As expected, Egypt and Sudan's bet on the Security Council move to preserve their water rights. In the end, China has sided with one of the most important and largest investors in the Renaissance Dam for its economic interests, while Washington and Moscow refused to hints Cairo to resort to military action and demanded to return to negotiation under the virtual African umbrella. Yesterday's session was a clinic death for political solutions, and Egypt and Sudan after that only moved to protect their interests, after Ethiopia succeeded in developing itself and its ambitious project at the heart of a complex network of international interests, which appears to be not packed with the dangers that threaten national security and economic and social stability For my country.
"Whoever wants the Nile to ride to have a woven sails of patience," this is the Nobel Prize -winning British novelist, William Golding, more than eight decades ago, and it appears that his saying is still correct to this day, and it applies in particularOn Ethiopia's long ambitions to control the Nile, by a huge dam that is carefully built on the Mukhtar site on the Blue Nile, the most important tributaries of the Great River.
In light of this, it is not surprising that we indicate that the first beginnings of the Millennium Dam project, or the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as it is now known, dates back to long decades, specifically to the middle of the last century between 1956-1964 when the United States Land Reclamation Office made A comprehensive survey of the Blue Nile to determine the most suitable places to establish a huge dam on the Blue Nile, in the time of the Ethiopian Prime Minister Clayllo Habti was born, and under the rule of Emperor Haila Silasi, the last of the Ethiopian emperors, and it was then planned that the Great Dam was funded by the United States and international financing institutions, but this is The plans suddenly disrupted after the collapse of the Ethiopian property by the coup that led him to seize the stairs in 1974, so that Ethiopia fell in a long era of the Soviet military rule.
Over the following decades, the Renaissance Dam project was noticeably and its luster was noticeably eager, mainly due to the fact that the poor Addis Ababa had no resources that enable it to build the huge project itself, and that Egypt - the country of the main estuary and the most prominent power in the Nile Basin - and its Western allies did not They would be to allow the control of the Nile Basin through a huge dam funded by the Soviet Union, and despite that, the aspirations of the Ethiopians to control the Nile and their historical sense of injustice and the denial of their exploitation of their water resources have never disappeared, and the issue of exploiting water resources and building the dream became one of the few issues to unify the Ethiopian people Because of the ethnic and sectarian conflicts.
It appears, "Malas Zenawi", who arrived in power in Addis Ababa after the overthrow of the military government in the early nineties, was well aware of this fact, so Zenawi, who is now known as the economic rise engineer of Ethiopia, has woven a large part of his economic and development vision on exploitationThe country's water resources with the aim of converting them into a regional energy center, through the establishment of a number of huge dams on the 12 basins of rivers that make Ethiopian lands to feed neighboring countries with water.
The beginning was in 2002 with the Takizi Dam, which was built on the Atbara River, one of the tributaries of the Nile River, at a cost of $ 224 million, and I was already finished in 2009, but it did not cause a large amount of problems due to the decrease in the total capacity of the dam ( Its capacity is about 9 billion cubic meters only), although he detained at least 30% of the silt that the Nile was carrying to the Egyptian territory, causing its fertility to decrease, and later, Addis Ababa succeeded in signing initial contracts to build 5 other dams, headed by the "Jaib Dam 3 "On the Omo River at a cost of $ 1.6 billion, a dam that almost raised a major political crisis between Ethiopia and Kenya, because of its potential impact on the flow of water from the Omo River to the Kenyan Torcana Lake, an effect has already been confirmed after the monitoring of independent international organizations in 2017 the low water level In the Kenyan lake at a rate of 1.5 meters compared to its previous levels before the dam's residence.
