Political Vulnerability and the Origins of the EPRDF’s Dams Boom

This chapter focuses on the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF’s) first two decades in office from 1991 to 2010, analysing the government’s development strategy and the role of electricity within it, and the spatial distribution of the government’s dam building. The chapter shows that the motivation for the EPRDF’s dams boom can be located in the government’s broader approach to development. For the new government, rapid, broad-based development was considered essential to addressing the political vulnerability facing the regime, with industrialization and the mass creation of manufacturing jobs key to its political survival. The government’s ambitions regarding the electricity sector largely stem from this goal of structural transformation. Moreover, given its central importance to the EPRDF’s economic project, the government considered the retention of electricity and a handful of key economic sectors under state control to be a necessity.