The Boiling Nile, Part 1
It Isn't Just A River In Egypt
This note was distributed to Premium Plus clients on 29 July 2021. I am publishing it here to provide background for new readers as I continue to cover the topic. With wheat prices currently sky-high and the list of countries banning food exports growing, the topic of Ethiopian rainfall is about to be of much greater interest to the wider world than it has been historically.
“The Horn of Africa today is a region of strategic significance.
The global military superpowers are expanding their military presence in the area. Terrorist and extremist groups also seek to establish a foothold.
We do not want the Horn to be a battleground for superpowers nor a hideout for the merchants of terror and brokers of despair and misery.”
-Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, 10 December 2019.
· Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi has said Ethiopian projects on the Nile, not only GERD, are an “existential” issue for Egypt. A more accurate statement would replace ‘Egypt’ with ‘Sisi’.
· Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has used the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as the centerpiece of his national unity campaign. Abiy has staked his power, and probably his life, on GERD – he must see it completed.
· The media, policymakers, and nonprofits seem to take for granted that the Nile is existential to Egypt and that the country will shrivel up and die if it does not consume copious amounts of water. The question is: Will Sisi go to war to avoid telling Egypt’s farmers to get new jobs?
One Dam to Rule Them All
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali’s acceptance speech for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize was filled with lofty statements about unifying a deeply fractured nation, putting aside ethnic conflict, and introducing real democracy to Ethiopia. After winning a scramble for power behind closed doors (where he was not the favorite), Abiy became chairman of the country’s then-only political party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), and the prime minister. Abiy’s rise to power was notable because it was Ethiopia’s first bloodless transition of power since the country’s final emperor was crowned in 1930[1]. Unfortunately, the situation is developing so that a subsequent bloodless transition is increasingly unlikely.
It remains to be seen whether Abiy really is a pan-Ethiopianist or just an opportunist. In either case, Abiy has used the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as the centerpiece of his national unity campaign. When completed, GERD will be Africa’s second largest dam with a wall one-hundred seventy-five meters tall and a reservoir capacity of 74 billion cubic meters – twice the capacity of China’s Three Gorges Dam. Thirteen massive turbines will pump out 6.4GW of electricity, much of which is planned to be sold regionally. Abiy has staked his power, and probably his life, on GERD – he must see it completed.
Meanwhile, Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi has said Ethiopian projects on the Nile, not only GERD, are an “existential” issue for Egypt. A more accurate statement would replace ‘Egypt’ with ‘Sisi’. In Egypt this has become a major domestic political issue that threatens Sisi’s position. However, to thrive as an economy, Egypt needs only a small portion of the water it currently uses. As will be discussed below, “land reform” during the Nasser era created a class of smallholder farmers that are domestically very powerful. To stay in power Sisi must keep these farmers happy.
The Horn of Africa has become the chessboard of Great Powers and the situation is a dangerous one for the locals[2]. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned Congress that the GERD dispute could “boil over” and Jeffrey Feltman, the first U.S. Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, has said the Ethiopia crisis could make Syria look like “child’s play”. This note examines the events leading up to the GERD crisis, Part 2 will examine the potential outcomes.
A Tumultuous Past
Ethiopia is the oldest nation-state in Africa and is home to eighty different ethnicities (Chart 1). For most of history the area that is today Ethiopia was a mess of feuding petty kingdoms. The region had always been dominated by the highlanders of Amhara and Tigray, but territorial control had been local. Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889-1913) gathered supporters from Amhara and Tigray to consolidate the petty kingdoms into what is now the nation of Ethiopia (Map A). By expanding without the intention of integrating the conquered, the Christians of Amhara and Tigray made themselves minorities in their own empire.
During the imperial period, the Amhara elite implemented harsh policies to remake the country as Christian and Amhara-speaking. This period of conquest and Amharization left wounds that have never had time to heal. The nation of Ethiopia is really the rusted-out hulk of the Ethiopian Empire, in which the Amhara and Tigray were ascendent and other ethnicities held varying levels of diminutive status. Many Ethiopians continue to see the nation as a colonial empire.
