Turkey, Tigray, Tana: The Problem with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

As temperatures rise throughout the world, the future of global conflict will not be over oil or gold, but water and arable land. In Africa, the world’s poorest continent, a striking example of a “water war” is currently unfolding.

In 2011, on the Blue Nile, which runs from Ethiopia’s Lake Tana until it drains at Egypt’s Nile Delta, the Ethiopian government began building and filling what has been dubbed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a hydroelectric dam that is projected to triple Ethiopia’s electrical capabilities and transform it from an energy importer to an energy exporter. Ethiopia is one of Africa’s fastest-growing countries—its population has quintupled since 1960—and needs a strong source of electricity to power its growing nation and economy. Addis Ababa views the dam as an existentially vital piece of infrastructure that is equal parts power source, equal parts economic enabler.

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The Nile, though, flows through more countries than just Ethiopia. Egypt, which lies downstream of the Nile, has expressed concern for the building of the dam. Egypt relies on the Nile for over 85% of all drinking and agricultural water, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has asserted that “not one drop” of Nile water should be stolen from the Egyptian people. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assures other riparian states that the dam’s effects will be negligible, but Cairo is not so sure.

Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed (left) shakes hands with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (right).

Egypt, a Muslim nation, feels angry at majority-Christian Ethiopia for announcing plans to build the dam during their 2011 revolution. Because Egypt was sidelined from the international playing field during their period of instability, they were not able to reject Ethiopia’s plans to build the dam, which were in violation of the earlier 1959 Nile Waters Agreement. Ethiopia rejects the treaty, seeing it as nothing more than a colonial-era treaty that does not need to be followed. Ethiopia feels that Egypt has long benefitted from such colonial agreements, and now it believes such agreements are meaningless. Clear tensions between the two states exist and are starting to bubble to the top. Ethiopia has started to deploy troops to its border with Sudan to ensure that the dam is protected, which Egypt interprets as a sign of aggression. Ethiopia’s policies are rooted in its own self-interests, circumventing multilateral talks and leveraging its upstream position to gain an advantage over Egypt.

Each nation views the dam as “existential”—for Ethiopia, it’s an existential piece of infrastructure that will boost its economic prospects. For Egypt, the dam is “an existential threat” that could threaten a large-scale drought and concurrent economic crisis. As Africa enters a new decade, each nation is scrambling to protect itself against climate change and boost its economic and geopolitical power, and the dam is a prime example of such self-preservation. As the German Institute of Global and Area Studies Assesses, “The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is not only a national project central to Ethiopia’s development vision of becoming a middle-income country but also a tool to change the power dynamics in the Nile Basin.”

Although Ethiopia is right to secure its future through the dam, some of its policies will only act to destabilize an already unstable region and one that is contested by other external states, such as the United States, France, or Turkey.

Ethiopia’s aggression at its border with Sudan threatens to set off a war. Cairo perceives Ethiopian troop buildup around the dam as an act of aggression. Ethiopia risks a conflict that Egypt sees as necessary to protect itself. But the implications of Ethiopian policy do not stop there. In between Egypt and Ethiopia lies Sudan, one of the world’s least stable countries, that recently underwent a coup in November of 2021. Extremely reliant on agriculture, Sudan is split between a ruling military party and a populace that yearns for change. Egypt supports the military party because it is opposed to the construction of the dam; Ethiopia supports civilian governance in Sudan because they realize it will increase the chances of the dam’s success.

But embroiling itself in Khartoum’s political squalor may not be the smartest move for Ethiopia. By projecting their power onto Sudan in an effort to gain support for their policies, Ethiopia risks worsening Sudan’s problems by entangling themselves in a proxy war with Egypt—already the “Ethiopian government has expressed concern that the Sudanese military will involve itself in the Ethiopian Civil War and support the Tigrayans against the Ethiopian central government.” Not only do Ethiopia’s unilateral policies risk a hot war with Egypt, but they also risk a cold war that could destabilize Sudan and worsen the ongoing insurgency in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region.

Ethiopia’s inflammatory policies will create partisanship among the international community, potentially sparking a larger global crisis. Northeastern Africa is a resource-rich region and is the focus of many superpowers that have key interests in the region. As the German Institute of Global and Area Studies continues: “the region is turning into a competition stage for external actors over natural resources, such as oil, natural gas, hydropower, and precious metals. It is a region evincing a number of overlapping conflicts, with alliances forming across conflicts that are hard to separate. The region also hosts external armed forces from over a dozen countries, such as the United States, France, and China.” Just like how Ethiopia and Egypt act in their own self-interest, foreign powers risk developing the crisis by picking a side based on their quest for power. Turkey, for example, rivals Egypt because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to make Turkey the leader in the Sunni Islamic world. The United States recognizes the disastrous potential of Ethiopia’s unilateralism, and, as such, sides with Egypt: “the Trump administration appeared to simply be doing Egypt’s bidding…the U.S. Treasury warned Ethiopia that ‘final testing and filling [of the dam] should not take place without an agreement.’ To Ethiopia, this seemed to confirm the longstanding fear that the United States has been a biased mediator.”

Although an undeniably important piece of infrastructure, Ethiopia’s aggression with Egypt and Sudan will only create more problems. By provoking Sudan’s military, they could destabilize Sudan and render themselves weaker for a potential war with Egypt. Further, international powers condemn Ethiopia’s aggression because wars in Africa threaten to disrupt the flow of minerals, oil, and other natural resources. Not only does Ethiopia’s unilateralism threaten to involve outside actors, it makes them side with Egypt, pushing for a multilateral peace agreement that those in Addis Ababa do not want.