The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) broke ground nearly a decade ago. Since then, the discourse around this uniquely Ethiopian project has been hijacked by international actors. From Egypt protesting the dam as a threat to its "water security" to Donald Trump recently egging Egyptian leaders to “bomb the dam”, it seems everyone outside Ethiopia has an opinion about the GERD.
Within Ethiopia, the potential ramifications of a deal or agreement arising from the negotiations on the GERD with Egypt and Sudan are given scant attention. The government has not appropriately engaged the public in a nuanced dialogue about the seriousness and risks these negotiations pose to the current and future interests of more than 100 million Ethiopians. Outside of reaching for the public’s pockets to raise money for the dam through bonds and fundraisers it has failed to engage the public in an honest conversation. Patriotic Ethiopians, to their credit, have shown they are determined to pay whatever costs are necessary despite being left in the dark.
This is a missed opportunity because a serious engagement on the GERD has the potential to repair our fractured national identity from the debilitating ills caused by the nearly three-decade failed experiment in ethnic-federalism. The multifaceted benefits of the GERD to Ethiopians from relieving our mothers and daughters from backbreaking labor to its potential to transform our industries should be discussed with Ethiopians. Owning and advancing a narrative that highlights the benefits of the Abay River in general and the GERD in particular to Ethiopians is the government's primary responsibility.
Yet, our leaders have spent their energy roaming international capitals trying to convince downstream countries and other irrelevant partners about the GERD’s benefits to them. As a result, today’s dominant narratives on the GERD start and end with its benefits to downstream Egypt and Sudan. The dam’s benefits to Ethiopia’s nearly 60 million people living in darkness are secondary details. This misguided investment on external instead of domestic engagement has borne no fruit and has only served to exacerbate the politicization of the GERD.
The time to bring the GERD back home is now. Every Ethiopian should deeply understand the promise of economic and social transformation that rests in the Abay river and the GERD. Every Ethiopian should be encouraged to understand that these resources are vital to our national interests and our tickets out of poverty and into prosperity. Once we firmly understand this, we will no longer get lost in the patchwork of propaganda circulated by various international actors. Now is the time to stop pointing fingers at Egypt, Sudan, or the US for consequences arising from the decade-long negotiation on the GERD and instead look inward. We have more than enough reasons to abandon the talks.
As a starting point, Donald Trump, Washington's merchant of death, has unequivocally declared war on Ethiopia. His incitement of Egypt to blow-up Ethiopia's flagship national project is a declaration of war in every sense of the word. His remarks during a phone-call directed at Egypt to “bomb the dam” also sheds light about the nature of the closed-door discussions between Cairo and his administration. It is abundantly clear that Egypt is not negotiating in good faith and is weaponizing the negotiations to preserve its dominance over the Nile river.
Egypt’s circumvention of the DOP in its failed attempt to exploit its close ties to the US President and use his administration to coerce Ethiopia to sign an agreement that would have waived her eternal rights to the Nile should have been more than enough reason to abandon the negotiations. Trump’s recent declaration of war should be the nail in the coffin and unequivocally signal to the Ethiopian leadership that the negotiations are now a battlefield and the goal of opposing forces is to subdue Ethiopia and dictate matters of her national sovereignty.
Trump's incitement to blow-up the GERD, though illegal, remains a pipedream for Egypt. Nonetheless, the possibility of blowing up the GERD through a deal still remains. The negotiations are serving as weaponry for Egypt and its Western-backers to trap Ethiopia with a deal and restrain Ethiopia from ever using the waters of its own rivers in the future. A monumental decision to blow up the GERD with a deal and strip current and future generations of Ethiopians of their natural rights should not be left to a few technocrats in government, but to Ethiopians, the rightful owners of the dam. We dare say the GERD needs NO DEAL and the government should immediately leave these fruitless negotiations. Discontinuance will amount to a ceasefire and making peace. We can't play with a sword in one hand and sit for a roundtable negotiation on the other hand. In the strict terms of treaty-making, the GERD negotiations have taken place in violation of all the accepted norms of diplomacy and international law since November 2019 and the Ethiopian government should refuse to be party to this mockery.
The GERD shouldn't have been an object of negotiations between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan to begin with. Again, subjecting the terms of the filling and operation of the dam is unconstitutional and we shall say this louder and louder. The Ethiopian government owes the public an apology for the danger it has brought upon its citizens by inviting third parties to meddle in a clearly and exclusively Ethiopian matter. Instead, it has demonstrated its disregard of the public by rashly deciding to resume talks this week on the GERD in the aftermath of Trump’s declaration of war .
Saying no to a GERD deal will declare to the world Ethiopians’ commitment to honoring the universally recognized law and principle of national sovereignty. Erosion of sovereignty through coercion and under the threat of a gun is a very dangerous threat to the international system. Wealthy, poor, mighty, weak States can only live together if the minimum operating guidelines of the international system are observed by all. A wait and see approach on the GERD negotiations will get us in trouble. The process has been polluted by an irrelevant actor attempting to use its global economic and military might to coerce a smaller state to agree to its demands. Any potential deal arising from this polluted process will itself be contaminated.
Our government fails to understand that vital national interests should never be subjected to negotiations. It has invited thieves to ransack the Ethiopian public's property. It has pushed for negotiations because Ethiopian elites simply love and believe in the goodness of the term. Our intellectual class is also to blame here as they're recklessly encouraging the government to pursue a GERD deal against the national interest. Engineers are daring to articulate matters relating to international law outside the scope of their expertise while international relations experts are passing conclusive positions on matters which are clearly illegal from the prism of international law. Everybody is more interested in advancing their own argument about how negotiations are the only way forward even though the country does not even have a duty to negotiate. They fail to understand the repercussions of what sealing an agreement on the GERD will do to the future rights of Ethiopians. Their actions have been reckless and Ethiopia has suffered the consequences by ceding ground on the terms of the debate and the framing of the discourse to the unwarranted hyperventilations of Egypt.
We have to articulate a strong and bold narrative focused on the current and coming generation of Ethiopia. Firmly declaring the GERD as a sovereign Ethiopian project is the best way to opulence rather than appeasement. The GERD negotiations have morphed into a ticking time bomb which needs to be defused expeditiously before it blasts and buries the hopes of more than 100 million Ethiopians and seals our country’s fate forever.
