Ethiopia has vowed to defy threats from its neighbours and continue filling its giant $5 billion mega-dam after a breakdown in talks aimed at averting a regional conflict.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, on the main tributary of the Nile, has triggered alarm in the downstream states of Sudan and Egypt which fear it will leave them parched. Rains that will fill the dam are due in a few weeks’ time. Years of failed negotiations and festering tensions now threaten to boil over.
President Sisi of Egypt warned of “unimaginable instability” for the region if Ethiopia went ahead and filled the reservoir. “I tell our Ethiopian brothers — don’t touch a drop of Egypt’s water, because all options are open,” Sisi said in Cairo yesterday.
More than 90 per cent of Egypt’s population of 100 million live along the Nile or in its vast delta, many of them farmers who rely on its waters for their livelihood.
Seleshi Bekele, Ethiopia’s water minister, delivered a blunt riposte. “As construction progresses, filling takes place,” he said. “We don’t deviate from that at all.”
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The dam sits 15 miles from Ethiopia’s border with Sudan which has hardened its stance to the project. Mariam Al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan’s foreign minister, said any unilateral move by Ethiopia would violate international law.
Trust between the neighbours has been eroded by a border dispute during which Sudan has demanded that Ethiopian peacekeepers be removed from a United Nations mission in its southern region.
What Egypt and Sudan call Ethiopia’s “intransigence” over settling the dam dispute has given them a new and urgent purpose. Last month the two states signed a military co-operation agreement described by the head of Egypt’s army as “unprecedented”.
The Egypt-Sudan pact was aimed at achieving “national security for the two countries, and to build armed forces full of experience and knowledge,” said Lieutenant General Mohamed Othman al-Hussein, the head of Sudan’s armed forces.
Egypt is well equipped for any war. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Egypt was ranked third in the world between 2015 and 2019 in terms of arms purchases. Ethiopia was not ranked.
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Rashid Abdi, an expert on the region, said Ethiopia’s loss of support from Sudan, which has acted as a buffer between it and Egypt, was a huge blow to the government of Abiy Ahmed.
“This is its biggest strategic loss for Ethiopia in the last three decades,” he said. “Egypt is [now] effectively on the border with Ethiopia — in geostrategic and military terms.”
The new allies, as well as indicating they may approach the UN security council to bind Ethiopia to an agreement over the dam, are forming new alliances in the Nile Basin to isolate Abiy.
Uganda’s defence ministry today announced it had signed an intelligence-sharing agreement with its Egyptian counterparts.
“The fact that Uganda and Egypt share the Nile, co-operation between the two countries is inevitable because what affects Ugandans will in one way or other affect Egypt,” said Major-General Sameh Saber El-Degwi, the head of Egypt’s delegation.
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Abiy, who is facing international condemnation for waging a grisly civil war in the far north of his country, will be determined to stand up to his regional foes as he heads towards delayed elections in June.
Once celebrated as a young hope for the continent and recognised by the Nobel peace prize committee in 2019, Abiy has also insisted he “could get millions readied” and go to war over the dam project, which reflects his vision for a united Ethiopia as a continental powerhouse.
The project, half a century in the making, is set to be Africa’s largest hydroelectric-power project once fully operational later this decade. Behind the barrier that looms higher than three Nelson’s Columns, the dam’s reservoir will eventually hold half the river’s annual flow in an expanse the size of Greater London.