Published 09 Feb 10

Strategic Interests

by J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist

Crisis, Conflict, and Opportunity in the Nile Basin

Next week representatives of nine African states are scheduled to convene at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in an effort which may well decide whether long-simmering tensions between their countries can be defused through cooperation or simply be allowed to go unattended until they escalate into a full-blown conflict. In a way, the dispute over the allocation of the waters of the Nile River is not only a microcosm of how a "perfect storm" of factors—including resource scarcity, population growth, increase in living standards, climatic changes, and inadequate regional and global management—have heightened competition between the parties, but also underscores how it is in the best interest of the United States and other partners to encourage the integrated development of and promote better governance strategies in this geopolitically critical region.

The Nile is the longest river in the world, with a length of over 6,650 kilometers from its remotest source in Burundi's Luvironza River. Most of the water flowing through the great lakes of equatorial Africa to eventually form the White Nile is lost to evaporation in the Sudd, the vast swamp of southern Sudan. Thus by the time it joins the Blue Nile at Khartoum, the White Nile contributes barely 10 percent of the total flow. Together, the shorter Blue Nile, whose remotest source is the Felege Ghion spring held sacred by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the Nile's other major tributary, the Atbara River, which likewise originates in the heart of the Ethiopian highlands near Lake Tana, account for nearly 90 percent of the water and over 95 percent of the sediment carried by the Nile proper. The combined drainage basin of these river systems covers one-tenth of the area of the African continent.

Since the dawn of civilization when the ancient Egyptians worshipped the river as a primordial deity, Hapy, "father of the gods," the importance of the Nile's water has been recognized since, as the late historian Robert O. Collins put it pithily, "without the annual flood of the Nile waters cascading down, Egypt would consist of only sand and rock and wind." While the waters of the Nile Basin must currently serve slightly more than 400 million people—a number expected to nearly double by 2025—not all are equally dependent. The 78 million people of Egypt rely on the Nile for more than 97 percent of their freshwater, with scant rainfall and underground reservoirs making up the negligible remaining balance. The 41 million people of what, for the moment, is Sudan are only marginally less dependent, deriving 75 percent of their freshwater from the Nile. Agricultural usage accounts for most of this consumption, with Egypt thought to spend 86 percent of its freshwater and Sudan 99 percent of its supply in this manner.

While the Nile has provided for the livelihoods of the peoples along its banks from time immemorial, the rapidly expanding population, industrialization, and urbanization—to say nothing of the effects of climate change on Africa, as I discussed here three months ago—will place unprecedented demands on the river's fixed supply of water. This, in turn, will lead to increased tensions between the current ten independent countries in the Nile Basin—Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda—which together constitute the largest number of sovereign states in any river basin in the world even before they are joined, as is most probably the case, within the year by the nascent South Sudan. Each of these states has a distinct interest in the river's waters as well as varying capacities to exploit the resource. The classically educated will undoubtedly note that not for nothing does the modern English term "rival" originate from the Latin rivales, a legal term in Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis which refers specifically to "those who have or use the same stream" (Digest xliii. 20. i. 26).

Compounding this potentially combustive situation between the countries of the Nile Basin is the lack of a clear and generally accepted legal framework. During the colonial era, a May 1929 exchange of notes between Egyptian Prime Minister Muhammad Mahmoud Pasha and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, George Lloyd, 1st Baron Lloyd of Dolobran, stipulated that no projects affecting the Nile flow would be undertaken in Sudan, then under the Anglo-Egyptian "condominium," or any other territory then under British rule without the agreement of the Egyptian government which asserted its "natural and historical rights" over the river. Upon Sudan's independence in 1956, Prime Minister Ismail al-Azhari's government repudiated the agreement based on the juridical doctrine of rebus sic stantibus ("thus things standing"), which holds that treaties become inapplicable through a fundamental change in circumstances which transform the attendant rights and obligations. Subsequently, following the coup d'état which brought General Ibrahim Abboud to power in Khartoum, Sudan signed the Nile Waters Agreement with Egypt in 1959, which allocated 55.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of water annually to the Egyptians and 18.5 bcm to the Sudanese.

