Chief Engineer of the Grand Ethopian Renaissance Dam Found Dead in Addis

[Trajan]

Bloomberg
The chief engineer of Ethiopia’s grand dam project was a national hero. Just one year after his death, some wonder if it will ever be finished.


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Death on the Nile Haunts Ethiopia’s Rebirth
Egypt’s threatened war over Ethiopia’s grand dam project, but its biggest problems are local.

Goddamn someone got him out the paint

Learning from Israeli tactics of taking out scientists

 

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why are we even getting involved

 

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bbc.com
Nile River mega dam row ends with draft deal
5-7 minutes

Image copyright Reuters
Image caption The Grand Renaissance Dam is a source of national pride for Ethiopia
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have reached an initial deal on the filling and operation of what will be Africa's biggest hydro-electric dam.

The three nations agreed, following a meeting in Washington DC, that the mega dam on the River Nile should be filled in stages during the rainy season.

Ethiopia, which is building the dam, wants to start generating electricity as soon as possible.

But Egypt is concerned about its water supplies if it is filled too fast.

The preliminary agreement, brokered by US treasury secretary and the World Bank president, is short on details, says the BBC's Emmanuel Igunza.

Some delicate negotiations will be needed before the Grand Renaissance Dam agreement is finalised later this month, he says.

Is this a breakthrough?
Negotiators are presenting this as a win-win for both Egypt and Ethiopia. There have been fears the countries could be drawn into war if it is unresolved.

Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption Egypt considers reduction of the Nile flow as an existential threat
According to the joint statement, filling the dam in stages during the July and August wet season will allow for Ethiopia's "early generation of electricity" while "providing appropriate mitigation measures for Egypt and Sudan in case of severe droughts".

Ethiopia, which began construction of the $4bn (£3bn) dam in 2011 on the Blue Nile, a tributary that contributes 85% of the Nile waters, has always said it wants the dam to be filled within six years.

Egypt has maintained that a longer period - of between 10 and 21 years - would be better so that the water flow is not drastically reduced.

No time period is specified in the preliminary agreement.

What happens next?
The dam is already 80% complete, and it looks like Ethiopia will start filling it according to the schedule it has always planned.

The final deal is expected to be signed on 28-29 January, when foreign and water ministers from the three countries meet again in the US capital.

It is hoped they can sell the final text to their governments to end the tensions.

But the main question is whether Egypt will be satisfied with the guarantees given by Ethiopia on the amount of water to be released during periods of drought.

The deal may also have a bearing on how the other eight countries on the Nile Basin choose to exploit the River Nile in the future.

How dependent is Egypt on the Nile?
Very. Most of Egypt is arid with almost no rainfall and relies on the Nile for 90% of its water.

Africa's longest river flows through the city of Aswan around 920km (570 miles) south of the capital Cairo.

One of the North African country's other main concerns is that if the water flow drops, it could affect Lake Nasser, the reservoir behind Egypt's Aswan Dam, which produces most of Egypt's electricity.

So these negotiations over the future of the Nile River's waters are considered a matter of survival for millions of Egyptians.

What is at stake for Ethiopia?
Ethiopia considers the dam a matter of sovereignty and has been critical of what it believes is foreign interference in the matter.

It started building its dam at the start of the Arab Spring in March 2011 without consulting Egypt.

It refused to be bound a 1929 treaty that gave Egypt and Sudan rights to almost all the Nile's water without considering upstream countries.

The dam, with a capacity to generate a massive 6,000 MW of electricity, is at the heart of the country's manufacturing and industrial dreams.

Ethiopia has an acute shortage of electricity, with 65% of its population not connected to the grid.

The energy generated will be enough to have its citizens connected and sell the surplus power to neighbouring countries, including Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Djibouti and Eritrea.

Explore the Nile with 360 video
Join BBC reporter Alastair Leithead and his team, travelling in 2018 from the Blue Nile's source to the sea - through Ethiopia and Sudan into Egypt.

