The National Coordination Office for the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) reported recently that it is now 90% complete and poised to provide green hydropower energy capable of meeting all of Ethiopia’s electricity needs, as well as significant exports. The dam, one of the world’s largest and symbolic of Africa’s development potential, falls within the aspirations of the African Union’s Flagship Projects of Agenda 2063. But what lessons can other African countries learn from its successful completion?
To begin with, African countries find themselves in the irony of a man standing waist-deep in the middle of a river complaining of thirst while desert nomads gulp from it. For example, Niger’s Uranium lights up 75% of the bulbs in France, but 85% of Nigeriens lack electricity. DRC’s Cobalt is fueling Europe’s electric vehicle revolution, but Congolese are the least car owners worldwide. Besides extracting African resources for their indulgence, foreign influences also frustrate Africa’s development. Europe’s opposition to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) Project is a classic example.
The GERD faced similar opposition, but Ethiopia pressed on with its construction, rebutting detractors to finally sip from the river Nile, whose flow it contributes 85%, but was required to use 0% by an agreement Britain brokered in 1959 to assert proxy control through Egypt. GERD’s success sets a precedent for other African countries to shed the vestiges of colonialism and develop their resources to meet their own needs.
The key lesson from Ethiopia is that African countries need robust media and diplomatic channels for advancing their national interests in geopolitical contestations. Most importantly, they need to develop the capacity to self-fund mega projects since funding from international financial organizations is increasingly controlled by predatory foreign influences.
If anything, the GERD is classic proof that Africans can fund mega projects without conditional Western grants. Constructed at around US$5 billion, GERD is the first successful publicly-owned and publicly-funded project of its magnitude in Africa. Other African countries can learn from Ethiopia’s success in implanting the project in the national psyche for the common citizenry to buy-in and willingly fund.
Furthermore, Ethiopia has shown through the GERD that Africa’s transboundary resources can be areas of cooperation rather than conflict. The 11 countries, including Uganda, that share the Nile River on which the GERD sits today constructively engage under the Nile Basin Initiative and the Cooperative Framework Agreement, where they share development plans, address individual country concerns and oversee the equitable utilization of this shared resource.
For Eastern Africa, the GERD is also a flagship project for economic integration, long considered a precursor for Africa’s regional and ultimately continental political integration. Already, Kenya and South Sudan have signed purchase deals with Ethiopia to import cheap electricity, triggering a ripple effect of cooperation in other economic sectors, the most notable being the admittance of Kenya’s Safaricom in Ethiopia as the first private operator.
Meanwhile, development projects in Africa often stall when there are changes in government. The GERD, however, was advanced by every successive Ethiopian leader, with Emperor Haile Selassie reportedly imagining it in the 1960s, President Meles Zenawi flagging off construction in 2011, and Prime Minister Abiy now completing it. This is a big lesson for African leaders on continuing their predecessors’ development plans, regardless of political differences.
Finally, GERD remains a bone of contention between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan. However, while non-Africans in the League of Arab Nations and the West continue to interfere, Ethiopia’s insistence on engaging its riparian neighbors in a brotherly manner under the African Union’s framework of ‘African solutions to African Problems’ has given this noble concept life and set a seminal precedent for resolving the political contradictions of Africa’s 63 transboundary rivers and other inter-state conflicts. This once again shows that Africans can resolve their problems without the West’s escalatory and often predatory supervision.