The lack of reference to other riparian countries and their interests leaves open the question of the Nile Agreement's legal validity to bind any parties other than Egypt and Sudan which, ironically, contribute virtually nothing to the river's flow. Ethiopia, source of an overwhelming part of the Nile's water, was never a party to either of the agreements, although it was an independent state at the time of both. Burundi, the Congo, Eritrea, and Rwanda, were under non-British colonial regimes and likewise not parties to the accords. Following their independence, the former British colonies of Kenya, Tanganyika (later Tanzania), and Uganda all declared that bilateral treaties (including the 1929 agreement on the Nile) negotiated on their behalf by the erstwhile British colonial authorities invalid after two years unless renegotiated. As the late Ethiopian scholar Kinfe Abraham observed: "Utilization of the Nile waters is neither based on law or common sense. The lower riparians (Sudan and Egypt) contribute nothing to it, but consume most of it. In contrast, the upper riparians hardly utilize anything. This happens under circumstances of institutional and legal void. The sad status quo cannot last."

Alas, not only is there no unambiguous international legal authority in the specific matter of the distribution of Nile waters, there exist neither relevant statutory law on international watercourses nor an international body that could enforce such norms. The Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, open for signature in 1997, has thus far collected only eighteen ratifications—none of them from a Nile Basin state—seventeen short of the minimum for its entry into force among the parties to the treaty.

Nevertheless Egypt's leaders have traditionally been aggressive in asserting their claims over the Nile waters, even at risk of occasional semblance of paranoia (in all fairness to the authorities in Cairo, as the Daily Mail reported at the time, British documents declassified a few years ago revealed that after the 1956 Suez crisis Prime Minister Anthony Eden's Ministry of Defence came up with a bizarre scheme to use the Owen Falls Dam, now the Nalubaale Power Station, across the White Nile in Njeru, Uganda, to block the river's flow in the hope of bringing down Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser). President Anwar al-Sadat even declared that "any action that would endanger the waters of the Blue Nile will be faced with a firm reaction on the part of Egypt, even if the action should lead to war." The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, is both the symbol of and achievement of those ambitions, together with the 550-kilometer-long, 35-kilometer-wide Lake Nasser, created by the dam project. The dam allows Egypt to control the annual floods and facilitate the steady irrigation of over three million hectares of farmland in what is now year-round crop growth. On the other hand, critics have characterized the massive construction as "the wrong dam in the wrong place," noting that its desert location means more than three meters of water—equivalent to 15 percent of the total annual flow of the Nile—simply evaporates off the surface of the reservoir each year, while the nutrient-rich silt which used to flow down to Egypt's farmlands is now stopped by the dam edifice and uselessly fills the bottom of Lake Nasser. Moreover, Egypt has been increasing its use of Nile water with projects like desert reclamation in the Toshka Depression along the western shore of Lake Nasser and the Al-Salam Canal system from the Damietta branch of the Nile Delta under the Suez Canal to reclaim land in the Sinai desert.

While Egypt and Sudan have been hitherto the largest consumers of the Nile's waters, increased political and economic stability in recent years has meant that upstream countries are now in a position to develop the hydropower and irrigation potential of waters which, after all, originate in their territory. As Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin affirmed some years ago, "No earthly force can stop Ethiopia from benefiting from the Nile."

In the recent lead among upstream states in exploiting the Nile is Ethiopia whose population, estimated to number about 85 million, is the fifteenth largest in the world and the second largest in Africa. The government led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has moved the country towards a market economy through a combination of institutional reforms and expansion of infrastructure. GDP grew an estimated 6.8 percent in 2009, down due to global economic downturn from the 11.6 and 11.1 percent growth rates registered the previous two years, but still the ninth largest inflation-adjusted increase in the world according to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook. Despite these impressive statistics, the nation suffers from a chronic electric shortage which stunts its productivity and, consequently, its growth. Thus the government has put a priority on major hydropower initiatives like the Tekezé Arch Dam, completed last year as part of $365 million joint project between the state-owned Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) and the Chinese National Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Corporation that will add 300 megawatts (MW) to Ethiopia's power grid. The world's highest dam at 188 meters, the dam spans the Tekezé River, a Blue Nile tributary, as it flows through a deep canyon. Another EEPCo project in the Nile Basin, the Tana Beles hydropower plant built by the Italian firm Salini Costruttori S.p.A., is scheduled to be inaugurated next month. When fully operational, Tana Beles will generate 460 MW from water gushing from Lake Tana down a 12-kilometer tunnel. The discharged water will then be used to irrigate land along in Beles River basin. Altogether, Ethiopia has more than 2.2 million hectares that are potentially irrigable in the basin of the Blue Nile alone.

In addition to great dam projects, Ethiopia has undertaken a national campaign of micro-dam building which can be constructed with relative ease and at minimal costs across the literally thousands of rivers and streams that lace the country's highlands. These apparently parochial projects easily obtain local buy-in as the stored water—usually little more than a modest pond—is either used for the irrigation of small agricultural holdings or stored for the years of drought which, unfortunately, are rather episodic in the region. On the other hand, in the aggregate, this micro-level projects form a great national reservoir, albeit one with a far less contentious profile than Egypt's Lake Nasser or Sudan's controversial nine-kilometer-long Merowe High Dam north of Khartoum at the fourth Nile cataract (see my comments two years ago about this Chinese-built project).

