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The Fruits of Ethiopia’s Diplomacy
Amen Teferi
Ethiopia is burning the midnight oil to realize its Renaissance. It is really working hard to accomplish the daunting task of removing the ugliest impacts and the adverse effects of extreme poverty. Poverty reduction, for Ethiopia, is a ground zero of all its projects. It is impatient to see the realization of this noble goal and is working well beyond the limits of its poor financial and implementing capacities witnessed by the daring undertakings of the mega projects like Renaissance Dam.
As we all remember, there were ill-devised tantrums or hypes that were orchestrated to designedly misinform the downstream countries and potential financiers. Those who tried to promote “their own” skewed self/business interests by engaging themselves in pseudoscientific exercises and gibberish criticisms. Amidst these tumultuous conditions we had begun the construction of the GERD and now reached well beyond the half-way line and all those ill-devised tantrums have changed into thin air.
Those hollow propagandas were aimed at instigating animosity among the downstream countries; particularly between Ethiopia on the one hand and Egypt and Sudan on the other. In the fall of 2012 newspapers around the world reported on a Wikileaks document, surreptitiously acquired from Stratfor, the Texas security company, revealing Egyptian and Sudanese plans to build an airstrip for bombing a dam in the Blue Nile River Gorge in Ethiopia. That was simply a hot air.
However, the notorious and beaten-up campaigns have gradually turned out to be a futile venture and bore no fruit whatsoever. Instead, the pompous crusades have utterly failed to antagonize Ethiopia with its trustworthy neighbor Sudan on the one hand and Egypt on the other.
Now, the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is steadily approaching to the final. So far, 60 per cent of the GERD project is complete, according to Ethiopia’s minister for Water, Irrigation and Electricity Seleshi Bekele. Now we are looking forward to commemorate the 7th year of the commencement of our flagship project.
The Nile River basin countries continues to engage themselves to find ways on how best they can utilize their common water resource- the Nile River. Egypt has long been opposed to the dam over fears that it would reduce water downstream. Sudan, on the other hand, seems to be convinced that the giant reservoir would regulate the flow of water and prevent flooding.
In the middle of this week Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt were discussing to address the concerns of downstream countries –Sudan and Egypt — regarding the safety and impacts of Ethiopia’s 1,870 meter-long and 145 meter-high dam. The studies had been recommended by the International Panel of Experts (IPOE) that was established in May 2012.
Ethiopia played crucial role to end the long bellicose history that has given way to cooperation. The long history of threats and conflicts in the Nile River Basin is closed. We know that the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had once threatened war on violators of what he saw as his country’s rights to Nile waters. Now the downriver countries (Egypt and Sudan) are not arguing over historic rights they claim to have on the water of River Nile upon which they are absolutely depended on.
We know that Egypt and Sudan are utterly dependent on the waters of the Nile River. Hence, over the past century both of these desert countries have built several dams and reservoirs, hoping to limit the ravages of droughts and floods which have so defined their histories. On the contrary, upriver countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania argue that they too need the water that originates on their lands.
Ethiopia, the source of most of the Nile waters, has been suffering from repeated famine and drought. For instance, in the middle of the 1980s, rains failed in the Ethiopian highlands, causing a serious water crisis upriver and downriver. One million Ethiopians died as a result of drought and famine. Egypt averted disaster but Aswan’s turbines were nearly shut down, creating an electric power nightmare; and crops failed in the delta, bringing the real prospect of famine.
As a result, Egyptians came to understand that their great Aswan Dam had not solved their historic dependency on upriver Nile water. In 1987, after years of hostile rhetoric, the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak replaced the language of threat and confrontation with words of conciliation and cooperation.
Then in the 1990s the Ethiopian rains returned and, remarkably, Hosni Mubarak redoubled efforts begun during the Sadat administration to build the Toshka Canal, one of the world’s most expensive and ambitious irrigation projects. This plan would take 10% of waters in Lake Nasser to irrigate Egypt’s sandy Western Desert, increasing Egypt’s need for Nile water even if they maintained their 1959 treaty share of 55 billion cubic meters.
In anger and disbelief, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi protested: “While Egypt is taking the Nile water to transform the Sahara Desert into something green, we in Ethiopia—who are the source of 85% of that water—are denied the possibility of using it to feed ourselves.” He then began plans for the Grand Renaissance Dam.
As researchers in the field underscore that upriver countries have the most power when negotiating water rights. However, possessing the headwater of the Blue Nile water does not entitle Ethiopia an exclusive ownership over the Nile Water. Thus, Ethiopia’s daily mantra has been fair and equitable utilization of the Nile Water resource. This is not a diplomatic catch phrase of our politicians. You go and ask every man on the street, he would tell you in simple and plain words about fairness and equitable utilization of water. This is the basic orientation our foreign policy.
The Nile Water was assumed to be the most dangerous resource. Now things are beginning to change and we see very encouraging development in the Nile basin. The Nile Basin initiative (NBI) has gone a great length in breaking some of the psycho-political hurdles surrounding the basin. Now we began to realize that the Nile offers great potential to all concerned.
We can even envisage the possibility of having a ground scheme of regional water development plan that would take in to account or incorporate the political realities of the region that will help them to work out a plan and remain to engage in constructive dialogue. As such, water would lead to the direction of conflict resolution that has regional magnitude.
One of the notable implications one could draw from this fact is that what has been a key source of conflict in the region is witnessed to be an element that forge a strong economic interdependence for the sub-region. What is underscored in this process is that even the age-old animosity and mistrust and the interstate rivalry that characterize the Ethio-Egypt relation has undergone a most significance transformation that would open up a venue for a warm friendship between the two countries.
Egypt and Sudan are understandably concerned about Ethiopia’s Grand Dam Project over the Nile waters. The Nile is essential for the entire people who live in the basin. Without the Nile water, there would have been no food, no people, no state, and no monuments in Sudan and Egypt. Therefore Ethiopia proposed to undertake study on social and environmental impact the GERD. Dr Seleshi stressed the need for cooperation in the filling and operation of the dam as one of the 10 principles the three countries agreed on in March 2015 in Khartoum.
“If we focus on the actual pros and cons of GERD, without linking to other complicated issues around Nile discourse, the issue we have would be simpler and I urge you to focus on the pending, but most important issues,” Dr Seleshi said.
The ministers on Tuesday visited the dam’s construction site and were on Wednesday to hold closed-door discussions over the filling and operation of the GERD, the most controversial of the issues. We are in fact making progress and this is mainly the fruit of Ethiopia’s diplomacy.
