Backdrop: Before I proceed to put forth indisputable facts that rebut Egypt’s non-stop lamentations about the purported ‘calamity” the GERD (Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) is to bring upon that country, and the immorality of such storytelling, I would like to make remarks about dams in general to provide context.
The construction of dams extends back to over 4 millennia, pretty much along with the emergence of human settlements and agriculture. It is, however, only from mid-19th century onwards dams started being constructed for the express purpose of generating hydropower/electricity. At present there are over 60,000 large dams (according to ICOLD database) dotted all over the world.
These dams provide a wide array of services: domestic and industrial water supply; flood control; hydropower generation; irrigation; navigation; and recreation. North-American, European and Australian rivers can be considered pretty much closed systems. That is, their rivers cannot accommodate any more new dams. The Hoover Dam (on the Colorado, US), Atatürk Dam (on the Euphrates, Turkey), the Three Gorges Dam (on the Yangtze, China); Itapúa Dam (on Parana, Brazil-Paraguay), the Kariba dam (on the Zambezi River, Zambia-Zimbabwe) are some of the largest and most known ones.
According to the International Hydropower Association (IHA 2020 Status Report),the following countries are among the leading beneficiaries from large installed hydropower capacities: China (352, 260 MW); Brazil (104,139MW); the United States (102,745 MW); Canada (49, 917 MW); India (49, 917 MW); Norway (32, 256 MW); Turkey (28, 358 MW). Globally over 1310GW of power is installed resulting in reduction of 100 million Metric Ton greenhouse gas emissions. Particularly in the context of Africa, more so in Ethiopia, hydropower generation will confer significant benefits in terms of reducing or otherwise mitigating the unacceptably high rate of deforestation since, for all practical purposes, the majority of the population still derives energy from biomass – burning wood or charcoal.
Egypt is making proxy use of very wellintentioned, nevertheless misinformed and naïve, Western environmental and political groups to wage a campaign to discredit the GERD. Since some of these groups are well funded, their influence can reach – and misinform – the highest apex of decision makers in several global powers. Be that as it may, the facts will speak for themselves. When facts about the GERD are well contrasted with the claims made by Egypt, and particularly about what Egypt is doing in its own backyard, the hypocrisy will be glaringly evident.
Here are five false alarm bells Egypt is making about GERD. The five alarms will be compared and contrasted with similar situation at HAD, the very dam Egyptians are proud of.
False alarm 1: The GERD is the largest Dam in Africa and its huge size in itself is a threat to Egypt If one carefully examines the innumerable newspaper articles, radio and TV reports from Egypt the consistent messaging is about the size of the GERD. That is about GERD’s being the “largest dam in Africa”.
This false narrative has been repeated so consistently for so long that I am afraid it is accepted as a fact, not only by Egyptians but also by the rest of the international community as well. Seems lies repeated over and over again can be peddled as common, every-day truths.
The fact is this: the GERD is not the largest dam in Africa, Full stop. Egypt’s own High Aswan Dam (HAD) itself is more than twice as large as the GERD at 169BCM volumetric storage capacity; 6000 square kilometers reservoir surface area, 600 Kilometers length. One should keep in mind the fact that HAD has created the largest man-made-desert-lake in the world, a folly about which Egyptians are very proud! HAD can retain 3 years of consecutive Blue Nile in-flow.
The GERD, by contrast is less than half-the size of HAD at 74 BCM volumetric storage capacity; inundates one-fourth of area inundated by HAD at 1670 square kilometers surface area, and a third in terms of reservoir tail length at 250 kilometers. The Kariba Dam (between Zimbabwe and Zambia) and the Okosombo Dam on the Volta River (Ghana) in Africa are other two much larger dams than the GERD.
What the Egyptians are deliberately conflating about GERD is this: GERD could easily be the largest hydropower plant in Africa. That is, however, quite different from being the largest dam in Africa. The distinction is very important. Clever as the Egyptians are, they intentionally mistake the latter for the former.
Come to think of it. If one throws down a large bucket of water from the 100th floor of a high-rise building and throws the same volume of water from the 2ndfloor, the difference in the force with which the water hits your head is significant. The one thrown from the 100th floor could easily severe your head or do irreversible damage at the least. The same volume thrown from the second floor might at most make you wet.
