Washington, DC — 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.
But David Grey says such concerns fail to appreciate the larger picture. "Egypt has made it absolutely clear that it supports any development...and that it will support and assist food production around Lake Victoria, including shifting production from Egypt."
Currently, Egypt struggles to grow enough food for its burgeoning population, and imports 50 percent of its corn, 70 percent of its beef, mostly from Argentina, and five million tons of food from Australia. Yet the regions of the upper Nile - upper referring to the source of the Nile in southern Sudan - Egypt lies in the lower Nile where it flows into the Mediterranean - are well-suited to grow much of the food that Egypt requires. Lower labor and transportation costs would result in far cheaper prices than Egypt's current imports. Thus, Egypt may see regional cooperation and development as very much in its own interest.
Much of the concern about the "equitable" distribution of Nile waters seems to stem from the fear that there will be limited resources to share in the very near future, due to the high population growth rates in the basin region. The quota system established under the Nile Treaty of 1959 allotted specific amounts of water to Sudan and Egypt each year.
Yet attempts to define specific limits and measurements to the flow of the Nile may be deceptive, and David Grey says there are many options for increasing usage of the river. "You can generate electricity where that makes sense, you grow food where that makes sense, you shift sugar and rice production from the desert up into the highlands where you do it primarily as rain-fed production." Through cooperative efforts, he says, countries can achieve a much higher level of efficiency.
The Hurdles Ahead
The Nile basin is a region in transition. Five of the ten countries are among the poorest in the world, and seven of them are engaged in or just recently emerged from civil or trans-boundary conflicts. The situation does not promise to get any easier: the population is expected to double to 600 million people in 20 years.
In addition, national sovereignty concerns, setting development and funding priorities, and the colonial origins of the 1929 and 1959 treaties may exacerbate tensions and slow dialogue. As evidenced by the members of parliament in Kenya and Uganda who insisted on declaring the1929 treaty void, the issue has the potential to rouse nationalistic sentiments. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, which are working to or consolidating multi-party democracy, politicians could exploit this issue for political gains.
Regional conflicts in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, or the ongoing Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute could also provide further barriers toward cooperation. Peace negotiations between the southern-based Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and the government in Khartoum are particularly important to the Nile initiative, not least because 60 percent of the river lies within Sudan's boundaries.
Under the peace pact currently being negotiated, an interim period of six years will begin upon formal acceptance of the treaty by the SPLA and Khartoum government, after which southern Sudan may hold a referendum to secede and form its own government.
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There has been no public discussion of how this process may affect the Nile Basin Initiative, but it is easy to imagine that the division of Sudan into multiple parts could have major consequences for regional cooperation. John Young, a Sudan analyst and author, recently noted that Egypt has always sought strong relations with the Khartoum regime. Moreover, Egyptian Ambassador to the United Nations Ahmed Abul-Gheit has declared his country's commitment to peace in Sudan - but an undivided Sudan.
The United States has also focused attention on the Sudan peace process and must tread carefully to resolve competing interests - between northern and southern Sudan, as well as between Sudan and its neighbors. If Nile distribution issues become a prominent factor in the negotiations to end the long civil war, the U.S. could find itself trying to balance its promotion of peace in Sudan with issues of equitable distribution of water, and any appearance of bias could tarnish the talks.
Similar questions could arise over possible perceptions of U.S. favoritism towards Israel. Of all the basin countries, Egypt enjoys the best relations with Washington, due to its inextricable involvement in the Mid-East peace process. Should the Bush administration end up struggling with Nile water issues, the people of the upper basin could suspect an unwelcome intrusion of American geopolitical and strategic interests into matters of water distribution.
Despite the multiple opportunities for dispute, however, the Nile Basin Initiative has continued to build trust among the riparian countries. Beginning this summer, work will begin on the first joint Nile development projects. Though the plans are small in scale, and the $130 million dollars put forth by donors will be spread among eight projects lasting several years, the collaboration is no minor achievement.
Analysts like David Grey say that if countries sharing the waterway are able to rise above the history, the poverty, and the conflict that threatens cooperative engagement, the pay-off may be significant economic development and regional peace. "This is entirely an initiative of the countries themselves," he says. "It's a part of the world that needs opportunity and hope, and the Nile can bring that hope."
