Murkier waters or a spring of hope along the Nile?
Water rafting and sailing are some of the activities that will highlight the celebrations at River Nile in Jinja. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- 62 years and counting since independence the ghost of colonialism still haunts us through the colonial agreements made by Britain on our supposed behalf limiting us from leveraging the Nile towards our national development as a country.
A few days after our country’s independence, the Cooperative Framework Agreement came into force on the 13th of October 2024. The document promises a lot in the hopes of ensuring sustainable development and harmonious utilisation of the water resources along the Nile River among the countries that share the Nile, which includes Uganda.
Its timing could not be any better as a document meant to reform the governance of the use of the Nile River and its tributaries, which is premised on colonial agreements that were made by Britain as a colonial power on our behalf.
Right off the heels, of a riveting Uganda Law Society presidential campaign that saw chants of decolonisation, this agreement adds to the ambience by supposing to break off the shackles of colonisation, which many have acknowledged as one of the impediments to efficient development in the postcolonial world to this day.
The Cooperative Framework Agreement as such seeks to decolonise the governance framework of the Nile River, which many upstream Nile River countries such as Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda, among others, have branded as unfairly entitling Egypt and Sudan (the downstream countries) to the hugest chunk of the Nile’s waters, denying the upstream countries the river’s waters by allocating Egypt 55.5 billion cubic metres of water and Sudan (presently contending with conflict that has unabated since it broke out last year) 18.5 billion cubic metres of water without allocating any water to other Nile River countries.
In fact, the colonial arrangements even allocated a portion of the Nile’s waters to seepage and evaporation thus created a situation described once as ‘one of Africa’s cruellest ironies is that the land that feeds the Nile is unable to feed itself.’ How then does the Cooperative Framework Agreement set this right?
The Agreement promises equitable and reasonable utilisation of the resources of the Nile River by the countries that share the Nile River and its waters rather than imposing a duopoly as was the case with the colonial arrangements which vested chunks of Nile waters in Egypt and Sudan.
However, its promise falls short in seeking to do away with the veto power vested in Egypt by the colonial arrangements, which allows Egypt to veto any projects along the Nile River it deems likely to interfere with the flow of water into the Nile and thus meeting its allocation of 55.5 billion cubic metres.
It is this aspect which forms the foundation of Egypt’s infamous dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam situated on the Blue Nile which supplies 85 percent of the water that flows into the Nile River (the White Nile encompassing the stretches of river draining from Lake Victoria supplies only 15 percent).
Unlike Ethiopia which was not a colony at the time of the colonial arrangements particularly the 1929 Agreement between Egypt and Britain from which the Egyptian veto stems, Uganda’s interests were supposedly represented as a British protectorate.
The Cooperative Framework Agreement’s attempt to do away with this unreasonable veto which subjects Nile River countries’ development plans involving the Nile to Egypt’s scrutiny was thwarted after a dispute over retaining the privileges and entitlements enjoyed by Egypt and Sudan. This argument ultimately compelled Egypt and Sudan to reject the agreement altogether and thus makes the fact the agreement becomes a binding document sound hollow (the Agreement came into effect after it was acceded to by South Sudan as the sixth country to ratify it, the other countries being Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia) since it only has legal force against the states that ratified it thus cannot bind Egypt and Sudan at the moment.
For so long as this endures, 62 years and counting since independence the ghost of colonialism still haunts us through the colonial agreements made by Britain on our supposed behalf limiting us from leveraging the Nile towards our national development as a country.
If anything, the attachment to colonial agreements signifies how the fight towards decolonisation is not a sprint but a marathon. One that lasts to this very day.
Musana Joshua Malcolm, Lawyer enthusiastic about Public International Law & International Relations
