Twice a year the monks and priests of the Church of Narga Selassie on Dek Island in northern Ethiopia gather to bless an urn of water scooped from the lake that surrounds them. They pray over the water for three days and ask God to sanctify it in the name of Jesus. Then, in a small stone alcove, the head monk pours the water over a silver cross, its detailed engravings worn almost smooth with centuries of polishing, and onto the heads of believers who come in their dozens to be baptized. For the rest of the year the waters of Lake Tana, the eastern source of the Nile, are important to the holy men for more prosaic reasons. They drink it and water their crops with it, wash in its muddy shallows and scrub their laundry on the rocks that necklace the lakeshore. After every sorghum harvest they draw the water in buckets and mix it with grain and hops to make pungent beer. “Our life depends on the lake,” says Father Meseret Moges, 53, a priest who has lived in the monastery on the island for almost three decades.
That sentiment is shared by the millions of people who live along the 6,695 km of the world’s longest river. From its origins in Ethiopia and in the rolling green hills around Lake Victoria in central Africa, the Nile and its many tributaries loop through 10 countries across half the length of the continent. Egypt, which has viewed the Nile as something like its private possession for centuries, has long drawn far more from the river than its southern neighbors. But ambitious new development schemes are beginning to change that. Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda are all either building or planning to build new dams, and a regional grouping of Nile states is working on proposals for new
hydroelectric plants and massive irrigation schemes. To the plans’ backers, the Nile is an engine of economic growth. But environmentalists fear a development boom will destroy ecosystems, force people from their homes, and reduce the river to a trickle. “We’re definitely at a turning point,” says Kinfe Abraham, head of the government-linked think tank Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development in Addis Ababa, and author of three books on the Nile. “The question is what way we go.”
For centuries, suspicion and mistrust have flowed as freely as water in the Nile. So dependent is Egypt on the river that rulers since the Pharaohs have regularly cajoled and threatened upstream nations to ensure that their tampering did not leave Egyptians dry and hungry. In 1270, the Orthodox Church in Cairo exercised its control over Ethiopia and the Blue Nile by refusing to send a bishop to anoint an Ethiopian King. In the 20th century, Egypt signed a treaty with Britain that essentially gave Cairo full control over the Nile’s waters. Much to its neighbors’ disgust, Egypt held them to the pact even after they gained independence from Britain. As recently as the 1970s, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat warned that “any action that would endanger the waters of the Blue Nile will be faced with a firm reaction on the part of Egypt, even if that action should lead to war.”
It’s easy to understand Egypt’s motives: the Nile is a lifeline for the country’s 74 million people, over 90% of whom live along a thin strip of fertile land that hugs the river’s banks. The Nile also feeds a vast network of Egyptian irrigation canals that nourish the plots of peasant farmers such as Mohammed Sorour, 43, father of seven. “All the time, we have water,” smiles Sorour, who plants molokhiyya, a leafy vegetable Egyptians cook into a stew, on the east bank of the river near El Saff, 50 km south of Cairo. “If the Ethiopians ever tried to stop the Nile,” Sorour says, only half joking as he fires off rounds from an imaginary machine gun, “Egyptians will attack them and kill all the Ethiopians.”
Such threats, as well as grinding poverty and civil wars in Ethiopia, Uganda and Sudan — whose capital is built where the Blue Nile meets the White — have stifled development along the upper river for decades. Dam and irrigation projects have been blocked. That, say regional leaders, has kept millions of people poor. “While Egypt is taking the Nile water to transform the Sahara into something green, we in Ethiopia — which is the source of 85% of that water — are denied the possibility of using it to feed ourselves. And we are being forced to beg for food every year,” Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told the bbc last year. The imbalance is shocking: Egypt uses the Nile’s waters to help it produce more than double the power generated in the nine upriver nations combined. It also irrigates millions of acres of farmland even as its neighbors remain among the thirstiest and poorest nations on the planet.
Recently, however, things have begun to change. The end of the cold war eased many of the tensions between Egypt and its southern neighbors as the global powers no longer saw African nations as useful proxies in their own disputes. The ensuing political and economic reforms in Africa have pushed up demand for electricity in places such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. As new hydroelectric projects have started over the past few years — Sudan’s Merowe Dam is due for completion in less than four years; Ethiopia is building or planning to build a series of dams in its highlands; and Uganda will start work on a new World Bankbacked dam just north of Lake Victoria in the next few years — Egypt has realized that development along the Upper Nile is inevitable. Cairo’s leaders now know that it makes more sense for them to get involved than to carp from the sidelines. Moreover, those Egyptian politicians, journalists and other opinion makers who have visited neighbors such as Ethiopia have seen just how far behind such countries are. “We realized that we cannot stop the countries of the Upper Nile from developing the water,” Egyptian Minister for Water Resources and Irrigation Mahmoud Abu-Zeid told Time. “We understand each other now. We realize the need for the development of each country.”
The new sense of cooperation is enshrined in the Nile Basin Initiative . The grouping of nine nations was founded in 1999 with the aim of coordinating development along the Nile, boosting local economies, and helping to feed the millions of people in the region who regularly face starvation. Patrick Kahangire, executive director of the NBI
secretariat and former head of Uganda’s national water department, says that Nile development should help all the countries that share the river. There are still many hurdles. Egypt, for instance, is meeting resistance over its demands that it be given an effective veto over all proposed development. It also wants to be allowed to keep the historic agreements that assure it a minimum quantity of Nile water, which other countries question. “These issues could take many years,” says Abdel Fattah Metawie, chairman of Egypt’s Nile Water Sector, a department of the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation , “but we will reach agreement, even if it takes many years. There is plenty of water. The problem is managing it.”
The grand vision of the NBI goes something like this: large dams along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia will generate power for the region and even for export to Europe. In Sudan and Uganda, where the soil is much richer than in Egypt, vast tracts of irrigated land will grow food. That will help sustain Egypt’s population and enable the north African nation to expand its role as the region’s manufacturing powerhouse. Each country would invest in the projects, and each country would profit. The scheme’s proponents at the NBI point out its benefits: water stored in Ethiopian dams, built into deep ravines, would evaporate more slowly than it does in Egyptian dams with their much greater surface areas; it would take a lot less water to grow crops such as sugar, bananas and rice in Sudan than in Egypt; and a series of projects shared by all the Nile countries would help end devastating seasonal flooding while also promoting peace and stability by tying together the fates of the riverine nations. “It could transform the region completely,” says David Grey, the World Bank’s senior water resources adviser for Africa and a longtime promoter of Nile development to boost the region’s fortunes.
