What I have learned about this blog

The past couple of months I have learned a lot about the political dimension of water and development in Africa and in specific in Angola, Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. I started this blog with a biased view on water and its distribution and amount over the continent. I thought Africa was more than anything, a dry, unfertile continent. A continent plagued by droughts, famine and deserts. How can a country develop and flourish, not only economically but also politically and socially without having any water, was my thought? Of course this view of mine was too simplistic, I knew it was but I did not know the other side of the story. As a Dutch man, living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with access to great water resources, the struggle for water in Africa seemed far away. My view was influenced by media, addressing Africa as one country, always using its name in the same sentence with aids, poverty, conflict, corruption and definitely water scarcity. Thus, as a child growing up in a Western country my view of Africa was Eurocentric and biased from the beginning, even when I started taking this course.

I was immediately confronted with my biased views in the first lecture that introduced the course. My ideas of distribution, accessibility and volume of water in Africa was completely wrong. Furthermore I learned access to water had more to do with politics rather than volume or variability of precipitation. My first blog can therefore best be described as my revelation of water and politics. Specifically this relation is what grabbed my attention most. In the beginning of blogging I struggled with finding topics to write about. Politics is everywhere, where do I start? An article about Ethiopian’s Grand Renaissance Dam got me interested in what is called shared water resources management (SWRM). This comprises all water resources that are shared between different kinds of actors that all have an interest in the water resource. I found out that in a lot of cases water resources cover territories in different countries. Because water bodies are not limited to one specific territory but shared between different groups, and interests, conflict is likely to arise. Different groups have different interests and should therefore cooperate in fulfilling everyone’s needs. However power relations between the different interest groups are asymmetric. Some actors have more power than others, for instance national government have more power than small marginalised local groups and upstream riparian states often have more power than their downstream counterparts. These different power relations are key to understanding why some people have access to water and why some don’t. 

In my blogs I tried to involve as many interest groups as possible and tried to unveil the different power relations between actors in specific cases. I have discussed SWRM among the Nile riparian states, the Zambezi riparian states and the countries that are using the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. I have also touched upon  topics that are less place specific but happen all over Africa such as water grabbing. And finally I have discussed global actors in the case of the Akosombo dam in Ghana.

So what are my main findings after writing these blogs? First of all, the (extreme) asymmetry in power between different interest groups. Often, the national (or global) actor has a dominance over the local and region interests. National governments make decisions without paying any attention to local interest and often even exclude local groups in their decision-making. They do this under the guise of national interest and development rather than local decline. Furthermore have found out that making decisions about water management is not as simple is one might think. Data is often manipulated or faked due to a lack of adequate instruments to measure water quality, volume and variability. Therefore making wrong decisions is frequent. A third finding is the vitality of water for human kind. The reason why conflicts over water are happening is because of its great value. We must never underestimate the importance of water for humankind and its survival. Conflicts about water are serious and must be solved including all interest groups that are involved. I will never forget what the Egyptian president said about the construction of the GERD and its possible threat to Egypt’s water security: We would go over war for our water resources. This statement made me realise how serious water affairs are. I can’t blame Egypt for defending itself in survival. In the end we all need it to survive.

My final remark on this blog is that I feel more aware of the importance of water and the privileged position I find myself in, having access to sufficient and good quality water. I hope the world will shift into a world with equal water access in which we can all flourish and don’t have to suffer from the consequence of a lack of fresh water.

The Zambezi river basin: a regional lifeline

One of the main topics I discuss in my blogs in the management of transboundary water resources between the states that use these resources. I have discussed the Grande Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, involving Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan and I have addressed the transboundary water conflict between the riparian states of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in North East-Africa. I have realised my main focus has been on the Nile countries when it comes to transboundary water resource management (or an absence of this management). Therefore, thig blog will shift my focus on the Nile area to the southern part of Africa: the Zambezi River Basin. In this blog I will talk about the management of this important river basin between its riparian states.

