Ethiopia announced the postponement of the tripartite negotiations on the Renaissance Dam to August 17, after resuming for a short time on Monday.
The Ethiopian announcement came in response to the wish of the Sudanese team, which requested that the negotiations be postponed for a week due to internal consultations procedures, and at the same time revealed that it had noticed a new convergence between the positions of Egypt and Ethiopia.
Yesterday, Monday, the Sudanese Ministry of Irrigation said, "The negotiations on filling and operating the Grand Prix Dam were resumed this afternoon at the invitation of the African Union and in the presence of experts and observers."
The statement added, "The Sudanese delegation requested at the beginning of the session to postpone the negotiations for a week to continue the internal consultations conducted by the negotiating team."
Last week, Sudan received an Ethiopian proposal to link the operation agreement of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to a comprehensive agreement on sharing the waters of the Blue Nile.
The Ministry of Irrigation statement clarified that the request for the postponement is related to "developments in the negotiations in recent times."
A statement by the Ethiopian Ministry of Irrigation and Water stated that the three countries were expected to submit their report to the President of the African Union within two weeks, but that the period elapsed without actual negotiations due to Egypt's and Sudan's request to suspend negotiations.
As for the Egyptian side, it affirmed its readiness to resume negotiations on the basis of the results of the mini-African summit and the ministerial meeting on the third of August.
The African mini-summit called for negotiations to reach a binding agreement on the rules for filling and operating the Renaissance Dam.
Convergence and fluid position
In the same context, Sudanese Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Yasser Abbas said that they, as a Sudanese delegation, recently noticed an Ethiopian-Egyptian rapprochement during the last round of negotiations, which raised the interest of the Sudanese side.
The minister described the issue of the exchange of summoning ambassadors between Cairo and Addis Baba as a fluid position.
The minister added that the return to the negotiating table is bound by Ethiopia to withdraw its proposal at the beginning of this month, which contains a new agenda for negotiation, a proposal that the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Dina Mufti, had originally denied.
The Grand Renaissance Dam is a source of tension between Ethiopia on the one hand, and Egypt and Sudan on the other.
And it is expected to become the largest facility to generate electricity from water in Africa. Ethiopia is building it on the Blue Nile, which meets the White Nile in Khartoum to form the Nile River.
Ethiopia considers the dam necessary to achieve economic development, while Egypt considers it a vital threat to it, as the Nile River is a source of more than 95% of the country's irrigation and drinking water.
In recent months, the dispute over the dam has escalated as Ethiopia continues to prepare to fill the reservoir, which holds 74 billion cubic meters of water.
Despite the objections of Egypt and Sudan, Ethiopia announced on July 21 that it had completed the first phase of filling the reservoir, amounting to 4.9 billion cubic meters, which allows testing the first two turbines in the dam.