Egypt looks to make up for lost ground with Nile Basin countries

(Fri, 13/01/2012, Al-Masry Al-Youm)--Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr is currently on a six-country tour of the Nile Basin countries as Egypt increases its attempts to engage its neighbors to the south lobbying for a greater share of Nile water.

Amr's visit is being advertised as promoting Egyptian investment in the Nile Basin countries, but Egyptian foreign policy experts say that the trip is really aimed at improving relations with the six countries that signed the Entebbe agreement in the Ugandan city back in 2010. The treaty calls for a more equitable distribution of Nile water rights among the eleven riparian countries, though at the time of signing it was ten, before the advent of South Sudan.

The treaty was initially signed by Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. Burundi signed a year later. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has promised to sign, but has yet to do so. Egypt refused to sign the treaty and declared it non-binding because it lacked Egypt’s consent.

According to a 1959 treaty, the current distribution of Nile water gives Egypt the lion's share (51 billion square meters per year) and the second most to Sudan (18 billion square meters per year).

The other Nile Basin countries have long called for a new treaty to delineate a more equitable distribution of water, but those entreaties were long ignored by the Foreign Ministry of former President Hosni Mubarak. The other countries eventually signed the Entebbe treaty, which was critical of Egyptian policy toward its Nile neighbors. 

Now is the time to change the treaty, political analysts say. “We must begin to realize that the other Nile Basin countries deserve to benefit more from the Nile river water, especially as they suffer economic problems and underdevelopment; and this will make a difference for them,” says Mostafa Kamel al-Sayed, a political science professor at Cairo University. Read more from Al-Masry Al-Youm »

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