Author: Robbert Woltering
To think of the Nile, is to think of Egypt. But while Cairo is adamant that this should remain so, no less than nine other countries are disputing Egypt’s dominance over the world’s longest river. The region is trying to talk it through at several meetings this month.
Where ten states fight for water
The trouble with the Nile waters was bound to rear its head sooner or later, and that is why the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999. The NBI is formed by a number of NGO’s and the ten riparian states. This week’s meetings in Entebbe between experts FROM all over the region and beyond, are expected to lay the groundwork for a meeting at the ministerial level later this month in Nairobi. Reportedly, Egypt will consider any unilateral breach of her water rights an act of war.
It is not illogical to consider Egypt and the Nile to be a siamese twins of sorts. With the exception of a few desert dwellers, all 65 million Egyptians are completely dependent on the Nile for their water. All the food produced in Egypt has ‘drunk of the Nile’, and it has been that way for thousands of years. But as can be expected of the longest river on earth, the Nile’s flow is not limited to Egypt alone.
The Nile in its full glory is formed at the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where the Blue Nile and the White Nile merge. Yet these tributaries also stretch beyond state borders: the Blue Nile emerges FROM the Ethiopian Highlands, the White Nile sets out FROM Lake Victoria, which is shared by Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In turn, the lake is dependent on the rivers that originate in the Congo, Burundi and Ruanda. And nearly all these states are eyeing the waters of the Nile ever more eagerly, as they try to cope with a rising shortage of electricity or food for their rising populations.
As the peace process in the Sudan gradually eliminates the civil war, policy makers in Khartoum start to look at the future. With the money generated by rising oil exports, ambitious plans come within reach. Sudan is troubled by great shortages of electricity and food, and these can be replenished through use of the Nile. Hydroelectricity and food production will emerge FROM dams and irrigation works that reduce the volume of the Nile waters reaching Egypt.
But where Sudan proves a problem for Egypt, Ethiopia is a potential catastrophe. Sudan’s food shortages are nothing compared with those in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is far less amenable to Egyptian manipulation. Ethiopian water supply to the Nile is no less than sixty percent of the total volume speeding North FROM Khartoum. And where Sudan could be persuaded to use its riches in oil for food imports (and thus mitigate the use of Nile water for irrigation), Ethiopia has no option but to develop its agrarian industry. This will force it to make intensive use of the Nile for irrigation. For a comprehensive irrigation system one needs a certain degree of stability. Central co-ordination is indispensable for maintaining canals and water quality. As Ethiopia is recovering FROM the war with Eritrea the moment closes in when it is capable of launching a large scale irrigation project. The question is, how will Egypt react to that?
A similar dilemma is at hand with Kenya. Although Kenyan use of water FROM Lake Victoria would extract less water FROM the Nile than in the case of Ethiopia, the problem with Kenya is much more acute. Kenya is stable enough to start an irrigation scheme today or tomorrow. Foreign investors will not be hard to find, because Kenya has a relatively good reputation (it has not witnessed a single coup d’etat), in particular since the ousting of the corrupt regime of President Moi in recent elections.
The other states involved with the Nile do not so much clamour for irrigation water, but eye the Nile for hydroelectricity. Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda all wish to build installations that would affect the Nile. Of these countries, particularly Uganda (again: a relatively stable country) is to Egypt a ‘concern-bearing state’.
The Nile water controversy has a longer history. In 1929, a treaty was signed to regulate the sharing of Nile water between the countries. However, the parties to the treaty were Egypt, Ethiopia and the British, the latter being the colonial authority over Sudan Uganda, Kenya etc... A revision of the treaty was signed in 1959, when Sudan had become independent (but not the other states). The treaty stipulates that Sudan can use up to 18 percent of Nile waters, and that Egypt can count on the remaining 82 per cent. The other states are forbidden to do anything that may diminish the Nile water’s volume or quality. After the wave of independence in the 1960’s, the sub-Saharan states dismissed the treaty. However, Egypt has never did accepted the annulment.
This puts Egypt in a rather awkward position. Especially under Nasser, Egypt presented itself as the leader of anti-colonialism, in particular in the African context. Yet when it comes to the waters of the Nile, Egypt clings to the colonial past and in fact demands that part of it remains in effect: the unequal division of waters that resulted FROM an unequal balance of power.
The conflict over the Nile sollicits the question as to whether we have entered the long fore-told era of the water wars. Theories concerning future water wars in the Middle East and North Africa are often clad in a somewhat apocalyptic discourse. But then, perhaps this is intrinsic to all predictions of war. For instance, water war ‘believers’ have a tendency to present conflicts FROM the past in a hydrological setting (e.g. The Six Day War in Israel, the Iran-Iraq War, but also the Fashoda Showdown between England and France in 1898). Nevertheless, and unfortunately, the prospect of water wars cannot simply be ignored. Water is the core of life, and where there is too little of it, people die. In water-rich areas this may seem a truism of mind-numbing simplicity but in areas where the source of all available water is concentrated in one single river, it may appeal to a much more fundamentally perceived essence of life. Then, even apart FROM the question whether urgent water shortages will arise, there is a ready-to-use sense of fear at the disposal of governments and opposition groups alike to mobilise people. Now that nearly all countries of the Nile basin have made public their plans for irrigation and/or hydro-electricity generation, and knowing that all these countries are dealing with a continuing growth in population, it must be feared that international relations in North and East Africa will acquire a new component: that of water scarcity.
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