Are the present Aspirations of 135 million Ethiopians to generate electricity from their country’s water resources inferior to the distant fear of 118 million Egyptians potentially losing water security from the former’s damming the Blue Nile within its border?
Official Inauguration
With GERD filled, is Downstream Water Security at Risk?
Neither Sudan nor Egypt reported a reduction in Nile water flow since GERD started being filled in 2020 until the process ended in 2023. Therefore, sincere concerns about reduced downstream water flow should have been allayed, considering that Ethiopia must keep water flowing to turn the turbines to generate electricity needed to power homes and factories and to enable paying off financial bonds used to raise capital for this infrastructure. However, on September 9, 2025, the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs sent a letter to the UNSC decrying Ethiopia’s celebration of GERD’s inauguration, which reveals how even the happiness of Ethiopians is not acceptable to Egypt’s leadership. This minister rushed to argue that the inauguration was an attempt to give the project a “veneer of legitimacy.” One wonders why Egypt thinks Ethiopia needs to seek legitimacy for a project implemented within its sovereign borders using its own resources. Interestingly, a session of the Arab League Nations’ Ministerial Council convening in Cairo on September 5, 2025, demanded that Ethiopia enter into a “binding agreement on filling and operation of GERD,” which was absurd, noting that the reservoir had already been filled. Such a demand shows the Arab nations giving Egypt imperial control over its neighbors, which is unacceptable in this century: Egypt never engaged other countries in its management of the Aswan High Dam. A sense of Arab supremacy may be driving Sudan and Egypt to emphasize potential threats of GERD while ignoring its practical benefits, including regulating flooding and reducing siltation in their own dam reservoirs.
The aforementioned Arab nations also displayed imperialism by seeking control over resources located outside their borders as they announced their rejection of Ethiopia’s supposed “unilateral control of the Nile by Ethiopia,” a claim that is false. Oppositely, Ethiopia does not direct how they use their oil wealth. The Arab league’s parochial stand may illuminate Egypt’s overbearing stand that GERD is against international law, considering that the said law includes colonial-era treaties that predate Egypt as a sovereign country. One example is the Anglo-Ethiopian treaty of 1902, which had an outdated article seen below:
His Majesty the Emperor Menelek II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, engages himself towards the Government of His Britannic Majesty not to construct, or allow to be constructed, any work across the Blue Nile, Lake Tsana, or the Sobat that would arrest the flow of their waters into the Nile except in agreement with His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of the Soudan.
The engagements in this excerpt could only apply in colonial times and are irrelevant today, not only for failing to meet the developmental needs of countries involved but also because vestiges of British colonial control have been eradicated in both Egypt and Sudan. The only practical way for both sovereign countries to move forward is to respect each other’s social, economic, and political needs. If all humans are equal, as the author believes, the Ethiopians’ right to a safe and reliable electricity supply is not secondary to the Egyptians’ perception of water security. Notably, the GERD reservoir can only need 6 months of River Nile flow to fill, meaning Ethiopia would be completely unable to restrict the flow beyond this limit, under the worst of circumstances, while the Nile has two other notable tributaries that would guarantee water flow to Egypt.
Possible Reason for Egypt’s Displeasure
Cairo may be lamenting due to its loss of colonial-era control and possible socio-economic strengthening of Ethiopia resulting from the use of the infrastructure under review. GERD Dam represents an important milestone in negating colonial-era treaties, especially those pushed by the British Empire. This empire arranged for its colonial, white minority governments in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Sudan to sign treaties barring Africans from using the headwaters of the Nile in a manner that would affect Egypt’s supply. These treaties gave Egypt an illegal veto on water-related projects conducted upstream, and Cairo seems interested in pushing them to date, while rejecting those that restricted it. The leadership in Cairo, after gaining sovereignty through rejecting colonial-era treaties, including those handing over the control of the Suez Canal to the British, now tries to enforce similar accords on other Africans, which is unacceptable. African countries will push back against modern-day domination, and more of them are likely to follow in Ethiopia’s lead and implement developmental projects that utilize water bodies within their borders, including those that form the headwaters of the Nile, for their economic needs. Notably, the GERD inauguration event was attended by the presidents of Kenya and Somalia, which denotes sub-Saharan solidarity in rejecting domination from Cairo. The presence of Somalia suggests Cairo’s loss of influence, noting that Mogadishu had sided with Egypt in the previous round of disagreement over GERD in late 2024.
Simon Chege Ndiritu is a political observer and research analyst from Africa
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