The Ethiopian Empire was able to hobble through the post-World War II geopolitical environment, but famine and economic collapse in the 1970s proved too much. In 1974 a group of junior level officers dissatisfied with their pay and living conditions led a mutiny against the political and military elite. Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown and put under house arrest, not to be seen again for seventeen years when his body was found buried under a toilet in the Imperial Palace. The emperor was replaced by a Marxist military junta called “the Derg”, which translates to “the Committee”.
During the imperial period Amhara became the dominant language in administration, commerce, and education, and remains so. Over time, the term “Amhara” has expanded beyond ethnicity to include everyone who speaks Amhara and holds pan-Ethiopianist views. The Derg regime was the epitome of Amhara cultural chauvinism and it brutally suppressed ethnic identities and regional political independence. The Tigrayans, in particular, resented having a centralized government intruding on their cultural practices. All the major ethnic groups had separatist movements while the Derg held power, but the Tigrayans were the best organized and motivated.
The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was founded in 1975 with the goal of creating a Tigrayan political distinction or outright autonomy. The Tigrayans are mostly Ethiopian Orthodox Christian sustenance farmers who share cultural connections with their highland neighbors, the Amhara. The rural highlands of Tigray are perfect ground for waging an insurgency and the TPLF grew by absorbing other groups. By the late-1980s the TPLF and its Eritrean allies pushed the Derg regime’s forces back to major urban areas. The central government’s control over the country continued to slip away until the TPLF, in partnership with three other regionally based groups, overthrew the regime.
After the Derg, Ethiopia became a one-party state ruled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The EPRDF consisted of the TPLF, the Amhara Democratic Party (ADP), the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP), and the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement (SEPDM). The TPLF dominated the EPRDF, and the president was always Tigrayan. The TPLF view is that the population is divided into ethnicities with unreconcilable difference. The TPLF installed a new constitution in 1995 that split the country into nine ethnically based federal states (Map B).
Ethnic Federalism
Federalism, the sharing of power among regional states, can be useful for preventing one state achieving hegemony over the rest and for accommodating local interests that cannot bear centralized rule. But federalism has a poor track record in Africa. Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Mali, and Cameroon all tried federal systems and subsequently dumped them. The TPLF wanted freedom from the central government, so they created an ethnic federation where each state has rights to self-determination and secession. The current government wants to replace the ethno-centric constitution put in place by the TPLF in 1995.
Under ethnic federalism ethnic groups, rather than geographic groups, are units of self-government. But, of course, some geographic delineation must be made to determine who runs what. The states of Ethiopia were drawn to include as many as possible of the specified ethnic group’s population, and their “ancestral homelands”.
The problems with such an arrangement are immediately clear. First, in a nation with eighty ethnicities and only nine states, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people. States with mixed populations have experienced instability as ethnic groups vie for control. Second, ethnicities are spread across the country, so each state has reason to interfere in the business of others in defense of ethnic kin. Finally, as one can imagine, there are many disagreements over which lands are “ancestral”. Indeed, the 1995 constitution redrew the map of the country and expanded the size of Tigray by a third by annexing areas from the states of Amhara and Afar.
The consequence of federalism in Ethiopia is that it took national political competition and decentralized it to the local level, where divisions are based on ethnicity. Problems between states now become ethnic conflict very rapidly. Indeed, most of Ethiopia’s “ethnic” conflicts are really about land. Every region is beset by border clashes, which are constantly in flux based on power and negotiation. Indeed, even before the war in Tigray there were three million internal refugees in Ethiopia (Map C). Under its current constitution Ethiopia is a pressure cooker ready to blow.
