Why is Ethiopia in a civil war? Who will win? Why does Egypt feel threatened? What will they do about it? Why did Ethiopia’s president win the Nobel Prize just a year before a civil war? Why is this area spawning so many new countries, from Eritrea to South Sudan? Are all these events interconnected?
Thank you for such an informative text! I just want to add the fact that the Lake Nasser holds 1.5 times the full volume of GERD. That means that even if Ethiopia completely closed the Blue Nile for the full time of filling the GERD Egypt could compensate the missing water from Lake Nasser and still have 33% of that lake left when the GERD is full. The Egyptian crop harvest is not at risk even with that rapid filling if olny Egypt would use their own stored water.
As for flooding ond overtopping of the GERD there will never come more water out than tere is let in. So the level of the Blue Nile will only be increasing compared to at pre-GRED situation at times of low rain. That is when the Ethiopians will allow the level of GERD to sink for the purpose of genereating electricity. At times of high rainfall Ethiopia will either fill the dam (if not already full) or simply allow all incoming water to go out - part of it through the turbines and part of it will overflow.
That much for Egypts talk of fear. The real fear is that a stronger Ethiopia will compete for economical power and influence in the region. A war inside Ethiopia could stop that competition, so of course it is in their interest to fuel all internal conflicts in Ethiopia. Devastated Ethiopian infrastructure will slow down Ethiopian economical development.
I assume there must be some papers on the societal causes of unrest. Your hypotheses make sense. Have you looked for such studies to back them up? Have you done some correlation at least of these factors with social unrest?
Great essay! I know this is considered a niche subject for many Westerners, who don't consider Africa much at all, and definitely don't care to know anything about perhaps its most fascinating and future-impactful country. Even if the COVID-19 articles keep driving traffic, remember that your voice really has staying power because of what Kevin Kelly famously termed your "1,000 True Fans" (https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/), and the unique value-prop you offer to them. Consider me one of the thousand.
I lived in Ethiopia for three years during the previous regime and the (mostly notional) GERD then took on an almost religious significance for the government as an icon of the developmental state. For Meles Zanawi, Ethiopia's (kinda?) benevolent dictator of 21 years, the dam also represented a totem of national unity under a multi-ethnic federal state then dominated by the tiny Tigray minority elite (7% of the total population). There were propaganda billboards of it EVERYWHERE. Very kitschy stuff. Low production values and zero irony. But there was nothing fake in people's faith in the project. The dam was unique in that it was truly "crowdsourced" by voluntary donations from millions of regular Ethiopians as their solemn and patriotic duty (and as a reaffirmation of Ethiopia's proud status as the never-colonized African state, but one not above bankrolling a significant share of its budget with Western and now Chinese funding...). A Kickstarter-ed hunk of infrastructure is a concept that I couldn't even fathom as an American, when my countrymen can't agree on nearly any state project, especially when we have to pay taxes... yuck!
Since then, though, this attempt at rallying around the flag (or, rather, dam) has broken down spectacularly even as the grand edifice now nears completion. Ethiopia cannot yet, it seems, overcome a core fact of its geography: geographic, ethnic, religious, and political Balkanization. And, honestly, the dam wasn't ever going to itself hold back all the waters of discontent, nor light every opportunity imagined for the country's future. Especially not if everyone's too busy killing each other.
Most Ethiopians and Ethiopia-watchers, of course, blame this civil war on particular groups or political personalities and their choices. The PM is said to be craven or inept in his ruthless subjugation of political opponents. Or, it's all the revenge of the Oromo or the Amhara (he's half of both) against the Tigray. Maybe he has overstepped or miscalculated, but I'm skeptical that it's all his fault. Like you, I look for systemic reasons.
And, really, it's down to the extreme difficulty in containing the centripetal forces of a landlocked, mountainous, populous, still-impoverished, and chaotically diverse country in the most conflict-prone neighborhood on the continent. Ethiopia has always been more of a multi-national empire than a nation-state, and one that was never fully-consolidated. No leader could really square that circle.
But I will say this: despite those systemic challenges, Ethiopia has made some very smart moves that have paid off and may continue to in the medium- and long-term. Adapting the Chinese Model has been very successful, economically, growing GDP at China-rates for coming on two decades until this war tumbled the cart a bit (but even know, the economy is still humming, and my former colleagues doing business in Addis don't even really register the conflict, surreally). Chinese-financed infrastructure investment has gone a long way in overcoming Ethiopia's tyranny of geography and landlocked isolation.
