It is the famous poem by Ethiopia’s Poet Laureate, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, that has lately come to represent the ideals of the Nile. In the poem, the river is portrayed as an irrigator that cultivates peace, “flowing from Ethiopia’s sacred mountains of the sun, across the East of Aden and Sinai, beyond Gibraltar and towards the heights of Mount Moriah.”

Yet long before Gebre-Medhin’s The Nile, the river had been celebrated and personified as a kind of god, a life-giving force that nourished both the rich and the poor. This reverence is captured in The Hymn to the Nile, an ancient Egyptian text dating to around 2100 BC.

For centuries, Egyptians celebrated the Nile’s annual floods, which watered the land, deposited fertile silt, and enabled crops to flourish. This flooding was central to Egypt’s agricultural calendar. As the waters receded, they left behind nutrient-rich silt on the fields, creating ideal conditions for farming. They would plant, tend, and reap, and when the work was done, they would eat, sing, and dance.

But between September and October last year, the tone changed. Flooding in Egypt no longer brought the familiar sense of renewal and abundance. Instead, it triggered anxiety, with Cairo questioning what had caused the unusually high waters.

Attention turned upstream to Ethiopia and its new baby on the waters, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), whose completion has transformed the politics of the Nile. The dam, Africa’s largest hydroelectric project commissioned around the same period, can hold back up to 74 billion cubic metres of water (equivalent to roughly 29.6 million Olympic-size swimming pools).

In Cairo, the dam has been portrayed as a threat to Egypt’s water security. When the September/October floods hit, Egypt’s Water Resources and Irrigation Minister described the project as an “illegal dam that violates international law” and accused Ethiopia of managing it “recklessly.”

Cairo adopted the talking points that the dam had significantly interfered with the Nile’s natural flow and contributed to the flooding. At the heart of the dispute is a century-old contest over control of the river, including the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement and the 1959 Egypt-Sudan agreement, which Egypt has long invoked to defend its claims to extensive control and priority use of Nile waters. Under the 1959 pact, Egypt was allocated about 66 per cent of the river’s total flow, while Sudan received about 22 per cent.

Ethiopia, however, has consistently rejected the characterisation of the GERD as a water-consuming project. Kifle Horo, the project manager of the roughly 150-metre-high dam, which stretches about two kilometres (of the 6,650km long river) across the Blue Nile, has repeatedly said its primary purpose is hydropower generation rather than water consumption.

“This is not a water-consumptive project. Whatever water comes in goes out. The main challenge was during the filling period, which took five years,” he said in a past interview.

The distinction is central to Ethiopia’s defence of the project. While the GERD can store an enormous volume of water, Addis Ababa argues that it does not permanently consume the water it stores, allowing downstream states to continue receiving their share.

Beyond calling the dam illegal, Egypt now wants a legally binding agreement governing the filling and operation of the GERD, including guarantees of minimum downstream flows during droughts and adherence to international principles requiring consultation before Ethiopia takes further action affecting the Nile.

Ethiopia, on the other hand, maintains that, as a sovereign state, such monitoring can’t happen, it has the right to develop its natural resources without such monitoring as long as its actions do not cause significant harm to other Nile Basin countries.

Significant harm in international waters laws means a real, measurable, and non-trivial adverse effect on human health, safety, property, or the environment caused by altering a water source.

Egypt has found a brother in Sudan in pushing back against Ethiopia over Nile water rights.

In February, the prime ministers of Egypt and Sudan reaffirmed their rejection of unilateral actions concerning the Nile and urged Ethiopia to adhere to international law principles of prior notification, consultation, and avoidance of significant harm.

In August, US President Donald Trump’s adviser Massad Boulos said Washington was willing to resume mediation among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The offer came despite a January letter from Trump to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Sudanese leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan that had produced little progress.

This followed the 2015 Declaration of Principles, signed by the three countries, including Ethiopia’s then Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, which bound them to ten items, including cooperation on the management of Nile waters.

Yet the tussle persists. Why has this historic agreement failed to end the deadlock?

According to Lt Col (Rtd) Jackson Nyoroge, a specialist in crisis management and military planning, the stalemate boils down to leadership. Both Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali and President el-Sisi have military backgrounds and are determined to defend what they regard as their countries’ strategic interests, making compromise particularly difficult. Nyoroge adds that with Americans involved in mediation, the outcome is likely to favour Egypt, given Washington’s close alliance with Cairo.

