Ethiopia is deeply unsettled and making worried noises. For the first time, Egyptian troops have deployed on Ethiopia’s doorstep.
Just over 1,000 soldiers have been sent to Somalia under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia.
Officially, they are there to stabilise Somalia. Unofficially, Addis Ababa sees something else: Cairo edging closer on the chessboard.
Suppose Egypt ever wished to threaten Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam (Gerd), which it has opposed as a water sucker threatening its very existence. In that case, the Somali frontier is the path it would take.
That is why Ethiopia has always treated Jubbaland, the Somali region running along its border and Kenya’s northeast, as more than a local issue. To Addis, Jubbaland is a strategic flank—control it, and you shield yourself; lose it, and you open the door to your rivals.
Ahmed Madobe, Jubbaland’s president, has been Kenya’s ally since Nairobi’s forces first intervened in Somalia in 2011 in pursuit of Al-Shabaab militant group. But politics in Somalia is a shifting stage. Recently, Jubbaland forces pushed into Kenyan territory, stirring tension with local leaders. It shows how porous this flank is.
Ethiopia’s additional headache is that the entrance of Egypt into Somalia links two great theatres: the River Nile, a lifeline for millions, agriculture, and ecosystems into North Africa, and the Red Sea–Gulf of Aden corridor, lifeline of global trade.
Ethiopia now faces pressure from both. For the first time, the politics of East Africa’s rivers and the wars of the Horn are mixing in one pot.
Since colonial times, treaties have guaranteed Cairo a lion’s share of the water. The future looks different. Counting Ethiopia along with the eight East African Community (EAC) countries, the region will have a population nearing 900 million by 2050.
Every new mouth needs food, every new farm needs water, every new factory needs electricity, and they all need water. That is why irrigation is the silent bomb under Egypt’s water security.
Technically, then, the dam is not the existential crisis Egyptian politicians thunder about.
It could then be that Cairo’s real fear is Addis using Gerd as leverage, threatening to withhold flows in times of tension. Its repeated demands for a “diplomatic solution” may aim less at stopping the dam and more at removing the possibility of blackmail. Egypt’s security establishment has long been alive to the threat lying beyond Ethiopia itself.
For that reason, it is not surprising that Egypt, a country without a tropical jungle, has invested in specialised jungle warfare units. Cairo’s generals have long anticipated that if war over the Nile ever came, it would be fought not in the Sahara but in the forests and hills of East Africa.
Neither here nor there: Jubbaland fighters causing jitters in Kenya, Ethiopia.
Yet while the logic of conflict is strong, the case for cooperation is stronger. A significant effort is also needed to reduce upstream evaporation losses.
The challenge is trust. Upstream states see Egypt as entitled and arrogant. Cairo views them as reckless and dismissive of history.
Yet the alternative to cooperation is a slow-burn conflict stretching from Rwanda’s hills to the Egyptian delta.
It is one Egypt—ranged against a region more than five times its size, and including many fairly formidable regional military powers—cannot win.
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