This 360° video is a version of the first VR documentary series from BBC News. To view the full films, click here.

 

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Wrong thread *

 

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Ethiopia with the stick talk



How to avert a war over the Nile between Egypt and Ethiopia
Addis has in the past rejected mediation, but the US has recently become involved
January 15 2020

Ethiopia's plan to build a mega-dam on the Nile presents an existential threat to Egypt
“No force can stop Ethiopia from building a dam. If there is need to go to war, we could get millions readied.” Thus spoke Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, in October, a few days after winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

To be fair, Mr Abiy has made clear that hostilities between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the biggest in Africa and the seventh-largest in the world, can only be resolved diplomatically. The prime minister was seeking to rebut Egyptian rhetoric, thankfully receding, that if necessary Cairo could halt construction of Ethiopia’s mega-dam through military action.

The stakes for both nations could hardly be higher. At its root is a fight over the resources of the Nile, a 4,100-mile river that flows through 11 African countries and without which more than 5,000 years of Egyptian civilisation — not to mention Egypt’s modern economy — would not exist. Plans are afoot to start filling the reservoir, which will eventually be the size of Greater London, this year, with the first power to be produced in 2021.

For Egypt, damming the Nile upstream is an existential threat. Some 90 per cent of its fresh water comes from the river. Millions of farmers depend on its waters to irrigate their land. Egypt wants Ethiopia to fill the reservoir over 15 years — against Addis’s stated intention of four to seven — and to guarantee that long-term flows are unaffected.

For 110m Ethiopians, too, the dam is almost everything. With a capacity of a massive 6,500 megawatts, it will produce more power than the country currently consumes. Financed partly through patriotic bonds, it is the most important expression of the country’s hoped-for transformation — already well under way — from symbol of poverty and famine to Africa’s most dynamic economy.

Plans for the dam were announced in 2011 when Egypt was reeling from the Arab spring and the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Some accuse Addis of deliberately picking this moment of maximum distraction to begin work on a project that would radically alter the Nile’s flow.

The dispute is similar to others between countries that share important water systems. India and Pakistan have periodically clashed over Himalayan-sourced rivers whose use is theoretically regulated by a 1960 treaty. Dams in China have affected the flow of the Mekong river, which snakes through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

For the Nile, no proper framework agreement exists. The Blue Nile, which starts in the Ethiopian highlands, flows northwards to Khartoum, capital of Sudan. There it joins the White Nile, which drains from Lake Victoria, through several African countries including Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet, according to a treaty orchestrated by the British in 1929, the Nile’s largesse is shared between just two nations: Egypt gets 75 per cent and Sudan (now split into two) the remaining 25 per cent.

That division is untenable. Addis has accused Cairo of leaning on a colonial-era arrangement.

The dam is located just 15 miles from the border with Sudan, which also originally objected to Ethiopia’s plans. Since then, Khartoum has been persuaded that the dam could actually help regulate the flow of a river that is prone to damaging floods.

That leaves Egypt isolated. According to the Crisis Group, which produced an excellent report on the stand-off, Egypt and Ethiopia “could blunder into a crisis if they do not strike a bargain” soon.

There are a few promising signs. Ethiopia has in the past rejected international mediation, but recently the US has got involved, with the US Treasury’s Steven Mnuchin taking a personal interest. Just last week, Mr Abiy asked Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, to mediate in the dispute.

The Crisis Group has sketched out a two-step solution. Ethiopia and Egypt would first agree to a flexible, technically driven timetable for filling the reservoir without disrupting downstream flows. Egypt would then rejoin the Nile Basin Initiative, which includes all the other Nile countries, to work out a long-term framework. That would govern the rights and obligations of nations when future dams are built and provide an institutional means of addressing the inevitable shocks that will result from climate change.

