allAfrica.com: Africa: The Nile River: Building or Stumbling Block? (Page 1 of 2)

The Nile River, long a trans-border artery linking 10 African countries, has become a major challenge for the nations that share its waters. The distribution of Nile waters has been a source of dispute and strained relations for many decades. Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian whose country sits at the river's mouth, predicted 16 years ago that the next regional war would be over the waters of the Nile.

But the Nile is also a source of vast untapped potential for one of the world's poorest regions. The Nile Basin Initiative is a cooperative and trust-building arrangement among the Nile basin countries to see that potential realized. As those countries - Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo - attempt to establish a framework for maximizing the benefits of the Nile, they will be shaping their own futures.

Potentially Volatile...

Not for the first time, colonial history has been a source of controversy. The Nile Treaty of 1929 between Egypt and Great Britain, who signed on behalf of its East African colonies, gave full control of the river and its sources to Egypt. A revised treaty of 1959 divided ownership of Nile waters between Egypt and Sudan by metric volume, with the bulk going to the former. Under this arrangement, countries are barred from developing or diverting flow that may lower the volume of water reaching Egypt.

The treaty's legality has long been a point of contention. But tensions reached a new peak in recent months, following media reports in December that Kenya had unilaterally renounced the 1929 accord. Subsequent reports claimed that Egypt's water minister Mahmoud Abu-Zeid had described Kenya's withdrawal as "an act of war."

Soon afterwards, Tanzania began diverting water from Lake Victoria, and Ugandan parliamentarians began calling for their country's rejection of the treaty. Assessments of the likelihood of Egyptian retributive military strikes on Kenya and Tanzania appeared in the east African press, as did angry opinion pieces denouncing the injustice of the treaty as a "colonial relic."

At the same time, these angry words contradicted a blossoming cooperative atmosphere among Nile basin countries. The Egyptian water minister quickly and vehemently denied any "act of war" statement, and the Ethiopian water minister, who was with his Egyptian counterpart at the time of the comment, concurred that the Egyptian official had been grossly misquoted.

Meanwhile, Kenya's water minister attributed the treaty-renunciation announcement to an ill-informed ministry representative and praised the excellent relations between Kenya and Egypt. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni dismissed parliamentarians' propositions on the Nile Treaty as "childish demands," and the Egyptian and Tanzanian water ministers traveled together around Lake Victoria discussing agricultural investment and development.

Moreover, all this took place as water ministers of Nile basin countries were due to hold the 12th annual meeting of the Nile Council of Ministers (Nile-COM), the highest decision-making body of the Nile Basin Initiative. After the mid-March meeting in Nairobi, the ministers released a statement saying their governments were committed and ready to invest, financially and politically, in mutually beneficial river development.

"We own the NBI - it belongs to our countries and our people - it is not an initiative of donors," the statement said. "We all believe that by moving together to major joint development, we can look forward to peace and prosperity and not backwards to dispute and conflict."

The statement also challenged press reports of fraying relations, arguing that "in order to do this, we need our domestic media - and the international media - to listen and to learn about what we are doing, and to report it responsibly."

...Potentially Valuable

So is the Nile Treaty of 1929 reconcilable with the Nile Basin Initiative? "That is truly, truly the wrong question with regards to the Nile Basin Initiative," says David Grey, World Bank Senior Water Advisor and manager of the multi-donor team that supports the pact.

Grey acknowledged that the 1929 agreement's "validity is hotly debated, if one chooses to debate it." But he says the idea behind the Nile Basin Initiative is that the treaty does not need to be the starting point for regional dialogue and cooperation.

The initiative has set neither specific goals nor dates by which to achieve them. Instead, According to Grey, the NBI "seems more focused on building trust on mutually agreeable projects, even if those projects will not translate into rapid growth and development for the populations of the Nile. The NBI's goal is just to negotiate a legal framework for discussing and establishing development projects, and that has yet to be attained in its seven years of existence."

Many people question the feasibility of such cooperation, since Egypt may see no national interest in relinquishing control of the Nile. The river is Egypt's only major source of water in an otherwise parched nation, and its economic and military strength far exceeds that of the other Nile countries.

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