Egypt, Ethiopia May Not Rumble Over Nile Dam

By Henry Srebrnik, (Fredericton, NB) Daily Gleaner

Ethiopia is currently building a giant dam on the Blue Nile, close to its border with Sudan. But this has become a polarizing political issue between the country and Egypt.

The $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) was announced in early 2011, when Ethiopia took advantage of Egypt’s distraction with the Arab Spring uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

A dream since the 1960s, the dam, which will be the largest in Africa,  is meant to provide huge amounts of electricity for the power-starved nation, energy that could both fuel economic development and bring in cash through international electricity sales.

Ethiopia has an acute shortage of electricity, with 65 per cent of its population not connected to the grid.

It is the centerpiece of Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter, with a projected capacity of more than 6,000 megawatts.

The dam has become a must-have project politically, especially since Ethiopians themselves underwrote its cost with a popular bond issue.

Ethiopia has said it will start filling the reservoir behind the dam in July, though construction has been hit by delays.

The reservoir, which has a capacity of more than 74 billion cubic meters, will be flooded to form an artificial lake.

The first stage of the filling process is expected to take two years and bring the water level in the reservoir to 595 metres out of an eventual 632 metres.

But for Egypt, which has a rapidly growing population nearing 100 million, the dam represents a potentially existential threat. 

Some 90 per cent of Egypt’s fresh water comes from the Nile, and about 57 per cent of that Nile water comes from the Blue Nile, the river that Ethiopia is going to dam. Even without taking the dam into account, Egypt is short of water. 

Egypt accuses Ethiopia of not factoring in the risk of drought conditions such as those that affected the Nile Basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While acknowledging such a scenario is unlikely, Egypt says it could lose more than one million jobs and $1.8 billion in economic production annually. 

Egypt’s farmers are already facing dry fields because of water scarcity due to a combination of factors such as rapidly growing population, climate change, and antiquated irrigation systems.

The Egyptian government fears that Ethiopia's dam will make the situation worse. It therefore wants the first, two-year stage of the filling process to be extendable.

At one point Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi even threatened to use military force to stop the dam’s construction.

Ethiopia, with a population of more than 100 million people, accuses Egypt of trying to maintain a colonial-era grip over the Nile’s waters, based on a 1929 treaty (renewed in 1959) gave Egypt and Sudan rights to nearly all of the Nile waters. Addis Ababa says Cairo is trying to hold the project hostage by imposing rules over the filling and operation of the dam.

It also noted that while it could fill the reservoir in two to three years, it made a concession by proposing a four to seven-year process.

After Egyptian President al-Sisi met Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the sidelines of a summit in Russia in October, the two sides agreed to restart technical talks. Egypt then accepted an invitation from the United States for further talks in Washington.

Three days of intensive discussions beginning Jan. 13 laid the groundwork for a preliminary agreement that could defuse the growing tensions.

 “The filling of the GERD will be executed in stages and will be undertaken in an adaptive and cooperative manner that takes into consideration the hydrological conditions of the Blue Nile and the potential impact of the filling on downstream reservoirs,” the parties announced.

On Feb.1, a day after the latest talks ended, Abiy declared that Ethiopia was drawing ever closer to “our continental power generation victory day.”

Sudan, caught in the literal middle between the other two countries, initially opposed the dam but later came to support it since it promises irrigation and electricity benefits and a way to regulate irregular flows of water that often lead to devastating floods in that country.