A Bridge Over the River Nile

The Nile is, perhaps, the essence of the African continent: all of its nuances and sundry distilled and typified into its very being. She is unwieldy, fertile, destructive, glorious and inevitably fraught with political dissent. She is also large – very large. At over four-thousand miles, weaving through nine countries and reaching widths of up to five miles, the Nile is the longest river in the world. As with all of Nature's resplendent wonders, she is closely followed by the adulterating wiles of man. As contentious and volatile as the East African political landscape is, one unwavering constant has remained manifest since time immemorial: life itself heeds the beck and call of the River Nile, with all of her tortuous bends and turns. The undeniable significance of the river adds a further layer of gravitas, transforming what would ostensibly be harmless political squabbles into a matter of life and death.

The Nile sustains over three-hundred million people who reside in and around its Basin, extending from Burundi at its southern-most tip through the entirety of Egypt in the north, splitting into the vast Nile Delta and finally escaping into the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea. The Basin population is expected to double within the next twenty years, creating an unprecedented demand for water in a historically drought-ridden region. Of the 180 countries listed in the World Water Development Report’s ranking of water availability per capita, the Nile countries are conspicuously low: Kenya is ranked 154th, Uganda 115th and Ethiopia 137th, while the downstream nations of Egypt and Sudan are ranked 156th and 129th, respectively.

Burgeoning demographic growth, coupled with dwindling resources, is a recipe for political destabilization and armed escalation. At the heart of the issue lie the timeless truths of the African continent: scarcity, greed and inevitable international intervention. This crisis takes the discerning observer back to 1929 when the Nile Water Agreement, a thorny vestige of the colonial era that still bears legitimacy, was first established. The Agreement, brokered by the British, granted the Nile's downstream nations (Sudan and Egypt) extensive rights over the river's use and, more significantly, exclusive veto power concerning any public infrastructure projects built on or along the Nile by any of the upstream nations, much to the chagrin of countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. The logic behind their concern is that the unimpeded flow of nutrient-rich river water to the downstream states is threatened by the construction of dams, irrigation canals or hydro-electric turbines further up the river. The Nile's flow adopts a particularly sensitive demeanour in the Egyptian context: the country's sustenance hinges completely on the river and its population lives entirely along its banks as the rest of its territory is composed of the largest desert on Earth. The Agreement guarantees both Egypt and Sudan 56 billion cubic meters of the 74 billion cubic meters that constitute the Nile's total water flow (more than 75% of the total water volume). The upstream states claim that the Agreement rests upon an antiquated division that grants the downstream states a de facto monopoly over the rights and usage of the Nile's waters.

Several feckless attempts at reconciliation have been sought in the eighty-year interim since the Agreement's inception, with the most recent endeavour precipitating in the Nile Basin Initiative of 1993 which sought to "develop the Nile in a cooperative manner, share substantial socioeconomic benefits, and promote regional peace and security." Nonetheless, economic incentives, justified and zealous, die hard. The source-countries of the Nile (Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda) have unilaterally embarked upon their own agricultural and developmental infrastructure projects, most notably a 170 mile-long pipeline built in Tanzania, as well as the Tekeze Dam in Ethiopia. While reasonable in their nature, these projects and others like them have had indelible environmental effects on the Nile, most conspicuously in the formation of enormous water reserves which trap nutrient-rich silt necessary for the irrigation of farmlands further downstream. Egypt and Sudan deem any diversion of the Nile as nothing less than an act of war. Exacerbating the issue is the recent involvement of the World Bank in the foray, with the vocal backing of Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo. Many of the Nile Basin states view this intervention as a move toward destabilization, in particular on the part of Rwanda and Congo whom the Nile barely grazes. Of course, the downstream nations' vigorous rejection of water diversion is not to be deemed simply as innocent protest. Egypt's agricultural endeavours along the Nile have been marred by their grandiose, embarrassing and ostentatious nature. The earliest of these was Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam which resulted in the flooding and mass displacement of 300,000 Nubians. More recently was the Toshka Irrigation Canal Project which sought to construct a colossal artificial artery of the Nile that penetrated directly into the depths of the Sahara, in order to potentially turn the desert into farmable land. The project ended in fiscal, political and social disaster and firmly ingrained the image of Egypt as an irresponsible patron of the Nile in the collective conscience of the upstream states. Perhaps most damning of all were allegations that Egypt sought to create a waterway under the Suez Canal (named the Peace Canal) which would irrigate 600,000 acres of land in Northern Sinai with water from the Nile, and which would ultimately flow into Israel. Needless to say, these rumours struck a particularly contentious nerve among all of the Nile Basin states.

Where does this leave the Basin states? A political stalemate can maintain the semblance of stability for only so long. The conflict holds implications that are all too palpable for the populations of the Nile Basin and cannot continue to remain cordoned off behind the plush walls of foreign ministries and African Union assemblies. The Nile and her abuse are intimately connected to the beating hearts of three-hundred million souls. Compromise can no longer be deemed a lofty ideal, but must be treated as a tangible necessity. The unmoving hubris of the Basin states can only serve to usher in their own undoing.

Recommended Listening: New World Water - Mos Def