Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Ethiopia opens a controversial dam on the Nile River, South Sudan’s military seizes key towns amid conflict with a rival group, and Kenya’s president hires a U.S. lobbying firm to do his bidding in Washington.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Ethiopia opens a controversial dam on the Nile River, South Sudan’s military seizes key towns amid conflict with a rival group, and Kenya’s president hires a U.S. lobbying firm to do his bidding in Washington.

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Ethiopia opened Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam on Tuesday, ending Egypt’s majority control of the Nile River. The controversial $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which took 14 years to build, aims to double Ethiopia’s power generation and increase electricity access for around 60 million Ethiopians who lack it.

Ethiopia also plans to sell cheap electricity generated by the 5,150-megawatt-capacity GERD to Kenya, Tanzania, and Djibouti, through which the Ethiopian government is aiming to create $427 million in export revenue this fiscal year. Kenyan President William Ruto attended the dam’s inauguration.

But not everyone is happy about the GERD—especially not Egypt, which relies on the Nile for around almost all of its freshwater supply. Some 80 percent of the river’s waters originate in Ethiopia, and Egypt says that the GERD threatens its water security. Cairo previously floated the idea of military intervention against Ethiopia to stop its construction.

In a letter to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Egypt warned that it would take action to defend “the existential interests of its people.” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty wrote that “any misconceptions that Cairo would turn a blind eye” to its interests in the Nile are “mere delusions.”

Egypt long controlled the majority of the Nile’s waters under a 1929 treaty between the United Kingdom and Egypt, then under partial British colonial rule; the treaty granted Egypt veto power on Nile construction projects, even those beyond its borders. Sudan later signed a 1959 agreement with Egypt, which increased Egypt’s share of the Nile’s flow from about 57 percent to about 66 percent.

However, upstream nations—including Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia—had zero share of the river’s water resources and argued that they could not be bound by colonial-era agreements that excluded them. By 2024, five of these countries had signed a new treaty, which was rejected by Egypt and Sudan.

With the GERD, Ethiopia now exerts control over the Nile. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed........

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