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.
- Map by Agnès Stienne
“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 (
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 (
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 (
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.
The
roasted coffee is then put in a small household tool called 'Mukecha'
(moo-ke-ch-a) for the grinding. Most restaurants at this time
incorporate modern coffee grinders into the process, this is to save
time and it does not take much from the ceremony. For those interested
mukecha is a heavy wooden bowl where the coffee beans are put and
another tool called 'zenezena' which is a wooden/metal stick used to
crush the beans in a rhythmic up & down manner (pistil and mortar).