Nile dam agreement deadline passes without news

The deadline for an agreement between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt on the contentious Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam passed yesterday without a word from any of the parties.

Government ministers from each of the countries have been staging meetings in Washington DC for several months with the aim of agreeing a timetable for filling the dam.

Ethiopia say the dam is integral to its power needs and wants to fill the dam over a period of six years, but Egypt say that will reduce the flow of the river too drastically, and instead proposed a period of between 10 to 21 years.

The parties signed a draft agreement on 15 January with the help of the World Bank and the US Treasury Department, stipulating how the dam could be filled piecemeal during the rainy season.

But the memorandum did not go into specifics over how long that would take, believing those details could be decided in the final agreement.

Ethiopia began construction on the $4 billion dam in 2011, which traverses the Blue Nile, a tributary that supplies 85 per cent of the Nile waters.

But Egypt, which relies on the river for 90 per cent of its water, has expressed fears it will allow Ethiopia to control the upstream flow.

The issue has been a diplomatic headache for all those concerned, though up until this point things have managed to remain relatively calm.

Photo credit: Reuters