Pride and Politics Enmeshed in a $4.5 Billion Mega Hydroelectric Dam
To be patriotic is to find unequivocal pride in the death of your ancestors’ adversaries. Ethiopian modern history has nurtured and embedded that ideology at the heart of what it means to be a denizen of one of two African nations that were not colonised. Faced between the choices of surrendering his country to the British army or losing his life, the epic suicide of Emperor Tewodros II at the Battle of Magdala stands as an emblem of this notion, and remains revered as one of the most patriotic acts in the modern history of Ethiopia. Six years later in 1874, the Khedive of Egypt Isma’il Pasha launched the Ethiopian-Egyptian War, in an attempt to expand his territory and take control of the source of the Blue Nile River located in the north-western highlands of Ethiopia. Today nearly a century & a half later, at the face of a hydroelectric dam, tensions between the two nations have remerged and have reached a chilling height. Entitled the ‘Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam’ or GERD, the $4.5 billion mega hydroelectric dam which will be the largest in Africa, is symbolic of the nation’s tremendous ambitions to become an economic powerhouse in the region. Moreover, with only 45% of the population having access to electricity (World Bank 2018), the GERD promises a brighter future for a nation of 110 million.
After multiple failed attempts of negotiations over the past few years with regards to the regulation of the GERD between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, negotiations still to this day, remain at a deadlock. According to an Al Jazeera report, one of the main disputes is over concerns of how fast to fill the dam, with Ethiopia’s prospects of that at seven years while Egypt proposing for the dam to be filled in 12 to 21 years instead, in the fear that it would falter their access to its primary source of freshwater. Having said that, within two weeks of winning the Nobel Peace Prize on the 11th of October 2019, in a parliament interview session the Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed responded with belligerent rhetoric stating, “if there is a need to go to war, we could get millions readied. If some could fire a missile, others could use bombs. But that’s not in the best interest of all of us.”
A tremendous amount of socioeconomic change has occurred over the past nine months that renders that last sentence ever more pertinent. Amid the global financial strains enforced by the novel coronavirus outbreak, the latest report from the World Bank states that the pandemic has set off the first recession in the Sub-Saharan Africa region in 25 years. And even though Ethiopia is one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, the nation remains one of the poorest countries in that region, with a per capita income of $790, elevating the gravity of the cost of war. Similarly, a great amount of stress weighs down on Egypt, a nation which reached a population mark of 100 million in February. With a 2% population growth rate, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi described the booming population as a threat to national security on par with terrorism, over worries that it would amplify poverty, unemployment & lack of basic resources like land and water.
Over the past months, the hashtag ‘#itsmydam’ has been vehemently circulating social media platforms in Ethiopia, communicating more or less these two messages. Firstly, to express their heartfelt pride to using the river to provide electricity access to the tens of millions who don’t, since in today’s technologically advanced world, electricity has become synonymous to a basic need such as water. Secondly and more pertinently, to decry Egyptian claims of their ‘historic right’ which Egypt backs by the 1959 Nile Water Agreement. In the controversial deal, Egypt and Sudan reached bilateral agreements of the use of the Blue Nile river, completely disregarding Ethiopia and other riparian states in the negotiation, albeit Ethiopia supplies nearly 80% of the Nile water.
Today, after numerous failed negotiations over the past weeks, satellite images have emerged from the European Space Agency which show water filling the reservoir behind the dam, which Ethiopian officials have insisted that it’s due to “natural pooling” from rainfall. Concurrently, Ethiopian social media runs strife, frenetically condoning going into war, chauvinistic & heedless of its disastrous consequences that looms over both Egypt and Ethiopia. Dr. Abiy Ahmed recently stated that “if Ethiopia doesn’t fill the dam, it means Ethiopia has agreed to demolish the dam.” Filling the dam before signing a negotiation deal with all concerned riparian states, in an unpredictable region that reeks of poverty, overpopulation, ethnic tension and eminent climate change, is germinal to the infliction of decades long chaos & burden in both nations.
Patriotism & tribalism are the pernicious seeds that require regular surveillance and neutralisation, but in Ethiopia and all corners of Africa, that is almost never the case. This is not a naive fantasy of one letting their guard down to let the other pounce; weakness will be met with vengeance & ruthless dominance from the opposition. Instead this is to draw an image to both aggressors, something far more pertinent than any religious scripture or political belief: humanity supersedes all ideologies and that formal discussion ought be the only solution.
Why should guiltless children, women and men have to subject themselves into unsolicited torture? This is a watershed moment that will change the lives of hundreds of millions of people for many decades, and serves as a gold-plated opportunity for Dr. Abiy Ahmed to demonstrate a progressive leadership role. All this amid rising political tension that has erupted since the recent death of a famous Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa. Ethiopia and its people deserve the establishment and the use of the GERD to empower its people out of poverty, but we cannot ignore the tangible threat of climate change and its disastrous implications to unambiguous legal agreements. Ethiopia came out triumphant at the price of thousands of lives in the Ethiopian-Egyptian War in the mid-1870s, and next week’s decision on filling the GERD will declare our stance: are we at the pinnacle of progress or at the precipice before chaos?
