The Rights of Riparians and the Paradox of Negotiations in the Nile Waters: An Effort Escaping from Cooperation to Tripartite Bargain

Abstract

The Nile is a common natural resource and the longest international river that crosses the boundaries of 11 countries with no binding law allowing its riparian states the right to use its waters. However, among the riparian, Egypt and Sudan have used and established historical rights through the Bilateral Agreements entered in the years 1929 and 1959. Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, other riparian countries have begun to claim a fair distribution of the Nile water as their population and economic demand so desired they challenged unfair utilization by two riparian’s and appeared continuously as a counter-hegemonic collective power in the Nile hydro politics agenda claiming and negotiated for a system of shared water resources. In particular, the Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA), which was drafted in 1999 and was hampered by the Egyptian-Sudanese process, provided a better framework for the Nile water use and management than previous riparian countries' deals. The incidence of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) become another point of discourse that shifted and triggered the Nile water issues as the agenda of the three riparian countries. The basic premise of this article is that disregarding the quest for fair utilization of the Nile River and questions related to the GERD as the only concerns of the three riparian countries violates international water law rules regarding Transboundary Rivers. I argued that such an approach will have a spillover effect and not have a lasting solution to utilize and manage the common water resources and that will continue the tendency to pursue unilateral interests instead of sharing the common resource. Rather than intensifying the riparian joint efforts to have a law that enable them equitable access to shared water, I did not believe that a separate tripartite negotiation on a dam or a project has resulted in a basin-wide legal framework and regional solution to Ethiopia's natural and legal right to use the Nile river resources. Any decisions on the use and administration of the Nile water, including the tripartite negotiations between Egypt Sudan, and Ethiopia which excludes other riparian countries, will inevitably raise questions of legitimacy like the 1929 and 1959 colonial agreements. The tripartite approach downgrades the achievements of the NBI and will bring the Nile water use and management question back from cooperation to a conflict system, and allow the same experience of conflict resolution in the basin to be taken by unilateral action on the shared water.