Despite opposition from its downstream neighbour Egypt, Ethiopia is getting ready to start the fourth filling of its mega-dam reservoir on the Blue Nile, the nation’s deputy prime minister said on Thursday.
Since Ethiopia began construction on the enormous $4.2 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in 2011, the project has been at the heart of a regional conflict.
Sudan and Egypt have occasionally requested that Addis Ababa stop filling the reservoir.
“The GERD is now approaching its fourth filling. The last three fillings have not affected lower riparian states. Likewise, the rest of the fillings will not be any different,” Demeke Mekonnen, who also serves as foreign minister, said.
“The project is near completion, withstanding the rhetoric of some actors that seek to monopolise the use of the shared African river,” he said, opening a conference on the Nile in Addis Ababa.
The gathering includes a “high-level ministerial round table,” at which Demeke will be joined by his counterparts in the Nile Basin’s foreign ministries from Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda.
However, the two nations immediately downstream of the Ethiopian dam, Sudan and Egypt, are not featured.
Due to their reliance on Nile freshwater, Khartoum and Cairo have previously characterised it as a threat, while Ethiopia views it as necessary for its electrification and development.
Khartoum’s stance has changed while Egypt, which depends on the Nile for 97% of its irrigation requirements, maintains that the dam represents a “existential” threat.
Sudan’s leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said in January that Khartoum and Addis Ababa are “aligned and in agreement” over the dam.
Sudan has been ravaged since mid-April by deadly fighting between forces loyal to Burhan and his rival and former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, with more than 2,000 people killed and over 2 million displaced