However, the Renaissance Dam, or the project "X", as it was called in the official corridors, has been a special type challenge for Addis Ababa, due to several factors, foremost of which is the great cost of the fully estimated dam at 5 billion dollars (about 6 % Of the GDP of Ethiopia in 2018), an amount that cannot be collected as traditional financing methods, especially in a country classified as one of the largest recipients of international aid in Africa during the first decade of the millennium, and it is believed to have lost more than $ 11.7 billion due to financial flows during the financial flows. Illegal, that is, the movement of money illegally out of the country, whether due to money laundering activities or tax havens, not to mention that his foreign exchange reserves were barely enough to cover only two months of imports, according to 2012 data.
Add to that the large political and security dimensions associated with building the dam, and its certain impact on Egypt's water security, and the centrality of the Nile Basin region for many Western powers, which means that Cairo will mobilize all its political and economic influence, including its distinguished relations with the West, to prevent the dam from To become a reality by obstructing its financing in the first place, and this means that Ethiopia should search for unconventional ways to finance its dream project, and for the paradox, the tactics that Addis Ababa used to overcome these obstacles, political and economic, were simulated from the Egyptian play book , Where the approach that Ethiopia followed to finance the Renaissance Dam is similar to the way Egypt used to finance the high dam project in Aswan in the south of the country a few decades ago.
For decades, funding for major projects in Africa through a national fund represented a major challenge, whether due to the natural shortage of financial resources for African countries, or because of the money waste policies adopted by corrupt dictatorships on the continent, and as a result the financing mechanism approved for mega projects is aid The Foreign Ministry and loans presented by international financial institutions, led by the World Bank, but these international funds often came with political conditions and dictates, which Egypt realized early in its efforts to obtain the necessary funding to build the High Dam, the most important project on the agenda of the Nasserite government.
The financing of the High Dam was a pivotal moment in the diplomatic relations between Egypt and the United States, after the Egyptian dam project was early to one of the classic houses of the Cold War, while the United States and Britain were determined to prevent Egypt from falling under the Soviet influence, they were offered to Cairo That the World Bank support the construction of the dam, as an Eucharistic to warm relations with the Nasser regime, but the differences between Cairo and Britain - which were exercising sovereignty over Khartoum at that time - on the issue of determining the fate of Sudan, and distributing water shares between Cairo and Khartoum caused major differences between the two countries As Egypt was afraid that its water security would become hostage to the British decision.
As a result, Cairo made a bold decision to abandon negotiations with the World Bank, and seek to finance the dam from its local resources without the use of Western financing institutions, and as a result it has nationalized the Suez Canal Company for Navigation, with the aim of using the channel's revenues to finance the dam, which caused the outbreak of a crisis The famous Suez, where Britain, France and Israel launched a military campaign against Egypt, but the tripartite aggression failed to achieve any of its strategic goals, and instead of causing deterrence or dropping of the Nasserist regime as it was contemplating the aggressor countries, it ended in a complete break between Egypt and the West , And Cairo pushed an alliance with the Soviets who provided a third of the funding needed to build the High Dam, along with all the technical expertise needed to complete the construction process.
However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Western financial institutions have increased over international financing, and the establishment of any huge development projects in developing countries without the use of these institutions has become an impossible, and with Egypt gradually turning towards the western camp since the mid -seventies, Cairo has been able to Benefiting from this fact by employing its political influence, and exploiting its dominant legal position by virtue of the 1929 and 1959 treaties organizers to use the Nile water, to prevent the financing of dams in the Nile Basin area, and the exercise of vetoing any project that could threaten its historical rights from the water.
As a result, the efforts of Ethiopia, which seeks to bring funding for its projects on the Blue Nile, often failed, and Addis Ababa attributed this failure often to the virtual hegemony of Egypt, and Cairo's practice of pressure on international creditors and investors to prevent the dam's financing on the pretext of not sustaining it in terms of political and legal aspects, But Ethiopia found an opportunity for it to move forward in its plan to extract dominance on the Nile since 2011, when Addis Ababa took advantage of Cairo's preoccupation with the political transition process in the wake of the overthrow of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak, and the army devoted himself to protecting its dominance on power at the expense of national security issues, especially the water security And she laid the foundation stone for the largest dam in Africa on the Blue Nile.