Likewise the Great Lakes region of Africa is seeing economic growth and integration which will affect the development of water resources. In November 1999, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania signed a treaty in Arusha, Tanzania, establishing the East Africa Community (EAC), which entered into force the following year. Rwanda and Burundi joined the pact in 2007. The EAC partners committed themselves to "concerted effort to expand agricultural land through irrigation and water catchment strategies" and to promote "the least cost development and transmission of electric power ... [through] utilization of new and renewable energy sources." Among projects in the EAC area exploiting the Nile waters is the Bujagali Hydroelectric Power Station, an $862 million joint venture of New York-based Sithe Global and Industrial Promotion Services, a division of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, located on the Nile just 16 kilometers north of Jinja, Uganda. When completed next year, Bujagali will generate some 250 MW which will be transmitted to Kampala, 100 kilometers to the west. Furthermore, according to a report two weeks ago in the British newspaper The Guardian, the government of President Yoweri Museveni is in the advance stages of developing a national twenty-five-year master plan on irrigation to respond to droughts which have regularly dented the country's food security. The strategy is long overdue given that, as the government-owned New Vision noted in a recent analysis, Uganda has just 9,150 hectares under irrigation, with less than one percent of ordinary farmers and 5 percent of commercial planters availing themselves of the potential.

Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda have also joined together to exploit the Kagera River, which feeds into Lake Victoria. While the scheme makes perfect sense from the point of view of the opportunities for everything from agriculture to hydroelectric power generation to tourism, the marginal decrease in water flow to Lake Victoria will result in lowering even further the already-modest White Nile flow downstream. If the equatorial African states together were to eventually put 1.5 million hectares under irrigation—and they could potentially do much more—they would siphon off some 10 bcm of water, a not insignificant diminution of the flow of the White Nile.

The author of the New Vision commentary, which was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, added at the conclusion of his piece that "given the changing trends of the climate, Ugandan farmers need to adopt irrigation." In fact, climate is just one of the factors contributing to the decline in Nile, where the current average annual flow of just over 80 bcm is about one-fourth less than what it was a century ago. Add to that continuing population growth and development as well as ongoing pollution and mismanagement and one has the makings of even fiercer competition for a scarce resource.

In 1999, as part of an effort to head off open conflict, nine of the ten riparian states—as usual, Eritrea, which at one point or another in its less than two-decade existence as an independent country has been at war with each of the states it borders, absented itself from a neighborhood undertaking—established the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) as a joint program to develop the river in a cooperative manner, share its economic benefits, and promote regional peace and security. According to its founding documents, the NBI was to be a "transitional arrangement until a permanent legal and institutional framework is in place." A decade later, despite the ambitious catalogue of projects and plans reflecting its members' "shared vision" as compiled by the organization's Entebbe, Uganda-based secretariat with support from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and various bilateral donors, the nine NBI members have yet to agree on a cooperative framework agreement. The seven upstream states want the agreement to oblige signatories "not to cause significant harm to the water security of any other Nile basin countries" while Egypt and Sudan want the clause to require them "not to adversely affect the water security of current users and rights of any other Nile basin countries"—the latter language effectively canonizing the status quo. Meetings last year in the DRC capital of Kinshasa and Alexandria, Egypt, as well as the NBI tenth anniversary gathering in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, failed to resolve the impasse because, as Egyptian Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Nasr El Din Allam told Kenya's East African newspaper, "We still want historical uses of the Nile water to be recognized by other Nile Basin countries because this is the only source of water we have ... [W]e want historical rights to be recognized in the agreement before it is signed." In fact, just last week, Abdel Monem Said Aly, president of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, an influential Egyptian think tank connected to the eponymous government-owned newspaper, declared in a commentary for Al-Ahram Weekly that disparaged the prospect of South Sudanese independence that the 1959 Egyptian-Sudanese Nile Waters Agreement "is 'eternal' and can only be amended upon the approval of both Egypt and Sudan."

