Last month, a high-level Ethiopian parliamentary delegation visited Egypt to promote economic cooperation. "Let us coordinate economic activities and identify areas where we can work more closely together," said Haile-Kiros Gessesse, chairman of the Foreign, Defence and National Security Standing Committee in the Ethiopian parliament.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, technical experts and officials from ten Nile Basin countries met to iron out differences and work out solutions to the many challenges facing Nile Basin states. Details of how the meeting went remain frustratingly fuzzy. They met in the Ugandan port city of Entebbe, where they discussed the legal and institutional framework of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), a regional grouping that deals with riparian and development concerns.
A week later, representatives of Nile Basin nations met in Kenya to thrash out Nile River issues not dealt with at the Entebbe meeting. The Ethiopian Ambassador to Egypt, Amare Girma, who attended both meetings, said that they aimed to find long-term solutions to the challenges of the Nile, but several unresolved hard-core issues remained.
NBI Executive Director Maraji Msuya pointed out that there is a pressing need to re-evaluate certain aspects of the 1929 treaty. Water shortages are the biggest single threat to regional food security. The already fierce competition for limited water resources is bound to intensify over the coming decades. At current population growth rates, the population of three Nile Basin states - Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, now 150 million, will swell to 340 million in 2050.
"The Egyptian media often propagates the myth that Ethiopia has a hidden agenda with regard to the Nile. We are here in Egypt to dispel such myths," said Gessesse, adding that Egypt and Ethiopia should be partners in development. He stressed that Ethiopia does not want to endanger Egypt's access to Nile water, but conceded that Ethiopia was proceeding with plans to construct the Chara Chara Dam, primarily to provide hydroelectric power. He argued that today there is no starvation in Egypt, but there is starvation in Ethiopia due to recurrent droughts. Yet Egypt enjoys the benefit of the Nile and Ethiopia is starving despite the Nile. This is not fair.
Ethiopia will inevitably emerge as a pivotal country in considering the future of water in the region. It controls the headwaters of the Blue Nile and is the source of no less than 85% of Egypt's water.
The Kenya meeting was attended by representatives of Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was held under the auspices of the NBI, an inter-governmental body created in 1999. The focus was closer collaboration, but the controversy surrounding the 1929 Nile Basin Treaty, which governs relations between the relevant states on questions of Nile waters sharing, formed a strong undercurrent underlying the discussions.
Reports of the construction of hydroelectric projects in tandem with statements made recently by certain top-level officials in a number of Nile Basin states have put Egypt on the defensive. Kenyan and Tanzanian ministers are openly questioning their obligation to abide by the 1929 agreement on Nile waters sharing concluded between Egypt and Great Britain, then representing its East African colonies.
There is tension behind the diplomatic niceties. Egyptian officials say that they will challenge any attempt to change or violate the 1929 treaty. Last week at a conference in Alexandria, Egypt's Minister of Water and Irrigation, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, reiterated his warning that any unilateral change in the 1929 treaty would be a breach of international law. However, other states question why they should abide by an agreement from the colonial era. Besides, the problems posed by the Blue Nile are different from those posed by the White Nile, mainly fed by Lake Victoria.
Egypt, the state furthest downstream, utilizes the lion's share of the Nile waters. In the past, some upriver countries accused Egypt of consuming more than its fair share, but Egyptian officials are careful to cultivate close economic and political ties with their neighbors to the south. They believe that closer cooperation between Nile Basin nations is the surest guarantor of peace and stability in the region. Sustainable socio-economic development and the collective management of Nile Basin water resources is the key to easing tensions. Cairo argues that the upper riparian states are not dependent on the waters of the Nile for agricultural purposes, but realizes that these states are entitled to utilize the river's resources.
Eritrean Ambassador to Egypt Mahmoud Omer Chirum concurred. "The official Eritrean stance is that water is a gift that all of us in Nile Basin must learn to conserve and wisely utilize... Water must become a means of regional cooperation," he told Al-Ahram Weekly, and expressed his belief that the future will not bring wars over water resources.
