Addis Ababa, September 23, 2026 (FMC) — There is an old wisdom in the idea that one who drinks from another’s well should not presume to own the spring. It captures, in simple terms, a principle that is increasingly difficult to miss in the Abbay dispute: benefiting from what flows from another country does not confer the right to enter that country’s house, rearrange its rooms or dictate how its resources should be used.
That is precisely where Egypt’s long-running posture toward Ethiopia deserves a closer look.
The two countries are separated by geography, borders and sovereign jurisdiction. The connection between them is the Abbay and the wider river system into which its waters eventually flow. Ethiopia is therefore not asking Egypt to surrender its own territory, nor is it seeking to regulate what happens inside Egyptian borders. Ethiopia is developing a resource within Ethiopia, on Ethiopian territory, primarily to generate electricity for a population that has long faced a severe energy deficit.
And there is an important fact that should never be lost amid the political noise: the turbine takes the energy from the water; it does not take the water out of the river.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is a hydropower project on the Abbay in Ethiopia. Its purpose is to generate electricity from the movement of water. The water released from the dam continues downstream. Ethiopia has consistently presented the project as one intended to generate development while enabling benefits across the basin, rather than as a mechanism for permanently consuming the water.
This is where the logic of zero-sum thinking begins to unravel.
If Ethiopia can generate electricity from the Abbay while the water continues downstream, then Ethiopia’s gain does not automatically have to be Egypt’s loss. A light switched on in an Ethiopian home does not require a light to go out in an Egyptian one. A factory powered in Ethiopia does not inherently mean a factory in Egypt must stop. Development need not be a pie from which one country can eat only by leaving another hungry.
Yet the language surrounding the dispute too often turns cooperation into competition and shared benefit into a contest of winners and losers.
Egypt has repeatedly insisted on a legally binding framework governing GERD operations and has maintained that its dependence on the river requires strong safeguards. Those concerns deserve to be heard. But hearing a concern is not the same as granting a veto.
The historical record makes the sovereignty question even harder to evade. The 1929 Anglo-Egyptian arrangement and the 1959 Egypt-Sudan agreement established allocations for Egypt and Sudan without Ethiopia as a party. The 1959 agreement allocated 55.5 billion cubic metres to Egypt and 18.5 billion cubic metres to Sudan. Ethiopia and other upstream states have rejected the notion that those bilateral arrangements can determine their rights.
That is not a minor technical disagreement. It goes to the heart of whether an arrangement made without a sovereign country’s participation can later be invoked to supervise that country’s development.
One cannot write the rules of another household and then knock on its door demanding obedience.
Ambassador Zerihun Abebe, Director General of African Affairs at Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, captured the absurdity with characteristic diplomatic wit after the latest Egyptian statements. Addressing Egyptian Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Hani Sewilam, he offered to arrange “a tailored crash course on ‘International Law 101,’” focused specifically on the sovereign rights of states over their natural resources.
The humor carries a serious point.
International relations are not a landlord-and-tenant arrangement in which one state possesses the authority to inspect the plans of another sovereign state simply because something originating there eventually crosses a border.
The Abbay does not become Egyptian territory because its waters continue toward Egypt. Nor does Ethiopia cease to exercise sovereign rights over its natural resources merely because those resources form part of a transboundary system.
The irony becomes even sharper when the benefits of Ethiopia’s development are considered.
Ethiopia has spent enormous national resources to construct GERD, while its electricity deficit has constrained households, businesses and industrial expansion. The project is part of a broader Ethiopian effort to convert natural resources into productive capacity, expand electricity access and build an economy capable of supporting a rapidly growing population.
At the same time, Ethiopia has argued that GERD can generate downstream benefits through regulated flows, flood mitigation, reduced evaporation and improved water management.
So what exactly is the proper response to a country that develops its own resource while maintaining that the resource continues downstream?
Is it gratitude for the additional energy and regulated flows that can benefit the basin? Is it cooperation to maximize those benefits? Or is it another demand that the upstream country first obtain permission to develop itself?
The choice matters because the second path builds a basin of shared prosperity, while the third keeps the region trapped in a contest over who gets to hold the keys.
There is another old expression worth remembering: you cannot eat your cake and have it too.
Egypt cannot simultaneously insist that the Abbay is a shared resource requiring cooperation and treat Ethiopia’s sovereign development rights as though they were subordinate to Egyptian approval. Shared resources call for shared responsibility, not transferred sovereignty.
Nor should Ethiopia’s development be portrayed as though it were an act of taking something from Egypt. Ethiopia is not diverting the Abbay into a private reservoir and sealing the gates. It is harnessing the river to produce electricity, while the water continues its journey.
The distinction is fundamental.
A person may benefit from what comes out of another household without acquiring the right to decide what happens inside that household. One may be grateful for the water from another’s well without demanding the keys to the well. One may receive the bounty without becoming the gatekeeper.
That is the principle Egypt should consider.
And Ethiopia has little reason to apologize for using the resources within its sovereign territory to improve the lives of its people. The country’s development cannot remain frozen simply because another state has grown accustomed to a historical pattern of water use.
The old Nile order was constructed at a time when the development needs and voices of upstream African countries were largely absent from the arrangements that shaped it. Today, those countries are sovereign states with growing populations, energy needs and legitimate development ambitions. The search for a durable basin order therefore cannot simply be a quest to preserve one side’s inherited advantage indefinitely.
That does not mean Egypt’s interests should be dismissed. They should be placed within a framework in which Ethiopian development and Egyptian water security can coexist.
Ethiopia’s position has repeatedly been that cooperation, mutual benefit and equitable utilization are preferable to confrontation. The country has also rejected what its Ministry of Water and Energy has described as threats and attempts to undermine Ethiopia, while calling for relations among the riparian states to be conducted on equal terms.
The broader lesson is therefore simple.
The house that generates the bounty has a right to live in it. The guest who benefits from what leaves that house has a right to appreciation, not possession.
The Abbay can generate Ethiopian electricity and continue downstream. Ethiopia can develop without depriving Egypt of its existence. Egypt can safeguard its water interests without attempting to turn those interests into authority over Ethiopia.
That is not a zero-sum proposition.
It is the difference between partnership and prescription, between cooperation and control, and between respecting sovereignty and attempting to rearrange another country’s house from afar.
The Abbay should be a bridge between development aspirations, not a pretext for one country to dictate the affairs of another.
And if Egypt truly believes in cooperation, shared interests and mutual benefit, then perhaps the most constructive response to Ethiopia’s development is not to stand at the door with a list of instructions, but to recognize that a stronger, better-connected and more prosperous upstream Ethiopia can be an asset to the entire basin.
The water keeps flowing. So should the benefits. What must stop is the presumption that receiving the flow gives anyone the keys to the source.