FEAR ON THE NILE

WHY EGYPT SEES A MASSIVE DAM IN ETHIOPIA AS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Afirst-time visitor to Cairo might assume that Egypt is a water-rich country in the clever guise of a desert. The Nile, the world’s longest river, is wide and fairly deep as it saunters north through the capital en route to the Mediterranean, soaking the lush farmlands of the Nile Delta along the way. The river traffic and the fountains belie the sands that infiltrate Cairo’s suburbs; central Cairo, at least, feels like a maritime economy.

By day, the Nile is alive, brimming with cargo, fishing and passenger boats, and cruise ships that have found new lives as floating restaurants. At night, when the din of Cairo’s traffic fades and the torrid heat is tempered by breezes slightly cooled by the water, the Nile takes on a new personality. The river, in its blackness, gives a calming, reassuring effect to a frenetic city. Egyptians know they exist only because their river exists.

While the Nile could be a metaphor for infinite water, it would be a wildly misleading one. Egypt’s water riches are a mirage. Egypt as a whole is classified by the United Nations as a water-scarce country on the verge of “absolute water scarcity.” That crisis seems inevitable, because the Nile – the source of 95 per cent of Egypt’s freshwater – is under siege.

Climate change is making Egyptian summers hotter and drier, boosting evaporation rates. It is raising the level of the Mediterranean, turning ever larger patches of the northern section of the Nile Delta into saline crop killers. Rapid population growth is putting so much demand on the Nile and its farmland, which covers only 3 per cent of the country, that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is practically begging Egyptians to raise fewer kids so he doesn’t have to keep building watergulping cities in the desert.

But there is an even bigger threat, one that does not even reside in Egypt.

It is known by the acronym GERD – Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – and has emerged not just as the greatest perceived environmental threat to the country, but also the greatest security threat.

The GERD is Africa’s biggest infrastructure project and biggest dam, with a cost of about US$5-billion. It is nearing completion on the Blue Nile, the tributary in rain-heavy Ethiopia that provides most of the Nile water that courses downriver through Sudan and Egypt. The GERD is being billed as the agent of Ethiopia’s rebirth (hence “Renaissance”), capable of providing renewable electric power to between 60 and 70 million Ethiopians, lifting many of them out of poverty and positioning the country as an economic rival to equally populous Egypt.

Egyptians believe that the enormous dam in effect gives Ethiopia control of the Nile, all the more so since the often acrimonious negotiations to strike a watersharing agreement among Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt have been stalled for a decade. They won’t restart any time soon now that Ethiopia is in the grip of civil war that could see the Tigray People’s Liberation Front take the capital, Addis Ababa, in weeks or months.

Egypt’s big fear is that, in the absence of an agreement, a long Ethiopian drought – they do happen – would see Ethiopia hoard the Blue Nile water for itself, starving the downstream countries and shutting down their economies fast. That’s why the Egyptian government considers the GERD a matter of life and death.

Mr. el-Sisi said so himself. “The Nile River must not be monopolized by one state,” he told the United Nations in September, 2020. “For Egypt, the Nile water is an existential matter.”

No one knows this more than the Delta farmers, who, for thousands of years, have relied on the Nile to flood their land and feed their families. They are unsure how much longer the bounty can last as the various threats to the river seem to hit all at once. Among those threats, the GERD is the most visceral. Photos of the dam and the huge reservoir behind it have convinced many of them – and the Egyptian government – that the project is a clear and present danger.

The GERD has turned into such a hotbutton issue in Egypt that there is open talk among everyone from farmers to military officials that an Egyptian air strike on the dam or the electrical infrastructure around it is not out of the question. Mr. el-Sisi himself has hinted that all options are on the table to remove the GERD threat. At a press conference in Budapest in October with Hungarian President Janos Ader, Mr. el-Sisi said that Egypt does not want “water to be the cause of conflict or clash, but rather the source of development and co-operation between countries.”

Some of Egypt’s retired generals, a few of whom are close to Mr. el-Sisi, who was defence minister in 2012 and 2013, are more direct.

“Ethiopia is ignoring all the laws governing building a dam on an international body of water,” Mohamed Ibrahim Eldewery, deputy general manager of the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies (ECSS), told me in an interview in Cairo. “There are two tracks – the political track and the other track. I cannot name the other track, but we will not allow anyone to make Egypt to go thirsty.”

The most direct of them all was Donald Trump, who called Mr. el-Sisi his “favourite dictator.” In October, 2020, when Mr. Trump was announcing a diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and Sudan, he clearly took Egypt’s side in the GERD dispute.

“It’s a very dangerous situation because Egypt is not going to be able to live that way,” he told reporters at the White House. “They’ll end up blowing up the dam. And I said it and I say it loud and clear – they’ll blow up that dam.”

The GERD is still standing, its turbines

ready to generate electricity, the Egyptian Nile is still full and Nile Delta farmers are still draining water from the river to grow cotton, rice and citrus fruits.

But there is no doubt the GERD issue tops the Egyptian government’s agenda.

“The GERD is Sisi’s biggest diplomatic challenge,” said Pacinthe Fahmy, a former banker who was appointed to parliament by Mr. el-Sisi.

Because it’s so politically sensitive, almost no one in Egypt is willing to talk openly about the GERD, even though the dam’s existence is routinely billed as a potential “existential” crisis. In my 11-day trip to Egypt in October, I was denied all requests to interview cabinet ministers and their associates in the irrigation, agriculture and environment ministries, or any water scientists who were on the government payroll. There was no reason given, beyond it being an issue of “national security,” though it’s possible they feared making provocative comments before a new round of negotiations with Ethiopia is secured.

