Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Ethiopia has inaugurated Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, a project that could transform the country’s energy sector. State media showed the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, touring the site of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in Guba district with the Kenyan president, William Ruto, the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, and the African Union chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, a Guardian report said.
“To our brothers, Ethiopia built the dam to prosper, to electrify the entire region and to change the history of black people,” Abiy said in an address to dozens of dignitaries during a ceremony at the site in north-western Ethiopia. “It is absolutely not to harm its brothers.” He was referring to Egypt and Sudan, which have expressed concerns about a likely reduction of flow downstream. Along with the White Nile, the Blue Nile is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile.
Construction of GERD started in 2011, with more than 25,000 people working on site.
Towering 170 metres (550 feet) high and stretching nearly 2km (1.2 miles) across the Blue Nile, the dam is designed to hold 74bn cubic metres of water and generate 5,150 megawatts of electricity, which is more than double the country’s capacity.
The megastructure is the largest by power capacity in Africa and among the 20 largest hydroelectric dams in the world. It cost $5bn (£3.7bn), with Ethiopia’s central bank providing 91% of that figure and the rest coming from Ethiopians through bond sales and gifts, local media reported.
But the project is a source of tension and diplomatic feuding with downstream countries, with neighbours critical of the project from the onset. Egypt, which has a population of more than 100 million and experiences little rainfall, depends on the Nile for 97 percent of its water needs and fears lower supply during drought.
