What if Egypt, Ethiopia go to war?

Egypt sees the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) – the largest hydroelectric power plant on the continent – on the Blue Nile, the feeder branch from where up to 85 per cent of the River

Nile’s waters flow, as one of the greatest threats to its survival. Egypt gets nearly all its fresh water from the Nile, and it’s a country that today exists inland largely along the river, and coastal cities on the Mediterranean and Red Sea.

From 2011 when the GERD began, amidst diplomatic jousting over the project, Egyptian hardliners have threatened to bomb it and go to war.

Ethiopia, which has now overtaken Egypt as Africa’s second most populous nation, also sees the GERD as existential, the main way it can power its way out of the grinding poverty of over 60 million of its citizens. Failing which, they will bring Ethiopia down.

GERD has already been generating power and is nearing completion. Because it has been filling with water since 2020, Egypt in reality no longer has the option to bomb it, even if it could.

The resulting floods downstream in any such event, including in Egypt, would be calamitous.

Cairo’s best option, failing a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough, is to have a puppet regime in Addis Ababa, which turns down the knob on the GERD. It’s a tough ask, but not impossible.

Events in the Horn of Africa have played into its hands. At the end of last year, Ethiopia inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the self-declared republic of Somaliland, granting it port access and a leased military base on the sea.  Somaliland is not internationally recognised, and Mogadishu sees it as an integral part of its territory.

Mogadishu was mad and has since forged close links with Egypt, seen as partly a bid to foil Ethiopia.

On August 27, Egypt sent arms, military hardware and special forces to Somalia under the terms of a military cooperation agreement the two nations had signed earlier in the month.

The action comes ahead of Egypt’s upcoming deployment of 10,000 troops to Somalia at the start of 2025 as part of the new African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), which is planned to run until 2029.

It will replace the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), which in April 2022 took over from the country’s first mission AMISOM which started in 2007.

Having boots on the ground in Somalia solves for Egypt a strategic handicap – it doesn’t share a border with Ethiopia. Now in Somalia, it is next door, and might finally have leverage.

Some analysts now fear that the worst – a war between Ethiopia and Egypt is closer.

However, the Egypt of the post-Egypt–Israel 1979 peace treaty is a cautious one, despite the frequent chest-thumping and sabre-rattling by hardliners and nationalists. This is evident in its posture toward the conflict in Libya, and more recently in the Israel-Palestine war.

Still, should it come to war, what would the neighbourhood nations, especially Kenya, do? Or rather, what should Kenya fear the most from such an outcome?

For starters, Ethiopia would most definitely fight the war in Somalia too.

The still-fragile government in Mogadishu would probably collapse quickly, and the militant Al-Shabaab, riding a wave of Somali nationalism – which is anti-Ethiopian and anti-Egyptian – would emerge as the dominant political force. Somaliland’s independence, which Mogadishu is currently working to stem, would harden.

Kenya would have a huge new Somali refugee problem, a large influx of small arms, and a foe, Al-Shabaab, in control in Mogadishu.

The war could also cause a major crisis in Ethiopia, whether or not the government in Addis Ababa prevails, and Kenya would have another refugee flood from there.

Egypt would have to supply its forces through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and without a navy to contest it, Ethiopia would lose use of the critical port of Djibouti and Berbera port in Somaliland.

Its main lifeline would become Kenya’s Lamu port, which is already growing in strategic importance for Ethiopia. 

Opportunistically, for Kenya, it would be a boost, with the possibility that the development of  Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) would accelerate as a “war corridor”, given that South Sudan is looking to diversify its oil exports from Sudan where it has been disrupted by war.

For Nairobi, both neutrality and making common cause with Ethiopia would be good business. It would only be left with dealing with the new refugee inflow, and figuring out how to do business with Al-Shabaab, or how to fight a Somalia led by it.