Unstable power structure, regional disagreement
Water politics along the Nile
The only equitable way to manage the Nile Basin and its water resources is
for all countries along its banks to make fair share agreements. But it
isn't likely to happen.
by Nizar Manek
May 2014
Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie once invited Dr Ibrahim Kamel to Addis
Ababa and housed him in the Ghion Hotel, which shared a garden wall with the
imperial palace. They chatted as the emperor took his morning stroll in the
garden with his cheetahs, says Kamel, now 76, an engineer and businessman
who between 1990 and 1995 was also a member of the Egyptian parliament and
its Parliamentary Economic Committee. Such a garden conversation now would
focus on the $4.8bn Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile.
Ethiopia sees its construction as an expression of national sovereignty. But
Kamel says Egypt "cannot afford to have the Nile run by countries that one
day love us, then the next have a bout of sovereignty fever."
Ahmed Abu Zeid, African Affairs advisor to Egypt's foreign ministry agrees
that the situation is dangerous, because no technical studies on the GERD
have been agreed between the three countries, yet construction of the dam
continues, 20km upstream of the Ethiopia-Sudan border. He doesn't rule out
any strategy, "political, legal or technical", in regard to Egypt's
interests on the Blue Nile. According to Kamel, Egypt is only doing what
Haile Selassie did in 1925 when he complained to the League of Nations about
agreements between Britain and Italy over Lake Tana, in the Ethiopian
Highlands. "We're back in 1891," Kamel says, referring to the Anglo-Italian
Protocol between Britain (representing Egypt and Sudan) and Italy
(representing Eritrea). Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Sissi is expected to make
a statement on the dam during his Egyptian presidential campaign.
Kamel, who has been involved in Nile Basin issues since 1962, says that
former president Hosni Mubarak had wanted to do something (until an
assassination attempt in Addis Ababa in 1995), "but then decided to give
Africa the cold shoulder ... Since the time of the Pharaohs, we know how
things are." He also says: "If we have to go to war, we'll go to war -
period. Dams are easy to bomb or destroy by missile. Who wants that?" He
recounts conversations on Nile issues with heads of state including Uganda's
Yoweri Museveni, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Congo-Kinshasa's Joseph Kabila.
Before Mubarak, Anwar al-Sadat threatened that Egypt might well go to war
with any state that reduced its share of the Nile waters. However, right up
to his assassination in 1981, he was too busy dealing with Middle East
events: the Suez crisis in 1956, the October war in 1973 and the Camp David
accords in 1978.
Talks grind to a halt
Trilateral meetings on the GERD between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan have over
the past year come to an acrimonious standstill. Egypt has decided to
boycott the process: this April, a secret international experts' report (on
which the meetings were based) was leaked and posted online (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb1> 1), partially confirming the
reasons for Cairo's opposition.
Kamel says there has to be interdependence among the African states (Rwanda;
Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda; the Sudans; Ethiopia; Egypt). But many
more powers have a stake in Nile Basin cooperation: the UN Development
Programme, the US State Department, the European Commission and European
countries (Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland). Through the Nile
Basin Initiative, since 1999, western donors have worked to develop
transboundary cooperation between the 10 states that share Nile waters, and
lay the foundations for a permanent river basin commission.
The GERD dispute has international dimensions. Italy's ambassador to Egypt,
Maurizio Massari, South Africa's state security minister, Siyabonga Cwele,
and Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, have all declared an
interest in mediating between Egypt and Ethiopia. Their offers didn't come
out of the blue. The Milan-based Salini Costruttioriwon a no-bid
construction contract for the dam in 2010. The South African electricity
public utility Eskom has interests in Congo-Kinshasa's 4,300-megawatt Inga
III dam, which would provide hydropower to the Southern African Power Pool
(the first formal international power pool in Africa). Turkey is developing
economic relations with Africa and wants to share its experience of
constructing the Atatürk Dam in Anatolia in the catchments of the Euphrates
River (shared with Syria and Iraq) (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb2> 2).
Egypt has instead sought Gulf mediation under the leadership of Saudi Arabia
- a sign of desperation. Egypt's irrigation minister Mohammed Abdel-Muttalib
was exceptionally rude about Turkey (its relations with Egypt's
military-backed regime were soured by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
backing the government of Mohammed Morsi). "When Turkey built the Atatürk
Dam, it made the Syrians and the Iraqis thirsty and ignored international
agreements," Abdel-Muttalib said in February. "Egypt is not Iraq or Syria,
and Ethiopia is not Turkey" ( <
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb3>
3).
To end the dispute, Kamel proposes arbitration, or war; or an alternative,
provided by the late British hydrologist Harold Edwin Hurst, that the whole
Nile river basin should be managed as one, with long- and medium-term
storage in the African and Ethiopian plateau lakes under the collective
sovereignty of all basin countries (using valley reservoirs for annual and
excess water storage because there is no way to allocate sovereignty to a
single country).
After Egypt's 2011 revolution, Kamel submitted another proposal to the
government, and has been "on their backs ever since": all Nile Basin member
countries should form a consortium company (and put $20bn at its disposal)
with pro-rata percentages of their shares of water, and jointly manage the
basin "to make money for everybody". Kamel suggests that in years when there
is "over-abundant water that ends up in Egypt's Aswan High Dam, that water
can be sold for cash to any member country that wants it." It could be piped
across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, or piped to Libya, earning foreign
currency for basin countries. "If the water came from Ethiopia, that would
mean Ethiopia would get a bigger share of foreign currency, and give people
an incentive to spend money and improve the system."
CFA threat to Egypt
The dam presents Egypt with a wider legal predicament. The 2010 Nile Basin
Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA), which Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania,
Uganda, Kenya and Burundi have already signed, but which Egypt and Sudan
have rejected, is a new framework on water resources that will come into
effect later this year. The CFA would deprive Egypt of its veto power over
any water development project on the Nile. Ana Elisa Cascão, a specialist in
basin hydro-politics, says theagreement will challenge the colonial-era
arrangements based on "inequitable utilisation" of transboundary resources
(as in the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement between Egypt and Sudan). The CFA is
inspired by the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses
of International Watercourses, which has not yet been ratified by enough
countries to be binding, but is already the guiding framework for
transboundary basin agreements. Ethiopia could be the one of the next
countries to ratify it.
Egypt is more concerned about the CFA, which represents what Cascão calls an
"epoch shift" in basin geopolitics, than about the GERD. She says it would
mean that all the Nile countries would have to operate according to
"equitable utilisation", so that not only Egypt and Sudan would have the
right to a water allocation. This is altering the dynamics of Egypt-Ethiopia
relations, and Egypt's relations with the upstream bloc. Egypt last month
signed a military cooperation deal with Salva Kiir's South Sudan (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb4> 4), but Egyptian leverage there
can do little to suspend the epoch shift (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb5> 5).
Egypt's diplomats are aware of the importance of South Sudan's decision to
join the CFA, and want it to halt its ratification. South Sudan says the
process is irreversible. The country has been in turmoil since December and
understands the benefits of a rapprochement with Egypt. As Ethiopian
diplomat Birkuk Mekonnen observes (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2014/05/09egypt#nb6> 6), both Sudans rely on the Nile
for water, yet when South Sudan became independent in 2011, there was no
agreement on its post-independence rights to Nile water. Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, former Egyptian minister of state, predicted 30 years ago:
"The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not
politics."
Received on Fri May 02 2014 - 12:33:46 EDT