“If Egypt doesn’t back down,” Tekle says, “and the treaty isn’t re-negotiated, then we’re headed for serious trouble. Ethiopia owns 85 percent of the river, but because of Egypt all of eastern Africa can only use one percent of the water.” The 1959 treaty was the reason Egypt – Khartoum’s ally – was opposed to South Sudan’s independence. Cairo’s ill will has long been adopted as a given, so the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks came as no surprise. According to these documents, Egyptian diplomats lobbied intensively for the U.S. to help them postpone the referendum in Juba. Now that the referendum passed, Egypt is promising South Sudan greater financial and technical help with anything pertaining to the Nile. This is meant to mollify South Sudan,
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whose President Salva Kiir recently met with the Ugandan leader, Yoweri Museveni, to discuss measures for weakening Egypt’s dominion over the river. “Every existing arrangement concerning the Nile is outdated and part of our colonial inheritance,” the Water Minister Akec claims. “In the last fifty years, Africa has changed and there has been too much exploitation. Along the Nile, everybody deserves their fair share of drinking water, fish, transport and energy. Water is a gift and it must be shared.” But this may be rather utopian. Mwambustya Ndebesa, a professor of history at the Makerere University in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, claims that, sooner or later, the region will be awash with blood. “What we have here is an explosive mixture of the world’s
increasing demand for oil, Islamic and Christian fanaticism, as well as unsolved questions pertaining to the Nile. There will be trouble in the near future, and there will be lots of it.” More than 30 years ago, the former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said: “The only thing that could drag Egypt back into war is water.” That same concern was echoed by the former Egyptian Foreign Minister and later Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros Ghali. The wars to come in Africa and Middle East will be about the natural resource of water.
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