The New Pan-Ethiopian
Prime Minister Abiy entered office in 2018 after massive protests broke out among the Oromo and then spread across the country. Abiy’s plan to put Ethiopia back together was ambitious from the start. He improved freedom of speech and released political prisoners, which is good in the long run. But came at the short run cost of letting radicalized ideologs out into the population and making it legal for them to take their hate to the airwaves, which they did in short order.
Abiy founded the Prosperity Party (PP) in 2018 with a pan-Ethiopian platform and an intention to replace the ethno-centric constitution. From the start Abiy’s plan was contentious with critics saying he was trying to continue “Ethiopia’s centralizing and homogenizing past”. Abiy’s success as a unifier has been mediocre. The TPLF refused to join the new party, claiming PP does not respect the constitutional autonomy of the regions. Abiy successfully negotiated peace with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and brought the group into the Prosperity Party, but some members refused to lay down their arms and formed the Oromo Liberation Army.
The elite of the Prosperity Party’s Amhara and Oromo wings have a tactical alliance, but it cannot last. Amhara’s PP favors pan-Ethiopianism while Oromo’s PP favors ethnic federalism. Amhara nationalists have been celebrating the reign of Emperor Menelik II, which puts them on a collision with Oromo nationalists who see him as an invader. Both groups want to hold power in Addis Ababa and, as the two largest groups in the country, will inevitably come into conflict in a scramble for power.
Ironically, in Abiy’s efforts to change the existing constitution, he triggered a constitutional crisis caused by a contradiction in the wording of the document. Article 31.9 says that every state has the right to self-determination and secession. Article 62.9 says the House of Federation can intervene if any state government “endangers the constitutional order”. The TPLF wrote the constitution in this way so that Tigray could bully other states and have a “trapdoor” to escape if it lost political power. So much for that.
The War in Tigray
After being excluded from the ruling party, the TPLF relocated to Tigray and administered the region with relative autonomy for two years. Tensions between Tigrayan state officials and the central government steadily worsened as Abiy worked to extend the power of the central government across the country. The final straw came in August 2020 when the federal election board, citing COVID, delayed national elections. Tigrayan officials said the delay was unconstitutional and went ahead with their own elections on September 30th, 2020. The central government saw the elections as prelude to secession and declared the vote “illegal”, without citing any specific law. The government then began preparing for armed conflict.
The Northern Command was the Ethiopian army’s strongest division, comprising about half of its total force, mostly deployed in Tigray. The unit’s location and strength were the result of the long war with Eritrea. By design, more than half of the unit’s officers and soldier were Tigrayan. Well-aware of this fact, the government was about to shuffle leaders and troops across the country when the war started. TPLF forces attacked the Northern Command headquarters to capture weapons and half of the division defected to the rebels - about 15,000-20,000 troops.
The remaining ENDF forces, along with militia from Amhara and Afar, launched a blitzkrieg attack into Tigray, quickly capturing the capital, Mekelle, most major towns. The central government said the war, which started on November 4th, 2020, would be a quick and easy victory. On November 28th Abiy declared the war was over and claimed victory.
The TPLF underestimated their weakness against the conventional forces of the government and initially suffered heavy losses. But they soon abandoned their heavy weapons, retreated to the highlands, and shifted to a guerilla insurgency. The insurgency has plenty of local support as a scorched earth policy has made the central government hated in Tigray. Villagers have been kicking out administrators sent by the federal government and self-organizing local government.
Enter Eritrea
After losing half of its fighting force the Ethiopian army knew it could not face the Tigrayan rebels (the Tigray Defense Force) in open battle on their turf. Even with the help of state militia, the ENDF could not contain the TDF and fight insurgencies elsewhere. As soon as the war in Tigray started the Oromo Liberation Army launched attacks on government forces and other separatist groups across the country followed suit. To prevent the overrun of government forces, Abiy invited Eritrean forces into the country to join the fight. The Ethiopian government initially denied the presence of Eritrean troops, even providing them with Ethiopian uniforms, but was eventually forced to admit the truth. Abiy and the Nobel prize committee faced significant international criticism, but Eritrean forces stayed put.