Despite this, the funding problem was still in place, which prompted Addis Ababa to try to simulate the experience of the High Dam, seeking to finance the Renaissance Dam through local resources, and since Addis Ababa lacked any huge national resources to nationalize it as Egypt did, it has sought To pump national financing through more traditional means, initially dependent on local banks that were under pressure from the government to grant them loans with reduced interest, as the authorities imposed on banks to allocate 27% of their lending power for the benefit of the state, despite international institutions warning that this It can lead to the withdrawal of liquidity from banks and the slowdown in economic growth.
Later, the government imposed on civil service employees to donate part of their salaries to contribute to the establishment of the dam, in a controversial governmental procedure that the opposition claimed that it was imposed with coercion, and that many employees were threatened by separating their work if they refused, and these governmental measures were part ofA huge financing campaign in which many local institutions participated, and included collecting donations via mobile phone messages, lottery competitions, and even sports events held throughout the country with the aim of collecting money to finance the dam.
In conjunction with all this, the government resorted to an old trick that poor governments often use to benefit from their migrant citizens in the rich countries, which is the issuance of financing bonds directed in particular for migrant societies, and this type of financing often provides many advantages that are often not available to foreign creditors The first is the availability of the national sense, as immigrants often love the idea that their money is investing in projects that benefit their families at home, especially if they generate profits at the same time, and the second is that these immigrants are often very patient and accept the purchase of bonds with long deadlines due to the long relationships The term that links them with the source (their country's governments in this case), and finally these immigrants remain less affected by the risks of the currency, because even with the assumption that the values of their investments have decreased if the currency collapses, they will be able to benefit from the reduced currency to buy many cheap assets.
Indeed, the Ethiopian Development Bank has issued two batches of bonds designated for financing the Renaissance Dam that were directed to more than three million Ethiopian residing abroad, but while the first version of the bonds did not achieve the expected turnout due to the political risks associated with the project and concerns about the government's ability to pay, then The second batch of bonds achieved remarkable success after the government reduced the minimum investment in bonds from $ 500 to only $ 50, and allowed the transfer of the ownership of the bond between individuals, and increased the return on the bonds to range between 5-6%, and also pledged to bear all associated transfers fees By buying bonds.
Underlessly, the government financing plan was apparently eaten, as Addis Ababa succeeded in collecting more than $ 450 million from local financing sources by 2014, and it is believed that its outcome has reached at least one billion dollars since that time, and despite that, this remained.The money is far from the amount of five billion dollars required initially to finance the dam, and soon was exhausted in the initial construction work, so, by 2015, construction work in the dam was completely arrested, and it seemed that the ambitious dreams of Addis Ababa were on the way to collapse.
At that time, the dynamics of power in the Nile Basin region have begun to witness a remarkable change with China's strengthening of its diplomatic presence on the international scene, especially in Africa, and Beijing's efforts to reproduce the role played by the Soviet Union in the continent during the Cold War era by providing alternative financing sources The technical expertise necessary for ambitious development projects in Africa, and unlike the loans of Western financing institutions that often come carrying political requirements on liberalizing the economy and improving government and administration's efficiency and monitoring regulations in the field of human rights, the Chinese funds came exempt from these requirements, so they found a lot Those wishing to marginalized countries on the continent.
China has hidden its influence among the emerging forces in Africa, and put its attention on the most disputed resources on the continent, especially water resources and rivers, where data indicate that China has invested in financing and building dams in 22 African countries during the last decade, and the Nile Basin region was not an exception From that, among the remarkable decline in Cairo and the clear rise of Ethiopia, Beijing managed to employ a long -term conflict between the two powers for its benefit, and otherwise, Beijing found in Addis Ababa, historically known for its resistance to colonialism and Western influence, a suitable foothold to secure its future role in Africa in general And in the Nile Basin area specifically.
