This week’s preliminary agreement between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia on use of Nile water and access to hydroelectric power from assorted dams up and down the world’s longest river is a significant breakthrough. All 11 Nile Valley states need to work together, but Ethiopia’s new Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile tributary had triggered serious problems with Sudan and Egypt, both of which are forced to rely almost totally on the Nile for their water needs.
The technical details of the agreed water use are important, but the agreement also shows a new spirit of different nations being willing to work together and it is significant that the new thinking has emerged from Egypt, which is looking to play a larger regional role. Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi’s approach has been a far more constructive issue than that of his unfortunate predecessor, Mohammad Mursi, who railed against the dam and threatened to unleash the Egyptian Air Force to bomb the dam and other sites in Ethiopia.
Mursi’s bluster did not succeed in anything other than to thoroughly irritate the Ethiopians and ensure that they would do little to help their Nile Valley partners.
All riparian states need to have a fair share of whatever water is available. Egypt’s share of Nile water has been defined in a variety of letters dating back to the 1800s and the two bilateral treaties between Egypt and Sudan in 1929 and 1959, which were then supplemented by the Nile Basin Initiative in 1999 that brought together the (then) nine states of the Nile Valley reaching as far south as the Congo and other central African nations, and Eritrea as an observer.
There has been an effort to update these out-of-date treaties through the 2010 Nile Basin Initiative, but that has been dominated by the central African states and largely excluded Egyptian interests. It is to be hoped that Egypt’s new diplomacy can bring all the Nile Valley states back to necessary agreement.