The Ethiopian military cannot even contain the TDF without the help of Eritrean troops and regional militias. Eritrean troops have no reason to give up captured territory and the ENDF cannot make them leave. Eritrean forces are building forts in northern Tigray along the border and new trenches are being built on the Eritrean side. Eritrea is preparing for a TDF counter-offensive.
Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki cannot face a repeat of his humiliating defeat in 2000 by the TPLF. In 1998, Eritrea launched an offensive against Ethiopia over a small strip of land. The TPLF dominated the central government at the time and the Prime Minister, a Tigrayan, called for a general mobilization. Over the next two years, one-hundred thousand were killed before the Eritrean army was crushed and pushed out of Tigray.
Isais tries to project an image of Eritrea as an African Sparta. The country has been at war with its neighbors almost continuously since its independence in 1993 and Eritrea was always the first to attack. Attacking the TPLF has made Eritrea’s president Isaias Afwerki very popular with his military leadership, but it could be his undoing. Eritrea has committed most of its troops to the fight in Ethiopia. Isaias cannot be made to look weak, but also cannot burn too many resources in Tigray. The quagmire appears to be deepening, there have also been reports of Eritrean forces fighting the OLA in the state of Oromo.
A Fragile Ethiopia
The fight in Tigray is just the tip of the iceberg of ethnic tensions in Ethiopia. The war has briefly distracted everyone from the country-wide increase in targeted ethnic killings that had been taking place. Amhara ethno-nationalism flourished under TPLF as the Amhara public increasingly felt they were experiencing identity-based oppression. Areas of Amhara were annexed by the TPLF in the mid-1990s and Tigrayans were brought in to replace the native Amhara. By the 2010s, a generation raised under EPRDF ethno-centrism had come of age and young Amhara were primed to see the world in terms of ethnic conflict. The TPLF had sown the seeds of their own defeat.
Regional militarization began in 2017. In addition to police and militia, each state has developed paramilitary “special forces”. Oromo and Amhara each have about thirty thousand of these forces. In comparison, the total Ethiopian National Defense Force was one-hundred twenty thousand men prior to the war. The federal government needed the help of paramilitary forces from Amhara and Afar in their war against the TDF.
A dangerous precedent was set when Amhara forces annexed large territories in western and southeastern Tigray. Within weeks, Amhara forces started putting up billboards in annexed areas declaring them part of Amhara and appointed administrators. Amhara’s forces had amassed along the border with Tigray before the fighting had even started. The precedent now is that border disagreements can be solved with force of arms.
Meanwhile, the separatist Oromo Liberation Army took the opportunity to launch a blitzkrieg campaign against government forces. Like the TPLF, the goal of the OLA is complete self-rule for the state.OLA forces have seized significant territory in Oromo and expanded into Amhara. The OLA has fought its way into the Shewan area of Oromia, near Addis Ababa. Abiy’s back is against the wall, he must force the dam issue because it is one of the few cards he holds.
Egypt is for Farmers
The issue of the Nile is a sensitive one for Egypt, because it involves a scarce resource and national pride. Government popularity is heavily dependent on controlling the Nile’s waters and the opposition has jumped at the opportunity. Mohammed Ali, an Egyptian opposition member in exile, called for a “Nile Revolution” to overthrow the Sisi for failing to protect the Nile.
In June 2021, seven political parties and 80 public figures created the “Popular Front for the Preservation of the Nile River”. According to the Front, “The people are an authentic party and must be aware of everything that is going on.” The front includes many leftist and Nasserist parties as well as writers and journalists critical of the state. The Popular Front says that it is “complementary” to the State, as are civil societies, and parties. The forces of civil society are gathering around the issue of the Nile to gain moral authority in an effort to push Sisi out.
