PRESIDENT Uhuru Kenyatta has been in Ethiopia for a state visit where he has held extensive meetings with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.
He has discussed activating the Lapsset corridor and reiterated Kenya's commitment to shared development with Ethiopia.
However there has been no official reference in the joint communiques to the Gibe III dam, perhaps the single most important issue in Ethiopia as far as Kenya is concerned.
For the next five years Lake Turkana will receive virtually no water at all as the dam Gibe slowly slowly fills up. Then Ethiopia will divert 50 percent of the River Omo to irrigate 250,000 hectares of sugar plantations.
Lake Turkana will gradually dry up and reduce to two small lakes with a devastating impact on 300,000 Turkana people. The ecological disaster could spread further if dried salt from the lake is blown by the wind onto agricultural land.
It is too late to stop the Gibe dam but there is still time to mitigate the effects.
While he is in Addis, Uhuru should push Ethiopia to scale back its plans for irrigation and request them to fill up the Gibe dam over a longer period than five years.
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