AFRICANGLOBE - For many years Ethiopia wanted to build a big dam on the River Nile. The country, once a poster-boy for famine and poverty in the 1980s, had been quietly working on transforming its economy from one based on subsistence agriculture to one that manufactures things. To manufacture stuff you need cheap electricity. Ethiopia did not have enough of it. But to build a big dam on the Blue Nile, which supplies most of the water that flows on to Sudan and Egypt, meant facing obstacles and opposition from the two downstream countries. What followed is something truly remarkable.