Sisi has used religion and nationalism to stabilize his position. Statements such as “No one can take a single drop of Egypt’s waters” have become ubiquitous in his speeches. Sisi has always had trouble with religious conservatives, so he turned to the clerics of Egypt’s prestigious Al-Azhar’s religious school. The clerics condemned Ethiopia for stealing Egypt’s “God-bestowed” right to the Nile. Al-Azhar is trying to unify Egypt’s citizens around a single rhetoric in favor of state action while providing religious legitimacy to Sisi.
As is the case in many countries, farmers in Egypt wield more political weight than their numbers alone provide. The distortion is especially important in Egypt because agriculture makes up such a huge portion of the economy. As a share of employment agriculture represents 21% in 2019 but could be as high as 40% when related industries are included (Chart 2). That is comparable to China where the share of employment in agriculture of 25%. In both cases a huge number of low-productivity small-holder farmers sustain the rural population.
Having such a large portion of the population dedicated to agriculture in a country that is 90% desert seems like a strange development. To find the reason we must look back to the distant past…1952. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 kicked off a series of “Land Reform” laws that incrementally reduced the maximum amount of land that could be owned and parceled out seized land to the underclass. Indeed, the practice continues right up to this day with the help of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The case study below from one of IFAD’s research pieces provides a helpful look at Egypt’s problem (emphasis is mine).
After receiving a degree in agricultural engineering from Cairo University, Ahmad Abdelmunem Al-Far was unemployed, except for occasional work in a garage or as a waiter. Then he responded to an announcement offering opportunities on reclaimed land for unemployed graduates and his life was changed.
Al-Far received a plot of 2.1 hectares of reclaimed land when he joined the IFAD-supported West Noubaria Rural Development Project. In partnership with the Government of Egypt, the project is helping ease some of Egypt’s most pressing social and economic problems.
For seventy years Egypt has relied on reclaimed desert to sweep its social problems under the rug, but the practice is catching up to them because the water is running out. The plan was always bound to fail because, as said by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (emphasis mine):
Historically, land reclamation has been the government‘s greatest agricultural investment, second to irrigation, consuming between 30 and 35% of the agricultural budget. Of the lands reclaimed, significant areas are lost each year through degradation and urbanization.
It is interesting to note that the media, policymakers, and nonprofits seem to take for granted that the Nile is existential to Egypt and that the country will shrivel up and die if it does not consume copious amounts of water. In reality, Egypt’s water for its population and industry is less than twenty-five percent of its total water usage, the rest goes to agriculture (table below). For a country just beginning to exploit its hydrocarbon resources and looking to modernize, smallholder farmers are a solvable problem. However, it can be difficult politically, if not personally, to tell people that their way of life is a waste of everyone’s time and money. The question is: Will Sisi go to war to avoid telling Egypt’s farmers to get new jobs?
Conclusion
Internal politics is playing a role almost equal to international politics in deciding outcomes in Egypt and Ethiopia. Sisi and Abiy Ahmed both must maintain an image of strength while also keeping balance at the top of a shaky political structure. As will be discussed in the next note, Egypt and Sudan will not attack Ethiopia for gradually filling the dam. An extended drought is a concern, but that scenario would play out over years and the international community could likely craft a solution. Two situations could trigger a ground incursion by Sudan to seize the dam, which would immediately involve Egypt due to the defense pact between the two. If a full-blown civil war erupts in Ethiopia the dam will be a major source of prestige for anyone who holds it. If the dam is not safely operated, it could cause a massive flood or a terrible drought. That is a risk Egypt and Sudan cannot take. A second trigger would be if Abiy, or someone else, uses the flow of the river as a direct threat. Such a situation would have the strong support of Ethiopia’s neighbors, if not the international community. Part 2 will examine these issues and more in detail.
[1] Bloodless in the sense that Emperor Haile Selassie had his archrival Lij Iyasu, grandson of Menelik II, strangled to death in 1916.
[2] For a discussion on the situation on the Horn of Africa, see my note: “The Red Sea, the White Nile, and the Blue Peoples” of 20 July 2019