|
|
This writing is motivated by Wondwosen Michago’s
thoughtful reflections headlined, “Navigating over
the Nile: Where’s the New Nile Water Agreement”
[Volume 9, Number 462, March 8, 2009]. His
commentary questions whether there is real
cooperation between negotiators of the 10 countries
located alongside the Nile Basin, or whether it is a
futile ritual of “pseudo cooperation” carried out
under the celebratory, if not illusory, theme of
“United in Diversity by the River Nile - Our
Heritage, Source for Regional Cooperation.”
To be sure, under this voguish banner, it is easy to
forget that the issues at stake are about rivalry
and control over life-sustaining resources, regional
power and rights, individual, national and
international.
A
pattern has already emerged over the last decade.
The 10 countries on the Nile riparian are far from
united over the future use of the Nile waters. Thus,
the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) remains the
privileged domain of the Council of Ministers and,
as usual, their negotiations are shrouded in secrecy
and confidentiality.
The stalled initiative towards a New Nile Water
Agreement (NNWA) proceeds without the input of the
300 million people, whose lives are directly
affected by the ebb and flow of the waters of the
Nile Basin. This state of affairs plays in favour of
the lower riparian countries, Egypt and the Sudan,
who are the major beneficiaries of the closed-door
ritual and syrupy language of diversity that has
paralyzed meaningful basin-wide concord and action
on a just and equitable water sharing agreement.
Egypt, the major recipient of the Nile waters, has
every reason to encourage this futile process, while
Ethiopia has every reason to change the present
process, language and path of the negotiations.
While the upper riparian countries are busy
celebrating their pseudo cooperation and false
regional unity, replete with empty
multicultural-sounding catchphrases and
depoliticized slogans, Egypt and Sudan have their
feet planted firmly in national security concerns
and geopolitical realities. As such, they are
turning deserts into fertile fields, and benefiting
extensively from the Nile’s bounty by citing fatuous
“historic rights,” convoluted principles and old
agreements, signed exclusively between the two
countries in 1959.
This was a time when the majority of the upper
riparian countries were under colonial tutelage and
in no condition to stake their rightful claims on
the Nile River. This condition cannot continue much
longer without depriving future generations of
Africans of their rightful heritage. Simply said,
they do not have to abide by a latter day Anglo
Egyptian Sudanese treaty in which they played no
part whatsoever. More urgently, the upper riparian
region’s long-term development and security needs
beg for a new and more substantial policy approach
to correct the huge disequilibrium in access to
water and resource sharing.
This is an undertaking for which Ethiopia is
well-positioned and perfectly justified in pursuing.
The stakes for Ethiopia could not be higher.
Occupying the headwaters of the Nile, Ethiopia
supplies 86pc of the Nile’s flow and uses only 0.3pc
of its benefits. This pivotal country was
effectively excluded from the 1959 unilateral
Egyptian-Sudanese agreement, for geopolitical and
strategic reasons I need not rehearse here.
Resulting injustices and disparities of the status
quo cannot be ameliorated by tinkering with trendy
technocratic-administrative concepts, but by
forcefully arguing the sovereign, historic,
national, economic and legal rights of the Ethiopian
people, along with those of the peoples of the other
upper riparian states.
The whole region must come to terms with its own
geopolitical imperatives, and start minimizing its
asymmetrical disadvantages. After all, as the
popular African saying reminds us, “no condition is
permanent.”
A
clear-eyed geopolitical assessment of future
prospects in the region is crucial now. Just as wars
have been fought over coal, iron, energy and oil,
the simmering conflict over water rights will grow
deadlier as the vital resource grows ever scarcer.
What will happen when Ethiopia has the wherewithal
to build its dams?
It is not realistic to pretend that the war over
water is not being waged by other means and
diversionary projects already. Indeed, the visionary
Jacques Attali (2006) reminds us further, that over
the last 50 years, “37 conflicts have been waged
over it,” albeit on a localized scale so far. The
truth is that the technicalities over water-sharing,
under the trendy formulae of “virtual water” and the
like, cannot be grasped adequately outside the
crucial geopolitical fault lines, which gave rise to
the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) in the first place.
Policy deliberation regarding water, a precious and
finite natural resource cannot be based on
ceremonial niceties, multicultural and managerial
jargons that evade the deeper inequities at the core
of the problem. The issues call for a scientific
policy discourse that balances factual/empirical
data with demographic imperatives, and people’s
rights and justice with the national security needs
of all riparian states. Science must inform, and
geopolitics, rather than historic or so called
“sacrosanct” rights, must seize command in the next
phase of these deliberations.
|
|
