The Nile Basin countries’ one-day ministerial meeting concluded in Dar eSalam, Tanzania with a call from Ethiopia and Uganda for the expedite ratification of the Nile River Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA).
Ambassador Shibru, Dr. Eng. Habtamu Itefa and Sam Cheptoris, Uganda’s Minister of Water and Environment, made a call to the initiative’s members to expedite the ratification of the Nile River Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement.
The NBI is a regional intergovernmental partnership of ten countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, the DRC, and Egypt. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was born on February 22, 1999, in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania.
Work started immediately on the CFA, and lasted ten years. However, by 2009, major differences over some basic issues erupted, and could not be resolved, neither at the technical, nor at the political levels, leading to the impasse on the CFA.
These major differences persisted as a result of the resurfacing and hardening of the respective positions of the Nile riparians over the colonial treaties, as well as the Egyptian and Sudanese claims to what they see as their acquired uses and rights of the Nile waters, and the rejection of these claims by the upper riparians.