And Chinese development models or cash don't magically do that themselves. Local conditions matter. Ethiopia has always been far less corrupt than other African countries, making executing against Five-Year Planning more successful, and I don't really have a good explanation for why (Perhaps partly the lack of Resource Curse and Dutch Disease? Or maybe the stoic, revolutionary background of the entire elite class?). Crime is low. Ethiopians, culturally, are perhaps the best example of retaining unique, traditional culture(s) even through the advent of modernity, globalization, and development. They haven't fallen prey to either the Western foibles of scientism or technocracy nor the foolish Romanticism of religious fundamentalism: they use development for their own, idiosyncratic ends. Their cultural ballast is deep, as befitting one of the only countries mentioned in both the Bible and the Qu'ran, and gives a very different sense of self-confidence that you just don't see in Nigeria or South Africa. This is a social, political, and geopolitical asset, if channeled well.
So, I do assume that the civil war will reach a standstill and that there will be some kind of power-sharing arrangement that will continue to be tense, but that Ethiopia will muddle through with evident success, anyway. As you say, tech overcomes geography as the engine of history, and that augers well for Ethiopia.
"The dam wasn't ever going to itself hold back all the waters of discontent, nor light every opportunity imagined for the country's future."
Beautiful.
What you tell about the country is fascinating. Thank you. I've never been, but it's on the list, and more so now.
I do very much hope you're right. For starters, once the GERD is on, the electricity consumption will bring so much prosperity that it might transform the country!
Thanks Tomás for this nice article! I have already read all your Geography series and I loved them! I want to get deeper in this topic, do you have any book recommendation about it? (I've read Guns, Germs and Steel from Jared Diamond and Sapiens from Yuval Noah Harari).
Prisoners of Geography is reasonably good. Stratford’s content is not bad, especially their monographs. They have some nice videos in their YouTube channels. Johnny Harris is another good source of geo content on YouTube.
Good work. But this sentence "If you ever hear news of Egypt complaining about the dam, you should quickly discount it." isn't a great advice. And Egypt's fears are not exaggerated. What you missed to clarify here is that 10 years of negotiations led to nothing because Ethiopia wants a "non-binding" agreement that doesn't regulate what to do in times of drought and doesn't give Egypt or Sudan access to enough data when they need to assess the impact of Ethiopia's annual decisions on the two countries. Ethiopia's insistance on having a non-binding agreement, topped with a very flaky attitude ( last minute no show at an agreement signature in Washington, etc.) is damn worrying. Second thing to put in mind is that none of the bad scenarios are so far off as we think. With the climate change changing the world as we speak, nobody knows how severe will droughts be in the near future. The downstream countries have the right to think ahead snd regulate this with Ethiopia (who by the way unfortunately rushed to do a surprise launch the work on the damn 2 months after the fall of the Egyptian regime in 2011 with no consultation what so ever, like a thief in the night). Ethiopia's right to development is undeniable. All they needed to do is be more cooperative and collaborative. Things could have been much smoother
The thing is that Egypt has no negotiation power in this relationship. Ethiopia is very far away, gets all the water, has never benefitted from it, and never signed the old agreements. I certainly hear Egypt's concern. But there's really not much they can do, and Ethiopia knows it.
And bombing the dam, which has been suggested, would invite a tit-for-tat that would be even worse.
That's why nothing—including saber-rattling—has led to anything. What, exactly, does Ethiopia have to win in committing to anything with Egypt?
Egypt has the right to try—and I surely understand why they do—but from a negotiation power perspective, it's unsurprising that it hasn't succeeded.
Much communication within Ethiopian elite circles (and society, generally) is implicit and opaque to outsiders, which makes diplomacy and negotiation *very* difficult. For one thing, the lingua franca is Amharic, a language that is both unique to Ethiopia and extremely complex, both grammatically and also stylistically. There's a saying in Ethiopia, "Sem ena Woriq" (literally, "Wax and Gold"). The "gold" (of meaning) is obscured under the "wax" (what is said). It requires a poetic reading of everyday speech and a lot of cultural, historical, and literary cues. You're not going to get it through literal translation. Not dissimilar from Arabic, but at least Egyptian Arabic is understood across a wide area thanks to popular media and has more cosmopolitan influences.
It's easy, then, to come away frustrated by how "rude" or "irrational" Ethiopians can be. They have a hard time imagining that others find them so bewildering. After all, they are perfectly understood by most of their 115 million countrymen! And they haven't until recently had that much exposure to outsiders. So, when they commit a faux pas at a summit or renege on an "understanding," they often don't even realize it.
