Nile Riparian Countries on Sustainable Management of Their Natural Resources
The Nile Riparian Countries ought to setup guidelines for the proper and sustainable management of their natural resources, said a scholar.
In his article, Dr. Eng. Tsega Tibebu, also said that it is time to nominate the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his crew as ambassadors for environmental protection via planting seedlings across all the Water Towers of Africa.
He also said that the world is witnessing a shameful squabble among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia on the Dam filling schedule in Ethiopia. It is worth noting that Egypt is harvesting a great benefit by using the waters of the Blue Nile for all aspects of its related development. “A change of norms and procedures are required to allow all the Nile valley countries to be equal beneficiaries of their water resources,” he added.
“The British were known to have influenced Egyptians to believe that they were the rightful beneficiary of the waters of the Nile. A proof of this assumption could easily be found in the various water partition agreements, which were drafted by the British during the colonial times signed both by Egypt and Sudan, excluding all other riparian countries. This is perhaps one of the main reasons as to why the Egyptians have adopted a wayward attitude to the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD),” he added.
He further accentuated that the world knows that the construction of the Dam was officially started nine years ago, thus giving ample time for providing any alternative solution for any imaginary or real water stress expected downstream in Egypt. Given the fact that the Dam’s storage capacity is about 74 billion cubic meters, it becomes purely a puzzle to schedule water impoundment, every time it exhausts its storage for electric generation. The water filling schedule should be automatic without any third party interference.
“As witnessed in many possible alternatives, the hurly-burly of the negotiation on the delaying of the reservoir filling is quite a comedy, because it is surely a repetitive required action every time the storage is exhausted by the yearly electric generation,” he underlined.