As I have mentioned, the Zambezi River is located in Southern-Africa flowing through 8 different basin states: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (see figure 1). Out of these countries Zambia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. These eight states are members of the economic grouping called the Southern African Development Community (SADC). have the largest share of its basin (Heyns, 2003; Osborne,2000; Tumbare, 2015). The river supports over 20 million people and is expected to increase to over 70 million people by 2050. As we have seen before in the Nile countries, these population growths will increase water demands for food and energy which can negatively impact the basin’s ecosystem and environment. The river basin has experienced infrastructural development for energy generation, flood control, recreation, fishing and irrigation. It is now home to two large artificial reservoirs: the Kariba and Cahora Bassa (Osborne, 2003; Tilmant et al. 2012). Furthermore a number of at least 26 dams has been built for domestic, industrial, and mining water supply and for irrigation and power generation (Heyns, 2003). It's noteworthy to mention most of these irrigation and hydropower projects are being developed independently in the early stages of the projects (Tilmant et al., 2012).

Figure 1: the Zambezi River Basin

Source

Management of the Zambezi river basin

Like I have said before the Zambezi river is of vital importance of the region and is used through infrastructural projects like dams and irrigation systems. Obviously, this infrastructure affects the river in a great way. Especially the interferences upstream have a significant impact on the downstream regions. This demands a cooperation between the river’s riparian states to avoid conflict and achieve an equal share of the pie for all countries. The riparian states each monitor, asses, plan, develop, conserve and protect the water resources that are found in their territory of the Zambezi River. There is however little consultation or cooperation among the riparian states. Historically the Zambezi’s riparian states have not take the opportunity for joint water resources management, except in isolated cases (Osborne, 2000).

I start with the Zambezi River Action Plan (ZACPLAN) agreement signed in 1987 in Harare and strongly initiated and supported by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). The ZACPLAN was signed by the governments of Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. A move forward to a shared programme must be a good thing, I hear you think. However the ZACPLAN agreement was signed not primarily and foremost to prevent future conflict through judicious development of the Zambezi’s waters and a coordinated international water management, but for a political strategy to isolate South Africa. Thus, the riparian states seized the opportunity to eliminate South Africa’s opportunity to tap the Zambezi River in the future. Therefore, important issues concerning water management have not been considered or agreed upon (Kampanje-Phiri, 2016). The Southern Africa Development Coordinating Conference (SADCC), a mandate that included the promotion of power development and interconnection was signed in 1980 and would obtain the power to oversee the implementation of the ZACPLAN. The riparian states, however, did not want to give up their power to a third party. This shows the error in the programme, lacking a practical, executive basis having no real impact on the states’ approach to water resource management and development (Kampanje-Phiri, 2016).

In 1995, another protocol followed on shared watercourse systems and was signed by the Zambezi River Basin states. In 1997, the UN held a conference about the Law of Nonnavigational Uses of International Watercourses, the conference's key principles were to achieve reasonable and equitable utilisation and obligation not to cause significant harm. This conference influenced the revision of the 1995 protocol that was finally ratified in 2003 and embraced the conference’s international watercourse law (Kampanje-Phiri, 2016).

Besides the previous agreements and protocols that were signed and discussed in 1995 and 1997, there has been another initiative: the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM) which would be a legal instrument to guide water resources development in the Zambezi River Basin. Zambia resigned the negotiations but the remaining 7 riparian states signed the ZAMCOM in 2004, adopting the generalised principles of the UN convention (Kampanje-Phiri, 2016).

Analysing the Zambezi’s water management agreements and protocols, we can see there has been a progress in signed agreements that should implement more cooperation and more regulation and management on the river overall. However one must be careful with this ‘success’. As Kampanje-Phiri (2016) argues, the Zambezi’s riparian states have signed the ZAMCOM in 2004 but this agreement overlooked specific instruments to address inherent issues in the Zambezi River Basin, this development endangers overlooking key issues that may be a key to promoting water cooperation in the basin.

Thus, it remains unclear whether the riparian states of the Zambezi are effective in managing their precious water resources that in the future will even be used more intensively than ever before. Whereas no real violent conflicts have occurred so far, without implementing a strong cooperative and integrated management system this might become reality in the future.