We are far from such a happy outcome. Sections of the Egyptian media still claim the dam can be stopped. Ethiopia’s default position remains essentially unilateralist. No one wants a water war. Fortunately, that is not inevitable. With skilful diplomacy and a forward-looking agreement, the Nile need not be a source of conflict, but rather a force for co-operation.

david.pilling@ft.com

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Ethiopia still pushing forward.

 

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Ethiopia still pushing forward.

Mothafukk those racist sand cac foreigner usurper Egyptians. Do sumn Sisi, ol bytch ass Jay mariotti lookin fukkboy...

 

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bloomberg.com
Ethiopia Starts Filling Nile Dam at Center of Dispute With Egypt
By Samuel Gebre
5-6 minutes
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (CARA ANNA)
,

July 14, 2020, 4:40 AM EDT

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Johannesburg (AP) -- New satellite imagery shows the reservoir behind Ethiopia’s disputed hydroelectric dam beginning to fill, but an analyst says it’s likely due to seasonal rains instead of government action.

The images emerge as Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan say the latest talks on the contentious project ended Monday with no agreement. Ethiopia has said it would begin filling the reservoir of the $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam this month even without a deal, which would further escalate tensions.

But the swelling reservoir, captured in imagery on July 9 by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, is likely a “natural backing-up of water behind the dam” during this rainy season, International Crisis Group analyst William Davison told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“So far, to my understanding, there has been no official announcement from Ethiopia that all of the pieces of construction that are needed to be completed to close off all of the outlets and to begin impoundment of water into the reservoir” have occurred, Davison said.

Satellite images from June 26, top, and July 12, show the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile river.

Source: Maxar Technologies via AP Images

But Ethiopia is on schedule for impoundment to begin in mid-July, he added, when the rainy season floods the Blue Nile.

Ethiopian officials did not comment on the images.

The latest setback in the three-country talks shrinks hopes that an agreement will be reached before Ethiopia begins filling the reservoir.

Ethiopia says the colossal dam offers a critical opportunity to pull millions of its nearly 110 million citizens out of poverty and become a major power exporter. Downstream Egypt, which depends on the Nile to supply its farmers and booming population of 100 million with fresh water, asserts that the dam poses an existential threat.

Experts fear that filling the dam without a deal could push the countries to the brink of military conflict.

But Kevin Wheeler, a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, told The Associated Press that fears of any immediate water shortage “are not justified at this stage at all. If there were a drought over the next several years, that certainly could become a risk."

He said the escalating rhetoric is more due to changing “power dynamics” in the region.

Years of talks with a variety of mediators, including the Trump administration, have failed to produce a solution. Last week’s round, mediated by the African Union and observed by U.S. and European officials, proved no different.

“Although there were progresses, no breakthrough deal is made,” Seleshi Bekele, Ethiopia’s minister of water, irrigation and energy, tweeted overnight.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry in an interview with Egypt’s DMC TV channel warned Monday that Egypt may be compelled to appeal again to the U.N. Security Council to intervene in the dispute. Ethiopia rejects that, preferring regional bodies like the African Union to mediate.

Meanwhile the countries agreed they would send their reports to the AU and reconvene in a week to determine next steps.

Between Egypt and Ethiopia lies Sudan, which stands to benefit from the dam through access to cheap electricity and reduced flooding. But it has also raised fears over the dam’s operation, which could endanger its own smaller dams depending on the amount of water discharged daily downstream.

Sudanese Irrigation Minister Yasser Abbas on Monday said the parties were “keen to find a solution” but technical and legal disagreements persist over its filling and operation.

Most important, he said, are the questions about how much water Ethiopia will release downstream if a multi-year drought occurs and how the countries will resolve any future disputes.

Hisham Kahin, a member of Sudan’s legal committee in the dam negotiations, said 70% to 80% of negotiations turned on the question of whether an agreement would be legally binding.

___

Associated Press writers in Cairo contributed.

 

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[King Ming]

Ethiopia has every right to fill that Dam up. fukk egypt!