Secondly, foreigners try to project their own values and goals onto Ethiopians. But Ethiopians aren't us. They were largely isolated from the world for centuries at the very time everywhere else was being colonized and eventually digested into globalization. They're Japan before Commodore Perry. They don't want the things societally or geopolitically that Egyptians, Americans, or even Chinese people want. This makes the guessing-game of gives and gets in a negotiation again very difficult. It doesn't help that states are often coy or circumspect about what exactly is their national interest. What does Egypt *actually* fear here that makes them so worried about the dam. Could they substantiate it? Ethiopians are pretty clear that for them, access to electricity (and the means to export it for hard currency) is essential to the developmental state and therefore the very national integrity of a country riven by divisions.
And - the only thing Egypt has to do is forget talking about a colonial-time agreement with Sudan and Great Britain (!!) which Ethiopia was not even invited to discuss or sign. Egypts talking of a right to certain number of cubicmeters (or percentage) of water, pointing to that agreement, makes it impossible for Ethiopia to negotiate. How could Ethiopia accept to sign an agreement with a fixed number of cubicmeters per year when we dont even know how big flow there will be in the Blue Nile coming years (due to climat changes)?
Also Egypts talk about veto against all construction works upstreams - again pointing to that obsolete agreement - is discriminating and of cause nonsense as Ethiopia never signed it.
How can a country be bound by an agreement it was not even invited to discuss - even less sign?
The Ethiopian plans for the dam was well known prior to the fall of Mubarak. Dont talk about a thief at night.
So - Yes! Things could have been much smoother if only Egypt had understood how impossible their talking about the 1959-agreement is.
We're in a world where the main threat to nation-states is not from abroad, but from within.
Few countries try to conquer others because the cost of war and occupation is not worth the hassle. If not even the richest country in the world can do it to the poorest (US vs. Afghanistan), how are others supposed to do it?
The main threat is internal turmoil, for example where a region wants to keep the local resources instead of sending them to the capital.
Thank you for such an informative text! I just want to add the fact that the Lake Nasser holds 1.5 times the full volume of GERD. That means that even if Ethiopia completely closed the Blue Nile for the full time of filling the GERD Egypt could compensate the missing water from Lake Nasser and still have 33% of that lake left when the GERD is full. The Egyptian crop harvest is not at risk even with that rapid filling if olny Egypt would use their own stored water.
As for flooding ond overtopping of the GERD there will never come more water out than tere is let in. So the level of the Blue Nile will only be increasing compared to at pre-GRED situation at times of low rain. That is when the Ethiopians will allow the level of GERD to sink for the purpose of genereating electricity. At times of high rainfall Ethiopia will either fill the dam (if not already full) or simply allow all incoming water to go out - part of it through the turbines and part of it will overflow.
That much for Egypts talk of fear. The real fear is that a stronger Ethiopia will compete for economical power and influence in the region. A war inside Ethiopia could stop that competition, so of course it is in their interest to fuel all internal conflicts in Ethiopia. Devastated Ethiopian infrastructure will slow down Ethiopian economical development.
Well said. I agree with your conclusion, and I didn’t know all these facts (I didn’t realize the GERD lake was 2/3 of Nasser!)
Great take. Worth comparing with this level of network system dynamics https://medium.com/@giannigiacomelli69/societys-collective-intelligence-is-emotional-leaders-pay-attention-92baa9df3e91. And - fast forward 20 years, what's climate change going to do to all these fault lines?
This makes sense. Thanks for sharing.
I assume there must be some papers on the societal causes of unrest. Your hypotheses make sense. Have you looked for such studies to back them up? Have you done some correlation at least of these factors with social unrest?
some here https://faceofafghanistan.org/fofa/aid-rebooted
Great essay! I know this is considered a niche subject for many Westerners, who don't consider Africa much at all, and definitely don't care to know anything about perhaps its most fascinating and future-impactful country. Even if the COVID-19 articles keep driving traffic, remember that your voice really has staying power because of what Kevin Kelly famously termed your "1,000 True Fans" (https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/), and the unique value-prop you offer to them. Consider me one of the thousand.
