When the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed opened the vast Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the country’s west on 9 September, he did not mince his words.
“This lake has brought with it a wealth greater than Ethiopia’s GDP. This generation has accomplished a great deed with the Renaissance Dam. The era of begging has ended,” he told a group of assembled officials, media and some regional leaders.
Behind him, sheets of water poured over the concrete from the reservoir behind, which holds almost 74 billion cubic metres of water over a surface area roughly the size of Greater London.
The prime minister went on to call the mega dam, which is expected to produce somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 megawatts of electricity, a “shared opportunity” for the region.
Notably absent from the pageantry, however, were representatives of the two countries downstream, Sudan and Egypt.
Just a month after the opening, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told the Cairo Water Week conference that Egypt “will not stand idly by” what he labelled Ethiopia’s “irresponsible” actions.
However, the question of Nile water distribution has been a diplomatic bone of contention for years before the dam was even conceived of, let alone when construction began in 2011.
Historical precedent
“There have been multiple agreements on the Nile, and Ethiopia keeps breaking them,” professor of geology and water resources at Cairo University and a prominent critic of the GERD Abbas Sharaky told Euronews.
As much as 85% of the Nile waters that converge in Khartoum have flowed from the highlands of Ethiopia, in the so-called Blue Nile branch, despite its reputation for a muddier, siltier appearance than the other White Nile branch flowing from the Rift Valley.
It is for this reason that water diplomacy over the river has more often focused on Ethiopia’s control.
When the first major dam was built in 1902 at Aswan during the period of British colonisation, the UK also signed an agreement with Ethiopia on behalf of its colonies that gave the former veto powers on any construction upstream “which would arrest the flow of their waters into the Nile.”
Subsequent treaties in 1929 and 1959 are seen to have heavily favoured a larger, more powerful Egypt, eventually granting it an allocation of 55.6 billion cubic metres, or 66% of the flow.
Egyptian academic and analyst Ahmed Morsey told Euronews that this stood for a long time because “there had been this understanding by the Egyptians, and to some extent the Sudanese, even by some of the previous Ethiopian leaders, that these older arrangements were here to stay.”
The visiting fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs said construction of the GERD was the first time these treaties, which had long governed the waters, were really thrown into question.
His Ethiopian colleague Tsedenya Girmay explained that this was not always the case, pointing to a 2015 declaration of principles that aimed to end the long-running dispute, so that “Ethiopia would continue with the dam, but in a fashion that wouldn’t cause harm to the downstream countries”.
“But then domestic issues had an impact on the failure of diplomatic efforts,” Tsedenya said.
Not just a domestic issue
In Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, much has changed since the 2015 deal. Only one of the three leaders who signed the 2015 declaration, Egypt’s al-Sisi, remains in power. As politics in Addis Ababa and Cairo have slipped into greater authoritarianism, Sudan has suffered a full-blown civil war.
The issue of the dam has become as much a domestic political football of national unity as a cross–border dispute.
Tsedenya recently travelled to the Ethiopian capital, where she said this was more prevalent than ever.
“I spoke to people from the Foreign Ministry, and it does seem to be the one thing that’s unifying and driving whatever policy we have. The dam itself is the only thing that is unifying us,” she told Euronews, noting internal strife in the African country, including the devastating conflict in Tigray.
According to Tsedenya, the centrality of the dam in the Ethiopian school curriculum is evidence of its status as a national rallying cry, especially in a country where almost 60 million people lack access to electricity.
In Egypt, Prof Sharaky also told Euronews that the Nile represented “life” for a burgeoning population of over 115 million people, 95% of whom are packed into the 5% of the land along the river.
It was for this reason that it is seen as such an existential threat to the largely desert-covered country, with al-Sisi warning in 2021 that “no one can take a single drop of water from Egypt.”
Despite US President Donald Trump suggesting that Egypt could “blow up” the dam in 2020, Sisi has always contended that he was determined to resolve the issue through diplomatic means.
