Ethiopia has inaugurated Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, as the $5bn project continues to sow dismay with downstream neighbours Sudan and Egypt.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has hailed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as a “shared opportunity” for the region that is expected to generate more than 5,000 megaWatts of power and allow surplus electricity to be exported.
A handful of regional leaders, including Kenya’s President William Ruto and Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, attended the festivities in person on Tuesday, which kicked off the night before with lantern displays and drones writing slogans such as “geopolitical rise” and “a leap into the future”.
But Sudan and Egypt – who rely heavily on the Nile for water supplies – have expressed fears that the dam will threaten their water security and even breach international law. Their leaders did not attend the inauguration of the dam.
The Blue Nile, one of the Nile’s two main tributaries, flows north into Sudan and then Egypt. The dam is located just 14km (9 miles) east of the Sudanese border, measuring 1.8km (1.1 miles) wide and 145 metres (0.1 mile) tall.
“I understand their worries, because of course, if you look at Egypt from the sky, you see that the street of life is existent” thanks to the Nile, Pietro Salini, the CEO of Italian company Webuild that constructed the dam, told Al Jazeera. But “regulating the water from this dam will create an additional benefit” to neighbours, he added.
‘Continuous threat to stability’
GERD has spawned regional tension since it was launched in 2011, with years of cooperation talks between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt still stalled.
Last week, Sudan and Egypt released a joint statement calling Ethiopia’s actions “unilateral” and saying the dam posed a “continuous threat to stability”.
Sudan’s Roseires Dam, located about 110km (70 miles) downstream of GERD, faces potential future effects if Ethiopia were to perform large water releases without coordination, reports Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall.
“Roseires is the closest, it’s 60 years older, and when constructed was 25 times smaller – and will likely bear the brunt of the fallout if anything goes wrong at the Ethiopian dam,” Vall said.
But GERD may also provide benefits such as regulating the annual flow of the river and reducing potential flooding in villages on the banks of the Nile.
Abdullah Abderrahman, Roseires Dam administration manager, told Al Jazeera that GERD has helped to control overflow at Roseires that “used to be extremely big”.
“Then there is the reduction of the huge amounts of silt and trees that the rainy season used to bring into Roseires, causing its storage capacity to shrink by a third,” Abderrahman added.
Dessalegn Chanie Dagnew, associate professor of water resources at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia and a member of the Ethiopian parliament, told Al Jazeera the dam’s benefits could eventually reach beyond assuaging flooding and silt.
Rather than creating tension, he said, GERD “will also serve as a project that can really bring about regional integration and cooperation”.
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