Ethiopia refused to negotiate with Mubarak’s regime over water, believing no one could stop its projects on the Nile – British Documents

Ethiopia refused to negotiate with Hosni Mubarak’s regime over the Nile water issue, believing that no one could stop it from pursuing its projects on the river’s source, according to declassified British documents.

The documents also reveal that the UK had predicted, 36 years ago, that Egypt would face water shortages throughout the remainder of the 21st century due to the “improbability of an agreement” among the nine Nile Basin states regarding water distribution.

In February 1988, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire signed an agreement to establish an international committee on drought and Nile waters. British officials considered this an encouraging move, but a limited one. Their assessment described the agreement as a “very small step” since it excluded key states in the basin “especially Ethiopia”, which contributes 86 per cent of the Nile’s main flow from its highlands. The UK emphasised the need for a “comprehensive   programme” for the development of entire basin.

Documents obtained by MEMO from the National Archives show that the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) believed that, despite improvements in Egypt-Ethiopia relations at the time, Egypt “had not been able to convince the Ethiopians to engage in dialogue” over Nile water issues.

In April 1989, British hydrological experts working in the Middle East and North Africa told the FCO that Ethiopia viewed its Blue Nile projects as unstoppable. This belief, they said, explained Ethiopia’s reluctance to join talks on Nile water management.

During a meeting with Anthony Gregory Shapland, head of the FCO’s Middle East Research Department, experts from MacDonald & Partners Company explained that Ethiopian officials often claimed a lack of expertise to defend their interests. However, water and politics expert Terry Evans dismissed this claim, asserting that Ethiopia had access to capable and honest expertise. His dealings with Ethiopian counterparts led him to conclude that “they were too clever to be deceived.” According to Evans, Ethiopia saw no reason to engage in talks, believing that “there was nothing anyone could do to damage their hydrological interests or to prevent them from doing what they wanted on the Blue Nile”, the source of over 85 per cent of the Nile’s water flow to Egypt. 

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He further speculated that Ethiopia was probably waiting until someone else had something to give them in exchange”. 

Evans, who gave the FCO official a summary of projects his company was undertaking in Egypt, also predicted that the projects Ethiopia could implement at the time on the Blue Nile “would not , in any case,  deprive the Sudanese  and Egyptians  of great quantities  of water”. 

Reasons of the Ethiopian refusal to negotiate with Egypt

UK Study on Nile Water

UK Study on Nile Water

Meanwhile, Hugh Morrison, who spent two years in Egypt working on irrigation rehabilitation, voiced concerns about the “conservatism” of Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation. He criticised its tendency to “allocate water the way it was always had, without much reference to anyone else.” He also highlighted poor coordination between the Ministries of Agriculture and Irrigation on water conservation efforts.

Egypt was undertaking some water-saving projects, including the rehabilitation of irrigation systems by lining canals to reduce seepage. However, Shapland “was surprised’ when both Morrison and Evans told him these measures “would not save an enormous amount of water”. While much water was lost through canal seepage, they explained that most of it eventually returned to the system through groundwater flow.

In the 1980s, Africa faced a wave of drought that heightened Egypt’s fears of water shortages. Although the Aswan High Dam shielded Egypt from the worst effects, a British memorandum warned that “definite possibility that the below-average floods will continue indefinitely”, forcing Egypt to “have to come to with this reduced supply of water”.

The memorandum, commissioned by the FCO, stated that while the Egyptian government could implement number of measures to use water more efficiently, most of these “will take a number of years to implement”. It emphasised that Egypt must continue its diplomatic efforts “over the much longer term to ensure an adequate supply of water”.

Given the political divisions among the nine Nile Basin states, British experts predicted that a comprehensive water-sharing agreement was “unlikely to be signed before the end of the 20th century.” They argued that the other eight states had “little to gain by accommodating Egypt” and cited that deep political differences “stand in the way of any agreement”.

Based on reports filed by various British government departments and diplomatic missions in Africa, the memo concluded that the improbability of a water-sharing agreement meant “continued uncertainty about the volume of water which will be available to Egypt next (21st) century”.  It stressed that Egypt “needs to use the water it receives with maximum efficiency”.

More than two decades later, Ethiopia moved forward with its controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), exploiting Egypt’s political instability following the 2011 revolution, despite repeated protests from Cairo.

In March 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who assumed power after the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, officially recognised the legitimacy of the dam. Alongside Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, he signed the “Declaration of Principles” on the GERD in Khartoum.

However, all subsequent diplomatic efforts and negotiations have failed to yield a binding agreement on the dam’s operation or its potential impact on Egypt’s water supply. Addis Ababa is continuing filling phases of the dam’s reservoir despite objections from Egypt and Sudan.

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