Immediately following Egypt's 25 January Revolution, Ethiopia, taking advantage of the internal upheaval, moved to increase the capacity of the Renaissance Dam it plans to build on the River Nile. The reservoir capacity is now set for 74 billion cubic metres, or five times the capacity recommended by all US and European studies, which was 14 billion cubic metres. There was no technical or economic justification for the huge increase in dam height that would generate this expansion in the reservoir capacity. It is also important to note that the Ethiopian government, led at the time by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, took pains to keep this plan under wraps until the cornerstone for the dam was laid in April 2011, just two months after Egypt's revolution. It was evident from the secrecy and the timing that Ethiopia sought to attain political and strategic ends rather than developmental ones. Further proof of this can be found in the decree Zenawi issued granting the Italian Salini company the licence to build the dam. More significantly, the cornerstone for the dam was laid before the necessary feasibility studies were completed for a project of this scale. The final report of the international Renaissance Dam Tripartite Committee, issued in May 2013, two years after the cornerstone was laid, stated that the feasibility studies were incomplete and unreliable, especially those pertaining to the dam's impact on the two downriver nations of Sudan and Egypt. Other crucial studies, such as environmental impact studies, have not been done. Addis Ababa is a member of the tripartite committee and it signed the report. One can only conclude that the Zenawi government was in a race against time, desperate to complete the dam before Egypt could catch its breath, return to strength and ward off the potential dangers that would arise from a dam built according to the current specifications. In its bid to press forward with the project at all costs, Ethiopia pursued a long-term strategy that brought into play various types of deception and manipulation. It concealed facts and information about the dam. It used the tripartite committee (made up of four international experts, two each from Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt) as a smokescreen. Addis Ababa claimed that the committee would prove that no harm would come from the dam and reassure Egyptian public opinion on this score. But the decree ordering the creation of the committee stated that the dam was under construction, wording that Ethiopia still insists on retaining so as to justify the continuing construction even though the feasibility studies have not been completed. Furthermore, the decree states that the committee's recommendations are not legally binding, another point that Ethiopia adamantly refuses to alter so as not to be forced to yield to the findings of the feasibility studies. Then, Ethiopia dragged its feet in creating the committee. It was not formed until April 2012, a full year after the cornerstone of the dam was laid, after which it manoeuvred to slow the committee's work. This delayed publication of the final report until May 2013, whereas the report was originally supposed to be completed within six months. The obvious intention behind these ruses was to buy time in the hope of turning the dam into a de facto reality. Simultaneously, Ethiopia portrayed itself to the regional and international community as the cooperative party, whereas in fact the committee meetings merely went round in circles as Ethiopia drew Egypt into endless arguments over every minute detail while constantly threatening to change its mind on everything that had been agreed on up to that point and returning the talks to square one. Since the tripartite committee report was issued about 30 months ago, the Renaissance Dam crisis has revolved around how to apply the report's recommendations with regard to completing the feasibility studies. There have been several marathon meetings and presidential announcements, but they have yielded no results. Meanwhile, construction on the dam is proceeding at full speed.
