After 15 years of unity, where are the fruits of Nile Basin Initiative?

River Nile is shared by 10 countries and because of this shared basin, an initiative was set up to monitor activities along the river. However, 15 years later, some questions still linger on the relevance of the initiative. COURTESY PHOTO

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On March 3, the water and foreign affairs ministers of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, signed a Declaration of Principles (DoP) over Ethiopia’s new project, the Grand Renaissance Dam on River Nile, . Much trumpeted, this feat, significant in many ways in its own right, was outside of the wider Nile Basin cooperation arrangements under the Nile Basin Initiative, into which so many millions of dollars have been invested. This reflects broader challenges facing regional cooperation along the Nile. As much as there are achievements, questions still linger over the future of the cooperation between Nile states.

The Nile, the world’s longest river, drains a basin spread across Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
These countries are at different stages of growth but most notably, apart from Egypt, none of the other countries gets to the middle of the human development index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Egypt ranks number 110 by the 2013 estimates, 76 places above the DRC, the lowest of the Nile countries and second at the bottom in the international rankings.
In total size, Egypt’s GDP of $272b in 2013 compares with $296b for all the other 10 countries combined, according to World Bank figures.

The challenges
All Nile basin countries face significant environmental and socio-economic challenges. These include the fact that most people live on less than $2 (Shs6,400) a day.
Rapid population growth, averaging 2.9 per cent estimated by the World Bank in 2009, is augmented by widespread poverty, illiteracy, cultural norms, low access to reproductive health services, lack of empowerment, and civil war.
These represent substantial hurdles to growth and development and exert pressure on both human and natural resources, according to the 2012 State of the River Nile Basin Report.
While political instability is visible in some countries, even those that appear stable have governance structures that are too weak to respond effectively to national challenges, frequently curtailing important individual freedoms in the process.
With a majority of the population relying on agricultural production for a livelihood, low agricultural productivity and market challenges have confined people to low or negative economic growth.
They are stuck in cycles of low input-low output farming. This has, in turn, delivered devastating impacts on the environment as people expand into marginal lands to settle as well as produce more food.

Accountability
National governments are largely seen to have the responsibility, power and control over resources to steer growth at least within their boundaries.
Dr Hellen Natu, the Regional Director of the Nile Basin Discourse (NBD), a civil society network of Nile basin countries states: “In most of the countries, government is key because they do the planning and allocation of the resources.”
These governments, according to Dr Alan Nicol, an independent Nile expert and researcher, are also part of the problem.
“They can be focused mainly on accessing resources for large-scale ‘flagship’ development projects, rather than seeking more locally-generated solutions to basin challenges, including supporting stronger natural resource governance at a district level,” Dr Nicol says.

The wider problem
One challenging area relates to hydrocarbons development. “Neo-colonial governments inherited colonial structures that they are not willing to change.
Take an example of oil. You have foreign companies coming in to extract oil negotiating with powerful people in the government,” says Laurence Bategeka, Senior Research Fellow, Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC). “The benefits don’t reach the majority of the population.”
Richard Kimbowa, coordinator of the NGO Uganda Coalition for Sustainable Development (UCSD), however, says the power to determine development outcomes, is not with the national governments of the Nile anymore. Rather, their positions are largely influenced by foreign powers.
“There are virtual institutions controlling this [Nile Basin] region. Governments and their institutions or structures are not in charge. Essentially it is donors and big businesses that are running the show here. These countries have opened up too much,” says Kimbowa.
This is a point also reflected by Dr Nicol: “In many ways East Africa and much of the Nile basin is becoming part of a wider global political economy, with extraction of resources and market saturation by goods of certain origins being key features.
“This is not all bad, but it can lead to very unbalanced and risky development with continued high dependence on commodity prices (consider the recent fall in the oil price), and imports crowding out development of local industries, including food processing.”

