Irrigation Minister Mohamed Abdel Muttalib said on Thursday that Egypt will not recognize the Entebbe Convention.
“The Nile in Egypt will not dry out, and Ethiopia does not realize the importance of the Egyptian proposals to resolve the outstanding differences on the Renaissance Dam,” he noted.
The minister also said the government has developed scenarios to face Ethiopia’s intransigence so as to ensure Egypt’s rights to the Nile water. “We will announce those scenarios soon,” he said.
“We will waste no more time on negotiations,” he said. “We will only talk again if Ethiopia has something new to say about our proposals.”
Egypt proposed to halt the construction of the dam until studies are completed under Ethiopia’s conditions within a year at the most. Also, international experts should follow the work of the Tripartite Commission of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia that is responsible for the technical studies of the dam.
“Ethiopia did not involve the member states and started to build the dam unilaterally, exploiting the conditions Egypt has been going through since the January revolution,” Abdel Muttalib said.
He explained that The Nile Basin Initiative discussed the possibility of building two dams on the Blue Nile, namely the Border Dam to store 14 billion cubic meters of water and the Mandaya Dam to store 49.5 billion cubic meters.
Six states had signed the framework agreement in 2010 and 2011, namely Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. They said that they sought a fair redistribution of the Nile water, as the downstream states of Egypt and Sudan enjoy the lion's share as per an agreement signed under the British occupation.
