More than 13 years have passed since Ethiopia announced the beginning of the construction of the most massive dam in Africa, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, which has a total water storage capacity of 74.5 billion cubic metres.

Ethiopia claims that the GERD will only be used to generate electricity. During the drafting of the Declaration of Principles on the GERD that was signed in Khartoum on 23 March 2015 by Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, the latter described the purpose of the dam as being to “generate power and contribute to economic development”.

 Principle Two of the Declaration said that “the purpose of the Renaissance Dam is to generate power, contribute to economic development, promote cooperation beyond borders, and [promote] regional integration through generating clean sustainable energy.”

Surely, economic development includes industrial and agricultural activity, especially as there is arable land surrounding the dam’s reservoir, and such development might also include the storage of water for sailing on it, meaning that there are multiple purposes for the dam. This explains why Egypt sees an absence of transparency in what Ethiopia says.

There have been 13 years of negotiations and nine and a half years since the signing of the Declaration of Principles, but there has not been a single step forward in this time because Ethiopia has decided to approach all the negotiation rounds by wasting time and procrastinating. Not only that, but during the negotiations Ethiopia has deliberately voided any agreement of its meaning.

For example, Principle Five of the declaration, which governs the first filling of the dam’s storage reservoir and its operational policies, states that the signatories must apply the recommendations of the International Technical Expert Committee on the dam and the results of the final report of the Tripartite National Technical Committee during different stages of the project. It also says that the three countries should cooperate to implement the final findings recommended by the Tripartite National Technical Committee and International Technical Experts.

However, since the French international technical experts began their work and finished their first report about the impacts of the dam on Egypt and Sudan, Ethiopia has refused to accept this report because it points to several environmental and socio-economic impacts on Egypt and Sudan. Instead, Ethiopia has insisted on excluding the International Technical Expert Committee in order to keep the negative impacts of the dam out of the international press and avoid any international condemnation of its aggressive dam building.

Some 90 months have passed since March 2015, and there has been no agreement on the filling of the dam’s reservoir and the operation of its turbines.

Another proof of Ethiopia’s wasting time is its ignoring Principle 10 regarding the peaceful settlement of disputes, which states that the three countries commit to settle any dispute resulting from the interpretation or application of the Declaration of Principles through talks or negotiations based on the principle of good will. If the parties do not succeed in solving the dispute through talks or negotiations, they can ask for mediation or refer the matter to their heads of state or prime ministers.

This has never happened, and Ethiopia has also refused all offers of mediation from Russia, China, the EU, and the US and insists instead on the mediation of the African Union (AU), which does not have sufficient experts on the impacts of dams of the size of the GERD.

At the end of August, Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed ordered the operation of two turbines at the GERD in addition to the two that had already begun operation last year. He promised the Ethiopian people that seven turbines would be working before the end of this year. He also announced that the storage capacity of the GERD reservoir would reach 71 million cubic metres of water by next December.

The GERD has cost Egypt several billion dollars as it has needed to construct 20 sea water desalination plants on the Mediterranean and Red Sea, to treat wastewater for reuse and recycling, and to line irrigation canals and water delivery systems in the agricultural sector as direct impacts of the Ethiopian dam. All this goes against Principle Three of the Declaration regarding “not causing significant damage” to other countries.

The principle states that the three countries “will take all the necessary procedures to avoid causing significant damage while using the Blue Nile, the Nile’s main river. And in case significant damage is caused to one of these countries, the country causing the damage, in the absence of an agreement over that [damaging] action, [is to take] all the necessary procedures to alleviate this damage and discuss compensation whenever convenient.”

So far there has been no compensation from Ethiopia as provided for by the Declaration of Principles.

The writer is a professor of water resources at the Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly