Although the first practical attempt to build a dam for Ethiopia on the Blue Nile was commissioned in 2011 at a ground breaking ceremony at Guba Mountains of Benishangul Gumuz, the nation has been attempting to build her own dam for almost a century in an attempt to reverse a gross miscarriage of justice and the right to use ones natural resources. History records that King Lalyibela was also intending to build a dam on Abay. Today, Egypt is trying to use an expired card to pressurize Ethiopia on the issue of a dam that has already started generating power. GERD did not just drop out of the blue; it has much stronger historical back ground as more dams on the river are to come.
Let us look into the historical background to the colonial ambitions for the control of not only the waters of the Nile but also the colonization of the entire region by the colonial forces of those days.
The 1902 Treaty between Ethiopia and Britain has often wrongly been referred to a Treaty between Ethiopia and Egypt and that this treaty addressed the use of the Nile Waters. However, such a treaty did not exist between Ethiopia and Egypt. In fact, the treaty that was being discussed was between Ethiopia and Great Britain. At that time, Egypt was a protectorate of the British Empire and the Egyptian government of the time cannot make international treaties.
According to Cheeseman, (1968), the infamous 1902 treaty was drafted primarily to establish the borders between Ethiopia and the Sudan and not so much about the use of the waters of the Nile. At that time, the Sudan was under British rule. This treaty took many years to draft and negotiate and while the borders for the countries were central reason for the treaty, the Nile, or the use of the Nile water, was not.
One of the articles, Article III of this 1902 treaty discussed the use of the Nile waters. The English version, as reviewed by Britain, read: “His Majesty the Emperor Meneilik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, engages himself towards the Government of His Britannic Majesty not to construct or allow to be constructed any work across the Blue Nile, Lake Tana, or the Sobat, which would arrest the flow of their waters except in agreement with His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of Sudan.” However, the Amharic version did not oblige Ethiopia to seek permission from the British Government. This has an eerie similar to the misrepresentation of Ethiopia’s position under the Wuchale Treaty that led to the Battle of Adwa.
In November 1922, the British government, which then administered Sudan and Egypt as its colonial protectorates, was interested in building a dam across the Blue Nile with a view to further bolster an already thriving cotton-farming enterprise in Egypt and Sudan. Even though the British plan contained various concessions and payments. (See Cheeseman, 1968. Lake Tana and the Blue Nile: An Abyssinian Quest, new impression, Frank Cass and Company Limited).
In 1927, around the time Cheessman was surveying the Blue Nile, Ras Teferi Mekonnen, a delegation, led by Dr. Martin (also known as Hakim or Dr. Workneh), was dispatched to the United States to obtain the government’s help in getting the J. G. White Corporation to build a dam at a cost of USD 20 million. When the news of such a scheme was published in the media, the response from Great Britain, which, as was noted above, then administered Egypt as a colonial protectorate and had a vested interest in the implementation of such a deal, was swift. The British business community, in particular, had reaped enormous profits from the highly lucrative cotton cultivation in Egypt, spread over various parts of the Nile basin.
The second attempt to build the Dam came four decades later, in 1958, again under the direct leadership of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I. In this attempt, the United States government was persuaded to direct the U.S. Bureau of Land Reclamation to carry out an extensive, six-year-long study of the Blue Nile for both electricity generation and industrialized agriculture expansion. The findings of this comprehensive report, which had weighed the relative merits of various dam-construction and mechanized agriculture sites, made a series of recommendations which echoed the recommendation for a suitable site which, as noted above, Chessman had made some thirty years earlier. However, although His Imperial Majesty had a close relationship with the United States, Great Britain–and the multilateral institutions these nations kept represented—successfully thwarted the effort, and Ethiopia’s quest did not go further. Still, undeterred by this stinging set back, Haile Selassie’s government used this milestone to set the agenda for the next generation, by printing a picture of the dam on the Ethiopian banknote of 50 Birr, accompanied by the emperors prophesy that future generations of Ethiopian leaders would one day succeed in building bigger dams.
The third attempt was made by the Derg under President Mengistu Haile Mariam, but this quest focused primarily on irrigation and mechanized agriculture. Although the Derg was embroiled in continuous warfare against separatist groups throughout its tenure, it did make a significant effort to relocate people affected by famine to areas where irrigation would be possible throughout the year and set up new towns like Pawe, in Gojam. It is one of the first significant efforts in Ethiopia to diversify agriculture and move away from total dependency on rain.
The last but successful, attempt to erect a dam across the Blue Nile was carried out in 2011, under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The project was accidentally rolled out at an opportune moment when Egypt, which had always objected to any work on the Blue Nile, was far too preoccupied with the widespread uprisings sweeping the Middle-East at the time to thwart the start of the project
Editor’s Note: The views entertained in this article do not necessarily reflect the stance of The Ethiopian Herald
BY SOLOMON DDIBABA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 4 OCTOBER 2024
