Politics

Africa: the eternal battle for water

Non 1995, when the World Bank warned that “if the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, those of the 21st century will be about water,” the statement was not taken too seriously. Yet, conflicts between peoples and nations linked to access to water resources have increased exponentially in the new millennium, and this trend – the data says – is destined to continue. Between 2000 and 2009, for example, 94 conflicts were recorded, while between 2010 and 2018 the figure reached 263. This was revealed by the UNESCO report The United Nations world water development report 2019: leaving no one behindthe examination of which leaves no doubt.

What situations are most at risk? The course of the Nile, water reserve of many African countries and source of eternal tension between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan; the Indus river in Pakistan, whose tributaries originate in the Subcontinent and create continuous clashes for supply; the same goes for the Jordan river basin, on which the lives of more than seven million people depend and whose area intercepts the needs of Jordan, which controls 40 percent of it, Syria (37), Israel (10), Palestine (9) and Lebanon (4 percent). Finally, the Tigris and Euphrates should be mentioned, which flow through Syria and Iraq but whose control by Turkey is essential for Ankara; and the Mekong in Asia, the “mother of waters”, a source of food as well as a means of transport and trade for 60 million people, shared by China, Laos, Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The ones just mentioned are some of the future theaters of wars over water, outbreaks that could soon lead to real armed conflicts. Starting right from the Nile, where the issue also becomes geopolitical, following the adage “whoever controls the Nile, controls the power”. A certainty for the people who live on lands that were once lush, but today plagued by prolonged seasons of drought which make climate change the first real enemy to fight as well as a disastrous variable. The Horn of Africa, therefore tens of millions of people, has for years faced long periods of lack of rainfall and sudden and devastating floods.

The second enemy, however, is precisely the men and governments who find themselves having to manage an emergency that is a prelude to an announced clash: it all begins when Ethiopia begins to build a large dam, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, more than two thousand kilometers south from Egypt to channel the spring waters of the eastern branch of the Nile, the so-called Blue Nile, which brings most of the water and fertile silt downstream. Since then, Cairo has been on alarm, worried and aware of the real risk of seeing its water inflow significantly reduced, given that the dam built in Ethiopia is a mammoth work of very high engineering, which will serve to imprison a reservoir of dozens of billions of cubic meters, which will therefore never reach – if not rationed – the Egyptian lands. The work for the client Ethiopian Electric Power was carried out by an Italian company, the former Salini Impregilo, now WeBuild. Although at home it is unable to carry out functional projects such as the Bridge over the Strait of Messina due to vetoes and counter-vetoes, abroad WeBuild carries out very large projects: the one on the Nile is in fact entirely Italian and its value would be equal to around four billion (but the figure official is not known). The same goes for Trevi, the Italian company that was awarded the maintenance of the Mosul dam in Iraq, where the Tigris river flows: it is the fourth largest in the entire Middle East and was damaged during the war with which the Islamic Caliphate wanted to subjugate significant portions of Syria and Iraq.

Returning to the dispute over the waters of the Nile, in the beginning it was the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassiewho was the first to propose the construction of a dam on the Blue Nile. It was 1958 but only in April 2011 was the first stone laid. Since then, Egypt and Sudan have been working to boycott the creation of the immense water reserve that will generate so much electricity for Ethiopia that it can then be resold. «Already last year, the Ethiopian government had announced the complete filling of the basin of the enormous dam which, by design, should be handed over to the Ethiopian government within a few years, once the works have been completed. And this despite Egypt and Sudan having asked Ethiopia on several occasions not to complete the filling of the basin until they had found a precise agreement on its functioning. Now, once things are done, everything becomes more difficult” comments Rocco Bellantone, author of essays and Africanist for NigriziaItalian magazine of the Comboni missionaries dedicated to the African continent. «Furthermore, the rapid growth of the Egyptian population, which is increasing by two million a year and which, together with climate changes which they cannot govern, will be a source of water shortages, weighs on the future of relations between these nations, especially between Egypt and Ethiopia. in the region by 2025, also considering that Sisi has just built a megalopolis in the middle of the desert.” The reference is to the new administrative capital of the country, which intends to intensively exploit the capacities of the Nile.

Bellantone continues: «To make the situation more complicated, not to say explosive, there are also the tensions between Sudan and South Sudan, which since April 2023 have been compounded by the civil war that broke out due to the seizure of power in Khartoum. Many conflicts, in fact, arise in already problematic areas, where issues such as the supply of resources are added to geopolitical factors. Thus in Darfur, a region of Sudan that develops between the Sahara desert to the north and the more fertile savannah to the south. For years there has been a progressive decrease in rainfall which, due to the advance of the desert, is forcing millions of people to flee the drought. Which amplifies African humanitarian crises, even without the need to fight a war. Because “war” here means, first and foremost, surviving the day.” But then there is the real conflict, for which Egypt seems to want to prepare: for this reason too, on 14 August in Cairo, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi and his Somali counterpart, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, gave their consent to the signing of a bilateral defense cooperation protocol, to make Addis Ababa understand that you don’t mess with fire, but not even with water. Egypt, in fact, intends to create a cordon sanitaire of alliances to isolate Ethiopia and militarize its borders: in this sense, it supports an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, with the deployment of around ten thousand soldiers deployed along the border with Ethiopia and Somaliland; the latter is the separatist region that self-proclaimed independence from Somalia with Ethiopian help. Thus, while Mogadishu is at odds with Addis Ababa because it favors the Somali separatists, Cairo, after the agreements with Sudan, is creating a new axis with Somalia and also with the Eritrea of ​​the dictator Isaias Afewerki, which traditionally fuels the historic rivalry between the two nations of the Horn of Africa.

Where all this might lead is unclear, but tensions in the region have already resulted in serious threats of sabotage and even demolition of Africa’s “dam of discord.” Similar events have already occurred in Iraq, when the Islamic State conquered the Mosul dam in August 2014, threatening to explode it to pour a wall of water over Mosul and Baghdad, with hundreds of thousands of deaths and incalculable damage. The same happened in Ukraine in June 2023, when the Russians allegedly destroyed the Kakhovka dam, causing the worst ecological disaster since Chernobyl: about 16 billion cubic meters of water from the Dnipro River overwhelmed more than 80 villages , destroying 20 thousand hectares of land and even causing oil spills. According to the UN, by 2025 two thirds of the world’s population will live in water shortages and by 2030 over 700 million people will be at risk of evacuation. This is also why, according to some governments, water is worth a war.