The National Committee of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is meeting on Thursday in Addis Ababa with 12 experts from the Tripartite Committee of the dam to agree on a deadline for the consulting firms to deliver their technical studies.
The meeting will discuss why the French and Dutch consulting firms did not deliver the studies, which were supposed to be delivered on Wednesday before last.
Former Irrigation Minister Nasreddin Allam said the negotiations are a waste of time. “Any observer or even man on the street knows that, while the Egyptian government insists on them,” he said. “The negotiations must take a political track conducted by the Foreign Minister under the direct supervision of the President.”
He added that the construction of the dam must be stopped immediately after the first phase or after approaching half its capacity, which would be sufficient to generate the desired amount of electricity. And Egypt should compensate Ethiopia for any damage resulting from stopping the construction, provided that the dam would not harm Egypt’s interests.
“If Ethiopia does not accept that, we should resort to peaceful means of arbitration or to the Security Council,” he said.
He explained that there are three scenarios that the meeting is expected to arrive at, namely that the three countries agree on extending the deadline for the studies, that only the French firm be assigned the task, which Ethiopia favors, or that the firms provide new studies to choose from.
“Ethiopia does not favor the Dutch firm because it had prepared a mathematical study in 2007 that showed that a dam in Ethiopia would be harmful. “They wanted the firm to prepare the new study on the basis that the dam would be useful to Egypt and Sudan, which the firm rejected so as to preserve its reputation,” he said.
He said another reason why the negotiations are stalled is that the three countries did not agree on the part each firm would handle, suggesting that the French firm prepare 70 percent of the studies and the Dutch 30 percent, yet leaving the matter for the firms to decide.
“It was only natural that the two firms could not submit a joint study because the Dutch firm is the largest research institution in the world in this field, while the French firm is new and inexperienced,” he said.
“Either Egypt will accept that only the French firm prepares the studies, or they would be assigned to other international consulting firms, which would take at least another year,” he said.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
