Threat of war looms over river of the dammed
When Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for ending his country’s 20-year military confrontation with neighbouring Eritrea, United States President Donald Trump was cross. He should have had the prize, Trump said, because it was he who had prevented a war.
Part of the problem is that Trump was talking about the wrong country. War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, but Trump missed all of his generation’s lessons. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, what’s the difference? They’re all in Africa, and they all start with E.
The conference where Trump allegedly saved a country was about preventing a war between Ethiopia and Egypt, not between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Nobel Prize Committee can’t give him a prize for his walk-on role in those talks, because Egypt-Ethiopia is not a war that didn’t happen, just a war that hasn’t happened yet, but it might.
The deadline for an agreement in months-long direct talks between the main parties in the dispute, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, passed this week. Now the dispute goes to the three heads of government to agree on a mediator – and if they can’t agree, maybe we’ll see our first real ‘‘water war’’.
It would be hard to arrange, since Egypt and Ethiopia don’t share a border, but they do share a river: the Nile.
Ethiopia is building a huge dam – the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – on the Nile. and Egypt is unhappy about it. So unhappy, in fact, that it would be no surprise if there were Ethiopian anti-aircraft missiles hidden in the hills around the dam site.
Egypt depends on the Nile for almost all of its water – it’s basically a big river flowing through a desert – so it’s very sensitive about people tampering with the source of that water. The branch flowing out of the Ethiopian highlands, the Blue Nile, accounts for 85 per cent of that flow, so Cairo is bound to get twitchy when Ethiopia starts building a dam on it.
On the other hand, the dam is strictly a hydroelectric dam, meant to double Ethiopia’s supply of electricity. They’re not taking any water out for irrigation, so all the water should just flow through, spin the turbines, and carry on downriver to Sudan and Egypt. The only water lost would be the relatively small amount that evaporated in the reservoir.
That’s the theory – but in practice, there are two problems.
One is just filling the dam’s immense reservoir. That’s 74 cubic kilometres of water that will never flow down the Nile – a full year’s flow if you took it all at once. But then everybody in Egypt would starve, so the dam must be filled over a period of years. The dispute is about how many. Ethiopia wants four to seven years, while Egypt is talking about 12 to 21 years.
With good will, it could all be sorted out, but good will is notable by its absence here.
Egypt is a brutal military dictatorship. Ethiopia is a democracy. Egypt is the traditional great power of the region. Ethiopia is the rapidly rising rival. And the Egyptians, naturally enough, are paranoid about the Nile. Even without the dam, their rising population means they will face grave water shortages within five years.
Back in 2013, at a conference to discuss the dam, senior Egyptian politicians discussed ways of destroying it with then-president Mohammed Morsi. They didn’t realise that the meeting was being televised live. The preferred method seemed to be backing Ethiopian anti-government rebels – but, as Morsi said, ‘‘All options are open’’
The man who overthrew Morsi, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is certainly no stranger to violence – and Ethiopia will start filling the reservoir this year.
Egypt depends on the Nile for almost all of its water – it’s basically a big river flowing through a desert – so it’s very sensitive about people tampering with the source of that water.