In Depth Egypt Rethinks Strategy as Ethiopia Prepares to Unveil GERD
May 24, 2025
Ethiopia is putting the finishing touches on its mega hydroelectric dam on one of the main tributaries of the Nile, just off the border with Sudan, and insiders say an official grand opening ceremony is scheduled to take place soon.
Meanwhile, Cairo’s campaign against the completion of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), set to be Africa’s largest hydro electric generation scheme, is pivoting increasingly towards the Horn of Africa and its thousands of kilometers of shoreline.
Sources who spoke to The Reporter indicate that Egyptian politicians have enlisted hydraulics experts, intelligence operatives, and members of the media to hammer out ways of helping the North African nation to redesign an entry point in its bid to launch a new wave of pressure against Ethiopia.
The re-strategizing has been underway for more than a year now, as Cairo looks to incorporate a subtle show of force in its diplomatic efforts opposing GERD. A few months ago, Egypt secured its participation in the latest AU-led peacekeeping mission in Somalia, allowing it to deploy troops in the Horn.
More recently, Cairo has renewed diplomatic relations with both Eritrea and Djibouti as it looks to gain a stronger foothold in the region.
Among those keeping a close eye on the developments is Fekahmed Negash, a hydraulic expert who has held senior positions at both the Ethiopian Ministry of Water and Energy as Director of Trans-boundary Rivers Affairs, and later as the executive director of ENTRO (Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office) of the Nile Basin Initiative. He now works as a consultant.
“Everything that Egypt has been doing across the Eastern Africa spectrum as of late is tied to the GERD, even though its politicians deny it or do not make mention of it as a main cause for their growing encroachment in the Horn of Africa,” he says.
Fekahmed has long been a staunch advocate for the continued construction of the dam, arguing that once completed, GERD would “serve as a diplomat and negotiator in its own right.” He sees that time has come.
“Egypt lost all its cards when it comes to the incessant negative ads it publicized against it. The dam has now been realized. The negative impact Egypt said the dam would have on downstream countries had been exposed for what it is: a wrong hypothesis. This is why Egypt is shifting its strategy,” he said.
Last month, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi made an official visit to Djibouti, where, along with President Ismael Omar Guelleh, he signed a maritime pact that seeks to exclude non-littoral countries from getting involved in affairs concerning the Red Sea.
Djibouti, though a small country in land area and population, occupies a highly strategic location on the western coast of what is one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes.
Both Djibouti and Egypt will contribute troops to AUSSOM (the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia). Despite not sharing a border with any of the Horn countries, Egypt jumped at the chance to establish a presence in Somalia, taking advantage of a rift between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu brought about by Ethiopia’s controversial MoU with breakaway Somaliland in January 2024.
Egypt’s military presence in Somalia goes beyond AUSSOM. Following the lifting of a UN arms embargo on Somalia in late 2023, an Egyptian military cargo ship docked at a Somali port and reportedly offloaded considerable amounts of heavy artillery and anti-tank weapons.
El-Sisi’s visit to Djibouti last month followed an earlier rapprochement with Eritrea and Somalia that saw the three countries form an axis of collaboration aimed at warding off Ethiopia’s coming to the scene of maritime geopolitics.
And Ethiopia has expressed its intent in no ambiguous terms. During a recent address to Parliament, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) defended his open declarations that Ethiopia would need a sea outlet sooner rather than later.
The PM said Ethiopia would pursue its sea access policy peacefully, diplomatically and through negotiations with neighboring countries.
Experts like Fekahmed observe the policy has proved an invaluable opportunity for Cairo, which sees the fault lines stemming from regional tensions as a suitable entry point for its campaign against the GERD.
“In whatever it does, Egypt has been overly protective of its perceived ‘historical’ rights to the Nile waters, notwithstanding competing interests borne out of natural rights,” he said.
An analyst who spoke to The Reporter anonymously questions what Egypt stands to lose if Ethiopia’s quest for maritime access succeeds.
“Egypt’s worst nightmare is not if and when Ethiopia gets access to the sea. Egypt only fears that an economically and politically powerful Ethiopia may eventually diminish Egypt’s say on the Nile and undermine its hegemonic stance over the Nile,” said the analyst.
