MINISTERS from ten countries bordering the Nile or Lake Victoria, its main source, met in Uganda yesterday amid increasing fears that disputes over how to share out the waters could lead to serious conflict in the region.

The emergency meeting, held under the auspices of the United Nations-backed Nile Basin Initiative, was called after Tanzania announced a £16 million project last month to draw water from Lake Victoria for a million peasant families in western Tanzania.

The move, in open defiance of colonial treaties stipulating the use of the Nile’s waters, drew the immediate wrath of Egypt and Sudan, the Arab-African countries whose economies depend on the Nile’s flow.

A 1929 agreement between colonial Britain, which then spoke in the name of all of East Africa, and Egypt stipulated that without the express permission of Egypt, none of the countries on the banks of the Nile could initiate any project that would affect the volume of flow.

Cairo has said frequently that it would regard any attempt to alter the Nile status as an act of war. It has threatened to bomb Ethiopia if it goes ahead with plans to use the waters of the Blue Nile, which pour out of Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands, for irrigation projects in its drought-hit and impoverished lowlands.

The Blue and White Niles converge at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The two rivers generate an estimated annual water allotment of 83 billion cubic metres, of which Egypt receives 55 billion cubic metres, with the remainder going to Sudan.

Uganda has already built a huge hydroelectric facility at Jinja, where the White Nile leaves Lake Victoria. As this tends not to affect overall water levels, Egypt did not object. Plans now afoot to use the water for irrigation and drinking purposes in Ethiopia and Tanzania are viewed entirely differently. Egypt also fears that a quasi-independent black African state in southern Sudan — likely to emerge from peace talks to end Africa’s longest civil war — would also seek to maximise use of the Nile as it slowly meanders through the Sudanese plains and the Suud swamp.

The issue is not helped by a history of bad blood between black Africans and Arabs, who plundered the continent for slaves while Victorian explorers searched for the source of the Nile in the 19th century.

Last year Kenya called for the treaty to be revised, but all efforts to negotiate a more equitable arrangement have failed. Tanzania says that the 1929 treaty, and a 1959 update — recognised only by Sudan and Egypt — are illegal as the modern, sovereign states of the region were not consulted.

The Nile Basin Initiative, which is backed by the World Bank, was created in 1999 in an attempt to head off what many regional analysts see as a potential source of “water wars”.

“In ten to twenty years all these countries, particularly Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, will have much larger populations and face much greater demand for water,” Milas Seifulaziz, of Inter-Africa Group, an Addis Ababa-based conflict prevention unit, said. “In the absence of an agreement on equitable allocation, there will be a considerable increase in the risk of conflict.”

The governments of Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya have recently increased the pressure on Egypt. They are supported by Western countries, which encourage irrigation as a means of combating famine.

“It is simply not fair to ask eight African countries, badly in need of economic growth, to ignore such a natural resource on its doorstep,” one East African diplomat said.

Underlining the enormous gap between the two sides, Egypt said before the talks yesterday that it would reject any proposal to lower its quota of the Nile water and said that the talks would have to focus on initiatives to prevent “lost” water or seepage.

“The talks will have to comply with one permanent feature: not to touch Egypt’s historical rights,” Mahmud Abdel Halim Abu Zeid, the Egyptian Irrigation Minister, said. The 1929 treaty was concluded by an exchange of letters between the Egyptian Prime Minister and the British Ambassador in Egypt on May 7. It stated categorically that no works would be undertaken on the Nile, its tributaries and the Lake Basin, which would reduce the volume of the water reaching Egypt. It also awarded Egypt the right to inspect and investigate the whole length of the Nile up to the remote sources of its tributaries in the “Mountains of the Moon” of Burundi and Rwanda, also members of the Nile Basin Initiative, along with Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sudan and Egypt renegotiated the 1929 accord in 1956, coming up three years later with the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters treaty, which allowed the construction of the Aswan High Dam as the main element in the control of the Nile waters for the benefit of the two countries.

The contract for the laying of the 100-mile Tanzanian pipeline, which will provide water to 54 villages in Kahama in the Shinyanga region, has been awarded to a Chinese construction company.

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