The difference is due to the height. Because GERD is located high up in the mountains of Ethiopia (compared to HAD), with a taller dam that creates more head, it has much more capacity (two and a half times more). Substituting “largest hydropower plant’ with “largest dam” in “messaging” thru the media might be smart trickery and ploy to raise false alarms easily, mobilize following, etc., but it simply is doing injustice to the Egyptian public and even insulting. In the long-run, such falsehoods do not endure. Lies harm everyone – the originator of the lie; the audience at whom the entire false story is targeted and even the bystander who might inadvertently and often is exposed to the lies!
False alarm 2: GERD will reduce “water flow to Egypt”
This is yet another false alarm. What makes this narrative all the more worrisome is that the misinformation leverages genuine apprehension of any desert people might harbor when it comes to water, that is the risk of not being enough water to go around. As it were, successive Egyptian governments have been busy painting catastrophic scenarios in the event their exclusive use i.e. their claim to “historical right”, “prior use”, etc. is not maintained. Egypt has been equated with the Nile.
The international community has been willing partner in propagating this fiction. Poor Herodotus could have been right when he said, “Egypt is the gift of the Nile”. This was, however, millennia ago when the entire Egypt was anything but agrarian. To repeat the same claims now, in the 21st century, when agriculture which consumes over 80% of the Nile waters but accounts for only 10-15% of the country’s GDP is unforgivable – whoever happens to harp on this dated song! This is doing more harm to Egyptians by allowing the false Nile narrative to imprison them and delay much needed policy change to diversify their economy. If anything, going forward, Egypt is likely to be less dependent on the Nile and threatened, simply because there are going to be water saving technologies everywhere in agriculture, urban use, industrial use, etc.; there are going to be more possibilities to harvest water from aquifers (remember the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer holds 800 year Nile flows) and from the sea. Even more, with regional cooperation water use can be further optimized, releasing surpluses for all.
What is sadly very disingenuous has been the false alarm bell Egypt has set to ring around particularly the filling of the GERD, now politicized as an international UN security issue. How unfortunate!! The claim is that the GERD ‘will reduce water flow to Egypt” without any qualification. During the filling period, for about 5 or so years, indeed, water flow into the HAD from Blue Nile can reduce by anything from 10 to 25%. But this is during the “filling period” only. Can Egypt accommodate temporary reduction? Of course, she can! Remember the HAD holds within it significant buffering capacity, that is the HAD can tolerate reduction in in-flow for several years as it is a multi-year storage dam (average annual inflow into HAD from Blue Nile is around 50BCM, but the HADs storage capacity is 168BCM!).
The difference in the expressions between “flow to HAD” and “flow to HAD during filling period”is subtle, but significant all the same. To the ordinary person the former sounds as if in-flow to HAD will reduce forever, while the latter circumscribes it to a particular phase and indicate the transient nature of the constraint, if any. After all, the GERD, a hydropower generation dam, will eventually release, and indeed must release the water stored behind it, if it is to achieve its intended goal, that is provide affordable electricity to energy hungry Ethiopia!
This ought to have been the best opportunity for Egypt once in a lifetime, to be honest and speak the truth and show friendship to Ethiopia. Such falsehoods needlessly harm the confidence and trust that otherwise ought to have been thriving among these two inextricably interlinked, co-dependent countries and peoples – Egypt and Ethiopia!
False alarm 3: GERD poses seismic safety risk to downstream countries
Egyptians never tire of talking about the “safety” risk GERD poses. They directly and indirectly allude to the location of the GERD on some kind of geological fault line and thus the risk of seismicity. This is yet another scare mongering Egyptians are spreading in an apparent effort to alarm the Sudanese and sway them to their side. The facts are but the opposite. Ethiopia submitted the results of the geotechnical investigations of the GERD to the International Panel of Experts (IPoE), in which Egypt was officially represented, along with renowned international experts in the field including from South Africa, Germany, Great Britain and France that also comprised expert reps of Ethiopia and Sudan.
The IPoE unanimously endorsed the findings of the geo-technical investigations of the GERD Ethiopia submitted, confirming that the dam is being built with the stateof-the art technology, including pertaining to seismicity and that the GERD is not exposed to seismicity risk. The irony is that it is Egypt’s own HAD that is sitting on a major geologic fault line, the Aswan-Red Sea Fault line, thus exposing Cairo and over 98 million of its citizens to significant risk. One only needs to be reminded of the 1981 earthquake that hit the vicinity of HAD (5.5 on the Richter scale). Needless to say, such useless antics of Egypt do not add any value to the building of trust and amicable relations in the joint management and use of the blessing called the Nile God has given to both countries.
