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That
Egypt’s economic well-being is dependent on the Nile has been a geopolitical
fact of life since ancient times. Fly
over the country, and Egypt’s dependence on the river is starkly
illustrated. Amid vast deserts, the
river and its cultivated banks appear as a narrow green ribbon snaking its way
to the north, where it widens into a delta before reaching the Mediterranean.
The vast majority of Egypt’s 94 million people live adjacent to this fertile
belt, along which its main cities from Aswan to Cairo to Alexandria cluster. The lower Nile valley and the delta together
comprise about 3.5 percent of Egypt’s total area. The remaining 96.5 percent is mostly desert.
The Nile that enters Egypt is fed
from two sources. The White Nile,
flowing through Sudan, supplies Egypt with 15 percent of its water; the Blue
Nile, emanating from Ethiopia, provides 85 percent.
During the colonial era the fact
that one of the Nile’s main tributaries rises in Lake Victoria, which lies in Tanzania
and Uganda, and runs through what are now eleven African countries before
discharging into the Mediterranean, held little significance. Scant consideration was given by colonial
rulers to the needs or the rights of the African hinterland. Given the priorities
of the time, it is scarcely surprising that a 1929 treaty with Britain provided
Egypt with a virtual monopoly over the Nile waters with veto rights over all
upstream projects. In 1959, under the provisions of this treaty, Egypt signed a
deal with Sudan which guaranteed the two countries use of 90 percent of the
Nile waters.
But the world was changing fast.
The eight other nations that shared the Nile basin at that time viewed Egypt’s
historic dominance of the Nile as increasingly untenable. Egypt’s upstream neighbours were all undergoing
rapid socio-economic development, and these emerging regional powers began to challenge
Egypt’s control of what each regarded as its river.
The affected countries eventually
got together, and in the 1999 Nile Basin Initiative put forward a proposal to “achieve
sustainable socio-economic development through the equitable utilization of,
and benefit from, the common Nile basin water resources.”
Ten years of negotiations
followed. Finally in 2010, six Nile
Basin countries signed the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA): Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and
Burundi. They were joined in June 2012 by
the newly-created South Sudan. The CFA was
meant to replace the 1929 colonial agreement that gave Egypt absolute rights over
all the waters of the Nile, and provide a mechanism for cooperation among all
ten member countries in managing the Nile basin water resources. However Egypt
and Sudan rejected its reallocation of Nile water quotas under the 1959
agreement, and Congo also refused to sign.
This was the moment a further
major complication entered the already complex Nile situation.
Back in the late 1950s, the United States Bureau of Reclamation had
undertaken a survey of the Blue Nile to identify where a dam might be sited to generate
hydro-electricity for the region. Forty
years later, in 2009, the Ethiopian government suddenly decided that the time
was ripe to press ahead with the project. The driving force was former prime minister Meles Zenawi, who had run the
country for more than two decades and was obsessed with Ethiopia’s rebirth.
By November 2010 a design for the
dam had been drawn up. On 30 March 2011
the project was made public. Two days
later, on 2 April, Zenawi laid the dam's foundation stone. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance
Dam (or GERD), will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in
Africa.
Almost incredibly, once
constructed the reservoir is estimated to take from 5 to 15 years to fill with
water.
In August 2017, as construction on the dam reached 60
percent completion, tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia began to rise. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said
the Nile was “a matter of life and death” for his country and that “no one
can touch Egypt’s share of the water”. He demanded that Ethiopia cease
construction on the dam as a precondition to negotiations. Ethiopia retorted that the dam was a matter
of life and death for it, too, since it was a vital component in its plans for
economic development.
The Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia, but runs for much of its length into Sudan before joining the White Nile and flowing on into Egypt. In an attempt to resolve differences, discussions
were arranged between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to consider how best to manage
the impact of GERD. In November 2017 the
talks broke down. On December 26, Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, flew to Addis Ababa to emphasise Egypt’s concerns.
At the heart of the dispute lies Egypt’s fear that,
once the dam is built, and especially during the initial phase when the
reservoir is being filled, the country will receive less than the annual 55.5
billion cubic metres of water it says is the minimum it needs. With a surging population that President Sisi has termed “a threat to national
development”, Egypt will be requiring more, not less, fresh water over the next
decade.
Although most of Egypt’s water
comes from the Blue Nile, on which the dam is being built, Ethiopia is adamant
that, once the reservoir has been filled, GERD will not adversely affect
downstream countries. At the same time it refuses to acknowledge Cairo’s right
to 55.5 billion cubic metres of water every year, since this emanates from the
1959 agreement between Egypt and Sudan to which Ethiopia was not a signatory.
Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 8 January 2018:
http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/A-Mid-East-Journal/Damming-the-Nile-Egypt-Sudan-and-Ethiopia-battle-it-out-533183
Published in the Eurasia Review, 11 January 2018:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/11012018-damming-the-nile-egypt-sudan-and-ethiopia-battle-it-out-oped/
Published in the MPC Journal, 15 January 2018:
http://mpc-journal.org/blog/2018/01/15/damming-the-nile-egypt-sudan-and-ethiopia-battle-it-out/
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