By Minga
Negash, Seid Hassan and Mammo Muchie
The 1929 Nile water allocation agreement that was signed by Egypt and the
United Kingdom (which excluded Ethiopia and nearly all other upper basin
countries) allocated 48 billion (65%) cubic meters of water per year to Egypt
and 4 billion to the Sudan. The 1959 agreement between Egypt and the Sudan
raised the share to 55.5 (75%) billion and 18.5 billion cubic meters to Egypt
and the Sudan, respectively.
This agreement
also excluded all the other upper Nile riparian nations. Egypt wants to keep
the colonial-era agreements and the 1959 accord. This unfair allocation of the
Nile water enabled Egypt to construct the Aswan Dam and the two countries never
cared to consult the upper riparian nations. As argued by Badr Abdelatty, a
spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, Egypt wants to keep the status quo
because it needs all the “assigned 55 billion cubic meters a year for vital use
such as drinking, washing and sanitation needs” by 2020.
This clearly indicates Egypt’s desire to
secure its own Nile water-related benefits intact while at the same time
denying other (Sub-Saharan) Nile riparian countries from using their own waters
for alleviating poverty and enhancing sustainable development. Contrary to the
Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) that was formalized in 1999 that Egypt was a party
to, it is now saying that any change to the colonial era agreement would be
tantamount to affecting its strategic interests and repeatedly threatens to use
all means available if Ethiopia continues to build the Great Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam (GERD). Egypt continues to escalate the confrontation despite
Ethiopia’s claim that the dam would have no appreciable negative impact on
Egypt.
Ethiopia,
along with the other upper Nile riparian countries object the privileges that
Egypt gave itself and consider Egyptian monopoly over the Nile waters as a
violation of their sovereignty. In accordance to the 2010 Entebbe Agreement by
the upstream countries, which included Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and
Tanzania, and now effectively Sudan and South Sudan), Ethiopia, therefore,
insists on adhering to its plan and is forging ahead on constructing the dam.
In what
follows, we use an amalgam of economics, history, law, security and environment
factors to examine the Egyptian opposition to the construction of the Grand
Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). We try to triangulate these factors hoping to
contribute to the debate and gain insight into the current tension between
Egypt and Ethiopia. We attempt to make a dispassionate analysis of the water
sharing problem between upstream and downstream countries. Consistent with
theory and real life cases, we surmise that water has been and continues to be
the cause for conflict in a number of regions in the world and, unfortunately,
water wars tend to be irrational, unsustainable and economically and socially
destructive. Trans-boundary water sharing and pollution
(environmental-ecological) problems are never resolved through hegemonies,
militarism and ultra-nationalism.
Dissenting
voices against mega projects such as GERD are not new – the criticisms ranging
from cost and scheduling overruns (as a recent study by Ansar, Flyvbjerg,
Budzier and Lunn of Oxford University shows ), to their impacts on population
dislocation, corruption, transparency in awarding of contracts, the manner in
which such projects are financed, social and environmental impacts in upstream
and downstream countries and water security concerns. Hence, Ethiopians may
legitimately ask questions and raise concerns about the manner in which the
Government of Ethiopia is handling the project. In this article, however, we
focus on trans-boundary environmental problems, the fair use of the Nile water
and address Egyptian concerns.
This is
important because the construction of GERD has reignited the long standing
explosive issue of the equitable use of Nile waters. We also believe the recent
(counterproductive) Egyptian threats of war and various forms of diplomatic
offensives require the attentions of scholars of substance and policy makers.
Egyptian
worries and aspirations over the Nile River system however is historical and
goes back to the days before the formation of the Egyptian nation/state even
though the issue began to dominate the country’s political landscape with the
generation of militarism and ultra-nationalism (from Gamal Abel Nasser to the
late President Sadat’s 1979 threat of war and to the current leaders of Egypt
vowing not to lose a “drop of water).” The recent political instability in
Egypt must have made the trans-boundary water sharing problem a point of
political opportunism. Reports indicate that Egypt may indeed be laying the
ground work to “destroy the dam before Ethiopia starts filling it with water or
risk flooding Sudan’s flat eastern territories upon its destruction.
” A WikiLeaks
report is also known to have revealed that Egypt, in collaboration with Sudan,
had plans “to build an airstrip for bombing a dam in the Blue Nile River Gorge
in Ethiopia.” In its June 2013 analysis of Egypt’s military options,
Straighter, a global intelligence organization indicated that the country does
have military options against Ethiopia’s dam, but noted that distance will
heavily constrain Egypt’s ability to demolish the work. The options, however,
may include air attack from bases in the Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea and/or
sponsoring present day local “militants” to frustrate the construction of the
dam. Obviously, Ethiopia is aware of the Egyptian options and its age-old
aspiration to control the sources of the Nile River system. For example, on
April 17, 2014, amid reports that Egypt was trying to woo South Sudan towards
its dispute over Nile waters , the Voice of America reported that the President
of South Sudan assured the Ethiopian authorities that the recently signed
military and economic cooperation between Egypt and South Sudan would not allow
Egypt to attack Ethiopia or allow subversive activities.