False alarm 4: GERD will entail major environmental and social damage
It would be folly to claim that a structure of the dimension of GERD on a major river like the Nile would bring no social and environmental impact whatsoever. The question is not whether GERD would entail social and environmental impacts. That it will is self-evident. The question rather is this: given that the Nile (thanks to the many large and small dams, weirs, diversions and other structures downstream of GERD including HAD, Meroe, Rossiers, Sennar, etc.,) is almost a closed system – how much additional impact would GERD entail?
That is, how significant would the downstream GERD impacts be? To provide context, let us consider the social and environmental impacts of HAD. Thanks to HAD, over 35 migratory fish species (including the elephant fish; Nile jewel cichid; African bony tongue) have been decimated already and have disappeared from the lower reaches. Since HAD came to operation in the early 1970s, the annual Nile floods that used to supply rich silt all the way up to the delta have become a thing of the past. That is to say, the flow regime of the Nile has already been irreversibly modified.
Located in one of the hottest points of the world, the Sahara, the reservoir HAD created (Lake Nasser) with 6000 square kilometers surface area, is rightly called the largest man-made-desert lake and an evaporation pan. Lake Nasser loses to evaporation annually anything between 1422% (10-16BCM) of the total Blue Nile inflow. The Water lost to evaporation by HAD is sufficient enough to fill the GERD according to the Ethiopia filling plan of 4 – 6 years. In contrast, GERD located in the cooler Ethiopian highlands, is expected to lose only between one-fifth and one-eighth that of HAD (1.67BCM) annually. As regards adverse social impacts, it has been variously described as total disaster of global scale and inhumane when HAD submerged the ancient Nubian civilization in its entirety and displaced 160,000 Nubians, the native inhabitants of the area, without any compensation, relocating them 100 Kilometers away, far inland in Sudan in what is known as Halfa by constructing the Khasim el Girba Dam.
The economic and psychological toll the Nubians had to bear has been transmitted across successive generations and is still as palpable today as it was 50 years ago! Because the GERD site has been very sparsely populated only 20,000 persons were relocated, even then in adjacent locations. That is not to downplay the trauma any relocation causes even in Ethiopia. One relocation is too many. The purpose here is to provide contrast. Further, the health risks HAD engendered (the incidence of kidney disease in Egypt due to agricultural fertilizer and other input pollutants), the erosion of riverine and coastal areas and the growing salinization of coastal areas are serious adverse environmental impacts HAD brought on the ecosystem.
If the Egyptians had a modicum of sincerity, they could have given as much space for the positive impact GERD brings forth to all three countries –Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, as the extravagant resources they expend to falsely discredit the GERD. This is not to deny that there would be marginal negative impacts to Egypt and Sudan. But when compared to the benefits, these impacts are negligible and are not significant. What, after all, would be the purported impacts? Sudan would lose some recession agriculture (that can easily be converted to modern irrigated agriculture) and its artisan brickmaking from the Nile silts. Egypt’s Hydropower generation capacity would reduce by 7-10% – but only during the filling period (5-7 years). Remember, however, this reduction is less than one percent (to be exact 0.06%) of the annual total energy production of Egypt.
Now let us dwell on the positive impacts accruing to all three countries. In terms of overall positive impacts, Sudan benefits significantly. Its hydropower plants would acquire significant energy uplift worth millions of USD; annual flood damage would be history, again damage reduction in millions of USD; Sudan would not have to incur costs to dredge irrigation channels and reservoirs, again millions of USD worth saving; the regulated flow of the Nile would allow them to expand their irrigated agriculture; the economic life span of their reservoirs would increase since silt will be trapped in GERD. Egypt would also benefit from having the HAD life span prolonged, since sediment would no longer bother them, their Dams can be saved from extreme flooding and additional flow can be secured from savings from flood plains in Sudan. Ethiopia would indeed benefit by increasing its energy production by over 140%! In another setting i.e. in a more forward-looking environment, the downstream countries could have taken part in covering the costs of GERD (as well as sharing the benefits) a proposal Egypt shot down at the very gestation of the idea. Be that as it may, GERD will also benefit the entire Nile Basin (e.g. increased power trade) and Eastern Nile in particular (the three countries can buffer better the impacts of Climate Change now with two large dams – HAD and GERD- than before).
These are the social and environmental facts – good and bad – of the GERD. In its urge to get international sympathy and mobilize its Arab brethren, instead of a balanced story, Egypt selects and harps on the marginal, reversible and otherwise manageable negative impacts, while being completely “oblivious” to the, most prominent positive benefits accruing to all three countries and the river system itself.
