In a matter of days, when the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) begins full operation, it will rise not only as a power station but also as Ethiopia’s immovable emblem of sovereignty—a triumph no one can strip away.
For Ethiopians and their leaders, the project carries weight far beyond symbolism. It represents the fulfillment of a yearning carried for generations—a pledge passed down without pause.
The dream of a massive dam on the Abbay River (Blue Nile), has outlived emperors and generals, survived socialist revolution, and outlasted the political turbulence of successive governments. Ethiopia’s last monarch, the military junta of the Derg, the fragile transitional period of the 1990s, and three prime ministers of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia—all advanced the same vision, though each ruled under radically different systems. History records them as adversaries on many fronts, but on this one point, they spoke with one voice: Ethiopia must build its dam.
That determination now culminates in a decisive moment. With construction completed and full-scale power generation set to launch, the GERD stands as a rare point of unity in a nation often riven by division.
The aspiration itself is older than modern Ethiopia. In the 1920s, under RasTafari Makonnen—later Emperor Haile Selassie I—British and American experts were invited to survey the Nile Basin. But those plans collapsed after the emperor discovered that Britain and Italy, colonial rulers with vested interests in Egypt and Sudan, had conspired to block Ethiopia from benefiting from a dam on its own soil.
Two decades later, the effort returned. By the 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie commissioned formal feasibility studies with the US Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. A landmark agreement followed in 1958, bringing Ethiopia into partnership with the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) and the newly created USAgency for International Development (USAID). Together, they launched what was then the most ambitious scientific study of the Nile Basin ever attempted in Ethiopia.
Over six years, American and Ethiopian experts mapped the basin’s hydrology, geology, and land use potential. On August 7, 1964, the Bureau of Reclamation delivered its comprehensive report, Land and Water Resources of the Blue Nile Basin in Ethiopia. Contained in one main volume and six appendices, it became the blueprint for Ethiopia’s water resource planning for decades.
Armed with those findings, Haile Selassie laid out a bold national vision. He announced what came to be known as the “Ten Million Dollar Project,” a program to harness the Nile for irrigation and hydroelectric power, beginning with dam works around Lake Tana.
But almost immediately, Britain intervened. Still eager to control the Nile even after its withdrawal from Egypt, London lobbied West Germany and other financiers to withhold support for Ethiopia’s plans. It was the same old pattern: every attempt to develop the Abbay met foreign resistance.
Yet Ethiopia pressed on. Haile Selassie, cultivating his alliance with Washington, sought to secure the financing and technical support needed to move from vision to reality.
A Century of Planning, Interrupted but Never Abandoned
The US-Ethiopia Cooperative Program for the Study of the Blue Nile Basin, launched in 1958 with a budget of USD 42million, was more than a technical exercise. It was a declaration: Ethiopia intended to develop its resources on its own terms.
Over six years, a team of American scientists and engineers surveyed, mapped, and modeled the basin. The result was a 17-volume master plan identifying 36 potential dam sites—four major hydroelectric projects, several mid-sized dams, and dozens of smaller works for irrigation and drinking water.
Emperor Haile Selassie I treated the study as the foundation of a national future. He created the Ethiopian Electric Power Authority, providing a formal charter to manage generation and distribution as towns and cities multiplied and demand for electricity rose. His government’s approach was pragmatic: even if the money to build the dams was not yet available, the research, legal frameworks, and institutions would be ready when the day came.
In 1957, the Emperor captured this philosophy in a remark preserved in government records: “We may not have the means to build it now, but with the vision and plan we set today, they will build it tomorrow.”
Though his reign ended before the vision materialized, the idea endured—in reports, in archives, and in the imagination of a nation determined to free itself from dependency.
The monarchy’s fall in 1974 brought to power the Derg, a Marxist military junta led first by AmanAndom (Lt. Gen.) and later by Mengistu Haile Mariam (Col.). Ideologically, the regime was the antithesis of imperial Ethiopia, yet it inherited the same ambition: the Abbay must be harnessed.
In 1978, Italian engineers drafted designs for the “Border Dam,” a direct precursor to what would later become the GERD. But the plan was shelved as Ethiopia slid into economic crisis, endured the Red Terror, and a war with Somalia.
