Parting Waters

During their “scramble for Africa”, European colonialists partitioned communities across Africa, and their surface and groundwater deposits. Today, over 62% of Africa’s surface area is covered by transboundary river basins, which makes governing and distributing resources extremely contentious, as emphasised by the Nile's GERD.

Source: Hyde, 2016

The Nile, the GERD and Hydro-Hegemony

The GERD or the 'Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam', a large-scale hydroelectric dam, sits on the Ethiopian part of the Blue Nile, close to the Sudanese border. The dam has long been an issue of dispute between riparian and downstream sharers of the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. Yet with the GERD's imminent completion, tensions over the dam are increasingly on the verge of eruption.

Map showing GERD dam at the Ethiopian-Sudanese border and the Blue Nile flow from Ethiopia-Sudan-Egypt.

While European colonialism undoubtedly shaped today's Nile politics (eg. 1929 and 1959 British-backed agreements), tensions between present-day Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the Blue Nile pre-date the colonial era. Ethiopia, the source of 80% of the Nile water that reaches Egypt, was left out of the agreement and prevented from using the Nile waters. 

Equally, we must understand that tensions between present-day Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the Blue Nile, existed well before the colonial era. Since the 10th century, Ethiopian rulers were aware of the Nile's value to Egypt, and used it as political leverage to get a Coptic metropolitan consecrated for Ethiopia from the patriarch in Alexandria and to improve the treatment that Coptic Christians received under sultan rule. Unless their conditions were met, Ethiopians threatened to divert the Nile and dry up Egypt, according to Ethiopian and Egyptian legends. On one occasion, a disagreement between religious leaders in Ethiopia and Egypt, coincided with low rainfall on the Ethiopian highlands. This lowered the Nile's water level, making Egypt believe that Ethiopia had executed its threat of cutting the Nile water. Needless to say, the Egyptian patriarch, fearful of being left with no water, made peace with Ethiopia. 

Riparian states have always known the value of the Nile, and the power it possesses as a political instrument. The British 1929 agreement simply formalised pre-existing tensions. 

As Ethiopia proceeds with its GERD plans, the future for downstream states is inherently uncertain. While there is little evidence to suggest that the GERD would disrupt Egypt's long-term flow, neither is there evidence suggesting that is would not –"and this is the problem". Moreover, the lack of an independent, mutually accepted system for monitoring and enforcing GERD agreements, also creates breeding grounds for corruption and breaching of accords.