Beijing began its journey in Ethiopia early, specifically in 2002 when it funded a $ 224 million tested dam via "consortium" from Chinese companies, but the most bustling announcement of the Chinese presence in the Nile Basin region happened in 2012 when Beijing decided to invest 500 million US dollars In the controversial "Jeep 3" Dam on the Omo River, which caused great anger that spanned from neighboring Kenya, the main affected by the dam, all the way to Cairo, but all of this did not deter Edis Ababa and Beijing to continue their electrical cooperation, although China may I avoided providing loans directly to cover the costs of the establishment of the Renaissance Dam, for fear of provoking Egypt's anger in which Beijing also has growing interests.
Instead, China pledged in 2013 to provide a loan of $ 1.2 billion to finance the electricity and infrastructure lines to transport the electricity generated from the dam to the main towns and cities. Moreover, in April 2019, Beijing announced a loan of $ 1.8 billion The government of the new Prime Minister Abe Ahmed during the latter's visit to China with the aim of expanding the electricity network in Ethiopia, a loan believed to be a large part of it had been directed to complete the construction work and buy the turbines needed to operate the dam, and in return the Ethiopian government granted many of the profitable dam contracts For Chinese companies, during the first half of last year alone, the Ethiopian Electricity Company contracted with the Chinese Gizuba Group, a state -owned engineering company, for the construction work for the dam for $ 40.1 million, and at the same time, the Ethiopian government contracted with the Chinese branch of the company The German "Voyth Hydro" is the limited electrical energy to supply the last three turbines of the dam for $ 112 million (the company has already wanted 13 turbines for dam work during the two years The past).
Chinese companies alone were not the one who received their share of profitable contracts in the Renaissance Dam, where Addis Ababa sought to bring international support to their huge project by granting contracts to many prestigious Western companies, for example, the Italian construction giant "Wei Bild", Salini Embrillo Previously, he is the one who undertakes the implementation of the main construction work for the Renaissance Dam, and the company itself was the one who took over the construction work in the "Jeep 3" Dam, and it is also linked to a contract with the Ethiopian government since 2016 to build the "Kyusha" Dam on the Omo River, while the company "works" The famous German Vieth Hydro, specialized in the field of hydraulic turbines and engines, is to supply the turbines needed for the dam in partnership with the French company Alstom, which is also working in dam projects under a joint contract with the Giant American General Electric.
Things do not stop there, as it is believed that there are dozens of western companies that are linked to varying work contracts in the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and in fact, sources indicate that all countries are permanent members of the Security Council, and other countries in regionally and internationally, they have companies working inThe Renaissance Dam, which means that these countries will be - at best - are reluctant to take any biased positions against the interests of Ethiopia on the issue of the Renaissance Dam, if the issue was raised in any of the international forums and forums, including the United Nations and the Security Council.
In fact, there are many reasons that drive Western countries, especially the United States, to avoid bias against Ethiopia and stand by Egypt in the case of the Renaissance Dam, despite Cairo possessing legal and historical justifications, perhaps the least of which are the interests of Western companies operating in Addis Ababa, where It seems that factors such as Ethiopia's distinctive site in the Nile Basin and its undeniable historical weight, the relative stability it enjoys compared to its turbulent neighborhood, the promising economic opportunities it offers, and its position as a possible rule of Chinese influence in East Africa, has put Addis Ababa in a similar position to a position Cairo during the Cold War era, where the competing forces compete to gain their friendship.
This was evident in March, when the United States announced that it is ready to invest $ 5 billion in Ethiopia through a new development institution that was established late last year under the name of the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) with a huge lending capacity of $ 60 billion,The new institution was established mainly to replace the American Foreign Finance Corporation (OPIC), provided that its financing activities are directed to serving the political interests of the United States, foremost of which is confronting the great Chinese influence in developing countries, especially in Africa.