Background
The NBI, established in 1999 by 10 of the Nile countries (South Sudan was still part of Sudan at the time) with Eritrea as an observer, and including significant contribution from donors including the World Bank, aimed to bring together these countries to manage the water resources of the Nile.
It also aimed to ensure a fair share of benefits from utilizing the waters of the Nile for people in these countries.
Fifteen years later, however, a Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) between the countries is still not fully ratified and therefore not legally binding in international law.
Controversy surrounds the agreement, particularly over the pre-existing 1959 Nile Waters Agreement between Egypt and Sudan which apportions the entire river’s annual flow between the two countries. Upstream countries see this as out-dated in the modern – high water consumptive – age and a barrier to future hydropower and irrigation development.

Undertaking
The DoP signed last in March, suggests a marginal slippage by Egypt towards greater accommodation with its upstream neighbours. But the signing of another, separate, agreement may be a way of hindering progress of the CFA ratification process as well.
All eyes are now on the NBI and its achievements to date. Undoubtedly, these have included initially defusing tensions between states and promoting joint implementation of some energy and environmental projects. But to some people this is a fig leaf for business as usual.
“These institutions are intergovernmental and can only work if the governments can sacrifice some power but many of the national governments are not willing to sacrifice their power. In NBI, they have instead created another bureaucracy,” says Oweyegha-Afunaduula, former Chairman, NBD.
“We have some structures such as the Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC), the NBI but these are not owned by us. Look at NBI, the traditional donors are walking out. The member countries’ contributions are small [Each member state has to make an annual contribution of $50,000 to NBI]. Some of the members are in arrears. You don’t see a clear future for NBI,” adds Michael Wakabi, the Kampala Bureau Chief of The East African.

Different perspective
But John Rao Nyaoro, the Executive Director of the NBI, is confident the Nile cooperative arrangements will get stronger, even without donor funding.
“The first years were for nurturing cooperation, then building confidence and staying together. The period 2012-2017 is for growth. We should be able to deliver results,” Nyaoro says. “Egypt has been a key participant but of late, for three years, they took some leave because they thought the CFA was not going the way they wanted. We still believe they have no choice.”
Some experts, however, feel that without donor funding, the NBI will get weaker, surrendering its role to cooperative arrangements between individual countries.
In other words, basin-wide cooperation will default to a series of ‘DOP’-type arrangements between two or three countries.
“The Nile is changing from a natural river to a regulated river. Many projects are being implemented or in the pipeline.
“Water resources infrastructure such as dams represent facts on the ground that are a strong driver for issue-based cooperation among the countries directly affected.
“Egypt will coordinate with Sudan and Ethiopia, Tanzania will coordinate with Burundi and Rwanda, and so on.
“If the NBI is not strong there will be lots of fragmented coordination but basin-wide cooperation, and the associated benefits, will be lost,” says Bart Hilhorst, former Chief Technical Adviser, United Nations FAO-NILE project.
Implications
The danger of this fragmented cooperation, according to Dr Nicol, is that “we will then see a rush for resources within a shared system – If you like, a potential scramble for water, land and hydropower.”
“The system may be able to contain this for a period, but with huge population increases still projected, the dangers of systemic degradation, breakdown and eventually major, and painful, tensions erupting between states cannot be discounted.
Cooperation across all countries is the only option in the long term, and this will need to be worked on an enshrined in the appropriate legal and institutional forms” adds Dr Nicol.
Fruits of cooperation, it appears, are not fully developed, but the buds are there.
If Nile states can maintain a single vision and direction in jointly managing the river, benefits for all could be within reach.
“The reality is”, says Dr Nicol, “that uncertainties, including climate change, are such that cooperation is the only sustainable pathway for the hundreds of millions of people living within basin countries. Governments must recognise this and make it a priority.”

WHAT IT IS

The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), a regional body that brings together the 11 countries that share the Nile, including Eritrea, which has observer status, is half way through its second decade. Government contributions and grants from different donors, most through a trust fund managed by the World Bank, have been injected into this body to foster fair sharing of socio-economic and environmental benefits between the countries. But many ask where the real fruits of the NBI are.