Ethiopia has gone through very difficult stages in the Renaissance Dam project, and was able to reach the final steps from it and start filling it even without an agreement with Egypt and Sudan, which led to the escalation of the dispute, especially between Cairo and Addis Ababa.
Although Egypt has exhausted most of its political options represented in direct negotiation, the intervention of the United States as a mediator, and the resort to the African Union and then requested the intervention of the United Nations Security Council, Cairo has issued only faint indications of the possibility of using military force to resolve the matter, including the statements of Egyptian Minister of Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Al-Atti to the parliament in which he said that Cairo will not stand idle by the Renaissance Dam, and that it does not play the role of spectator.
The Egyptian Middle East News Agency also reported that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi met on Sunday with the National Defense Council and discussed the overall political, security and military situations on all strategic directions of the state.
However, the option of using military force seems unlikely until now in light of Cairo not getting any real support for its position, especially from its allies in the region who are pushing it to another military intervention in Libya instead of supporting it in ensuring its water security.
On the other hand, we find that Ethiopia has announced more than once its willingness to go to war to defend its project, and it appears that the confidence that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abe Ahmed speaks comes from receiving real international and regional support that pushed him to move forward with the dam project.
But what is surprising is that the military cuff tends completely in favor of Egypt, and there is a huge gap in the numbers between the capabilities of the two armies.
In this report, we will monitor some features of the power of the two countries and their arrangement on the international economic, military and human ladder.
The people of the two countries ... between harmony and complexity
The difference between the two countries appears clear in the biomass represented in the land and the population. Despite the convergence in area and population in the two countries, the cuff tends to favor Egypt in terms of illiteracy, unemployment, poverty and per capita income.
Egypt also excels in terms of demography in terms of the homogeneity of its people, as the vast majority of them are Sunni Arabs, while Ethiopia is divided into dozens of minorities, national ethnicities, languages and religions.
On the human side as well, the issue of population distribution may tend to geography in favor of Ethiopia, as the population there is distributed all over the country and the complex geographic nature, which has historically formed a protection for it from external invasions, while in Egypt, there is about 95% of the population on the banks of the Nile And in the delta, which makes up less than 10% of the country.
Economy .. optimistic numbers and bitter reality
Economically, the two countries have recently won international praises regarding their economic performance. The Ethiopian economy ranks among the fastest growing economies in the world, and is considered the fastest growing on the African continent level, according to the International Monetary Fund.
In its annual report in 2019, the fund said that Ethiopia is implementing an ambitious reform program under the leadership of Prime Minister Abi Ahmed, and it is heading towards record growth at 7.4% this year, and this will slow slightly to 7.2% in 2020.
In Egypt, the World Economic Outlook Update report released by the International Monetary Fund last month indicates that the rate of growth of the Egyptian economy in the past fiscal year 2018/2019 had increased by 5.6%, compared to 5.3% in the previous fiscal year.
But there is a real gap between the data presented globally and the reality experienced by citizens in both countries, where poverty rates rise to affect about a third of the population, while the second third is threatened, and unemployment rates are high in them, as it reaches 12% in Egypt, while it exceeds in Ethiopia 18%.
As for foreign debt, the Central Bank of Egypt announced that the volume of foreign debts owed on Egypt increased to about $ 112.67 billion at the end of December 2019, while official data revealed that the volume of external debt to Ethiopia increased to about $ 50 billion.
While the nominal GDP in Egypt is about 302 billion dollars, the average per capita income does not exceed 3105 dollars annually, while in Ethiopia the gross domestic product reaches about 91 billion dollars, while the per capita annual income does not exceed one thousand dollars.
Militarily, a clear Egyptian supremacy
Most of the military data available on several reliable websites - including the CIA's factbook and the military's Globalfirepower site - clearly indicates the military's superiority Al-Masry, who is ranked by number nine in the world in the list of the strongest armies in the world for 2020, while the Ethiopian army ranks 60th out of 138 countries.
The defense budget of the Egyptian army is about 11.2 billion dollars annually compared to 350 million dollars for the Ethiopian defense budget, while the number of soldiers in the Egyptian army is 920 thousand soldiers, of whom 440 thousand are in service and 480 thousand in reserve, and the Ethiopian army has a total of 162 thousand soldiers, and no soldiers Reserve.
With regard to the Air Force, Egypt has 1054 various military aircraft, including 215 combat aircraft, and 294 military helicopters, while the Ethiopian army owns only 86 aircraft, including 24 fighters, 33 military helicopters, and 8 attack helicopters.
As for land, the Egyptian army possesses a huge fleet of tanks amounting to 4,300 tanks, and a huge number of armored vehicles up to 11 thousand and 700 armored vehicles, in addition to 1039 self-propelled guns, and more than 2189 field guns, in addition to 1100 missile launchers, and thus clearly outperforms its counterpart Which has 400 tanks and 114 armored vehicles in addition to 67 self-propelled guns only.
The Egyptian naval fleet includes 320 marine ships, including two aircraft carriers, 7 cruisers and 4 submarines, in addition to 50 patrol ships and 9 frigates.
On the other hand, Ethiopia does not have a naval fleet because it is a landlocked country, but reports indicate that its naval fleet will be modernized by French companies, and it will have a sea view through the ports of Djibouti, according to agreements signed recently between the two countries.