Instead, the Derg turned its attention to the Tana Basin. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, the regime launched a massive resettlement program, moving hundreds of thousands of farmers from Wollo, Tigray, Kembata, Hadiya, Alaba, and other regions. The effort was fraught with logistical and humanitarian problems, but in the short term, agricultural output around Lake Tana surged.
Like his predecessors, Mengistu saw the Abbay as a strategic resource. He established Ethiopia’s first water resources research institute in Arba Minch—today Arba Minch University—turning it into a hub for hydro-engineering. He personally pushed the Tana Multi-Sectoral Development Project forward, even as civil war engulfed the country. A comprehensive development scheme, codenamed Project X, sat in the palace, a reminder of plans too ambitious to be realized amid unrelenting conflict.
By the time Mengistu’s 17-year rule collapsed in 1991, the projects remained unfinished. The Tana River hydroelectric plant, first conceived during the imperial era, was still on the drawing board.
The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which seized power that year, inherited not just a fractured country but also decades of unfulfilled plans for the Abbay.
Through war, famine, and political upheaval, the dream persisted. Each government—monarch, junta, or revolutionary—had failed to finish it, but none had let it die. The Abbay remained an unbroken thread in Ethiopia’s political imagination, an unfinished promise waiting for its moment.
From Vision to Reality
Under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia not only began rebuilding infrastructure shattered by years of war but also revived the long-held dream of turning the Abbay River into a pillar of national development. Projects that had languished under previous regimes were revived and expanded, reflecting an unusual blend of political will, technical precision, and mass mobilization.
By his final term, Ethiopia was experiencing some of the fastest economic growth in Africa. Urban skylines and rural towns alike bore signs of transformation, and with them came a renewed sense of pride. At the heart of this resurgence lay Meles’s determination to do what emperors, generals, and revolutionaries before him had only imagined: build a great dam on the Abbay.
The concept itself was not new. As far back as the 1960s, feasibility studies had proposed a “Border Dam” capable of generating 1,400 megawatts. What distinguished Meles’s approach was his resolve. Years of secretive planning culminated in a project that few outside his inner circle believed possible.
Despite Ethiopia’s meager finances and the unwillingness of international lenders—who insisted on consensus from all Nile Basin countries—Meles pressed forward. On April 1, 2011, in a remote corner of Benishangul-Gumuz, he laid the cornerstone for what was then called the “Millennium Dam.” In his speech, he defied skeptics, declaring that Ethiopia would no longer be told it could achieve nothing on the Nile without foreign blessing. The project, he proclaimed, would be built by Ethiopians, for Ethiopians.
When the dam’s name was changed to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), the word “Renaissance” was chosen deliberately. It signaled not just rebirth, but a national awakening—a bridge between Ethiopia’s ancient heritage and its modern ambitions.
Meles understood the GERD’s implications stretched beyond engineering. He sought to anchor Ethiopia within the Nile Basin Initiative, promoting cooperation among riparian states and reframing the river as a shared resource rather than a colonial inheritance.
By the time of his death in August 2012, civil works were already well underway. The GERD had become not just a government project but a people’s project—financed in part by bonds, donations, and grassroots contributions.
His successor, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, shepherded the project through its middle years. Between 2012 and 2018, new turbines were ordered, contracts secured, and construction advanced beyond the halfway mark. International negotiations intensified, culminating in the 2015 Declaration of Principles signed in Khartoum, as Egypt and Sudan voiced fears over the dam’s downstream impact. Yet domestically, the GERD only deepened its cultural roots, appearing in paintings, music, films, and rallies—its concrete walls becoming synonymous with Ethiopia’s collective imagination.
When Abiy Ahmed assumed office in 2018, the GERD entered its final phase. His premiership was marked by internal turmoil, war, and economic strain, but the dam pressed ahead. The first reservoir filling came in July 2020, followed by the second a year later and the third in 2022. In February that year, the first turbine came online, producing 375 megawatts; a second followed that August. By 2024, the fourth filling was complete, paving the way for full-scale operation.
For Ethiopians, the GERD has come to embody more than electricity. Farmers who gave up their meager savings, students who donated stipends, and workers who toiled in the heat and dust can now point to its massive silhouette and say: this is ours.
Across a century of rulers, ideologies shifted, regimes rose and fell. Yet one immovable consensus endured: Ethiopia must build its dam.
Muchlike a symphony unfinished for decades, it now reaches its crescendo.