THE ESSENCE OF THE CRISIS: Ethiopia is forever claiming that the purpose of the dam is solely to generate electricity. But this cannot explain why the crisis has been so intractable and why Ethiopia has rejected out of hand any compromise solutions. Egypt supports Ethiopia's right to develop and has submitted offers to take part in the funding and operation of the dam, but on the condition that the reservoir's capacity is reduced. In fact, from the technical and economic standpoint there is no justification for a dam of that height and reservoir capacity. It has already been established that electricity generation would be far more efficient and cost-effective with a smaller dam. Therefore, the Ethiopian persistence on this project with its current specifications can only be explained in terms of the political and strategic ends of the current regime in Addis Ababa. The Renaissance Dam project is being used as an instrument to rally Ethiopian public opinion and that country's various ethnic communities behind the current regime. Ethiopians are being told that the dam will be their portal to development and modernisation via electricity production. But this hugely expensive dam, especially in terms of the Ethiopian economy, will never be able to generate the advertised 6,000 megawatts of electricity per year. Moreover, only a third or less of the electricity produced will be consumed domestically. The rest will be exported abroad at cost price, which is also inconsistent with the exorbitant cost of the project, as well as with the frenzied PR campaign for the dam and the obligatory “donation” drive that has made the dam the subject of Ethiopian daily conversation. The most crucial issue in this context is that Ethiopia still adamantly refuses to recognise the international rules and principles regarding international waterways, and specifically the principles regarding prior notification and averting harm to other countries that share the same watercourse. Nor does it recognise previous agreements with Egypt and Sudan or their historic rights to Nile water. Also, there have been no agreements on how to dispose of the water retained behind the Renaissance Dam or the other three dams that Ethiopia plans to build on the same river. Ethiopia claims that the water in its rivers is its own property, which can only signify that it seeks to control this fundamental resource unilaterally. Such developments will undoubtedly precipitate a geopolitical shift in the region. Already Ethiopia has become a major power in the Horn of Africa and the Nile Basin with the help of American backing. Washington is using Ethiopia as a proxy to control the region under the pretext of the fight against terrorism. Now Ethiopia is working to expand its control into the Nile Basin, towards which end it has established a high profile in all Sudanese crises, whether inside Sudan itself or between Sudan and South Sudan. It sent a peacekeeping force of more than 7,000 troops to the Abyei region which is under dispute between Sudan and South Sudan, and it is currently acting as mediator in order to contain the civil war between South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and his former vice-president Riek Machar. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has pursued a provocative policy towards Egypt, starting with the Entebbe Agreement that was signed unilaterally by a group of Upper Nile nations and proceeding through the commencement of the construction of four dams on the Blue Nile, beginning with the Renaissance Dam. All these moves translate into a drive to change the strategic balances in the region in favour of Ethiopia and against Egypt. Ethiopia is positioning itself as the region's maritime and riparian linchpin, which is to say that it seeks to assert its hegemony over the countries overlooking the southern entrance to the Red Sea and, at the same time, over the countries at the convergence and the mouth of the Nile. Ultimately, it envisions itself as the hub of a galaxy of petty states revolving in the Ethiopian orbit, in which capacity it will become a key platform for US policies in the region and also for the policies of Ethiopia's invisible and visible strategic partner, Israel. In short, the basic aim of the Renaissance Dam and the three others that are to follow is to change the regional strategic balances in the medium term by driving Egypt into a vicious cycle of domestic economic, social and political problems, thereby diminishing the Egyptian role in the region as Cairo would be too preoccupied with these internal problems to focus on regional and international ones. At the same time, the attrition wrought on both Egypt and Sudan would propel these countries into an adversarial relationship, rather than the cooperative one they have been seeking until now, while Addis Ababa stands aloof, monopolising water policies from its perch in the Ethiopian highlands.
SELLING WATER: To put the crisis in its broader context, it should be borne in mind that the Renaissance Dam crisis is closely connected to the crisis surrounding the Entebbe Agreement, which has enough signatures to go into effect once the signatory parties complete their ratification processes. The Entebbe Agreement is the fruit of a joint Nile Basin initiative proposed by the World Bank. The initiative was paraded beneath glittering banners that spoke of cooperation projects that would serve all and optimise opportunities to benefit from Nile Basin resources. It ended up by turning all the upper riparian nations against Egypt as they demanded shares of the water that converges in the Nile River course, even though this amounts to only five per cent of the total water resources in the Nile Basin from which the upper riparian nations benefit and in spite of losses through transpiration and seepage. However, the more dangerous aspect of the joint Nile Basin initiative is that it implicitly promoted a conceptual shift from water as a basic human right to water as a commodity to be bought and sold. Proponents of this shift argue that water is ultimately a scarce commodity and that this is the best way to preserve it. The idea, which arose in the 1990s, was essentially to be translated into practice through a water quota system for the countries in the same river basin and in accordance with which any country that receives more than its established quota would have to pay for the excess at the rate of the cheapest alternative. In Egypt's case, this would be desalinated sea water which costs about a dollar per cubic metre. Clearly, this is the ultimate objective of the Entebbe Agreement, which as it is currently worded avoids any mention of “historic rights” precisely for this purpose. To spell out the agreement in full, the idea of allotting shares of water to countries that do not need that water automatically means that these quantities of water are to be earmarked for marketing. The Ethiopian dams are merely a mechanism to facilitate the implementation of this new concept. After all, Ethiopia is the chief beneficiary, which explains why it was the main party that fuelled the disputes with Egypt and the driving force behind the unilateral signature drive to the Entebbe Agreement. The writer is an expert in African affairs.
