ETHIOPIA & PRESIDENTIAL ADVISOR
9107 OU32 - Ethiopia -- Further Commercial Development and Eritrea
The biggest potential project in Ethiopia had been investigated by the Italians, on behalf of the previous government. The basis for this was Lake Tana. This is the source of the Blue Nile. It is one of the largest lakes in Africa, measuring 50 miles by 50 miles; in other words two and a half thousand square miles. It isn't particularly deep, sitting up on the Ethiopian plateau, but it contains a vast amount of water. More important, in the rainy season it receives a massive amount of rainwater, which floods downstream to create the floods on the Nile. With all this water, mind you, goes the top soil of Ethiopia; hence the brown colour. As you fly over Khartoum where the two branches - the Blue and White Nile - meet, you can clearly see the division between them; stretching for miles downstream as the muddy waters from Ethiopia mix with the clear waters from Lake Victoria.
The Tana project was quite simple. The intention was to drill a tunnel through the mountains on the north western edge of Lake Tana. This sounds expensive but the scheme would be relatively small, since the plateau very rapidly dropped off on the other side of mountains. Accordingly it was estimated to cost less than £1 billion, not much in terms of hydroelectric schemes. Better still, there was no need for any significant dams; since the vast area of Lake Tana was maintained naturally.
Having drilled the tunnel, it was then possible to divert, in effect, the Blue Nile through into Sudan. This would, of course, help irrigate the arid areas of Sudan. More important, it would have allowed the Nile water to be dropped nine thousand feet. This could have generated massive amounts of electricity. In comparison the Aswan Dam, which dropped the same Blue Nile through about 50 feet, supplied a substantial proportion of Egypt's electrical meets. From dropping this same water through something like 100-200 times as much height, it would have made this by far the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world.
Although this sounds quite marvellous there was one problem. There was no one to use the power that would have been generated. The surrounding areas -- for hundreds of miles -- were populated by poor peasant farmers They couldn't even afford candles let alone mains electricity. Accordingly, the scheme was non-viable. There was one possibility, and that was using the electricity to power energy hungry industries on-site. The output of such industries, smelting etc, could then be taken to the world markets. Again, this was blocked -- since Lake Tana sat in the middle of nowhere.
More important, after the secession of Eritrea, Ethiopia had no access to the sea. Thus, it would have been possible to run power lines over the hills to an industrial complex on the Red Sea. That would have been quite commercially feasible. The problem that then existed was that between Tigray and the Red Sea now lay an independent Eritrea. In my opinion, the Ethiopian government had made a major mistake when they allowed Eritrea to secede without any rights of access to its ports. They'd been so keen to help their wartime allies, that they had negotiated no such access agreements. Thus, the most important ports for the north of Ethiopia were now locked up in Eritrea; and, even before the war between the two, this posed an insurmountable barrier. The southern port, at Djibouti, was owned by the French and was in a very unstable area, and only had a narrow gauge railway from there to Addis. Ethiopia was, therefore, effectively landlocked in the worst possible way.
I don't know if this was the cause of the war later on. While I was there the two countries were the best friends, and in particular the two presidents were the best of personal friends. They even both did the OU MBA. I didn't run the programme in Eritrea, but I advised the group who were setting this up. So, for a time, we had tutorial groups in each of the countries - with both their presidents being taught by us. Eritrea, though, was a much more difficult country. It's government had remained Marxist, quite strictly Marxist. Although it was richer than Ethiopia, it had not commercialised itself in the same way.
One of the moves that it made, to assert its independence, was to change from using the Ethiopian birr - its previous shared national currency -- to its own version of the birr. It had expected that Ethiopia would accept this, which it did. But Ethiopia didn't accept parity between the two currencies -- and it certainly didn't want to support the Eritrean currency. This developed into a massive argument, and -- as is often the case -- it came to a climax in an argument about disputed borders. Thus the war broke out and, for a time, we had two tutorial groups who were bombing the hell out of each other.
Ethiopia for a while handled matters rather badly. Seeye had resigned from the government to go back and help run Tigray province, as some years before I had advised him to do. It was rumoured that he and the President had an argument and this was the reason for his leaving the government. Whatever the reason, and – having seen their close friendship at first hand – I very much doubted the rumours (but journalists are never happier than when promoting such garbage), he was sadly missed in the initial military moves. I began to see his hand in military matters, as he was invited back, when unusual tactics started to appear. Not least, and unpredictably, as was Seeye's wont, the battle in the north of the country - on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea - moved into the trenches; and into something like a version of the First World War, with thousands of lives being lost for just a few hundred yards of territory. This was amazing in view of military developments in modern times. However, I think the probable rationale was that Seeye demonstrating, quite brutally, to the Eritreans that when the last person in Eritrea was killed Ethiopia would still have another 50 million left to fight on.
This went on for a number of months, before Ethiopia -- presumably led by Seeye -- undertook one of his famous encircling moves and the war was in effect over. It was a tragedy that the war ever happened since it weakened both countries. More important, it vetoed the joint Lake Tana efforts which would have benefited both countries massively.
Sometime later I had some contact, through the Futures Observatory, with the South African electricity company, and discovered that they were planning to build a distribution backbone right way from South African to Egypt. As this was passing not too far away from Ethiopia I tried to persuade them to tap into the Lake Tana scheme. It would have brought massive benefits to all involved, but they already had their blinkers on and had laid out their scheme; and it didn't include Ethiopia.
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