Water Wars: The Nile River Basin

Introduction

In 1979, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said: “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water, ”and in 1988, then Egyptian Foreign Minister, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who later became the United Nations’ Secretary-General, predicted that the next war in the Middle East would be fought over the waters of the Nile, not politics . Since then Egypt has threatened to bomb dam development in Sudan. It has also challenged Kenya’s rhetoric denouncing the 1929 and 1959 agreements and desire to withdraw from them as acts of war, as well as warned Tanzania over its plans to drain the Lake Victoria. These Egyptian concerns may justify the cries of water wars. However, rather than accept these frightening predictions, we must examine them within the context of the Nile River basin and the relationships forged among the states that share its waters.

The Nile River is 6850km long. It is the world’s longest river and flows from the east and central African plains to the Mediterranean sea in a south to north movement with a catchments basin covering 10% of the African continent. The Nile River spreads across 10 states with an area of approximately 3x106 square kilometers . All the waters in Burundi and Rwanda and more than half the waters in Uganda are produced within their boundaries, while most of the water resources of Egypt and Sudan originate outside their territories, 77% and 97% respectively. The river has 3 tributaries: the White Nile, the Blue Nile and the Atbara. The upper White Nile originates in the East African highlands in Burundi and flows through Owen falls, Lake Kyoga, Kabalega (Murchison) and Lake Mobuttu as it drains out of Lake Victoria. The Blue Nile is 1529 km long and rises upstream of Lake Tana in Ethiopia and provides more than 53% of Nile’s water. The Atbara also originates in the Ethiopian highlands and is joined by the White Nile which merges with the Nile at Khartoum from the Atbara confluence. The Nile then flows through the Nubian Desert through Egypt, draining into the Mediterranean. The Nile River thus represents one of the critical and most important shared water basins in the world. Recently, upstream states have begun to consider the control of more of the Nile waters to initiate economic development and to sustain their populations 70% of whom live in the Nile basin and the other30% of the Nile basin population benefit less directly.

The Nile River as a Source of Conflict

Conflict over the Nile’s waters could fan existing conflicts in the Greater Horn of Africa, making them more complex and harder to address. Tensions in the Greater Horn of Africa are of great concern to the international community, due to its volatility and proximity to the Middle East. Conflicts emerging here might spread political, social, and economic instability into the surrounding areas. In a river basin, conflict is most likely to emerge when the downstream nation is militarily stronger than nations upstream, and the downstream nation believes its interests in the shared water resource are threatened by actions of the upstream nations. In the Nile basin, the downstream nation, Egypt, controls the region’s most powerful military, and fears that its upstream neighbors will reduce its water supply by constructing dams without its consent. Egypt claims a natural historical right on the Nile River, and principles of its acquired rights have been a focal point of negotiations with the upstream states. The fact that this claim exists means that any perceived reduction of the Nile water supply to Egypt is seen as tampering with their national security and thus could trigger conflict including armed conflict.

There have been occasions when Egypt has threatened to go to war over Nile water. This is not always simply because of a threat to Egypt's water supply by neighboring states, but it is also based on action taken by Egypt itself. Since the 1990's steps have been taken by the Egyptian Government to divert the Nile out of its natural basin. Sudan also has hydraulic potential and has created four dams in the last century. This has resulted in the development so far of 18,000 kmÐ'І of irrigated land, making Sudan the second most extensive user of the Nile, after Egypt , which gives an indication of the possibility of potential conflict, on the one hand between Sudan and Egypt as part of a wider conflict involving the other 8 riparian especially Ethiopia and Kenya whose rhetoric seems to point in this direction. Ethiopia contributes about 86% of the Nile’s waters, but uses less than 1% of this amount (about 0,65-billion cubic meters of water annually). Irrigated land in the Ethiopian portion of the Nile basin now stands at only 8 000ha -- which is 0,4% of the basin’s potential, at present estimated at 2,3-million hectares. The picture is not that different when one looks at the tapping of hydropower. Researchers estimate that Ethiopia has a hydropower potential of about 60-billion kilowatt-hours per year, the bulk of which is embedded in the Nile basin. However, Ethiopia is currently using only 2% of these hydropower resources.

According to Drake, until the 1950s, British colonialism and administration reduced water resource development and use tensions. The political fragmentation of the independent Nile region began with the creation of sovereign states and an increasing ethnic consciousness, resulting in growing disparities and rivalries among the diverse populations of the Nile Basin. Consequently, all nations now take a more competitive and nationalistic approach to regional politics.

During the 1970s, Ethiopia was ruled by Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam’s Marxist regime. Soviet experts, invited by the colonel, began studying the possibility of damming the Nile’s tributaries and exploiting its water, provoking Egypt to threaten the destruction of any new dams through military force . Rushdie Saeed, an Egyptian expert on water issues, argues that “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. Thus, based on Saeed’s argument, present and future conflicts will have Cold War foundations; the tensions over Nile waters have colonial underpinnings as reflected in the context of the various Nile Waters Treaties, in which nations with colonial representation (Egypt and Sudan) were able to exploit the resources of those without (Ethiopia). The proposals made during the Cold War era were products of colonial actions, and the subsequent threats were a continuation of Egyptian fears regarding the maintenance of the Nile flows. Therefore, colonial policies