Alaa Mubarak criticizes the comparison of the High Dam to the Renaissance Dam and describes it as an “extremely stupid fallacy.”

Alaa Mubarak, in a blog post on the “X” platform on Saturday, considered that using the High Dam to compare with the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is “an extremely stupid fallacy” that ignores the nature of the Nile River and the rules regulating cross-border rivers.

Read more

An upcoming summit between the leaders of Egypt, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea amid disagreements and the outbreak of war in Ethiopia

He said that it was “extremely strange” for an upstream country to ask a downstream country for an explanation for the construction of the High Dam without its approval, considering that presenting the issue in this way reveals, as he put it, “flagrant ignorance of the geographical nature of the river” or is a desperate attempt to justify non-compliance with the agreements and laws regulating the movement of rivers.

He explained that the Nile River naturally moves from the south, where it has its source areas, towards the north, where its downstream countries are, due to gravity and the laws of physics, indicating that this geographic fact cannot be compared to the situation of an upstream country implementing a project on a cross-border river course.

Alaa Mubarak considered that relying on the construction of the High Dam as an argument in the debate over the Renaissance Dam represents an “extremely stupid fallacy,” stressing that the mere presence of a dam in the downstream country does not mean that the legal and geographical conditions for its construction match the conditions for constructing a dam in the upstream country.

Alaa Mubarak's statements come as a comment on the statements of the Ethiopian Water Minister regarding the High Dam, at a time when the Renaissance Dam file still represents one of the most prominent areas of disagreement between Egypt and Ethiopia, as Cairo adheres to the need to take into account the rights of the two downstream countries and not take unilateral measures that would harm their water interests.

While Egypt affirms that the Nile River is a shared, cross-border water resource, and that any projects along its course should not harm the two downstream countries, Ethiopia adheres to exploiting its water resources within the framework of what it considers a sovereign right to development.