometers by river, 333 kilometers by rail and 100 kilometers by truck," he explains. In fiscal 2015/16, Egypt expects to spend some LE 100 billion on fuel subsidies--which have long been acknowledged as wasteful and of little benefit to the millions of poor Egyptians they are supposed to support. The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi pledged in 2014 to phase them out completely within five years, though record low petroleum prices have called into question that promise.

It was ancient Egyptians who first pioneered river transport thousands of years ago. Millennia before modern road construction, Egyptians used the Nile as their highway, building river barges to deliver stone from the far south to build the pyramids and other famous monuments in the river valley. The early Egyptians developed technologies like depth gauges, river-bed charts and river locks and implemented shipping schedules to ensure safe, efficient navigation. Thousands of years later, stressing industrial development and Egyptian cultural pride, President Gamal Abdel Nasser spawned a "river transportation revolution," according to Mohamed Kandil, a professor at Nasser Military Academy and a member of the Egyptian Maritime Salon, a think tank. It was during the Nasser era that Egypt created the River Transport Authority to license and inspect river barges and ports and help train workers. The Nasser government bought motorized river barges to move goods and dug the Nubaria canal to connect the western branch of the Nile with Alexandria's seaport. Kandil says that at its peak, at the end of the 1960s, river transportation accounted for around 25 percent of the nation's total freight.

Back then, "the fleet and infrastructure were in good shape and the government covered all capital expenses," enabling shippers to stay in business despite transit prices being capped by the state. Between 1967 and 1975, when the Suez Canal was closed during the Israeli occupation of the Sinai, the Nile was the only route for moving goods between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. In the 1970s, President Anwar Sadat oversaw the creation of several new spillways and canals connecting the Damietta seaport with the Nile and linking Cairo with Ismailia on the Suez Canal.

Unfortunately, the 1980s changed all that, as privatization and business growth pushed freight onto what were then mostly empty highways, making for faster transit and loading and unloading times. Heavily subsidized fuel made road transport artificially cheap. In turn, Egypt's river transport sector dwindled. Currently, Qalaa Holdings is Egypt's only private firm with major investments in river transportation. In 2011, an executive at Qalaa, then called Citadel Capital, spoke of so-called intermodal transportation as the linchpin of the firm's vision for a transport network stretching the length of the Nile, from Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa, where Qalaa does business in numerous growing markets, to Alexandria. Ahmed El Sharkawy, the managing director of the firm's transportation and logistics operations, blames fuel subsidies and  infrastructure for the fact that "the return on investment for a river transportation company under the current circumstances is low."

Almost half of the cargo vessels currently licensed to operate on the Nile are owned by the state, amounting to 440 cargo barge, while the private sector owns around 520, according to government figures. "Most of these freights are medium to small and can't be    compartmentalized to carry multiple products," says Kandil. Only a fraction of these vessels are actually operational, say insiders. For those that are, Egypt's ports are woefully insufficient. There are 48 ports along the 3,160 kilometers of the Egyptian Nile, but most are little more than berths dating from Pharaonic times. Fluctuating water levels are another barrier. When seasonal Nile water levels drop, "bottleneck" sections of the river that are too shallow to allow freight barges to pass freely must be dredged in order to keep vessels from running aground.

Some years ago, the Dutch government funded a system of electronic buoys to aid in navigation on the Nile, but most disappeared or weren't maintained and stopped working. Last November, officials announced that the government had dusted off long discussed plans to launch a Nile "taxi"--a river transportation service aimed at traffic weary Cairo commuters--in early 2016 by contracting with private companies. In early March, then transport minister Saad al-Geyoush hosted a splashy inauguration for the Nile taxi/bus service, which was to charge a LE 15 to LE 35 fare. However, the service never actually began offering people rides, for reasons that were not made clear.

With unencumbered market conditions (i.e. no fuel subsidies), "river transport should account for a good share of overall cargo transportation in Egypt," says Qalaa's Sharkawy. Indeed, 80 percent of Egypt's cargo moves between north and south, and more than 95 percent of the population dwells in the crowded Nile Valley. But nobody will invest unless companies have a clear incentive to switch from trucks, says Mohamed Abdel Ghany, an engineer who has researched Egypt's transportation network on behalf of the Engineers Syndicate.

Qalaa began investing in river transportation in 2007, when the Egyptian government first promised to do away with energy subsidies imminently. The firm predicted then that companies would be drawn to river transport as fuel prices rose. "Unfortunately, things didn't evolve the way we expected them to," says Sharkawy. But analysts agree that it's only a matter of time before Egypt is forced to cut energy subsidies.

Nile Cargo is a firm owned by Qalaa that operates barges on the river, moving grain, coal and other goods between Alexandria, Damietta and Cairo to Beni Suef, Minya and Aswan. Qalaa's Nile River Ports, meanwhile, runs four docking facilities in Upper Egypt and Alexandria (the firm owns the latter), where it offers loading, unloading and storage facilities and services along the waterway. Egypt's only other river freight company, the National Nile Trans Co., is owned by the military. The remaining players are individuals who own and operate one or two barges.

Attracting investors also depends on whether Egypt improves its sagging river infrastructure. River locks need to be updated, the ports require more advanced storage and loading equipment and maps and lighting are required, say members of the industry. "You can't just put barges on the stream and expect the river transportation will come back," says Soltan, the former aide at the transport ministry. The first step, he says, would be to clean up the river-bed which has been accumulating garbage for decades. Such waste can cause damage or accidents.

"This is not a massive investment if we compare it to trying to improve trucking," reasons Abdel Ghany, who points out that river barges can be built here, with locally made parts, while trucks depend on imports. "The big problem is the lack of government vision and strategy when it comes to river transportation," says Sharkawy.

Currently, no one government body is responsible for regulating river transport; rather the job is split among the ministries of transportation, tourism, water, interior, investment, environment and local municipalities. As a result, prospective investors often find themselves adrift when trying to obtain licenses or resolve problems. "The Nile has no father," says Abdallah. In 2012, just before he retired as the head of the RTA, he petitioned local officials in Qena to offer three 10-year-old, unused river docks for sale to private investors. "Until now, the governorate has yet to talk to investors about these ports," he says.

Ahmed Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Ministry of Transportation, acknowledged at a January press conference that the Nile is mismanaged: "The vagueness is massive," he admitted. In order to address this, the ministry is creating yet another new body, he says, one devoted to the goal of attracting investment in Egyptian river transport.

In addition, there is Hanafy and Galal's plan to  transport hundreds of thousands of tons of imported commodities across the country via the Nile. From the south, Hanafy says that some 80,000 head of cows and camels will be brought up from Sudan on the Nile via Lake Nasser. "We aim to cut out land freight where we can," he says. "Using river transportation for at least part of the journey will definitely lower costs, which will translate into lower prices for the consumer."

However, few are optimistic about these plans coming to fruition without a more tangible show of political will. The $8.2 billion expansion of Egypt's second-most famous waterway, the Suez Canal, merited a national holiday when it was unveiled last August. Still, many experts have questioned whether the expansion made economic sense for Egypt at a time when global shipping is down and the --government is struggling to pay for basic services. Boosting river transport, on the other hand, most certainly makes long term financial sense. The question is whether Sisi's government sees it as politically expedient. "The river transportation network will not be fixed unless there is a decision from the president," says Abdallah. © Business Monthly 2016