False alarm 5: GERD is constructed without prior consultation
There has never, ever been a single instance in its modern history when Egypt extended recognition to, much less support, Ethiopia’s attempt to access the Nile waters, even for domestic water supply. It is documented fact that Ethiopia’s access to international sources to finance any water infrastructure project on the Nile has been held hostage by Egypt’s undue influence in these institutions, particularly the World Bank. No wonder past experience did not encourage Ethiopia to approach Egypt with its GERD plans, though there was recognition that at some stage both Egypt and Sudan would need to come on board.
What further complicated matters was that there has been no precedent or history of reciprocity in prior consultation and information exchange among Eastern Nile countries. Egypt, as the first and only Nile country that has embarked on a series of extensive water infrastructure projects across the stretch of the Nile – including, to cite but the major ones – the HAD, the Toshka out-of-basin Water Transfer; the Selam Canal out-of-basin and out of the continent water transfer, the Nile Delta Irrigation schemes, etc., has never shared information about these schemes with upstream countries.
Worse, even when upstream countries aired their concerns and demanded information, such as when Ethiopia raised its concerns when Egypt was embarking on the construction of the HAD, the Toshka and Selam Canals, Egyptian response was dismissive and hostile. In short, there was no precedence and culture of information sharing and consultation. There is none today. Unfortunately, there is also no agreement pertaining to prior notification to which both Egypt and Ethiopia are signatories. Both Egypt and Ethiopia have abstained from voting during the adoption of the 1997 UN Water Course Convention much less ratify the Agreement.
The Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) requires countries to exchange information about their planned measures through the Nile Basin Commission. Egypt rejected this agreement and the agreement itself is not enforce so far. It is against this backdrop– i.e. absence of precedence and/or common treaty and information exchange procedure or mechanism – Ethiopia was obliged to find creative solutions to support Egypt and Sudan, as the two most downstream countries, acquire the necessary information about the GERD.
At the end of the day, there is recognition that the GERD will have to operate within and in sync with the configuration of all major water infrastructure in the Eastern Nile. Cooperation and coordination is not a choice for any one of the three countries, but a must. Thus, Ethiopia initiated – with the participation of Egypt and Sudan –the establishment of the International Panel of Experts, thru which mechanism, the countries were enabled to access any technical or design information about the GERD. Then again Ethiopia facilitated signing of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) by the Heads of States of the three countries to provide a firmer basis for cooperation.
These are the facts. When viewed against these facts, Egypt’s behaviour i.e. playing the role of the aggrieved party becomes completely mystifying. Remember, it is Egypt that denied Ethiopia any bit of information on HAD, the Toshka and Selam outof-basin transfers as these schemes are known to foreclose Ethiopia’s future water use. It has now become apparent that what has angered Egypt is its failure to turn these consultation mechanisms (established in good faith) into forum in which it imposes its diktats and ultimatums. When this failed, Egypt decided to hype the rhetoric, politicize and internationalize the issue and take it out of the basin, out to the US and the UN! So much subterfuge and so little good faith!
By way of Conclusion: What then is the way out?
As I have tried to outline above, Egypt is ringing false alarms about the GERD. False things are not true. They are not moral either. Falsehoods pollute the environment. They do not add value. However, they can do immense harm, not least by destroying trust, confidence and mutuality – critical requirements for productive cooperation and co-existence of co-riparians as Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan are.
The Nile is a geographic reality, so is the fact that these three countries are tied together by this river, for better or for worse. In this sense, geography is indeed destiny. All the three countries have to learn to adapt to change. Change is happening – in the hydrologic, political, social, demographic, international relations senses. The countries can leverage and ride the wave of change to create a better future. It is an opportunity. Inherited inequities have lasted this long. Enough.
Attitudes that imply “my way or the highway” aka “historical rights “; “veto rights” should give way to more collaborative mind sets. We need a new beginning, a modern beginning, in the Eastern Nile. Provided we do not constantly undermine goodwill, trust and mutuality by false alarms, or clever media “messaging” what Eastern Nile is facing is a solvable, technically fixable, manageable resource management challenge. We can meet the challenge. We can manage the Nile sustainably. Let us give more space to science, to water science. Let us politicize Nile less. Let us not ring false alarms any longer. Let us not imprison the youth of the Nile in false narratives, manufactured grievances and eventual hopelessness.
The Ethiopian herald June 12,2020
BY MENAYE TEMAM
