Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty sent a letter to the president of the UN Security Council this week saying that Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), despite efforts to legitimise it, remains a unilateral project that violates international law and agreed-upon principles governing the Eastern Nile Basin.
The letter came as a reaction to the inauguration of the dam earlier on the same day by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who called it a “great achievement”.
Abdelatty described Ethiopia’s latest actions as another violation to add to its ongoing record of breaches. He emphasised Egypt’s rejection of any unilateral steps taken by Ethiopia concerning the dam and made it clear that Egypt will not acknowledge or accept any consequences that threaten the vital interests of downstream nations, namely Egypt and Sudan.
For 14 years, Egypt and Sudan have opposed what they describe as Ethiopia’s “unilateral acts” to control the flow of the River Nile. Egypt has repeatedly attempted since 2011 to reach an agreement through negotiations to regulate the filling and future operation of the dam without undermining development in Ethiopia.
Its inauguration without coordination with Egypt and Sudan was described by Mohamed Hegazi, a former deputy to Egypt’s foreign minister, as a “unilateral, hostile act”, “an environmental crime”, and “part of an irresponsible intention to harm regional security.”
Ethiopia is celebrating the inauguration of GERD, noted former minister of irrigation Mohamed Nasr Allam, despite its failure to realise its declared goal: to provide Ethiopians with electricity and to export the excess as a source of income.
He said the GERD was primarily built to harm Egypt and its water security and compromise the Aswan High Dam as a strategic source of water reserves for Egypt. “These goals were drawn up in the 1950s by the US, as shown in reports published in 1964,” he said.
But they failed to achieve their goal, he added, thanks to the average flow of the Blue Nile over the last seven years. This is in addition to the efforts that Egypt has made to rationalise water use, he noted.
Abbas Sharaki, a professor of geology and water resources at Cairo University, agreed with Allam that state water projects that cost more than LE500 billion had managed to ease the impact of the dam during the last few years.
Now, he explained, the GERD water level had reached the maximum capacity at 640 metres, with a total of 64 billion cubic metres (bcm) of water stored. Given that the turbines of the dam are not able to pass the daily flow of 400 million square metres of water, the excess flows from the top of its middle corridor.
It is not clear whether all the turbines are fully operable, but the fact that water is being drained via the middle corridor indicates that they are not. Water must pass through the turbines to generate electricity, he said.
“Regardless of how the water flows out of the dam, whether via turbines, flood gates, or the top of the middle corridor, the High Dam, which has protected Egypt from previous problems, is ready to receive its full water flow this year,” he said.
The inauguration ceremony of the GERD, held in the Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State of Ethiopia near the border with Sudan, was attended by various African and Caribbean leaders who were already in Addis Ababa this week to attend the Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) and the Africa-CARICOM Summit focused on deepening Afro-Caribbean ties.
Both events drew more than a dozen presidents, including the Kenyan, Somali, South Sudan, and Djibouti presidents, and prime ministers and senior ministers from various African and Caribbean countries.
Ahmed declared last week that the $4 billion hydroelectric project would be inaugurated on 9 September and is expected to deliver $1 billion in annual revenues, which will help finance other projects.
“We will set up other projects like the GERD in the next five, 10, or 15 years,” he said in a recent interview. He ruled out that the dam would cause harm to other states.
“The Renaissance Dam is not a threat, but a shared opportunity,” Ahmed said. He also sent a provocative invitation to Egypt and Sudan to attend the inauguration.
A few days before the opening of the dam, Egypt and Sudan held the second 2+2 Consultative Mechanism meeting on the GERD. The two states reiterated that the GERD poses “a continuing threat to stability in the Eastern Nile Basin”.
In a joint statement issued after the meeting, both nations agreed on the need to protect their water security. They also reiterated their commitment to collaborating to protect their full water rights in line with international law and the 1959 Agreement on the Nile.
The meeting was attended by the ministers of irrigation and foreign affairs of Egypt and Sudan. They said that Addis Ababa must “change its policy in the Eastern Nile Basin to restore cooperation” among the riparian states.
The next 2+2 meeting will be held in October on the sidelines of the Cairo International Water Week.
The GERD is expected to generate more than 500 Megawatts of electricity annually and expand power exports to Sudan, Kenya, and Djibouti. This could earn Ethiopia billions in annual revenue, easing foreign-exchange shortages. However, achieving this potential would require significant investments in the country’s grid.
At present, the concrete work at the GERD has been completed, and six of the 13 turbines have been installed. Two were installed in February and August 2022, two in August 2024, and the last two were tested in February this year.
The original plan of the GERD was to install 16 turbines, but these were later reduced to 13 for no clearly stated reasons.
The 1929 and 1959 treaties gave Egypt and Sudan their present water quotas of 55.5 and 18 bcm, respectively, of Nile water. It also gave them the right to veto projects on the Nile that would deprive them of their quotas. But Ethiopia said it should not be bound by these treaties, and it started building the dam in 2011.
Egypt and Sudan have repeatedly expressed their fears that the dam will affect their historic water quotas. Addis Ababa has said that it will not, and has refused to bind itself to an agreement to regulate the filling and operation of the dam with Sudan and Egypt.
In 2015, the three states signed the Declaration of Principles on the GERD, which was supposed to lead to another agreement on the rules that govern the filling and operation of the dam.
Numerous rounds of negotiation have been held since then to reach that agreement.
In December 2023, Cairo announced the end of the negotiations on the dam, citing Ethiopia’s refusal to seriously engage on proposed legal or technical solutions.
Between 2020 and 2024, Ethiopia unilaterally completed the dam’s five-stage filling and began operating the turbines without an agreement on filling or operations with Egypt and Sudan.
However, there is still a need to reach an agreement on the future filling and operation of the dam.
Hegazi called on the international community, especially the UN and African Union (AU), to assume their responsibility and put pressure on Ethiopia to engage in serious and constructive negotiations to reach a just and balanced agreement that protects the rights of the three states.
“Egypt has diplomatic powers that it can resort to in putting pressure on Addis Ababa, namely taking the file to the UN Security Council again or the African Peace and Security Council,” he told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Allam said that the coming years may see a drought, which may lead to a direct confrontation between the two countries that neither the region nor the international community wants to see.
“Working to reach an understanding and meet mutual interests is what we all hope for and what we wish to see soon for the benefit of Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Nile Basin, and the Horn of Africa region,” he concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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