I lived in Ethiopia for three years during the previous regime and the (mostly notional) GERD then took on an almost religious significance for the government as an icon of the developmental state. For Meles Zanawi, Ethiopia's (kinda?) benevolent dictator of 21 years, the dam also represented a totem of national unity under a multi-ethnic federal state then dominated by the tiny Tigray minority elite (7% of the total population). There were propaganda billboards of it EVERYWHERE. Very kitschy stuff. Low production values and zero irony. But there was nothing fake in people's faith in the project. The dam was unique in that it was truly "crowdsourced" by voluntary donations from millions of regular Ethiopians as their solemn and patriotic duty (and as a reaffirmation of Ethiopia's proud status as the never-colonized African state, but one not above bankrolling a significant share of its budget with Western and now Chinese funding...). A Kickstarter-ed hunk of infrastructure is a concept that I couldn't even fathom as an American, when my countrymen can't agree on nearly any state project, especially when we have to pay taxes... yuck!
Since then, though, this attempt at rallying around the flag (or, rather, dam) has broken down spectacularly even as the grand edifice now nears completion. Ethiopia cannot yet, it seems, overcome a core fact of its geography: geographic, ethnic, religious, and political Balkanization. And, honestly, the dam wasn't ever going to itself hold back all the waters of discontent, nor light every opportunity imagined for the country's future. Especially not if everyone's too busy killing each other.
Most Ethiopians and Ethiopia-watchers, of course, blame this civil war on particular groups or political personalities and their choices. The PM is said to be craven or inept in his ruthless subjugation of political opponents. Or, it's all the revenge of the Oromo or the Amhara (he's half of both) against the Tigray. Maybe he has overstepped or miscalculated, but I'm skeptical that it's all his fault. Like you, I look for systemic reasons.
And, really, it's down to the extreme difficulty in containing the centripetal forces of a landlocked, mountainous, populous, still-impoverished, and chaotically diverse country in the most conflict-prone neighborhood on the continent. Ethiopia has always been more of a multi-national empire than a nation-state, and one that was never fully-consolidated. No leader could really square that circle.
But I will say this: despite those systemic challenges, Ethiopia has made some very smart moves that have paid off and may continue to in the medium- and long-term. Adapting the Chinese Model has been very successful, economically, growing GDP at China-rates for coming on two decades until this war tumbled the cart a bit (but even know, the economy is still humming, and my former colleagues doing business in Addis don't even really register the conflict, surreally). Chinese-financed infrastructure investment has gone a long way in overcoming Ethiopia's tyranny of geography and landlocked isolation.
And Chinese development models or cash don't magically do that themselves. Local conditions matter. Ethiopia has always been far less corrupt than other African countries, making executing against Five-Year Planning more successful, and I don't really have a good explanation for why (Perhaps partly the lack of Resource Curse and Dutch Disease? Or maybe the stoic, revolutionary background of the entire elite class?). Crime is low. Ethiopians, culturally, are perhaps the best example of retaining unique, traditional culture(s) even through the advent of modernity, globalization, and development. They haven't fallen prey to either the Western foibles of scientism or technocracy nor the foolish Romanticism of religious fundamentalism: they use development for their own, idiosyncratic ends. Their cultural ballast is deep, as befitting one of the only countries mentioned in both the Bible and the Qu'ran, and gives a very different sense of self-confidence that you just don't see in Nigeria or South Africa. This is a social, political, and geopolitical asset, if channeled well.
So, I do assume that the civil war will reach a standstill and that there will be some kind of power-sharing arrangement that will continue to be tense, but that Ethiopia will muddle through with evident success, anyway. As you say, tech overcomes geography as the engine of history, and that augers well for Ethiopia.
"The dam wasn't ever going to itself hold back all the waters of discontent, nor light every opportunity imagined for the country's future."
Beautiful.
What you tell about the country is fascinating. Thank you. I've never been, but it's on the list, and more so now.
I do very much hope you're right. For starters, once the GERD is on, the electricity consumption will bring so much prosperity that it might transform the country!
Thanks Tomás for this nice article! I have already read all your Geography series and I loved them! I want to get deeper in this topic, do you have any book recommendation about it? (I've read Guns, Germs and Steel from Jared Diamond and Sapiens from Yuval Noah Harari).
Thanks again!
Prisoners of Geography is reasonably good. Stratford’s content is not bad, especially their monographs. They have some nice videos in their YouTube channels. Johnny Harris is another good source of geo content on YouTube.
