The Ethiopian Tribune

Editorial Front Matter  ·  Foreword & Synopsis

GERD: From Engine of Ethiopia’s Renaissance to Engine of African Peace

An essay by Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) — the twelfth and concluding article in the series

Foreword — The Bridge, and the Wall We Keep Building

For a year this newspaper has carried Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s argument in instalments, and readers have watched it accumulate into something rare in our public writing: a single, sustained case, built stone by stone, about what Ethiopia is and what it might yet become. Eleven essays traced the architecture — the Foundations of unity and a sovereign coast, the Means of broad-based development, and the Engine meant to drive them both. This twelfth and final essay turns to the Engine itself, and to the question the other eleven were circling all along: not whether the dam can be built, but whether we can build the country around it.

It arrives at an unusual moment. This month TIME’s Africa edition put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on its cover and called it the power to unite a continent — a bridge, in the magazine’s image, rather than a wall. Dr Hailu takes that mirror and turns it on us with unsparing candour: strangers see cooperation in the concrete we poured; we see, in one another, one more thing to fight over. The distance between those two visions is his subject, and he refuses every comfortable name for it — settling, in the end, on shame.

A dam can be a wall or a bridge — Ethiopia must choose the bridge.

I will not disguise where the essay lands, for the Tribune does not run it to flatter anyone, least of all ourselves. Its charge falls on all four estates of what the author has called the racket the cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit, and, not least, the pen. Among the writings it names is one this newspaper published only a week ago: Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal in the Tsimdo debate. We printed her argument in full; we now print the essay that faults it and its rival for quarrelling over how to wage a war while sparing not one line for how it ends. That is not inconsistency. It is what an independent press is for: to carry the argument and its judge alike, and to trust readers to weigh both.

What Dr Hailu leaves us with is not a lament but a blueprint five conditions under which a shared nation becomes the lived experience of ordinary people, not one of which asks any Ethiopian to surrender his language, his faith, or his pride in his people. Whether we build it is not for a newspaper to decide. But the question deserves to be put plainly, and few have put it more plainly than this.

Read it as it was written: as a wake-up.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

In the concluding essay of a twelve-part series, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu argues that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam must cease to be a monument and become an engine the physical spine of Ethiopia’s transformation, and then of its peace.

He begins from a mirror held up by outsiders: TIME’s Africa cover, The Power to Unite Africa, which reads GERD as a bridge an anchor of regional electricity trade and African integration where Ethiopians see only one more thing to fight over. That gap, he contends, is not about the dam but about the state behind it. A development engine is not self-executing; it needs a functioning institutional order to turn electricity into factories, factories into cities, and cities into a productive middle class for whom cooperation pays more than fragmentation. This is the “missing bridge” and precisely what a racket built on ethnic fear cannot supply.

Drawing on the economics of urbanisation and the arithmetic of a youth cohort of two million a year, Hailu recasts peace and development as a single question, answerable only by a national bargain in which every constituency holds a material stake that war would destroy. He sets out five conditions under which unity is actually made, impartial security, impartial delivery, the material bond, the mixing city, and an honest reckoning, none of which demands that any Ethiopian surrender his identity.

Against this he sets the “paper war” of hermitised intellectuals who argue endlessly over how to fight while never asking how the killing stops, and warns that a nation squandering GERD on ethnic conflict forfeits its seat in the age of artificial intelligence. The choice, he concludes, was never between Ethiopia’s peoples. It is between the country and the racket that farms it: the bridge, or the abyss.