Suppose you sign-up for the “America Got Talent” show and your turn is up to show-case your “newly” found magic tricks. You walk to the stage with a pan full of water, a small stove and a small fridge as well. You’re on. You put the pan full of water on the stove and you heat it up to the maximum. The audience is stunned and impressed for you have just turned once-liquid into a steam or a vapor. You’re not done yet. You put the liquid water in the fridge and after a while it is turned into a solid material—ice. Again, the audience is on its feet giving you a round of applause. That is the magic of water! Liquid, steam and solid!
I am sure, your high-school science teacher comes to mind when she defines and makes you recite—evaporation, condensation and sublimation like your daily prayer not to mention when she said, water is a universal solvent with an extraordinary capacity to contain or tolerate heat—heat-capacity as she fancied to call it including when water is composed of two highly flammable elements—Oxygen and Hydrogen and yet it is a source of life. Another magic of water!
It is not only that, water resides over the 60-40-20 rule as well where our body is 60 percent water where 40 percent of that is outside the cell and 20 percent is inside the cell. Essentially we are water beings except that we walk on Earth when the gills in us evolved into a pair of lungs instead. And one wonders why our planet is dubbed “Earth” if 3/4 of its surface is covered with water. It should have been called “Water Planet” instead. No?
The pervasiveness of water doesn’t end there. It takes the center stage in geo-politics as well. Perhaps, arguably no other body of water has shaped up geo-politics than the Nile River when Egypt can not survive without and the perennial tension it brought forth with the upstream nations particularly with Ethiopia. Previous Ethiopian rulers failed to prove Herodotus wrong when he famously said, “Egypt is the gift of the Nile” except Prime Minister Meles Zenawi when he said, the Nile is a gift to all of us and he walked the talk with an extraordinary courage and diplomatic finesse. To appreciate the up-hill struggle Meles was against, this is what the foremost scholar on Nile, Robert Collins had to say including how Egyptians have been psyched up about the river for millennia, “Among the pervasive beliefs in Egyptian culture is that water, like air, is God-given and free, any pricing system and controls on its use are totally unacceptable and almost blasphemous.” Question is how did Meles Zenawi make it happen? Better yet, what was the leaders before him didn’t have that he had? Perhaps the short answer is—clear vision and steeled resolve.
Meles Zenawi not only clearly understood the crucial element of energy for the ambitious economic development program he undertook but he understood the dire ramifications that would ensue should Egypt’s anxiety turns real. That is to say that, food crisis or reduction of agricultural output in Egypt due to the reduction of the river flow would have a tectonic effect in the entire Middle-East as well. As such, Meles’ proposal was based on a win-win situation so much so that the proposal benefits Egypt more than it was a boon for Ethiopia.
The water diplomacy as it was later dubbed started in the early 1990s when the new government in Ethiopia and Egypt agreed in principle that Ethiopia was entitled to an equitable share of Nile waters and to work cooperatively on Nile development. Later on, in 1999 Nile countries launched the World Bank supported Nile Basin initiative, a model in use in many international river basins around the world. The intent was however, a different story all together when the diplomacy was in fact Egypt’s own ambitious plan to water its desert to ease the explosive population pressures building along its narrow, fertile Nile corridor.
To entice Ethiopia’s cooperation, Egypt offered support for Ethiopian hydropower dams, terracing of Ethiopia’s highlands that improved water usage, augmented river flows, and reduced troublesome slit loads arriving at Aswan, and for some small scale irrigation projects. But any water storage that significantly enlarged Ethiopia’s capacity to expand its less than 1 percent of irrigated farmland was still not open to serious discussion. By 2005, with one in eight Ethiopians in need of international food relief, Meles Zenawi angrily protested Egypt’s monopoly in large-scale Nile irrigation and threatening to unilaterally divert its waters for Ethiopia’s benefit.
Meles went on to say that, “While Egypt is taking the Nile water to transform the Sahara Desert into something green, we in Ethiopia who are the source of 85% of that water are denied the possibility of using it to feed ourselves.” He further added when he said, “I think it is an open secret that the Egyptians have troops that are specialized in jungle warfare. Egypt is not known for its jungles and from time to time Egyptian presidents have threatened countries with military action if they move, If Egypt were to plan to stop Ethiopia from utilizing the Nile waters it would have to occupy Ethiopia and no country on Earth has done that in the past.” Furthermore, he went on to add that, “The current regime [Hosni Mubarak’s] cannot be sustained. It’s being sustained because of the diplomatic clout of Egypt. Now, there will come a time when the people of East Africa will become too desperate to care about these diplomatic niceties. Then, they are going to act.”
The above cited Meles’ tough but bold stand are not hubris but realistic assessments and a reflection of a fast changing world when Egypt’s strategy is stuck in the Nile agreement of the colonial era. And as a sign of a new era, through extensive diplomatic flexibility and adroit, Meles was able muster Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan with other Nile basin countries and launched a more vigorous new series of meetings to try yo reach a comprehensive accord on joint basin investment and development. And to that end, Egyptians started showing pragmatic willingness to seriously entertain with international monitoring and financing, significant storage volumes in the low evaporation rate highlands of Ethiopia. In fact, as experts on hydrothermal energy put it, through reduced flood loss from dam control, the same experts calculate that, Ethiopia will actually be able to provide all the irrigation water envisioned in its own master plan, create much additional hydroelectricity, and still release greater amounts of water downstream to Sudan and Egypt than it does presently.
The difficult task was not constructing or building the dam [GERD] but to muster not only the political courage but to have the resolve make it happen as well. Meles went on for it not so much to satisfy his ego as his detractors later on insinuated out of spite and bitter jealousy but Meles the idealist turned pragmatic clearly understood that to transform Ethiopia into not only a self-sufficient country but a middle-income one, he would have to secure energy supply first and foremost. The ungrateful Ethiopia however, not only failed to honor his extraordinary contribution and vision, it is sweating to erase his legacy all together. What is even repulsive and grotesque is that, Abiy Ahmed is sharing the credit with the last Emperor, an Emperor who never maned up to take on the bull by its horn. One only hopes, intellectuals and historians in particular would live up to an academic ethical standard and put Meles Zenawi where he belongs with respect to the success of the GERD.
Note: Most of the information is taken from the book by Steven Solomon titled, “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization.”