Ethiopia’s Nile mega-dam is shifting dynamics in Africa’s Horn

In a matter of weeks, the multi-year mission of Ethiopian engineers will start to fill the Great Ethiopian Renaissement Dam, the largest hydroelectric power station in Africa and the most ambitious tentative in history to harness the power of the Nile. Finally, the 4.8 billion-dollar project would double the ability of Ethiopia to produce electricity that will improve the most competitive big economy in sub-Saharan Africa.

The dam has not only increased tensions with Egypt, which worries that the rivers that have formed its destiny for thousands of years are losing control. However, as they have done so many before, they have formulated their own rivalry for an area with many divisions. The Horn’s heart is Ethiopia with 110 m inhabitants, which includes the much less populated countries of Djibouti, Éritrea and Somalia and, in its limited meaning, Somaliland’s auto-declared independent state. 

Following the Eritrean secession two years later, Ethiopia’s liberation from Derg was soon followed by the loss of its coastline. Despite its lack of physical capital, China has spent heavily, investing trillions in Ethiopia. The United States saw an opportunity to get Addis Abeba out of the malignant control of China. Washington also calls on Ethiopia to conclude a sharing agreement with Egypt and Saudi Arabia on water sharing.

Yet, with political players in the Horn never passive victims of foreign intervention, the Horn of Africa has never been a tale of steady development. Rather, he wrote John Defterios, he tried to benefit by putting one external actor against another. A political earthquake has occurred in Ethiopia. In 2018 Abiy Ahmed became prime minister after years of instability, he states, pledging stability, greater economic transparency, and peace with Eritrea. In 1991, following the fall of the Siad Barre regime, Somalia fell into decades of violent anarchy.