Nile Basin states meet in Kenya to discuss sharing of water

NAIROBI, March 15 (AFP) — A week-long series of meetings designed to ease tension between nine African countries and Egypt opened in Nairobi, with sharing water from River Nile on top of the agenda.

“The technical committee meeting of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) has already started discussing all sorts of issues, in preparation for the ministers’ conference later this week,” a spokeswoman for Kenyan water ministry told AFP by telephone on Monday.

“The committee will provide strategic guidance, direction and oversight to ensure that the project’s objectives are achieved… we envisage that poverty can be alleviated through improved and sustainable management of the Nile waters and through increased cooperation among Nile states,” NBI Executive Secretary Meraji Msuya said in a statement issued ahead of the talks.

The two-day technical committee meeting will be followed by a three-day council of water ministers talks from Wednesday.

A similar week-long meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, ended inconclusively on Friday.

The meetings in Uganda tried to strike a deal on how to share the Nile resources, as well as look into the contentious 1929 and 1959 Nile treaties between Egypt and the British colonial government, which other NBI member state have refused to recognise.

Over the weekend, Egyptian Water Minister Mahmud Abu Zeid said the 10 NBI members — Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda — are considering their first common treaty on the sharing and management of the river’s water resources.

Egypt, whose lifeline depends on the world’s longest river, clings to the two earlier treaties, which restrict other NBI states, which were British colonies at the time, from initiating projects that would reduce the volume of water flowing to Egypt.

The treaties suffered a first setback when former Tanzanian president, the late Julius Nyerere, dismissed them as null and void after independence.

Tanzania recently embarked on a project to draw significant volumes of water from Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile River, prompting threats from Egypt, while Kenya has said that it would similarly start using the waters of Lake Victoria, as most of its rivers flow into it.