Late Ethiopian PM Meles was a man with ardent admirers as well as fierce opponents. Let’s look at his relationship to this historic dam and set aside the argument over why people support or strongly criticise him.
Something happened the couple of weeks before he died. “I hear a lot of things, and many things are saddening,” Comrade Meles stated during a meeting with pertinent officials on the dam. Remember that the money used to build this dam came from the purses of low-income women. We must work quickly and with excellence. Those who oppose this dam will band together and cause a lot of trouble the longer we wait. And that will hurt and hinder the nation. He spent half a day talking about this.
Following the meeting, Mr. Meles remained. Leaning one of his shoes against the wall, he turned his wheelchair and spent a quarter of an hour staring at the wall, lost in thought. Following this period of reflection, he travelled overseas for medical care and died without mentioning the Grand Renaissance Dam ever again. He reflected on the time he said goodbye without witnessing the completion of the dam he had imagined. On March 2011, Mr. Meles Zenawi made the official announcement of the “Grand Renaissance Dam,” which he had been quietly protecting for more than seven years under the alias “Project X,” while he counted down the days until a revolt overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The World Bank and other foreign institutions refused to give money for the project after Egyptian politicians successfully spied on Ethiopia for years to prevent it from building a dam on the Blue Nile. As a result, they experienced the same thing when Mr. Meles showed them the Blue Nile project he had envisioned at Benishangul-Gumuz on television.
“The dam will be built by us Ethiopians and the government,” Mr. Meles said, adding that “the engineers are also us,” in response to the World Bank’s years-long refusal to lend money for the dam on the Nile. “I didn’t need the World Bank for the dam,” he said. He was asked by an Egyptian journalist visiting Addis Ababa whether Ethiopia was breaking the 1959 deal between Egypt and Sudan that gave Egypt 55.5 billion cubic meters of water annually and Sudan 18.5 billion cubic meters.
Mr. Meles retorted, “Ethiopia is not bound to abide by an agreement it did not sign,” “I alone will use it” is a thing of the past. When the Egyptians came to speak, he retorted, “No, the river affects 11 countries, and it is not just Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan.” By making this point, he was able to attract the attention of South Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. He initiated the attempt to make the dam a public cause by encouraging bond buying, which was a good thing. However, his decision to entrust the military-run METEC with the electromechanical element of the dam shows a lack of sufficient investigation.
This is demonstrated by the instances in which METEC mishandled jobs and created delays. We have doubts about METEC’s performance on the dam project since the Italian business Salini, who was in charge of the engineering for the dam, claimed compensation after being unable to work as a result of METEC’s delays. The project was scheduled to be finished on July , 2016, having begun on March , 2011. However, the construction of the dam was delayed for 14 years due to internal and foreign political and economic constraints, as well as a protracted project implementation.
There are numerous solutions to the question of what Mr. Meles did wrong, but the Grand Renaissance Dam will be one of the answers to what he did well. Anyone who comes up with a concept is definitely deserving of praise, and Mr. Meles deserves acknowledgement for his important contribution to this dam.