One month earlier, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo overcame the media from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, stressing that the United States came today to offer "real and attractive investment opportunities", in contrast It is clear to China, and at that moment, Washington had already demonstrated to Adis Ababa that it is ready to fulfill its promises, after giving the green light to the International Monetary Fund at the end of last year (2019) to provide a loan of $ 2.9 billion to Ethiopia, with the aim of restoring balance to the balance of payments In the country and financing the economic liberalization agenda.
This American and international aid and investments were much more than that Addis Ababa needed at the present time, and although none of them was directed to fund the Renaissance Dam directly, this money granted the kiss of eternal life to the Ethiopian dream, and at the same time provided clear indications that the support that Addis Ababa in Western circles today is able to equate the historical influence of Egypt, and this was likely the main reason that Ethiopia has adopted an aggressive and offensive discourse against Egypt in recent months, stressing that it will go forward in its plans to fill and operate the dam, whether it reached an agreement with Cairo or not.
For its part, it seems that Egypt is clearly aware of this shift in the balance of power in the Nile Basin and East Africa, while Washington seemed to be apparently restricted to Egypt's positions, especially since Ethiopia refused to sign an American sponsorship agreement at the end of last February, and left EgyptIt is signed alone in the first letters, press sources indicate that Egypt feels that Washington has failed it and that it did not do enough to force Addis Ababa to make concessions on the dam's issue, not to mention that Washington has refused to use its economic weight to pressure Addis Ababa to complete the negotiations.
Washington was not the only one who apparently failed Egypt, as China - one of Sisi's close friends - rejected a similar request from Cairo and did not exert any pressure on Ethiopia in the dam case, and more than that, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the most prominent allies of the Egyptian regime, ignored the continuous appeals For Cairo to suspend their investment in Ethiopia (about 7 billion dollars) in order to improve Egypt's negotiating position in the case, and on the contrary, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi invested in strengthening their relations with Addis Ababa, where the two capital sponsored a historical reconciliation agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea was the main reason In Ethiopian Prime Minister Abi Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize, while the UAE presented $ 3 billion in the form of deposits and investments in Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia provided 140 million dollars as loans to establish solar energy projects.
Given the positions of Riyadh in particular, it appears that the Gulf capital had a suspicious and controversial relationship with the Ethiopian project, although Saudi Arabia was forced to deny the existence of any investments in the Renaissance Dam, following a controversial visit by a high -level Saudi delegation to the dam building site in December 2016 and caused great dissatisfaction with Cairo, the Kingdom did not deny what was reported by press reports about its desire to establish an electrical connection project between the Gulf states and Ethiopia through a cable system that is passed through Yemen, as part of the Gulf efforts to reduce dependence on oil and gas In energy generation locally, helps to provide them for export purposes.
Likewise, Cairo may not be able to ignore the fact that the Saudi billionaire with Ethiopian assets, Muhammad Hussein Al -Amoudi is one of the most prominent investors in the Renaissance Dam, and that Al -Amoudi made a donation of $ 88 million to start the first construction work of the dam in 2011, and he is believed to be one of the largest financiers of the projectBefore his detention at the 2017 Ritz -Carlton Hotel, not to mention that he is the engineer of agricultural linking between Riyadh and Addis Ababa since he succeeded in persuading the Saudi authorities to invest billions of dollars to reclaim half a million hectares (about 1.25 million acres) in Ghamble Province, Ethiopia.
The land changes, then, at an unprecedented pace, under the feet of Cairo and Edis Ababa both, and while Ethiopia was complaining only a decade before the power of political and economic influence and the system of international and regional relations that enabled Egypt to preserve the upper hand in the Nile Basin region and obstruct the implementation of any Projects can threaten Egypt's water share, including the Renaissance Dam, which has suffered a lot to obtain funding, the situation appears noticeably inverted today as international capital and the offers of financing institutions that have always gave their back to the land of Al -Ahbash for a long time, while there is no appearance of any A country or an entity willing to exert real pressure on Addis Ababa to make real concessions to bring views with Egypt, which appears today - apparently formed - is unprecedented flexibility to relinquish its water rights in a way that could not be conceived before a decade ago.