Revista de Ciências Políticas e Assuntos Públicos
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Cooperation in the Water Resources Management in the Nile Basin and the Permanent Risk of Conflicts

Olivier Dismas Ndayambaje

The Nile Basin states are reluctant to undertake serious cooperation between them. All through the history, all the agreement over the use of the Nile waters have been partial biding some of the riparian countries. All the attempts to set an inclusive treat like the Cooperative Framework Agreement in the Nile basin (CFA) came to fail. Egypt by invoking the 1929 and 1959 agreements has always managed to keep a status quo which allowed him with Sudan to use unilaterally the whole waters of the Nile basin regardless the needs of the upstream riparian states. However, new trends are drawing a new configuration of the social, ecological, diplomatic and political context in the region causing the upstream states to contest this status quo. The example of the construction and the exploitation of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) show how this already boiling region of Africa is subject to a permanent risk of armed conflict within or among countries due to lack of collaborative use of the water resources of the Nile Basin. Here we can say that the conflict over the GERD is just a “tip of the iceberg”. To mean that a sustainable management of the Nile Basin should include all the riparian states in this time that a “sine qua none” changes in use of its waters is at hand.