Egypt’s policy
towards upstream countries is primarily driven by its interest on the water
which aims at thriving at the misery of downstream countries, apparently
without any form of substantive reciprocity. In contrast to the present day
relationship between Egypt and Ethiopia, their ancestors, despite their limited
knowledge of geography and hydrology, had a better understanding of the
economics of water sharing. As the renowned historian Richard Pankhurst
documented, the Turkish Sultan who ruled Egypt before the British, had “paid
the ruler of Ethiopia an annual tax of 50,000 gold coins” lest the latter
diverts the Nile. Nowadays, and not surprisingly, even the Egyptian Minister of
Antiquities is against the GERD.
In fact, institutional memories and abundant
documents of the last sixty years indicate not only just the inconsistency, but
also an immense level of damage that Egyptian foreign policy has done to
Ethiopia and the Sudan. Egyptian interference in the two countries’ internal
affairs has been largely driven by the Ethiopian and the Sudanese use of the
Nile waters. For instance, Egypt objected the independence movement in South
Sudan but promoted the separation of Eritrea and the creation of one of the
most densely populated landlocked countries in the world. The international
community is not unaware of these facts but Egypt’s strategic location and its
pivotal role in the politics of the Middle East did not allow the powers to be
to call a spade a spade.
As of late,
intergovernmental organizations like the African Union which were once mute
about the behaviors of successive military rulers of Egypt, who often
controlled political and economic power under the cover of phony elections and
revolutions, have started to recognize the problems of the Nile River system.
Ethiopia’s and the other upstream riparian countries’ rights to equitably share
the waters of Nile is now an African agenda though key members of the Arab
League continue to support the position taken by Egypt.
Ethiopia’s
right to use the water that originates within itself would have included (and,
in our view, should include), in addition to power-generating purposes,
irrigation, water recreation and navigational services, flood control as well
as water storage and supply. It is obvious, therefore, that dams provide
valuable economic benefits. Just like any mega project, dams also involve
several side-effects, which could be summarized as environmental and
ecological, social (forced relocation of locals), economic and even political.
Other concerns may include evaluating and managing the risks associated with
dam construction as well as asking questions whether the product (GERD in our
case) would provide the desired and needed benefits to stakeholders such as
access to electricity. A reasonable framework of concern about dam
construction, therefore, would include a thorough benefit-cost analysis, not
just one-sided focus on the costs. This is our major concern in regards to
environmentalists and some of their Ethiopian supporters who campaign against
the 6000 MW dam.
The
environmentalists refer to the GERD as a “white elephant,” despite the fact
that the project’s leaked document, alleged to be prepared by International
Panel of Experts (IPE) showing favorable financial and social benefits to
Ethiopia and the Sudan. Environmentalists such as the International Rivers
Network (IRN) need to, therefore, quantify the magnitude of the side effects of
the project and should not rely on “covert” and “secondary” data. More
importantly, rather than being the butterflies of potential conflict in the
Eastern Nile region, they need to: (i) acknowledge Ethiopia’s sovereign rights
to use its own resources in accordance to international law and without hurting
downstream countries; (ii) identify mitigation strategies so that genuine
concerns are addressed before the construction is finalized; and (iii) propose
how the mitigation strategies are going to be financed. In April 2014, the
California based environmental pressure group which is against any form of
large dam that is proposed to be built in Africa and Asia leaked the 48 pages
long confidential document that was prepared by International Panel of Experts
(IPE) on Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam. Now that the confidential report is
in the public domain, it allows everyone to put to test the concerns of both
the friends and foes of the GERD.
