Grand hostilities

12th February 2021

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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Before the madness in Tigray started playing out last year, most of the news coming out of Ethiopia was such that all of us would be proud to be African. A case in point was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed being named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending decades-old hostilities with neighbouring Eritrea that claimed many, many lives.

Before that, the Horn of Africa country had basked in the media glow for years courtesy of the novel and ambitious initiative taken by its government to build the gigantic Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) to generate 6.45 GW of electricity for domestic consumption and export.

The price tag of the GERD is about $5-billion – equivalent to 7% of Ethiopia’s gross national product in 2016.

While governments that are intent on undertaking infrastructure project of such proportions would ordinarily make a beeline for international development finance institutions or other lenders, the Ethiopians chose to implement the project using mostly domestic sources of funding, including taxes, sales of government bonds to citizens at home and in the diaspora, donations and even a national lottery.

The 145-m-high dam, which has been under construction since 2011 and straddles the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile river, started filling in July and will eventually hold 74-billion cubic metres of water. Economically, it will be a boon for Ethiopia. Besides meeting the needs of its 110-million-strong population, electricity generated at the dam will power the country’s industrialisation push and exports will earn much-needed foreign currency.

The project has, however, generated hostilities between Ethiopia and downstream countries Egypt and Sudan. Egypt, which gets more than 90% of its scarce fresh water from the Nile, fears that the dam could devastate its economy, while Sudan has said that its nearby Roseires dam would be overwhelmed if an agreement is not reached that would allow the countries to share data.

In the early days of the dam’s construction, Egypt threatened to sabotage the project, giving rise to fears of a water war. However, there has since been a shift towards conciliatory negotiation among the three countries.

Until they broke down last year, the GERD negotiations were mediated by the US and the World Bank. President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his capacity as rotational chairperson of the African Union (AU), then took over. This, as some commentators have pointed out, was done in the spirit of finding African solutions for African problems.

Ramaphosa, whose term as AU chair has just ended, achieved early success as mediator when he got the three countries to commit to refraining from taking any action that could jeopardise the AU mediation process. But if Egypt and Sudan – and Oom Cyril himself – took this to be a commitment by Ethiopia that it would not start filling the dam, which it had threatened to do when the 2020 rainy season started, then they had a thing coming, for this is what it proceeded to do within a matter of days of making this ‘commitment’. Ethiopia’s excuse for its move was that filling the dam was an integral part of the dam construction process.

To its credit, Egypt, which, when the fellow from the Muslim Brotherhood was still President, vowed it was prepared to go to war “if [the Nile’s flow] diminishes by one drop”, chose to swallow its pride and the negotiations continued. But they stalled again last month, with both Ethiopia and Egypt blaming Sudanese objections to the framework for the talks for the new impasse.

It’s not clear whether Ramaphosa will continue as mediator, now that his stint as AU chairperson has ended. But what is apparent is that the grand hostilities generated by the GERD are likely to endure for some time.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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