As floods continue to wreak havoc across Southern Africa, a look at the conservation of water resources may seem irrelevant, but delegates at an international water conference took a longer-term view
Jubie Matlou in The Hague, The Netherlands
A draft blueprint for fair and equal access to the Inkomati River by South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique was presented by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) this week to the Second World Water Security Forum in The Hague, The Netherlands.
The Inkomati Shared River Basin Initiative (ISRBI) is developing a water management system that intends to promote the justiciable use of and access to a river that cuts through the political boundaries of the three SADC countries.
A solution to the Inkomati River dispute, said Dr Joanne Leestemaker, Mozambique’s representative on the ISRBI, could encourage Mozambique to withdraw its claim for compensation from the International Court of Justice.
For the past few decades, South Africa has been exploiting the upstream end of the Inkomati, building over 40 dams to produce thermal electricity from coal, to meet the energy needs of its industrial heartland.
Swaziland uses what is left of the flow to irrigate its “gold” – the sugar plantations – and almost nothing is left for Mozambique in terms of river life for fishermen or clean water for domestic and industrial use. Over two million people in all three countries depend on the Inkomati for a living, and this number is expected to increase to three million.
Today the Inkomati River can no longer live up to its name: that of a cow that feeds the Tonga, Tsonga and Swati communities living along its banks. South African development projects upstream – thermal energy, irrigation and reforestation, as well as industrial and urban water use – are soaking up the flow, cutting off development downstream.
This sad state of affairs is a direct by-product of the ill-conceived Berlin Conference that carved Africa into artificial political entities that went up for grabs to the numerous European colonial masters.
Mozambique gets no clean drinking water from the Inkomati. As its volume is reduced, the river’s journey to the Indian Ocean is curtailed. Instead, the ocean flows for up to 60km inland, unleashing an environmental hazard. The salinated water pollutes the water table, disturbing the delicate eco-balance of the Inkomati downstream flow and the ocean’s inland flow.
The disrupted interface of the two flows also affects the supply of seafood stock to coastal Maputo restaurants, killing off small marine life such as oysters and prawns.
Pretoria University political scientist Anthony Turton, who is a member of the ISRBI task team, argues that the management of a trans-boundary river basin involves a conflict of choices when determining the optimal and most efficient use of a river by one country or another.
“It’s a tragic case – people live in habitat patterns determined by the flow of a river, as opposed to political boundaries. It’s difficult to justify the use of a river for the production of thermal electricity over the use of a river for fishing, domestic use for livestock or crops,” Turton said.
He said the use of the river value-chain cannot easily be resolved, as there are contending moral, political and socio- economic considerations.
“How do you justify South Africa’s multimillion investment in the Inkomati dam projects over the plight of poor communities living downstream alongside the Inkomati in Mozambique [who are] relying on the river for subsistence living? From a moral viewpoint, doesn’t this imply that Mozambican rural communities are less important?” Turton asks.
ISRBI has been in operation for the past five years, and is funded by the Swedish International Development Agency. The initiative’s task teams are responsible for four areas of concern in managing the river basin. These are :
l river health – monitoring the eco- system’s degradation in the water value- chain;
l socio-economic issues such as industrial development versus subsistence farming;
l institutional arrangements required to manage the basin, such as water legislation in the affected countries; and
l data management required to provide support for decision-making.
The solution to the river basin management system appears to lie in countries changing their national economic planning to regional, inter-country economic planning – moving from national self-sufficiency to food security based on regional economic bloc formations of a number of countries. The approach requires water-saturated countries to produce foodstuffs, and for water-stressed countries to buy from those countries.
Water-stressed countries would then concentrate on providing alternative service and goods not available, such as technology and other infrastructure requirements. For Zambia to provide for the agricultural needs of the SADC, for example, then South Africa and other countries would need to invest in the transport infrastructure of the region for the smooth movement of such goods, as well as provide the latest agricultural expertise and technology.
This new approach requires that an audit be conducted to establish the potential of each country’s economic output, and then planning be done acordingly, to establish a common market for the SADC region.
Turton argues that this trend has begun to unfold with the relocation of South African farmers to Zambia a few years ago.
Leestemaker said inter-regional co- operation could lead to “new ways of doing things. Existing irrigation practices by South African farmers, subsidised through low water prices and high sugar prices, prevents innovative irrigation technology and shifting crop patterns according to efficiency rules that could make scarce water available for the best user.”
She argues that if sugar is produced in Mozambique’s wetter regions, and South Africa holds its scarce water resources for other purposes, Mozambique’s labour force could find work at home on sugar plantations, instead of having to migrate to other countries to work.
Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils told the Mail & Guardian that the ISRBI is in line with government policy on trans-boundary river management.
“The National Water Act of 1998 recognises the right of our downstream neighbouring countries and their communities to have access to shared rivers to meet their water needs,” he said. “This provision is covered in the various bilateral treaties we entered into with our neighbours.”
Trans-boundary disputes relating to fair use of rivers include disagreements among Angola, Namibia and Botswana over the Okavango swamps, which are fed by the Cunene river and its Angolan tributaries, and a dispute over the Nile River, which Egypt is reportedly exploiting before it reaches the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda.