Africa: There Will Be No Water War in the Nile Basin Because No One Can
Afford It
By Seifulaziz Milas, 12 June 2013
Inside Story - Death on the Nile-Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9f04aTjtg0
<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9f04aTjtg0&feature=player_embedded>
&feature=player_embedded
Analysis
The River Nile has been a source of life for millions over the centuries.
Now Ethiopia is diverting water to build a giant dam pushing those ... (
Resource: <
http://allafrica.com/view/resource/main/main/id/00061923.html>
Inside Story - Death on the Nile
The comedy started last Monday when the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi
invited leading politicians to discuss the report of a tri-partite
Egypt-Ethiopia-Sudan commission.
The commission had recently conducted a one year study on Ethiopia's plan to
build a hydropower dam on the Blue Nile; the source of most of the water
reaching Egypt and Sudan. Some three days earlier the commission had
reported that the hydropower dam would not significantly reduce the flow of
water to the downstream countries.
This coincided with a report that Ethiopia had diverted the flow of the Blue
Nile (by some five hundred meters from its normal channel) as part of the
process of construction of its $4.2bn Grand Renaissance hydropower dam, now
about 20 percent complete.
This provided the occasion for the politicians to engage in one of their
favorite pastimes: repeating time-worn myths about the river Nile, their
ownership of it and their readiness to fight over control of its waters.
An aide to President Morsi later apologised for failing to inform the
politicians that they were live on air, which allowed viewers to watch them
discuss plans to sabotage the dam and undertake a variety of other hostile
acts against Ethiopia. The suggestions included aiding rebels inside
Ethiopia and destroying the dam itself. Ethiopian officials have long
accused Egypt of backing anti-government rebels in Ethiopia.
Getachew Reda, a spokesman for Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam
Dessalegn, was quoted on Tuesday as saying that Egyptian leaders had
unsuccessfully tried to destabilize Ethiopia in the past.
Morsi did not directly react to this suggestion, but concluded by saying
that Egypt respected Ethiopia and its people and would not engage in any
aggressive acts against it. However, on Wednesday a senior Egyptian official
was quoted as saying that Egypt will demand that Ethiopia stop building the
Blue Nile dam.
Getachew Reda responded with the following statement: "There are on the one
hand people who still think that they can turn back the clock on Ethiopia's
development endeavors including of course the construction of the
Renaissance Dam ... Second you have people like President Mohammed Morsi,
who according to the reports, said to have stressed said that there is no
point in trying to force Ethiopians, but the best solution would be to
engage to Ethiopians."
Meanwhile, Ethiopia has summoned the Egyptian Ambassador to explain the
hostile remarks and the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that it
is demanding an official explanation.
Three days earlier the report of an independent panel of experts from Egypt,
Ethiopia and Sudan had concluded that the hydropower dam would not
significantly reduce the flow of water reaching Sudan and Egypt, both of
which are highly dependent on the Nile waters. Hydropower dams do not
consume water - the water merely has to pass through the dam's turbines and
come out the downstream side to produce hydroelectricity.
However, for decades Egypt has spent considerable effort propagating various
myths about the Nile, including the myth of Egyptian ownership of the Nile
waters based on "international law" and the attendant myth that Egypt would
respond militarily against any upstream country that dares to interfere
without Egypt's permission.
Egypt justifies its claims to ownership of the Nile waters by reference to
two treaties, neither of which is relevant to Ethiopia (the source of the
Nile waters).
The first is the 1929 treaty between Britain, which controlled Egypt at the
time (and needed Egyptian cotton as raw material for its textile industry),
and the British colonial governments in the upper Nile basin colonies of
Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika.
The 1929 treaty prohibited the upstream British colonies in the Nile Basin
from building water infrastructure on the Nile without Egypt's permission.
This, of course, was not relevant to Ethiopia (which was never a British
colony); though it was the source of 86 percent of the Nile water reaching
Egypt.
The second treaty was a 1959 bilateral agreement between Egypt and Sudan to
divide the Nile waters between the two of them at the rate of 75 percent for
Egypt and 25 percent for Sudan. Of course they had every right to divide
such water as entered their territory, but this could not affect Ethiopia,
which was not a party to their bilateral agreement.
This agreement was made redundant in 2010 when Ethiopia and the other
upstream states signed the Comprehensive Framework Agreement (CFA), aimed at
ensuring the equitable access of all Nile basin states to use of the Nile
waters.
The Renaissance Dam has been under construction for the past two years in
the Blue Nile Gorge near the border with Sudan in an area unsuitable for
irrigation projects, as any arable land would be at a much higher altitude
than the river. The dam is expected to produce around 6000 megawatts of
electricity, making it Africa's largest hydroelectric power plant.
Egypt claims dependency on the Nile waters as the basis for its development
requirements, and the source of 97 percent of its water supply.
It proclaims the Nile as a strategic priority and its foreign policy focuses
on the need to control the Nile flow and maintain the status quo regarding
regional patterns of water distribution. From its strategic perspective
Egypt has always been concerned that control of the Nile flow by others
could threaten its own security.
But Egypt has consistently tended to over-estimate its own capacities and
needs, and to seriously under-rate those of the countries and peoples to the
south. Had it been otherwise, it might have made a more rational assessment
of the resources and potential of the Nile Basin and its diverse peoples and
interests.
This might well have led it to understand that its own long-term interests
might lie in seeking cooperation and consensus, rather than an ultimately
unsustainable focus on hegemony and confrontation. Nevertheless, it opted
for hegemony that it lacked the capacity to sustain, and threats of
confrontation that could only run counter to its unrecognised, but no less
vital, need for upstream cooperation.
For more than three decades Egypt's political leaders have claimed 'historic
rights' to control of the Nile waters, punctuated by threats of war against
any upstream country that might attempt to build dams or water
infrastructure on the river. This became a prominent feature of Egypt's Nile
policy after the construction of the Aswan High Dam by the Soviet Union.
The late President Anwar Sadat realigned his country with the West, made
peace with Israel and announced that the only thing that could bring Egypt
into war again would be if any country threatened Egypt's control of the
Nile waters.
This announcement was aimed less directly at the upper Nile basin states
than at the World Bank and other International Financial Institutions
(IFIs).
Egypt's peace agreement with Israel opened Cairo's way to aid agreements
with the United States and to Egyptian access to strategic positions in the
World Bank and other IFIs which they could influence against lending for
water infrastructure in upstream states without the agreement of downstream
states.
Until recently, Egypt was able to derive considerable comfort from the
knowledge that after decades of unrest, disasters and economic collapse, the
upper basin countries had little hope of financing any significant water
infrastructure on their own.
To build it, they would need loans from the International Financial
Institutions (IFIs), which were unlikely to be available without Egypt's
agreement, especially in view of propaganda that such loans might possibly
lead to war. Now however, there are many other sources of funding, like
China.
The way forward is increasingly clear. There will be no water war in the
Nile Basin, because no one can afford it, least of all those who talk most
about it.
For Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, rural futures may be limited by constraints
of land and water and rapid population increase. All three will need to
focus on rapid urbanization to address these constraints, and on
industrialization and urban job creation to sustain it. To make this
possible, all need to develop their sustainable energy resources, and
cooperate to use them as effectively as possible.
Seifulaziz Milas is author of
<
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharing-Nile-Egypt-Ethiopia-Geo-Politics/dp/0745333
206/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1349258917&sr=1-1> Sharing the Nile:
Egypt, Ethiopia and the Geo-Politics of Water.
Received on Wed Jun 12 2013 - 22:41:34 EDT