Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2013 13:03:35 +0200
Ethiopia and Sudan demand their water back
Egypt no longer owns the Nile
03 August, 2013
For 200 years, Egypt has dominated its region and the countries that are the
source of its crucial water supply, the Nile. Ethiopia and its Renaissance
Dam will change that
by Habib Ayeb
Mohammed Morsi, then Egypt’s president, said in June “Egypt is a gift of the
Nile, and the Nile is a gift of Egypt,” and promised that he was ruling no
options out concerning that river’s future. This reaction to the decision to
construct the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile is
unsurprising, since life in Egypt is dependent on the river.
“Ethiopia is not intimidated by Egypt’s psychological war and will not halt
the construction of the dam for a second,” the Ethiopian foreign ministry
spokeswoman Dina Mufti said the next day. Her country does not accept that
Egypt has historic rights over the waters of the Nile and refers to
“illegitimate colonial rights”.
Ethiopia, though ignored and even scorned for the past two centuries, is the
source of 80% of the Nile’s waters and now intends to impose its own vision
for the river and a different division of its waters. Egypt, having been the
dominant power in the region for 200 years, is still reeling from recent
political upheavals, economic weakness and the interruption of its
development — all of which reduce it to the status of one Nile state among
many, without the capacity for action.
Egypt is entirely dependent on other states for its water, almost all of
which comes from the Nile. Its four principal sources rise several hundred
kilometres beyond Egypt’s southern border: the Blue Nile, Sobat and Atbara
in Ethiopia, which provide around 80%, and the White Nile in Uganda, which
provides the rest.
Egypt’s share of Nile water has until now been regulated by a 1959 agreement
with Sudan, under which Egypt gets 55.5bn cubic metres a year and Sudan
18.5bn. (The annual flow averages 84bn cubic metres, 10bn of which evaporate
from Lake Nasser, created by the construction of the Aswan Dam, which came
into operation in 1964.) This agreement allotted nothing to Ethiopia and
other upstream states.
The longer term
The prospects for maintaining longer-term availability of water in
sufficient quantities are poor. If the short-term prospects for improving
resource management seem limited, the only possibility would be to construct
a series of large-scale hydraulic engineering projects that would mostly
depend on the goodwill of the countries controlling the river’s sources. But
Ethiopia is opposed to any joint hydraulic project before a new
water-sharing agreement is signed.
In 2010 Ethiopia secured a treaty reorganising water-management and
construction projects, the New Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement.
Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania are signatories. Under this
treaty, a commission representing all the signatories will approve (or
reject) large-scale hydraulic projects, dams, canals and anything else that
has an impact on the course, volume or quality of the Nile’s waters.
This alliance between six of the nine members of the Nile Basin Initiative —
the forum in which Nile states try to find practical solutions and formulate
joint projects ( <http://mondediplo.com/2013/08/04nile#nb1> 1) — has shaken
things up in the region. Egypt refused to sign without an undertaking from
the signatories not to alter the current division of the water and to
recognise the “historical rights” of downstream nations (Sudan and Egypt).
It now finds itself without any right of inspection in the Renaissance Dam
project — a source of discord — and, for the first time in its history,
without a right of veto, which it had thought innate.
The choice of name for the dam is no accident. Ethiopia’s renaissance as a
regional power is under way, strengthened by assets it has hitherto lacked.
We are witnessing the emergence of a strong Ethiopia capable of playing a
key geopolitical role in its zones of influence: the Red Sea, the Nile basin
and East Africa.
Ethiopia has flexed its muscles twice in the past 30 years. First, in Sudan
in 1983, it reacted to the construction of the Jonglei canal — when 150km
out of a planned total of 360km had been completed — by reigniting the war
between north and south Sudan (the latter independent since 2011) as well as
harbouring and arming John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army. In
Somalia, Ethiopia was heavily involved in the civil war against so-called
Islamists, supported by western powers keen to prevent the emergence of an
Islamist state at the mouth of the Red Sea.
China’s arrival in the region has freed Ethiopia from having to observe
conditions imposed by the US and international financial institutions,
including the need to seek agreement from all the countries with territorial
water rights — especially Egypt — before receiving funding for major
hydraulic projects on the river and its Ethiopian sources.
Diplomatic successes
Ethiopia’s diplomatic successes, such as the alliance with five other
upstream states in the New Nile River Cooperative Framework Agreement, have
given it the opportunity to escape hydro-political isolation. These
successes are all the more remarkable since Addis Ababa has gained two
significant strategic allies: the new state of South Sudan (
<http://mondediplo.com/2013/08/04nile#nb2> 2), which is about to sign
Ethiopia’s new Nile water treaty; and more astonishingly, Sudan itself,
which has traditionally allied itself with Cairo in Nile politics.
Sudan is hoping for benefits: electricity; increased irrigation capacity and
joint large-scale agricultural projects with Ethiopia (while the prospects
for using the water from the new reservoir in Ethiopia are limited because
of the nature of the terrain, Sudan, which is downstream of the dam, has
vast areas of irrigable land); and mitigation of its severe flood problems,
especially in the east, the agricultural Al-Jazirah region, and greater
Khartoum.
Through the Renaissance Dam and its huge electricity generation capacity
(around 6,000 megawatts from 2015/16) Ethiopia will achieve considerable
energy self-sufficiency and even become an energy exporter to the region,
particularly the Sudanese states and perhaps even Egypt.
Given its location, it would be hard for the dam to be part of the
development of irrigation and agricultural production on the high plateaux
upstream and in southern and eastern parts of the Ethiopia. But some of the
water held in the dam, which could have a capacity of 63bn cubic metres, is
likely to be used to create new irrigated areas around the lake, downstream
of the dam — some studies suggest half a million hectares (
<http://mondediplo.com/2013/08/04nile#nb3> 3) — and in Sudanese territory,
with cooperation. The Ethiopian leaders’ ambition is to make their country a
major regional power, an exporter of electricity and a producer-exporter of
agricultural products and foodstuffs.
<http://mondediplo.com/IMG/jpg/Nile-map.jpg> Beschreibung: JPEG - 326.6 kb
Map by Agnès Stienne
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