Averting the Nile problem

June 12, 2013

A little over two years ago, I decided to respond as an individual member of the Ethiopian Diaspora to long running criticisms on this group on a particular website. The website appears to be an uncritical supporter of the government of the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. I sent my reaction to four Ethiopian websites that I believed to be independent. I titled my article “An insight from an Ethiopian Diaspora”. The main message was to suggest that the lump sum criticisms against the Ethiopian Diaspora were unfair.

Various anonymous comments at nazret.com quickly spun my article from a response to the unabated criticisms of the Ethiopian Diaspora to my short comments in passant about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), named the Ethiopian Grand Millennium Dam at the time. The comments were closed before I got a chance to respond to them.

At the beginning of my article, I suggested that I tried to be judicious about the planned dam when I was invited to give an opinion about it. One of my short references to the dam, which wasn’t an objection to its construction, became evident in the renaming of the dam though it is not clear to me if this is by coincidence.

Following a recent completion of a study by an international panel of experts about the impact of the dam, we have been hearing in the international media regarding Egypt’s concerns about this dam. A very recent meeting between the president of Egypt and its opposition political leaders, which was reportedly broadcast live to the public, indicates a murky situation there about the dam that is under construction.

In the midst of these discussions, I feel compelled to set the above record straight and wish to extend my professional invitation to hydrologists in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, and the Nile Basin at large to look into the possibility of using science to help avert the Nile Problem.

A recent work in California (Ejeta, 2012, 2013) has uncovered an association of hydrological variability on earth and analogous orbital geometries of the earth and moon.
Nile flow data for the 1871-1970 period (Hipel and McLeod, 1994) shows that it averages about 92 cubic kilometers annually and varies from 46 to 137 cubic kilometers. The uncovered association is likely to help the long-term predictability of the flow of the Nile with some level of certainty.

Though this finding is just emerging and its robustness for the Nile basin remains to be seen, it points to a scientific direction in which our hydrologists in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt can put concerted efforts to help avert the Nile Problem.

What is for sure is that if this finding is proven to be robust enough for the Nile basin, it will open a new approach for future operations of the GERD in Ethiopia and Aswan High Dam (AHD) in Egypt. New regulatory provisions that consider more storage in the GERD during wetter years for higher releases to Egypt during drier years may ameliorate the Nile Problem.

The writer can be reached at MZEjeta at aol.com

References

Ejeta, M. Z. (2013), Validation of predicted meteorological drought in California using analogous orbital geometries, Hydrological Processes (accepted)

Ejeta, M. Z. (2012), Step toward a Deterministic Solution of the Paradoxical Hydrological Stationarity Problem, Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol. 17, No. 3, 424-430

Hipel, K. W. and A. I. McLeod (1994), Timeseries Modelling of Water Resources and Environmental Systems, Elsevier, Amsterdam