Egypt Struggles to Reclaim Role In Africa
As tensions heat up between Egypt and Ethiopia regarding a major Ethiopian dam on the Nile, Egypt is seeking to reassert itself, writes Abdelrahman Youssef.
Egypt’s diplomacy has noticeably focused on African affairs during the past month, an unprecedented development in the nine months since President Mohammed Morsi came to power. It represents an exceedingly important turn of events as it relates to two main arteries providing Egypt with life. The first is the Nile river, without which Egypt would not exist, and around the basin of which other countries thrive. The second is the Suez Canal, Egypt’s largest source of national income, itself tightly linked to the Bab el-Mandeb strait and Somalia’s coast.
The intense diplomatic activity in this regard saw Prime Minister Hesham Kandil visit South Sudan, while Morsi visited the north and Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr went to Somalia to inaugurate the opening of the Egyptian Embassy in Mogadishu following its move there from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. In parallel, a delegation of Somalia’s Muslim Brotherhood visited the Egyptian Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie in Cairo.
Dr. Hamdi Abdel Rahman, a professor of political science and African studies, analyzed this shift for Al-Monitor, saying that the Egyptian regime’s current moves came late, especially considering the ongoing geo-strategic changes that Western nations are striving to impose in East Africa and the Nile Basin. The reasons for these changes have to do with combating so-called Islamic fundamentalist forces in Africa, as well as other issues relating to petroleum and the fight against the ever-increasing Chinese influence in the region.
Furthermore, the secession of South Sudan and other regional arrangements concerning Somalia have posed risks for Egypt while bolstering the strategic importance of non-Arab regional countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya. In this regard, Abdel Rahman cited Ethiopia’s insistence on adopting a dam-building strategy and moving ahead with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, as well as becoming a signatory to the Nile Basin Initiative adopted in Entebbe. Ethiopia signed this initiative despite Egyptian objections to such an agreement, which allows countries upstream of the Nile to build water projects and dams without deference to the downstream countries Egypt and Sudan. This threatens these two countries’ historical Nile water quotas as prescribed in the 1959 agreement, which gives Egypt a share estimated to total 55 billion cubic meters of water annually.
