Egypt’s president says to protect state’s water rights in Nile
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said on Saturday that the Egyptian state, with all its institutions, is committed to protecting the Egyptian rights in the Nile waters.
In a post on his official Facebook account, President Sisi stressed that Egypt “continues to take necessary measures at the political level and within the limits of international law to protect these rights.”
Earlier on Saturday, spokesman for Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, Mohamed Sibai, said the recent negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) being built on the Nile River reached a “dead end.”
“I have followed closely the results of the tripartite meeting of the irrigation ministers in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to discuss the file of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which did not result in any positive development,” Sisi said.
Ethiopia started building the dam in 2011 and it is expected to produce over 6,000 megawatts of electricity and to be Africa’s largest hydropower dam upon completion.
Egypt, a downstream Nile Basin country, is concerned that the construction of the GERD might affect its 55.5-billion-cubic-meter annual share of the river water. Meanwhile, upstream Ethiopia and downstream Sudan eye massive future benefits through the dam.
Filling the reservoir, whose total capacity is 74 billion cubic meters, may take several years. While Ethiopia asked to fill it in five-six years, Egypt seeks to prolong the period to avoid the negative effects of water shortage, which is a main point of their talks.
