New Nile treaty sails past Egypt, Sudan snags

Sudan’s Minister for Irrigation and Water Resources, Mohamed Ali Kamal, said, “This meeting was unnecessary, based on the previous resolution of Nile Com, because we referred this [contentious] issue to the heads of state. Turning around to deal with positions already taken is embarrassing.”

Mr Kamal further said that Uganda’s Minister for Water and Environment, Maria Mutagamba, who chaired Nile Com in 2007 when the deferment was made, was supposed to ask President Yoweri Museveni to call for the heads of state summit.

In an earlier interview, Ms Mutagamba had told The EastAfrican that she could not do so because President Museveni was busy at the time with preparations to host the Commonwealth Heads of Governments meeting.

“When the minister from DRC took the chair, he was expected to call for the summit, but he requested for three months to go around the countries to resolve the problem. The differences were still there, but he went ahead to call for this extraordinary meeting,” said Sudan’s Mr Kamal.

Boardroom sources said Sudan felt snubbed by Egypt, which was the first to retract a notification stating that it would not attend the meeting.

Stopping the meeting would not go down well with DRC’s Mr Endundo, after he spent time consulting delegates in each of the Nile basin countries.

“This meeting was called specifically to discuss issues pertaining to the co-operative framework agreement and the permanent basin commission. We are going to look each other in the eyes and discuss the differences,” Mr Endundo said before the closed-door forum.

Mark James Mwandosya, Tanzania’s Minister for Water and Irrigation, said, “We later decided to conclude the issue ourselves. We did not want to turn our presidents into ministers for water issues.

It would be like putting a vote of no-confidence in ourselves. The Permanent Commission will deal with the issue of water security in the first six months of establishment.”

The timing of the meeting was critical as a number of projects under the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), the temporary inter-governmental organisation preceding a permanent commission, are ending.

Second, NBI is beginning a long-term programme with investment projects to be handled by a permanent commission.

Third, NBI is on an ambitious campaign to secure funds for development projects in the sub region. Some of the investments in East Africa include; a hydro electricity plant at Rusumo Falls for Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi; water management facilities in Malaba for Kenya; water hyacinth control in Kagera region (Uganda) for Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda; and a fisheries improvement project on Lake Albert for Uganda and DRC.

The controversial article 14 in the draft pact reads, “Nile Basin states, therefore, in a spirit of co-operation, agree:

a) to work together to ensure that all states achieve and sustain water security,

b) not to significantly affect the water security of any other Nile basin state.”