Nile Basin states meet on water

2004-03-18 21:55

Nairobi - Water ministers and other officials from 10 African Nile Basin countries met in the Kenyan capital on Thursday to draw up a treaty on sharing and managing water resources from the world's longest river.

In a joint statement issued in Nairobi, the ministers said efforts were underway to draw up a new legal framework, or treaty, aimed at reversing the "old path of blind confrontation, missed opportunities and wasted time, from which our people have suffered."

"What we are discussing here is a new agreement on water and ecosystem management," Uganda's junior minister in charge of water Maria Mutagamba told AFP.

"If we agree, no country should use water without informimg other basin countries," she said, adding: "That was not the case for the so-called Nile Treaty."

She was referring to a treaty reached between Egypt and Britain in 1929 to enable the arid nation to plant cotton.

Upstream countries have, however, rubbished the treaty, which requires them to ask Egypt permission to use the Nile waters, and started big projects that would affect water levels.

"There is no other way, except pushing forward the Institutional and New Legal Framework on the the management of River Nile," Kenyan Water Resources Minister Martha Karua, said on the sidelines of the meeting.

The two-day meeting was convened by the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), a regional cooperation body launched in 1999, grouping Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

"We view the Nile waters as a source of cooperation not confrontation ... This is the appropriate forum to discuss a new Nile agreement. We have embarked on the negotiation stage of the institutional and legal framework on cooperation on the Nile," Egypt's Water Minister Mahmud Abu-Zeid told the gathering.

"We also have to acknowledge that we just laid down the foundation and there are still many challenges ahead of us," Abu-Zeid added.

Experts from the 10 NBI countries adjourned talks in Uganda last week and started initial stages of hammering a deal on how to share the river's waters and avert a further escalation of the crisis, officials said.

Egypt clings to treaties signed with Britain in 1929 and with Sudan in 1959, which restrict other basin states, many of which were then British colonies, from undertaking projects that reduce the volume of water flowing to Egypt.

Tanzania, which has launched an $85m project to draw water from Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, and pipe it to residents on the lake shore will demand an equitable share of the Nile water, the country's water minister Edward Lowassa said.

"The Nile is the most important single asset that is shared by all the 10 countries lying within its basin and as such, the Nile is not a property of any one state," Kenyan Vice President Moody Awori told the opening of the ministerial meeting on Thursday.

- AFP