Is northeastern Africa heading for a bloody "water war" between its two most important countries, Egypt and Ethiopia? Judging by the rhetoric of the past two weeks, one could be forgiven for thinking so.
Ethiopia's plans to build a multibillion dollar dam on the Nile River spurred Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi - whose country lies downstream from Ethiopia - to vow to protect Egypt's water security at all costs. "As president of the republic, I confirm to you that all options are open," he said on Monday. "If Egypt is the Nile's gift, then the Nile is a gift to Egypt… If it diminishes by one drop, then our blood is the alternative."
The following day Dina Mufti, Ethiopia's foreign ministry spokesman, said that Ethiopia was "not intimidated by Egypt's psychological warfare and won't halt the dam's construction, even for seconds".
Morsi's bellicose warnings followed the suggestions of leading Egyptian politicians on television last week that Cairo should prepare airstrikes and send special forces to uphold its God-given right to the lion's share of Nile waters. The Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has signalled that it is not impressed and that it will carry on with work on the multibillion dollar Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam - a move seen by some as raising temperatures further, possibly triggering the "water wars" that pessimists have long predicted will characterise the geopolitics of the 21st century.
The war of words between Cairo and Addis Ababa is only the latest episode in a long history of confrontation between the two. About three-quarters of the Nile's waters flow downstream from Lake Tana in Ethiopia, through Sudan, to Egypt. The building of the modern Egyptian state in the 19th century was closely connected to the idea of an Egyptian agricultural and industrial revolution; the Nile was to be controlled and harnessed for economic development through large-scale irrigation works, canals and dams so that Egypt could export cotton and other strategic crops to global markets. The notion of establishing maximum control over the Nile and consolidating regional hegemony more broadly pushed Egypt to invade Sudan in 1821 and to occupy eastern Ethiopia in 1875.
Zero-sum mentality
The zero-sum mentality of that era - that others cannot be trusted with the waters of the Nile, and Cairo must at all times control its own water destiny directly - endures to this day. Both the construction of the controversial High Dam at Aswan and the 1929 and 1959 Nile Waters Agreements were guided by the same paradigm.
The latter allocated 55.5 billion cubic metres of water to Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt and 18.5 billion cubic metres to Sudan, while the government of Haile Selassie was shut out of the negotiations: all water was essentially given to the downstream states at the expense of Ethiopia and other upstream countries including Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. While Aswan ended Egypt's dependence on the erratic Nile flood and the 1959 treaty locked in Egyptian hydro-hegemony, it infuriated Addis Ababa.
Thus, rather than definitively resolving Cairo's existential angst about its extreme dependency on the river (97 percent of renewable water resources in Egypt come from the Nile), Aswan and the 1959 agreement created permanent tensions between upstream and downstream riparians that have destabilised the basin for decades. Proxy wars (pp 104-107), which claimed the lives of millions of people between the 1960s and 2000s in and around Sudan and Ethiopia had several complex causes, but the struggle between Cairo and Addis Ababa for primacy in the Nile Basin was an important one.
In the last 15 years, however, Egypt's hydro-hegemony has progressively unravelled due to a combination of factors. First, Cairo's neglect of Africa in its foreign policy under Hosni Mubarak cost it dearly. Its alliance with Khartoum has turned into a permanently uncomfortable relationship since Sudan's military-Islamist revolution in 1989; Egypt was historically the greatest opponent of self-determination for Southern Sudanese, but was unable to get the referendum clause removed from the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that allowed South Sudan to become an independent state in July 2011. Once respected and admired around the continent, Mubarak's systematic disinterest in the African Union diminished Egyptian influence in the Nile Basin and outside it.
Second, while unemployment, inequality and corruption have soared in Egypt in the last 15 years - ultimately culminating in the 2011 revolution that ousted Mubarak - upstream countries have transformed themselves. The late Meles Zenawi turned Ethiopia from an international object of pity into a regional power to be reckoned with through spectacular economic growth and a masterful foreign policy. More