Good work. But this sentence "If you ever hear news of Egypt complaining about the dam, you should quickly discount it." isn't a great advice. And Egypt's fears are not exaggerated. What you missed to clarify here is that 10 years of negotiations led to nothing because Ethiopia wants a "non-binding" agreement that doesn't regulate what to do in times of drought and doesn't give Egypt or Sudan access to enough data when they need to assess the impact of Ethiopia's annual decisions on the two countries. Ethiopia's insistance on having a non-binding agreement, topped with a very flaky attitude ( last minute no show at an agreement signature in Washington, etc.) is damn worrying. Second thing to put in mind is that none of the bad scenarios are so far off as we think. With the climate change changing the world as we speak, nobody knows how severe will droughts be in the near future. The downstream countries have the right to think ahead snd regulate this with Ethiopia (who by the way unfortunately rushed to do a surprise launch the work on the damn 2 months after the fall of the Egyptian regime in 2011 with no consultation what so ever, like a thief in the night). Ethiopia's right to development is undeniable. All they needed to do is be more cooperative and collaborative. Things could have been much smoother
Hi Ahmed, thanks for your comment. I hear you.
The thing is that Egypt has no negotiation power in this relationship. Ethiopia is very far away, gets all the water, has never benefitted from it, and never signed the old agreements. I certainly hear Egypt's concern. But there's really not much they can do, and Ethiopia knows it.
And bombing the dam, which has been suggested, would invite a tit-for-tat that would be even worse.
That's why nothing—including saber-rattling—has led to anything. What, exactly, does Ethiopia have to win in committing to anything with Egypt?
Egypt has the right to try—and I surely understand why they do—but from a negotiation power perspective, it's unsurprising that it hasn't succeeded.
Much communication within Ethiopian elite circles (and society, generally) is implicit and opaque to outsiders, which makes diplomacy and negotiation *very* difficult. For one thing, the lingua franca is Amharic, a language that is both unique to Ethiopia and extremely complex, both grammatically and also stylistically. There's a saying in Ethiopia, "Sem ena Woriq" (literally, "Wax and Gold"). The "gold" (of meaning) is obscured under the "wax" (what is said). It requires a poetic reading of everyday speech and a lot of cultural, historical, and literary cues. You're not going to get it through literal translation. Not dissimilar from Arabic, but at least Egyptian Arabic is understood across a wide area thanks to popular media and has more cosmopolitan influences.
It's easy, then, to come away frustrated by how "rude" or "irrational" Ethiopians can be. They have a hard time imagining that others find them so bewildering. After all, they are perfectly understood by most of their 115 million countrymen! And they haven't until recently had that much exposure to outsiders. So, when they commit a faux pas at a summit or renege on an "understanding," they often don't even realize it.
Secondly, foreigners try to project their own values and goals onto Ethiopians. But Ethiopians aren't us. They were largely isolated from the world for centuries at the very time everywhere else was being colonized and eventually digested into globalization. They're Japan before Commodore Perry. They don't want the things societally or geopolitically that Egyptians, Americans, or even Chinese people want. This makes the guessing-game of gives and gets in a negotiation again very difficult. It doesn't help that states are often coy or circumspect about what exactly is their national interest. What does Egypt *actually* fear here that makes them so worried about the dam. Could they substantiate it? Ethiopians are pretty clear that for them, access to electricity (and the means to export it for hard currency) is essential to the developmental state and therefore the very national integrity of a country riven by divisions.
Fascinating again. Thanks!
And - the only thing Egypt has to do is forget talking about a colonial-time agreement with Sudan and Great Britain (!!) which Ethiopia was not even invited to discuss or sign. Egypts talking of a right to certain number of cubicmeters (or percentage) of water, pointing to that agreement, makes it impossible for Ethiopia to negotiate. How could Ethiopia accept to sign an agreement with a fixed number of cubicmeters per year when we dont even know how big flow there will be in the Blue Nile coming years (due to climat changes)?
Also Egypts talk about veto against all construction works upstreams - again pointing to that obsolete agreement - is discriminating and of cause nonsense as Ethiopia never signed it.
How can a country be bound by an agreement it was not even invited to discuss - even less sign?
The Ethiopian plans for the dam was well known prior to the fall of Mubarak. Dont talk about a thief at night.
So - Yes! Things could have been much smoother if only Egypt had understood how impossible their talking about the 1959-agreement is.
Nice read and very informative!
Doesn't this sound like a good reason for nation states to persist? Defending potential "attack" against the food and water their population need?
We're in a world where the main threat to nation-states is not from abroad, but from within.
Few countries try to conquer others because the cost of war and occupation is not worth the hassle. If not even the richest country in the world can do it to the poorest (US vs. Afghanistan), how are others supposed to do it?
The main threat is internal turmoil, for example where a region wants to keep the local resources instead of sending them to the capital.