An article headlined ‘Securing Ties with Horn of Africa’ and published last month in Al Ahram, Egypt’s largest daily newspaper, posits that the “growing number of visits between Egyptian and African officials reflects Cairo’s keenness to address the challenges confronting Egypt and other countries in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa.”
“The geopolitically important area has long been the site of conflicts,” wrote Doaa El-Bey, quoting Egypt’s national security expert Mohamed Abdel-Wahed, who attributed the conflicts between Ethiopia and Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, and Djibouti and Eritrea to “the region’s rich resources and strategic location for international trade” and argued that developments in the region will inevitably impact Egypt.
On the other hand, Sherif Mansour, an Egyptian-American rights advocate, argues the completion of GERD will have little impact on Egypt. He made his case in an article published last month and titled ‘Egypt and the Horn of Africa’.
“At the present moment, the completion of the GERD appears not to pose an immediate threat to Egypt in terms of its access to water. Many of the experts I spoke to agreed that unexpected heavy rain seasons in recent years and certain mitigation steps taken by the Egyptian government meant that Ethiopia could fill its lakes from the dam without causing Egypt a major water shortage. Ethiopia has also made the case to its neighbors that its lush, high, mountainous terrain better protects the waters of the Nile from evaporation than Egypt’s hot, desert lands,” it reads.
Nonetheless, Cairo continues to oppose the dam’s completion, claiming ensuing water shortages would lead to the displacement of two million Egyptian farmers, according to Fekahmed.
The expert notes Cairo uses similar claims, often tying them to increased terrorism and migration, to keep the West on its side in the GERD dispute.
“They claim filling the GERD would lead to the Aswan High Dam going dry. The GERD is now full. Aswan remains full, too,” said Fekahmed. “The GERD is taking care of its own diplomacy. It’s clear that none of these claims are true.”
Jafar Bediru (PhD), executive director of the Institute of Foreign Affairs, is another expert who has noted Cairo’s shift from opposing the filling and completion of GERD towards restricting Ethiopia’s access to the Red Sea.
“The GERD issue appears to have been overshadowed to some extent,” he said. “It’s given Ethiopia some breathing room.”
Jafar expects vocal opposition to GERD from Cairo and its allies in the Arab League to pick back up during the rainy season, linked to the continued filling of its reservoir.
“The GERD issue hasn’t gone away,” he said, arguing the Red Sea’s strategic importance to Egypt and other Arab nations and Ethiopia’s efforts to reestablish itself on the coast have taken temporary precedence.
“I see it as a good opportunity for Ethiopia to finalize the dam,” said Jafar.
Fekahmed contends that Cairo will eventually have to come to terms with the realities created by the GERD, but would all the same be ever active in its interest to prevent any further attempts to construct additional dams on Nile tributaries downstream to the GERD.
With an installed capacity of 5,150 megawatts, the GERD is the largest hydro dam in Africa to date. Located in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, approximately 600 km northwest of Addis Ababa, the dam’s reservoir hold more than 74 billion cubic meters of water.
Ethiopia hopes to use the dam to generate enough electricity for its burgeoning industries. Part of GERD’s output is also slated for export to Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, and South Sudan with plans to extend the network as far south as Tanzania.
While the case of the GERD seems a foregone conclusion for adversarial countries such as Egypt, Ethiopian political, hydraulic and military experts agree that Egypt’s desire to maintain its age-old hegemony over the Nile Basin is unchanged.
Nile Basin countries, nevertheless, seemed to be taking the situation into their own hands when, in October 2024, they announced the establishment of the Cooperative Framework Agreement – an international legal framework that liquidates the present Nile Basin Initiative and replaces it with a higher level intergovernmental authority.
Fekahmed urges the governments of these countries to expedite the establishment of the Nile River Basin Commission (NRBC), which would oversee the ingenuous management of the basin and supervise related projects.
The Commission has power to enact laws and directives related to the utilization of the Nile waters, and to solicit financing from international lenders for specific projects.
The CFA signatories have all along been calling for Egypt to rejoin the pack and constructively engage in issues related to the equitable and fair utilization of the Nile waters.
It is not clear if and when the north African country will reverse its claims over the river and take its place in the newfound framework of basin-wide cooperation.
By Addis Getachew, Kidus Dawit & Yonas Amare