Water and Development: Africa

As this blog comes to an end, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect back on my original aspirations for these blog posts: to look into the theme of water and politics in an African context. After reading Wainaina's article on 'How to Write About Africa' , I did not want to make the grave mistake of generalising the continent, so I aimed to include a variety of case studies that covered a wide context variety. Overall, I believe that I have been able to meet my personal goal, and I am pleased with the topics that I addressed in my blog posts: relationships between the Nile riparian states (transboundary water management), dams and their political impacts, and how water shortages lead to violence in the South Sudanese and South African context. Further to this, throughout my blogging, I wanted to analyse to what extent water plays a role in African politics. Water is an essential need in order to survive: we need it for domestic, agriculture and health purposes. Securi...

We will step away from the Northern African context for this blog post. Instead, we will be looking at water narratives in the south. Cape Town, South Africa’s capital is projected to be the first major city in the world to run out of water . The cause of South Africa’s water crisis is unique as the water shortages are not due to the classic high demand and low supply paradox, but due to uneven distribution , politics, poor planning and inefficient crisis management . Although residents are not accountable for the crisis that is consuming South Africa, “ the burden of making sure it doesn’t happen rests largely on our [the South African local’s] ability to cut down on water usage ”. Cape Town bracing for ‘ day zero ’ (the day where the city has no more running water) is a middle-class crisis that made news headlines in 2018. However, many other Townships, namely black townships have long suffered water shortages and have been living in ‘day zero’ for years .   South Africa relie...

Making sure that freshwater is globally and widely accessible remains one of humanity’s biggest challenge . South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation after gaining independence from Sudan in 2011 . The young nation experiences flooding for over half of the year, has the White Nile passing through it and sits on 3 transboundary aquifers - it is not short on water. However, civil war has ensued the country, where they have faced several humanitarian crises: 80% of South Sudan’s population is without access to clean water. Civil unrest has nominally ‘ended’, but water now stands at the core for the increase in violent and less-than human acts of kidnappings and rape .   Due to the ensuing violence, infrastructure key to delivering clean, safe water has been destroyed through acts of political violence. In a warming climate, clean water is becoming more essential to our lives, and the drive to secure it has lead to armed political conflicts and statements between the different et...

There are actually two dams at Aswan, the Aswan Low Dam (ALD) and the Aswan High Dam (AHD), but generally when people talk about the Aswan Dam they are referring to the latter.   95% of Egypt’s population lives within the narrow strip along the Nile and there goes a saying that ‘ Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt ’. Historically, the Egyptians have been taking advantage of the annual flooding as the Nile brings nutrients needed to fertilise the soil for irrigation. However, as the population grew, the flooding became a hazard and in response, the ALD was built in the late 1800s by the British whilst Egypt was under British colonial rule. The ALD was deemed inadequate in controlling the floods and in response, the AHD was constructed in 1968, where it was deemed as an ‘ important hydro-political act ’ that will essentially act as an agent for economic development. The flow of the Nile is increasingly becoming unnatural with the construction of hard engineering solutions, a...

With water appreciating in value, in 1979, former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat claimed that the only reason for Egypt to go to war was over water . The following decade, former Egyptian UN Secretary warned that the wars to come would be over the waters of the Nile . It is becoming clear that water as a means to obtain national security is becoming a priority for many riparian states of the Nile. In this blog post, I will talk about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), and the subsequent political relations Ethiopia has with the riparian states of the Nile. The Nile passes through eleven riparian countries: Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan,, Sudan, and finally Egypt before it empties out into the Mediterranean. Due to the Nile’s transboundary borders, many political issues brew and perhaps one of the most well known disputes on the river is between Egypt and Ethiopia. When Ethiopia announced their int...