BLOG

WATER POLITICS

Via Foreign Policy, a look at how Egypt is responding to its lost of majority control of the Nile River:

Ethiopia opened Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam on Tuesday, ending Egypt’s majority control of the Nile River. The controversial $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which took 14 years to build, aims to double Ethiopia’s power generation and increase electricity access for around 60 million Ethiopians who lack it.

Ethiopia also plans to sell cheap electricity generated by the 5,150-megawatt-capacity GERD to Kenya, Tanzania, and Djibouti, through which the Ethiopian government is aiming to create $427 million in export revenue this fiscal year. Kenyan President William Ruto attended the dam’s inauguration.

But not everyone is happy about the GERD—especially not Egypt, which relies on the Nile for around almost all of its freshwater supply. Some 80 percent of the river’s waters originate in Ethiopia, and Egypt says that the GERD threatens its water security. Cairo previously floated the idea of military intervention against Ethiopia to stop its construction.

In a letter to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Egypt warned that it would take action to defend “the existential interests of its people.” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty wrote that “any misconceptions that Cairo would turn a blind eye” to its interests in the Nile are “mere delusions.”

Egypt long controlled the majority of the Nile’s waters under a 1929 treaty between the United Kingdom and Egypt, then under partial British colonial rule; the treaty granted Egypt veto power on Nile construction projects, even those beyond its borders. Sudan later signed a 1959 agreement with Egypt, which increased Egypt’s share of the Nile’s flow from about 57 percent to about 66 percent.

However, upstream nations—including Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia—had zero share of the river’s water resources and argued that they could not be bound by colonial-era agreements that excluded them. By 2024, five of these countries had signed a new treaty, which was rejected by Egypt and Sudan.

With the GERD, Ethiopia now exerts control over the Nile. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has framed the GERD as an issue of national pride. “This project means the end of Ethiopia’s geopolitical insignificance,” Abiy said this month.

“The idea that Ethiopia should be able to build a dam on its own territory … and shouldn’t be pushed around by Egypt is broadly something that most Ethiopians would get behind,” Magnus Taylor, the deputy director of the Horn of Africa project at the International Crisis Group, told Reuters.

During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, the United States reduced aid to Ethiopia in an attempt to torpedo the GERD’s construction. Egypt is a major U.S. ally and one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid and military assistance. However, Ethiopia then used popular bonds—sold to residents and the Ethiopian diaspora—to finance the dam.

Trump waded into the dispute again in July, when he said that his administration was “working on” resolving tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia. He said in June that the dam was “stupidly” funded by the United States, a claim that Addis Ababa disputes.

“Trump held grudges against Ethiopia for not adhering to his self-styled mediation efforts between Ethiopia and Egypt eight years ago,” Fekahmed Negash, a former Ethiopian GERD negotiator, told the Reporter Magazine, an Ethiopian outlet.

Since the turn of the century, Ethiopia has relied on China for financial support. Beijing partly financed some of the infrastructure around the dam, such as power lines, through loans from the Export-Import Bank of China.

Ethiopian critics have said that Egypt’s fears about the dam’s impacts on water security are overblown and that Cairo’s anger is driven by geopolitical ambitions. Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, built on the Nile in the 1960s, irrigates farms in the country. However, Egypt argues that the process of filling the GERD has already led Sudan to experience water declines.

The dam dispute has the potential to stoke tensions throughout the Horn of Africa, where Ethiopia faces a looming conflict with Eritrea over access to the Red Sea. In 2024, Ethiopia signed a deal with the breakaway region of Somaliland for Red Sea port access. That prompted Somalia, Eritrea, and Egypt to forge what they called an “axis” of resistance against Ethiopia.

Somalia has since made peace with Ethiopia in a deal brokered by Turkey, but hostilities remain between Ethiopia and its neighbors. Last week, the Arab League released a statement arguing for the protection of the water rights of Egypt and Sudan.

The statement prompted a sharp response from Suleiman Dedefo, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Somalia. “What legal or moral ground does the ‘Arab League’ have to threaten Ethiopia on behalf of Egypt and instruct Ethiopia to apply for permission to utilize its own resources?,” he posted on X.