The destabilising potential of foreign interests in the Nile basin

Welcome back!


This post will take a wider look at foreign interests in the Nile basin and how different actors act in the region. The fact that so many external actors are involved in what initially seemed like a regional issue makes the need for basin-wide cooperation even more crucial, due to the added pressure it poses on the Nile. 


According to the regional security complex theory, security issues can be clustered by region. This is the case in the Nile basin, where alliances are shifting because of the GERD, threatening to further destabilise the region. There are many instances of this, including a danger of civil war spillover from South Sudan and now from Tigray. However, one good example of the link between GERD and wider security issues is Egypt’s growing partnership with Eritrea. Indeed, as Egypt cooperates with Eritrea on security matters in the Red Sea, Eritrea supports Egypt’s position on the GERD and its historical rights to the Nile. This revives tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea, as Eritrea grows more confident that Egypt would intervene to protect them if any revival of conflict were to happen with Ethiopia. 


This issue can however not be limited to the Horn of Africa, and involves Gulf countries as well, contributing to the entanglement of Nile basin security issues with Middle Eastern security issues. These two culturally close regions interacted long before the colonial era, and Gulf countries’ interest in the region has been revived since the 1970s, with an economic and political agenda. Again, there are many examples, and we will only focus on the case of Saudi Arabia and Sudan. As explained in my previous post, there is a high potential for agricultural expansion in Sudan, which has led Saudi Arabia to invest, to compensate for its own lack of arable land. However, Saudi Arabia’s financing of dams and irrigation also aimed to get Sudan’s support in Yemen, where Sudan contributed to the Saudi-led offensive with troops and armored vehicles. This developing partnership worries Egypt because of what it might mean in terms of increased water withdrawals, but also in terms of its competition with Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony in the Middle East. Two other major players in the area are Turkey and Israel, whose alliances, mostly with Ethiopia, have the potential to shift the balance of power in the Nile basin and accelerate the loss of Egyptian hydro-hegemony. 


Finally, other world players have had an impact. Egypt, as the most influential country in the Nile basin, has used its diplomacy and old colonial treaties to prevent major projects upstream on the Nile, and it has often succeeded. Indeed, Ethiopia saw a lot of its funding requests denied by the World Bank and other international institutions. Egypt’s close proximity with the Trump administration even led the US to withdraw $272 million in aid to Ethiopia because of its intransigence in GERD negotiations. This came at the time Ethiopia refused a US-led deal for the GERD, claiming that its drought mitigation mechanism was too favourable to Egypt. 


Ethiopia and many others therefore turned to another major investor: China. China’s willingness to fund upstream projects without additional political conditions enabled countries like Sudan and Ethiopia to start unilateral projects that would have otherwise been impossible. Sudan, for example, received a $1.2 billion loan for its Merowe dam, and a further $396 million to improve the Roseires dam. While this might be beneficial to upstream countries, Mahlakeng (2017) warns that too much funding for too many uncoordinated projects could destabilise the whole region. Indeed, as the demand for the Nile increases, and climate change threatens the supply, coordination and a comprehensive basin-wide plan become all the more crucial, to ensure access to water, but also peace in the region. 


One positive development is the increasing involvement of the African Union, which could be the key to finalising GERD negotiations in the future, as an African multilateral organisation.  

Comments

  1. Tara de Klerk8 January 2022 at 14:20

    Hi, this is a really comprehensive post on the foreign influences in the region and helped clarify the complexity of state relations regarding water resources.

    ReplyDelete

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