The key features
of the IPE’s report could be summarized as follows:- (i) unlike the options of
smaller dams which would have included potential irrigation projects, GERD is
an energy production project and any fear of large and permanent reduction in
the flow of freshwater to downstream countries is unfounded; (ii) the filling
up of the dam is planned, to be done in stages by taking into account rainfall
patterns and the catchment area; (iii) both the financial and social
cost-benefit preliminary analysis of the project on upstream and downstream
countries are favorable and the expected damages on downstream countries are
not insurmountable; (iv) the preliminary findings about the project’s side
effects on Egypt is not sufficient and hence there is an information (hydrological)
void, and much of the current allegations and threats are based on unfounded
Egyptian fears; (v) work has progressed to the extent that, at the time of
writing this article, the project has reached a degree of completion rate of
31% and the water diversion has been successfully carried out; (vi) the
expected loss of water due to evaporation for the new project is not worse than
what Egypt is currently losing from its environmentally unfriendly projects and
poor water management (A number of analysts have indicated that Egypt has not
been an efficient user of the available water. Not only is water not priced
properly, but the Egyptian authorities also have allowed the expansion of water
devouring crops of rice and sugar cane- against the advice of experts and
bilateral donors. The irrational and increasingly thirsty nature of Egyptian
use of water has failed to recognize the realities of our time: escalating
shortages of water exacerbated by global warming, population pressure and
life-style changes.)(vii) recent geological and hydrological studies have
documented an abundant level of ground water in the Nile basin countries and
hence downstream countries will not be thirsty if upstream countries build dams
that generate electricity. It is clear, therefore, that Egypt’s no dam policy
or stance against large energy producing dams in upstream countries is a
misplaced opposition and therefore calls for a new thinking in Cairo.
As Professor
Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University observes, there are about 261
trans-boundary rivers across the world and unless carefully handled a
significant proportion of these rivers could be causes of conflict. Wolf
documented that water has been the cause of political tensions between a number
of countries, including but not limited to Arabs and Israelis; Indians and
Bangladeshis; Americans and Mexicans, the Chinese and other downstream
countries, Brazilians and Paraguayans and all the ten riparian states of the
Nile River system. He observes that “war over water seems neither strategically
rational, nor hydrographically effective nor economically viable.” In other
words, there is little reason for a “water war” between Egypt and Ethiopia.
The two
countries can also learn from inter-basin development projects that are successful,
such as the Colorado River Basin allocation between the US riparian states and
Mexico, the Columbia River Agreement between the US and Canada and the numerous
European collaborative projects and integrated river basin managements of the
River Rhine. In particular, Egypt and Ethiopia could learn a lot from South
Africa paying Lesotho to quench its increasing thirst from the Lesotho
Highlands Waters Project. The framework for exploiting the Niger River Basin,
the Zambezi River basin and the Nile Basin Initiative itself could serve as
useful points of departure for cooperation.
Notwithstanding
the above, Egyptian politicians often argue about “historical rights” and
connect the water issue with the civilizations of the antiquities on the Nile
delta and forget about the history of the formation of nations and states.
Evidently this stance is self-serving in that it ignores historical tensions
between black people in the region (present day Sudan, South Sudan, Niger,
Eritrea and Ethiopia, among others) and the race controversy in the African
origin of humanity and the history of the Nile Valley (see for example Martin
Bernal’s Black Antenna, 1987; Anta Diop, among others). The politics of the
Nile River system thus has an Africa-Arab dimension and hence sensitive to Pan
Africanist and Pan Arabism agendas. Hence, if a conflict between Egypt and
Ethiopia erupts, it is more than likely to have spillover effects on the rest
of Africa.
Like most of
the post colony states of Africa, modern and independent Egypt was created out
of the ashes of colonialism (see for example Achille Mbembe and Samir Amin,
among others). Britain’s colonial interest on the Nile dam at Lake Tana (main
source of Abay/Blue Nile) is the foundation of Egypt’s historical and legal
claims to the water. Britain’s interest however was primarily driven by its
desire to irrigate its large cotton plantations in the Anglo Egyptian colony of
the Sudan and supply its factories which were located in the United Kingdom.
Modern day cotton plantations in Egypt are entirely dependent on the soil that
gets exported by the river primarily from Ethiopian highlands. In a series of
short articles, Dr. Yosef Yacob documented the history of colonialism in the
region and indicated how Emperor Menelik (1844-1913) and Emperor Haile Selassie
(1892-1975) managed to escape Britain’s colonial ambitions over the Ethiopian
highlands. He also revealed how Emperor Haile Selassie was visionary in that he
successfully resisted Britain’s encroachments on Lake Tana by hiring an American
engineering company to construct the dam and trying to finance the project
through the issuance of debt securities in the United States. In other words,
had the Emperor’s wishes were realized, the GERD would have been built a long
time ago. We have yet to see any reasonable criticism of Dr. Yosef Yacob’s
treatise by those who oppose the construction of the dam.
The next leg
of the Egyptian opposition is international law. Here too the argument
collapses before it faces the scrutiny of legal scholars. Egyptian officials
often refer to the 1929 colonial era agreement and the 1959 agreement signed
between Egypt and the Sudan (both former British colonies) that Ethiopia was
not party to and had never consented to. First, it is important to note that
colonial treaties have no direct relevance for resolving Africa’s contemporary
problems. The Nile basin countries have already rejected it. Thus,
the dominant
view is that trans-boundary assets belong to the post-colonial states and the
new states have to agree how to share their jointly owned assets. Second,
Ethiopia was and is an independent state and it was not a party to the 1929 and
1959 agreements. Historical records also indicate that Britain, Egypt and the
Sudan conspired and excluded Ethiopia from the negotiation. In this respect,
Wuhibegezer Ferede and Sheferawu Abebe, writing on the Efficacy of Water
Treaties in the Eastern Nile Basin, Africa Spectrum, 49, 1, 55-67 (2014)
outline two approaches that evolve from the principles of international law.