Even many Egyptians not connected to the government were afraid to talk about the GERD. A UN food agency had agreed to arrange a tour of an irrigation project south of Cairo only to rescind the invitation when I made the mistake of saying my research would extend to the Ethiopian dam and its effect on the Nile. Two of my photographers even said they would not join me on trips to see farmers if I intended to ask about the GERD.

The Nile is called the father of all African rivers. It enabled Egypt, which is known as the gift of the Nile, to create a flourishing and incredibly advanced civilization 3,000 years before the region was absorbed into the Roman empire. The ancient civilizations that depended on big river systems such as the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates in Mesopotamia were among the first on the planet to use the plow to create sophisticated agricultural methods.

The entire Nile system forms the drainage basin of 11 countries, of which Egypt is the northernmost, the last stop on the 6,650-kilometre journey that begins in Uganda’s Lake Victoria. The two main tributaries of the river are the White Nile and the Blue Nile.

The former begins in Lake Victoria; the latter at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands. Ethiopia supplies about 85 per cent of the Blue Nile’s water, which in turn supplies most of the Nile’s water. The Blue and White Niles meet at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, which is about 1,600 km south of Cairo.

The GERD is located on the Blue Nile about 45 km east of the Sudan border and 700 km northwest of Addis Ababa. It was built by an Italian construction giant, Webuild (formerly Salini Impregilo), which has been building infrastructure projects in Ethiopia, including dams, since the 1950s. The company has scant information about the GERD on its website, preferring to take a low-profile approach to a project that is highly unpopular in Egypt and could trigger a regional war.

Construction of the dam began in 2011, when Egypt was in the throes of a revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak and replaced him with the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi. The ECSS think tank says that Ethiopia exploited the Egyptian political chaos by greatly expanding the size of the dam, gambling that the Egyptian government (or lack thereof) would be too distracted to notice.

All efforts by the el-Sisi government to scale down the GERD project have failed. The dam structure itself is almost finished and the vast reservoir behind it, which will cover an area the size of Greater London, is being filled. The second stage of the filling process finished in July and will continue during the Ethiopian rainy season for several more years.

Because there is no agreement among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia on the filling of the reservoir or the operation of the dam during drought and flood conditions, Egypt had no say on the water flows out of the reservoir.

The Egyptian government argues that Ethiopia is ignoring historic water-sharing agreements between Egypt and Sudan that, in essence, required a steady and robust flow to the Egyptian Nile. For its part, Ethiopia believes it needs no country’s permission to build, fill and operate the dam, all the more so since it was excluded from the 1929 and 1959 agreements that carved up the Nile’s downstream flow between Sudan and Egypt (a 1902 AngloEthiopian agreement, struck when Sudan was a British colony, compelled Ethiopia not to “arrest” the flow of Nile waters).

An analysis of the GERD done in 2015 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) noted that “Nowhere in the world are two such large dams [the GERD and Egypt’s Aswan High Dam] on the same river operated without close co-ordination.”

Mohamed Higazy, an Egyptian former assistant foreign minister and a former water negotiator, said in an interview that the el-Sisi government is not, per se, against the GERD and encourages its use for electricity generation. “We are fully in agreement with Ethiopia for using the dam for economic development,” he said. “We are just against building it without [a water-sharing] agreement. Water rivalry will help no one; stability will help everyone.”

Egypt’s worst fears, so far, have not come to pass. Ample Ethiopian rains in the last two years allowed Ethiopia to start filling the reservoir without diminishing the downstream flows to Lake Nasser, the enormous reservoir behind the Aswan High Dam, which was completed in the 1970s. “Most of Egypt’s concerns about the filling of the dam have not happened yet,” said Pasquale Steduto, senior water adviser to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “So far, there has been no serious damage downstream.”

But that does not mean Egypt’s worries are overblown – far from it. In an interview in Cairo, Safwat Abdel-Dayem, former Secretary General of the Arab Water Council and former water drainage adviser at the World Bank, said Egypt is not against dams on international rivers (Egypt has helped Uganda and Tanzania build dams but only after agreements were struck with the downstream countries). Its biggest worry is an accelerated filling of the GERD or extended droughts that might greatly diminish downstream flows from the Blue Nile. Egypt argues that agreements on the speed of filling the dam and its long-term operation would alleviate those concerns.

Mr. Abdel-Dayem said drought-triggered restrictions to downstream water flows could have devastating effects on Egyptian agriculture. The shortfall of only 5-billion cubic metres of water a year – the 1959 water-sharing agreement with Sudan guaranteed Egypt 55.5 bcm – would, according to some Egyptian research simulation scenarios, eliminate US$9-billion in direct agricultural output, he said. The shortfall of 10 bcm would double the loss.

“Ethiopian droughts happen and the last one lasted eight years, in the 1980s,” he said. “Will Ethiopia keep all the water and deprive Egypt of water in a drought when it happens again?”

Lack of water in the Nile is a matter of life or death for Egypt because the river is the only source of renewable water, he says. It isn’t for Ethiopia, which has seven other water basins. This is why it is important for Egypt to have a water-sharing agreement.

The Egyptian climate is one of the driest in the world. “Where there is rain in Cairo, the children look up and shout, ‘There’s water in the sky,’” said Mr. AbdelDayem. “Rain is a very rare event for them.”

The extreme dryness explains why almost all Egyptians live in the Nile Delta, which spreads out like a fan north of Cairo, or in the narrow strips on either side of the Nile. These areas, plus stretches along the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, are among the most densely populated spots on Earth.

Any visitor to Cairo, population 22 million – more than half of all of Canada – is immediately aware that Cairenes live in a human pressure cooker. Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and among the top 10 megacities.