Sudan and Egypt are wary of the continent’s largest dam, which Ethiopia inaugurated on September 9.
By Boniface Gbama and Gonzalo Viton
The inauguration of the Grand Renaissance Dam (GERD) has marked a historic milestone for Ethiopia. Ethiopian President and Prime Minister Taye Atske Selassie and Abiy Ahmed respectively presided over the ceremony in Guba on September 9, two days before the Ethiopian New Year celebration. It is the largest hydroelectric infrastructure in Africa, built on the course of the Blue Nile, about 20 kilometers from the border with Sudan and 750 from Addis Ababa. The dam wall reaches 145 meters high and extends almost two kilometers in length. The budget required was 4.3 billion euros, a pharaonic investment aimed at creating a stable source of energy for 118.5 million Ethiopians, of whom 45% still do not have access to electricity.
Designed to store up to 74 billion cubic meters of water, the GERD will generate a power of 5,150 megawatts, five times more than the Cofrentes nuclear power plant, the largest in Spain. Thus, its implementation is interpreted as a decisive step in the development strategy promoted by Abiy Ahmed’s Executive. The objectives of this megaproject are clear: to substantially improve the Ethiopian population’s access to electricity, gaining energy autonomy and, at the same time, exporting the surplus to neighboring countries. These include Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti, although there are also plans to sell to Tanzania and South Sudan in the future.
The construction of the GERD
Work on the dam, awarded to an Italian company, Salini, began at the end of 2010. Although the initial completion period was five years, the work was not completed until 14 years later. The accumulated debt and other factors slowed down the work, which gained new momentum in 2018, when Abiy Ahmed came to power. The transalpine corporation, renamed WeBuild in 2020, built a complex in the vicinity of the dam that includes schools, hospitals, a small airfield, sports facilities and other infrastructure to serve the thousands of workers who have participated in the works, with peaks of up to 10,000 people working simultaneously.
The financing of the work has fallen for the most part on the Ethiopian State through the issuance of public debt, the mandatory deduction of one month’s salary per year by civil servants and a special tax on the use of mobile phones, as the Comboni missionary Fr. Juan González Núñez points out to MN through WhatsApp. This collective effort generated a feeling of national unity and patriotism in a country riven by deep ethnic and political divisions. Moges Yeshiwas, an engineer on the GERD project, told the BBC that he was “very proud to be part of it, since I came looking for a job, but at some point I stopped feeling like it was just a job.”
González Núñez said that the inauguration of the dam has motivated large demonstrations of support and celebration in Addis Ababa and other cities, including a parade of electric cars through the main arteries of the capital. For this reason, the Ethiopian Government sees this energy project as the tangible expression of national pride and the ambition to position the country as a regional leader in energy generation.
Tension with Egypt and Sudan
In 2010, after the signing of the Basin Cooperation Framework Agreement (CFA), Ethiopia took the final step towards the construction of the GERD. The CFA sought to integrate all the countries of the basin in the management and use of the Nile, although only six States signed it –Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda–, of which only three ratified it –Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania–. Just a year later, Addis Ababa began construction.
From the beginning, Cairo and Khartoum showed their outright rejection of the project. However, the Ethiopian Government stayed the course, convinced of its importance. In 2015, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan signed the Declaration of Principles (DoP). This document was limited to recommending that the three countries agree on the rules for the initial filling of the reservoir, but did not establish clear mechanisms to manage the operation of the dam in periods of floods or droughts, something that worries Egypt and Sudan.
For Cairo, negotiations with Ethiopia have reached a deadlock and, therefore, it has sought mediation from external actors such as the US, the World Bank or the Arab League. Even on the same day of the inauguration, Egypt sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council denouncing what it described as “a unilateral measure that violates international law.” Sudan has not hidden its fears either. At the end of June, and together with Egypt, it reiterated its rejection of any unilateral decision that affects the Blue Nile basin.
However, Abiy Ahmed sent a conciliatory message to the coastal countries: “I want to assure you that we do not intend to harm you, but rather seek common prosperity,” he said in a message echoed by RTVE. The Ethiopian Minister of Water and Energy, Habtamu Ifeta, stated on the BBC that “the project will not reduce the volume of water flowing to the riparian countries” and that “negotiations on the use of Nile waters could continue.” Faced with the Egyptian and Sudanese position, the presence of four presidents from the Horn of Africa – Kenya, Djibouti, Somalia and South Sudan – during the inauguration, as well as that of the president of the African Union Commission (AU), Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, and other senior officials, was significant.
The commissioning of the dam, which seeks to be a symbol of the Ethiopian “renaissance”, also threatens to change regional power dynamics, as it will allow Ethiopia to transform into an energy exporter, placing itself in a position of greater influence within the region. The dam is not only a development project, but has become an emblem of national sovereignty.