“Cairo, which derives over 90 per cent of its water from the Nile, attaches immense importance to the river, and Ethiopia’s development of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has touched a deeply sensitive national interest in Egypt,” he says.

Nyoroge warns that if diplomatic efforts fail to produce an understanding, tensions could potentially escalate to a military level.

His fears are not entirely unfounded. In 2020, Trump remarked that Egypt could “blow up” the dam if no agreement was reached with Ethiopia over the use and management of the Nile waters. Nyoroge, however, holds that such rhetoric does little to help resolve the dispute, which instead requires carefully calculated diplomatic manoeuvres.

“The intensity of the debate within Ethiopia itself, including among communities in Tigray, demonstrates just how deeply the Nile issue resonates,” he observes.

Amid internal rifts within Ethiopia, the country is building new friendships abroad through the GERD. The dam generates about 15,000 GWh of electricity annually, with some of it exported to countries such as Kenya, Sudan, Djibouti, and Tanzania.

Beyond its energy contributions, the GERD has also become a powerful symbol of national pride and self-reliance for Ethiopia.

In August, speaking at the Africa Mindset Reset Forum in Kigali, Desalegn urged other African countries to draw lessons from Ethiopia’s experience in mobilising domestic resources to finance the GERD, a project estimated to have cost about $5 billion.

Its construction has further encouraged Addis Ababa to explore additional hydropower projects along the country’s rivers, including plans for three more dams on the Blue Nile: Karadobi, Mandaya and Beko Abo, even as tension over the use of the Nile among its downstream neighbours, especially Egypt, rises.

At this stage, what realistic paths remain for a negotiated solution? And has Egypt’s leverage to halt Ethiopia’s further development of the Nile effectively run out?

Dr John Rao Nyaoro, an international consultant specialising in transboundary water policy and legal frameworks, sees an opportunity for a solution through greater cooperation among the Nile Basin countries to build consensus on the equitable use and management of the river.

The Nile Basin includes Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

He proposes that the states adopt the 2010 Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (Entebbe Agreement), which establishes a permanent Nile River Basin Commission to coordinate the sustainable and equitable use of the river’s waters.

Similar arrangements, he notes, have helped countries sharing other transboundary rivers, including the Mekong and Zambezi, manage competing interests.

But when most Nile Basin countries signed the agreement, Egypt rejected it. In October 2024, Egyptian Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam said, “Egypt categorically rejects the Entebbe Agreement in its current form” and “will not concede even a single cubic metre of Nile water.”

Sudan, too, has opposed the agreement, favouring the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement instead. Even so, Dr Nyaoro maintains the key is “cooperation by the Nile brothers sitting on one table.”

The expert on water matters for over 40 years says there is no law limiting any Nile Basin country, including Ethiopia and Egypt, from building dams on the river, citing international water law and the principle that countries sharing transboundary rivers should use them reasonably and equitably.

“As long as you don’t chemically alter the waters or as long as the use doesn’t cause significant harm to other partners using the same waters,” he tells the OAT.

How would he rate the GERD’s development along the Nile? Dr Nyaoro believes the dam could benefit both Egypt and Sudan. He argues Egypt would gain a more consistent water supply thanks to controlled flow, and that the GERD’s cooler location reduces evaporation, a problem long associated with Egypt’s Aswan High Dam.

For Sudan, he says the dam would alleviate sedimentation caused by annual floods, enabling year-round farming rather than relying on July floods. The stored water at GERD is released steadily throughout the year.

High Court lawyer Sheldon Atamba, who is familiar with international treaties, says the GERD’s location within Ethiopia does not make its filling and operation solely a matter of domestic jurisdiction.

“The Nile is a shared international watercourse, meaning both upstream and downstream states have obligations under international law,” he says.

At the same time, he says Egypt cannot claim an absolute veto over Ethiopia’s use of the river simply because it is downstream. Ethiopia and Egypt must instead be guided by their international obligations.

Practically, he says, Egypt’s position is unlikely to succeed if it seeks an outright veto over the GERD. Its stronger legal case would be based on preventing “significant transboundary harm, prior notification, cooperation, information sharing and predictable rules for droughts, prolonged dry periods and dam operations.”

As the tussle over the Nile continues, it remains to be seen whether developments around the dam will ultimately add value for the roughly 300 million people who depend on it. Will it keep the steady flow the poet envisioned, “flowing from Ethiopia’s sacred mountains of the sun…,” while still nourishing both the rich and the poor, as the ancient Egyptian hymn writers of the Nile once celebrated?