Lining up for water in Ethiopia, a nation hard hit by periodic droughts
since the 1970s.
Nile
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River
flows
Nile
Length: 6,693
km from its remotest headstream, the Luvironza River, Burundi; 5,588 km from its
major source, Lake Victoria in East Africa
Mouth: Mediterranean Sea
Countries: Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya,
Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda
Population around the basin: 89 million
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Water
always flows toward the areas of least resistance.
Moses
Isegawa,
Ugandan writer (1963-)
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Guzzled
by Egypt but generated in Ethiopia, the waters of the Blue Nile have long been a
source of sabre-rattling. A new plan might finally put an end to the spectre of a
river war
Legend has it that at
the time of the pharaohs, the people of Egypt sent gifts up the Nile to the kingdom
of Ethiopia to placate the Gods that fed the river’s source. Egypt had, and remains
to have, good reason to be grateful: some 86 percent of the water that flows down
the Blue Nile to irrigate the arid North African country emanates from floodplains
on Ethiopian territory.
Yet the one-way river flow between Egypt and Ethiopia—as might be expected between
a country that craves water and a country that supplies it for free—has not always
resulted in such harmonious exchanges of gifts. In 1979, Egypt’s then president Anwar
Sadat made the Nile’s fate into an urgent issue of national security. “The only matter
that could take Egypt to war again is water,” he said in reference to Ethiopia’s
plans to tap into its one precious natural asset.
The potential for conflict over the water is undeniable. Some 95 percent of the Egyptian
population is packed onto the fertile ribbon of land along the banks of the Nile
and its delta, the country’s only water sources of note. Desperately poor and underdeveloped
Ethiopia, in contrast, has suffered periodic droughts since the 1970s, causing the
loss of millions of lives. The Blue Nile1, emerging largely from Lake Tana in the
Ethiopian highlands, has long been eyed as a possible source for irrigation, hydroelectricity
and general economic growth in a country whose population is set to boom. At present,
Ethiopia consumes a mere two percent of the water available to it.
Water distribution between the two African neighbours has always had a political
edge, but by the time of Sadat’s sabre-rattling remarks, a different rivalry was
poisoning relations. After flirting for a decade with the United States, Ethiopia
found itself ruled in the 1970s by Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam’s Marxist regime.
Soviet experts invited by the colonel began studying the feasibility of damming the
Nile’s tributaries and exploiting its water, provoking Egypt into threatening that
any dams built would be destroyed by military force.
“Although such threats gave rise to the commonly held notion that future African
wars would be over water, the fact is that these tensions were a spin-off of the
Cold War,” argues Rushdie Saeed, one of Egypt’s most prominent experts on water issues.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, the Nile waters have continued to prompt
regular diplomatic spats. The early 1990s, for example, saw Sudan and Egypt at loggerheads
following alleged efforts by the Sudanese government to overthrow Egypt’s president,
Hosni Mubarak. Sudan and Ethiopia formed a joint Blue Nile Valley Organization and
pledged to study several major infrastructure projects with or without Egypt’s approval.
Once again, Mubarak resorted to threats of military intervention.
Though a marked improvement in relations between Cairo and Khartoum has since calmed
nerves, diplomats and experts are convinced that only a lasting settlement will bring
peace to the Nile’s coveted waters. Until now, only one agreement has been signed
by Egypt and its neighbours—the Nile Waters Agreement of 1959 between Sudan and Egypt,
itself based on a deal made by the region’s colonial powers in 1929. Ethiopia was
not even mentioned in the accord.
Yet the case for some more equitable distribution of the river waters is mounting
by the day. Besides Ethiopia’s traumatic droughts and destitution, studies point
to a staggering rise in the country’s population: current data suggest that the population
will increase from 61.4 million at present to 186 million in 2050. Given that only
1.7 percent of the country’s arable land is irrigated (compared to 100 percent of
Egypt’s), an exponential rise in demand for water is only to be expected.
A durable solution might not be too far off. In July of this year, and after five
years of preliminary talks, the 10 states of the Nile basin—including Egypt, the
Sudan and Ethiopia—announced that they had secured World Bank money for a series
of programmes to explore how the river’s waters can best be shared. The Nile Basin
Initiative (NBI) has launched several such studies, due to be followed by loans worth
at least three billion dollars.
Thrashing
out differences
“The
River Nile still has a great potential which is not yet exploited and which can be
a great benefit to the people of the Nile basin,” said Egypt’s minister of public
works, Mahmoud Abu Zied, in a recent interview. “Each country is entitled to an equitable
share from the river without causing appreciable harm to the other riparian states.”
Underpinning the initiative is the experience of states surrounding the Mekong River
in Southeast Asia. Since 1957, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand have been members
of a commission charged with economic development of the river basin. Despite political
differences between the nations and an absence of formal treaties, the body has helped
convert the Mekong into a source of regional integration instead of rivalry: the
Nam Ngum hydropower plant, completed in Laos in 1971, provided electricity to the
home country and covered 80 percent of Thailand’s needs, even during the violent
conflicts that followed inauguration.
With this precedent in mind, the World Bank hopes the Nile’s waters might usher in
a similar spirit of co-operation. Which is not to say that members of the programme
have been pulling their punches. “There are questions such as how to calculate future
quotas. Should it be according to the size of the territory or the size of the population,
or possibly the availability of other water resources?,” wondered one Egyptian official
who took part in a recent NBI meeting in Geneva. “We all have different ideas for
answers and this remains to be resolved.”
Ethiopia has already started building a series of small dams to tap the Blue Nile
water. According to officials involved in the projects, these dams will benefit nations
downstream by protecting Sudan from over-flooding and reducing the silt accumulation
suffered by Lake Nasser dam in Egypt. But Egypt’s Saeed is unconvinced by their arguments.
He insists that it is in fact more dangerous for the silt to be stopped than for
it to flow with the water: should the former occur, he says, the river might gain
in energy and cause havoc in the northern reaches of the Nile.
Saeed also takes issue with Ethiopia’s claims that the new dams will enable the government
to sell electricity to neighbouring countries. “Which countries Ethiopian officials
have had in mind is difficult to determine, however, as none of Ethiopia’s neighbours
are industrialized nations or great consumers of electricity,” he observes.
All parties now admit, however, that their differences of opinion are better thrashed
out at the negotiating table than left to the generals. What promised to be Africa’s
next war might just have become Africa’s latest remedy.
1. The Blue Nile
originates in Ethiopia, the White Nile in Uganda. The confluence of these two rivers
is near Khartoum, in the Sudan. Approximately 86 percent of the Nile water flowing
into Egypt is from the Blue Nile. |