Yet, a former senior US official who mediated on the GERD during the Biden administration, who spoke under the condition of anonymity as they still work in the region, laid much of the blame for the breakdown in negotiations at Egypt’s door.
“What we concluded … is that in the end, the Egyptians actually didn’t want a deal. Like, there was no deal on the table that would satisfy them,” they said, admitting that Ethiopia also “weren’t going to make a deal easy.”
They told Euronews that “al-Sisi actually benefits from this threat of an external enemy, a domestic political matter,” especially as Egypt’s economy has been faltering and the population faces higher prices, notably after essential wheat imports skyrocketed following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ethiopia has also accused Egypt of interfering in its domestic politics. Morsy dismissed this as Addis Ababa trashing Egypt for domestic gain, saying the claims were “without any evidence. I almost wish that Egypt had this power to see if it can actually do any of this.”
Sudanese activist and analyst Kholood Khair also suggested that the civil war in Sudan had pushed the de facto authorities and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) closer to Cairo and its position on the dam.
Khair runs a Sudan-focused think tank that was based in Khartoum until the war. She contends that “opposing the GERD became much more of a vehicle to get greater Egyptian support than it had anything to do with the GERD itself”, saying that pre-war authorities saw a possibility of the project being “good for Sudan,” due to promises by Ethiopia to share the electricity produced with Khartoum.
However, when SAF leader Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan met with al-Sisi in Cairo on 15 October, in the wake of flooding in Sudan and Egypt, much of the blame was apportioned to the GERD, a claim Ethiopia vehemently denies. The two discussed an increasingly coordinated position regarding the dam.
Is Brussels invested in the Nile?
Brussels seems to have fallen increasingly into Cairo’s orbit over the GERD. When the EU welcomed al-Sisi with open arms to a high-profile summit in the Belgian capital in October, it released a joint statement expressing its desire for future cooperation.
Tucked in towards the end, the statement highlighted that “the EU reiterates its support to Egypt’s water security and the compliance with international law, including concerning the Ethiopian Dam.”
Corrado Čok of the European Council on Foreign Relations argued that this marks a shift in EU policy, which used to “keep a balanced position between Egypt and Ethiopia …centred on de-politicising the issue by fostering a technical approach.”
This included “diplomatically, technically and financially” supporting independent research panels on the dam’s impacts.
Čok sees reasoning for the policy pivot as two-fold, noting first the devastating war in Tigray between 2020 and 2022, for which the government in Addis Ababa was roundly condemned.
“The disagreements over Ethiopia’s conduct in the war prompted the EU to suspend aid programmes and, eventually, also the dialogue on the GERD faltered,” he explained.
Conversely, the bloc is becoming increasingly reliant on Egypt. “Cairo is becoming a prominent partner for multiple reasons, such as addressing the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Libya, underpinning Europe’s energy security through natural gas and renewables and containing migration flows,” Čok argued.
According to him, this meant the EU had come to “accept” Egypt’s demands for diplomatic support on the dam.
It is not just Brussels that Cairo has targeted. The former US diplomat argued that al-Sisi had also used the issue as a bargaining chip with Washington. “It helps him with the United States, because it’s a means of deflection,” they said.
“The US will come and say, ‘stop doing X with the Russians,’ and he’ll say, ‘I would love to do that, but I can’t do it unless you help me with this existential threat of the GERD.’”
Yet, with the dam now built and in use, all sides find themselves in a political stalemate. Morsy concluded that Egypt will “just have to deal with it,” until the adversaries can agree to hand over policy control to technocrats.
Even Prof Sharaky was amenable to the idea, but he doubted its likelihood, with even the mediators tending towards a more partisan approach.
“I would speak to other colleagues and geologists in Ethiopia. I just don’t think they’d give me the visa,” he laughed before ringing off.
Euronews has reached out to the Egyptian foreign ministry for comment.
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