Overcoming 14 years of political strife, concerted diplomatic pressure and a conflict-battered economy, Ethiopia has inaugurated Africa's largest dam as it phases out non-electric cars.
Tuesday marked the official opening of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a hydro-electrical venture launched on the Blue Nile in 2011 to make the nation prosperous in energy.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said at the official launch that the GERD would be "remembered as a great achievement not only for Ethiopia, but for all black people".
Entirely self-funded, the $US5 billion ($7.6 billion) dam has been hailed as a source of national pride and a testament to Ethiopia's determination to grow on its own terms despite being among the world's least developed nations.
But it is also the basis of an intense three-way dispute with Sudan and Egypt and has been deemed a threat to the livelihoods of more than 100 million people.
Ethiopian dam in world's top 20
Straddling the Blue Nile River — a tributary of the Nile — the GERD has been built near the town of Guba in Ethiopia's west near the border with Sudan.
It is designed to hold 74 billion cubic metres of water and is expected to produce more than 5,000 megawatts of power, doubling Ethiopia's overall electricity generation capacity.
Around 45 per cent of Ethiopia's 130 million people lack electricity, according to World Bank data, and frequent blackouts in the capital Addis Ababa force businesses and households to rely on generators.
Analysts say the dam can boost industrial production, enable a shift towards electric vehicles and supply the region through power lines that stretch as far as Tanzania.
Supporting the domestic development of EVs is crucial to Ethiopia's strategic goals after it last year became the first country in the world to ban all imports of fuel-powered vehicles.
Measured by power generation capacity, the GERD is the 15th biggest hydro-electric dam in the world.
At 170 metres, it is also among the highest dams in Africa, behind the Gilgel Gibe III Dam (243m) on Ethiopia's Omo River, inaugurated in 2016, and the Katse Dam on the Malibamatso River in Lesotho (185m).
The GERD has come to symbolise national unity in a country that has grappled with bitter divisions along ethnic lines, including a brutal civil war in the Tigray region from 2020 to 2022.
Funded, built, and defended entirely by Ethiopians, Addis Ababa bills it as a unique national achievement.
More than 90 per cent of the GERD's construction was state-funded, and the remaining 9 per cent was raised through contributions from locals, the Ethiopian diaspora, public bond sales, and gifts.
Dozens of African nations, including Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan, have expressed interest in starting or scaling up electricity imports from Ethiopia following the mega dam launch.
Countries lying downstream, however, do not share the same optimism.
The Nile, a geopolitical flashpoint
The Blue Nile originates in Ethiopia's Lake Tana before converging with the White Nile in Sudan, creating the larger Nile River, which flows north through Egypt and into the Mediterranean Sea.
It provides 85 per cent of the water to the Nile Basin, which is a vital resource for tens of millions of people in the 11 countries it traverses — Ethiopia, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan and Egypt.
All but the latter two lie upstream, meaning the construction of the GERD on the Ethiopian-Sudanese border does not disrupt their respective water flows or quality.
But Egypt, for which the Nile has been a lifeblood for millennia and sustains 95 per cent of its population, fiercely opposed the dam's construction since the onset and sought all forms of avenues to try and stop it.
Cairo has consistently argued it reserves the right to defend itself and protect its water interests in the face of any threat, on the basis of a 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that granted Egypt veto powers over any upstream development.
[MAP]The Egyptian government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has long called the dam an "existential threat" to Egypt's water security.
"There was no prior notification, proper consultations, or consensus with downstream countries, thereby constituting a grave violation of international law," said Tamim Khallaf, a spokesperson for Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Egypt's bid to stall the GERD included threats to use military force, complaints to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), backdoor diplomacy to get the United States to withhold aid, lobbying the World Bank to stop financing, and appeals to the Arab League.
In recent years, it has also drawn closer to Addis Ababa's rivals in the Horn of Africa, notably Eritrea, although refraining from direct reprisals against Ethiopia.
Mediation efforts by the US, Russia, the UAE and the African Union to secure a legally binding agreement on how the dam should be filled and operated have all faltered over the past decade.
"For the Egyptian leadership, GERD is not just about water, it is about national security," Mohamed Mohey el-Deen, formerly part of Egypt's team assessing GERD's impact, told the AFP news agency.
"A major drop in water supply threatens Egypt's internal stability. The stakes are economic, political and deeply social."
Sudan's position, meanwhile, has fluctuated.
It has joined Egypt in condemning "unilateral measures in the Nile Basin" and backed calls for a legally binding agreement on the dam's filling and operation.
However, Sudan finds itself torn as it also stands to potentially benefit from better flood management and access to cheap energy from the dam.
"The cruel irony of Sudan's predicament is that it stands to gain the most practical benefits from GERD-regulated water flows, flood control, reduced sedimentation in its own dams, and potential electricity imports, yet political paralysis and dependency on Egypt prevent it from embracing these advantages," said Memar Ayalew Demeke, an expert in Horn of Africa geopolitics.
Ethiopia has said the dam will not significantly harm downstream countries, with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assuring his neighbours they would have shared prosperity.
"I assure you that Ethiopia will never take away your rightful share," he said at the launch on Tuesday.
"Today, I make this promise before my people. The hunger of our brothers in Egypt, in Sudan, or anywhere else is also our hunger. We must share and grow together, for we have no intention of harming anyone."
The dam's reservoir has flooded an area larger than Greater London, which the government said would provide a steady water supply for irrigation downstream while limiting floods and drought.
Conflicts over water bodies on the rise
While trans-boundary waters are not governed by treaties, their use is regulated under the 1992 UNECE Water Convention, the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention and the 2011 UN Resolution on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation.
It is not legally enforceable, like most matters of international law, but provides an overarching framework to address issues spanning multiple countries.
The tenets of international water law are the duty to cooperate and the principle of equitable and reasonable use, which includes a due diligence obligation not to cause significant harm.
Shared water bodies have long proven a point of contention between countries and disproportionately affect those located in conflict zones.
The Pacific Institute's latest Water Conflict Chronology report from last year found water-related armed conflicts were on the rise globally, with 347 incidents recorded in 2023.
Studies predict that without mitigation measures, almost 40 per cent of the world's trans-boundary river basins could face conflicts driven by water scarcity in 2041-2050, with hotspots in Africa, southern and central Asia, the Middle East, and North America.
For Ethiopia, despite controversy, its new mega-dam may not be all bad, according to Alex Vines of the European Council on Foreign Relations:
"Ethiopia is located in a rough neighbourhood and with growing domestic political fragility, the government seeks to use the dam and confrontation with neighbours as a unifying strategy."
ABC/wires