The authors
show the fundamental differences between upstream and downstream countries in
that upstream countries (Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and South Sudan) appear to favor clean
slate policy while downstream countries (Sudan and Egypt) favor colonial
treaties (It is not clear whether some of the governments would change their
position as a result of Egypt’s recent diplomatic offensive). Notwithstanding
the preference of one or another form of legal principle, Egypt’s insistence on
colonial treaties collapses simply because Ethiopia was not a colony of Britain
or indeed any other European power.
III
Now that we
have seen Egypt’s historical and legal arguments falling apart, the next step
is to examine the third foundation of the Egyptian stance – the environmental
aspects of the dam. Previous literature indicated that carbon emissions and
contaminations of rivers that cross national boundaries are examples of
trans-boundary environmental problems. Hence, policy formation requires
enforceable global treaties, sound national policy and the examination of
advances in a number of disciplines. Furthermore, investments in big national
projects such as stadiums, mineral extraction, oil and gas, canals, big dams,
highways, and big architectural projects add behavioral and political
dimensions to the science, technology and the economics of such undertakings.
Most of the finest buildings and stadiums that host world cup games were and
are being constructed in that national pride. And behavioral and emotional
factors dominate financial arguments. In other words, national projects by
their nature have behavioral dimensions and may not be captured by the
paradigms of rationality and net present values. Time will tell whether the
Ethiopian dam is different.
The mainstream
literature on environmental economics focuses on welfare measurement,
sustainability, technological change, externality and green accounting. The
world commission on environment and development (aka the Bruntland Commission,
1987), for example, states that “sustainable development is meeting the needs
of the present generation without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs”. Consistent with this understanding, the
Nile River system has both trans-boundary and non-trans-boundary features for
the riparian states and hence Egypt, in theory, may have a cause for concern.
This concern can nonetheless be resolved
through international instruments and institutions and bilateral relations that
are based on mutual respect and trust. The international convention on the
protection and use of trans-boundary and international lakes which was signed
by nearly 40 countries does not provide the base for resolving disputes, and
worse, no country from Africa (including Egypt) has actually ratified it. It
nonetheless can be another point of departure. The United Nations Environmental
program could also be a facilitator.
Furthermore,
as noted earlier, Africa has frameworks for inter-basin development. The Nile
Basin Initiative (NBI) has been a major institutional development which enables
all riparian states to collaborate and act as equal members. Egypt’s effort to
undermine this agreement is a mistake.
Other features
of the leaked report of the International Panel of Experts covers the main
factors of the project. Among other things, it confirms that: (i) GERD is
economically feasible; (ii) the design meets international standards, subject
to minor “corrections”; (iii) the contractor is reliable and has extensive
international expertise and reputation in building large dams; (iv) the
environmental impact study within Ethiopia is adequate and the trans-boundary
effect on the Sudan is favorable and controls flood; and (v) the section on
trans-boundary effect on Egypt requires additional study using complex models
and actual data rather than reliance on desk work. In short, the authors of the
48 pages-long confidential report did not say that they expect a catastrophe
and the vanishing of the Egyptian nation if the project gets completed. In
short, Egypt is not in any imminent danger. This conclusion has ramifications
for the multilateral institutions that refused to finance the project. In
summary, Egypt’s opposition to GERD is indeed misplaced. Its return to the
negotiation table and the African Union and the ratification of the Nile River
Basin Cooperative Framework and Convention on the Protection and Use of
Trans-boundary Watercourses and International Lakes are avenues for resolving
the sticky problems of water sharing.
–
Minga Negash is a Professor of Accounting at the Metropolitan State University of Denver Colorado and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Minga Negash can be contacted at mnegash@msudenver.edu or minga.negash@wits.ac.za Seid Hassan is professor of Economics at Murray State University. He can be reached at shassan@murraystate.edu Mammo Muchie is a research Professor of innovation studies at Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria) and Senior Research Associate at Oxford University (U.K).
Minga Negash is a Professor of Accounting at the Metropolitan State University of Denver Colorado and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Minga Negash can be contacted at mnegash@msudenver.edu or minga.negash@wits.ac.za Seid Hassan is professor of Economics at Murray State University. He can be reached at shassan@murraystate.edu Mammo Muchie is a research Professor of innovation studies at Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria) and Senior Research Associate at Oxford University (U.K).
He can be reached at
MuchieM@tut.ac.za .