Despite the tensions, there have been some tentative steps toward healing the breach. Last month, the Egyptian government donated $4.5 million to Uganda to help secure equipment for the construction of water harvesting dams and well drilling. This outreach followed on the heels of an end-of-the-year visit to Addis Ababa by Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Mohamed Nazif for meetings with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles. During the visit, it was announced that the National Bank of Egypt would be involved in developing 20,000 hectares of agricultural land in Ethiopia's Afar Regional State and a memorandum of understanding was signed between the Ethiopian Chamber of Commerce and Sectoral Association and the Egypt Business Association to establish a Joint Business Council. More recently, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the independent Egyptian newspaper circulated primarily among Cairo's intellectual elite, published an interview with Mohamed Salman, professor of political science at Cairo University, in which the expert on the Nile Basin acknowledged: "Egypt and Sudan made a big mistake in the past in 1959 when they went only together to sign the agreement. They must in this period take all of the countries in the Nile Basin and look for their water requirements and give them some quotas ... [T]he probability of having a final agreement in Sharm is very small. Egypt has started to move toward win-win cooperation. If we have a common interest between Egypt, Sudan and upstream countries, the external rule will be nonsense. The potential for cooperation will increase."

In fact, this modest progress points to what Claudia Sadoff and David Grey of the World Bank have termed "benefit-sharing" when they argued in a seminal article several years ago that:

A focus on sharing the benefits derived from the use of water, rather than the allocation of water itself, provides far greater scope for identifying mutually beneficial cooperative actions. While the allocation of water, particularly in international systems, is often contentious, the underlying interest of most riparians is to secure the benefits of water use.

How this might be implemented along the Nile was the subject of a detailed study by Simon Mason at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) several years ago entitled From Conflict to Cooperation in the Nile Basin. Mason suggested that the transition to cooperation in the Nile Basin would, among other factors, be dependent on "multi-track dialogue accumulation, coordinated third-party assistance, projects to satisfy the interests of development, ongoing discussion of legal issues to satisfy the interests of security, win-win potential of using the comparative advantages ... and the combination of an integrated (holistic) and functionalist (step-by-step) approach to river management." Specifically,

The development of the industrial and service sectors in the long term eases the pressure on the finite resources of the Nile. Agriculture remains important, but the economies diversify, and off-farm opportunities are created. On the international level, increased confidence resulting from communication and concrete win-win projects on the ground (e.g. [hydroelectric power], irrigation, watershed management) are institutionalized in a flexible legal framework.

The author of a well-regarded textbook on water resources and conflict in the Middle East, Nurit Kliot, chair of the department of natural resources management at the University of Haifa, Israel, has even theorized that if most of the water storage currently done at Lake Nasser were transferred upstream to the Ethiopian highlands, the amount of water saved by reduction in the evaporation rate alone would quadruple Ethiopia's irrigated area without even touching the current allocations to Egypt and Sudan.

While the environmental, economic, political, and other benefits to be had by the countries of the Nile is evident, before such cooperation comes about, a more satisfactory, permanent legal settlement of the dispute between Egypt, Sudan, and the upstream riparian states is needed. Thus the countries find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. The current water usage is unsustainable—as Steven Solomon warns in his just-released tome Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, "Egypt and its basin neighbors are sitting atop a growing demographic and hydrological time bomb"—but without a formal accord there can be no rational management, much less reallocation, of a resource whose ownership is so hotly contested. Increasingly, securing their access to water will be a vital component of the national security of the riparian states and, given the geostrategic significance of this subregion at the crossroad between the Middle East and Africa, of all the more greater importance to global security in general. The United States, which has significant links across the subregion, has a major stake in helping to resolve the conflict, both with diplomatic negotiations towards a Cooperative Framework Agreement and with technical assistance in actually implementing its commitments. Thus far, however, there has been little attention given in Washington to tackling a problem that does not seem to be immediate, even if the geopolitical damage that U.S. interests would suffer should three of America's most important partners in Africa—Egypt, Ethiopia, and Uganda—come to blows is incalculable. This shortsightedness is even more regrettable given the opportunities for both U.S. diplomacy and American firms to help these same allies work together to develop the Nile as a whole—to say nothing about how such engagement would not only be the right thing to do, but also advantageous to the nation's security and global standing.

— J. Peter Pham is Senior Fellow and Director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in New York City. He also holds academic appointments as Associate Professor of Justice Studies, Political Science, and African Studies at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. He currently serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).

Dr. Pham has authored, edited, or translated over a dozen books and is the author of over three hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress on numerous occasions and conducted briefings or consulted for the U.S. and foreign governments as well as private firms. He has appeared in various media outlets, including CBS, PBS, CBC, SABC, VOA, CNN, the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, National Public Radio, the BBC, Radio France Internationale, the Associated Press, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, USA Today, National Journal, Newsweek, The Weekly Standard, New Statesman, and Maclean's, among others.

© 2010 J. Peter Pham

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