Countries that share the Nile waters are not about to agree on how to equitably share the River Nile waters following the postponement of a meeting Kampala where Nile Basin Initiative countries should have agreed on the matter.
The African Summit on Nile waters which was scheduled to take place in Kampala next week has been postponed due to what officials say was unavailability of some of the Heads of state of member countries.
The summit was supposed to attract all Heads of State from the East African Community and other countries sharing the Nile including Egypt, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
Egypt and Sudan are yet to agree to a new Cooperative Framework Agreement signed by other NBI countries. The agreement is aimed at giving more equitable rights to countries over the Nile, because the current agreements signed with colonial masters Britain gives superior rights to upstream countries Sudan and Egypt.
The new agreements arrived at after 100 years of negotiations seeks to establish a permanent Nile River Basin commission which will set clear procedures of water sharing thereby replacing the two widely disputed colonial-era pacts deemed unfair by the seven of the Nile Basin member counties including Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and the DRC.
Egypt’s Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, Mona Omar
Egypt and Sudan are not comfortable with a clause in the new agreement that removes their veto and monitoring powers of water consumption on River Nile, and establishment of any projects along or near River Nile that may be against Egypt’s interests, as per the colonial agreement.
But Egypt’s Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, Mona Omar was quoted by the media there as saying that Egypt had planned to propose the establishment of an investment and development commission similar to the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA).