Fifteen years to the day after making this statement, on 2 April 2011, MelesZenawi laid the foundation stone for what would become the Grand EthiopianRenaissance Dam (GERD), domestically funded and, at 5,150 megawatts (MW)of installed capacity and 74 billion cubic metres of water storage, one of the largestdams in the world. As Turkey had unilaterally built a series of dams upstream onthe trans…