Oil, land and water

The 2005 peace agreement makes provision for the sharing of oil revenue, three-quarters of which is obtained in South Sudan. It also makes provisions regarding the concluding of international treaties, including the treaty on sharing the waters of the Nile. To these two sensitive issues, a third must be added that is not covered by the peace agreement: land ownership. 

Whereas in North Sudan the land theoretically belongs to the state - even though the latter privatised farms in the 1980s and 1990s - it is a land tenure system rooted in common law that must prevail in the South. That at least is the position adopted by the Juba government, albeit while recognising the need for a land policy that permits the commercialisation of agriculture and the development of a “fair and inclusive” market economy in a region ravaged by war and where the population is dependent on subsistence farming. 

The recognition of common land ownership will be even more difficult to apply in the oil regions from which the population was forcibly evicted by Khartoum. As government revenue in South Sudan comes almost exclusively from oil revenue, the government will have cause to create new structures for political control.  

Monopolizing

In the meantime, according to a study carried out by the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid, between 2007 and 2010 foreign companies purchased a total of 2.64 million hectares of land designated for agriculture, forestry and biofuel production. The surface involved is believed to represent about 9% of South Sudan’s total surface area, which makes it an area bigger than the whole of Rwanda. 

Blue gold

The independence of South Sudan should speed up negotiations on the difficult issue of sharing the waters of the Nile.  The visit of Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Elaraby to Khartoum on 27 March, followed by a visit to Juba, is noteworthy. Egypt enjoys an “historic” right to the waters of the Nile that, since the agreement imposed by the British in 1929 and amended in 1959, has enabled it to benefit from 70% of the waters of the river, 20% being allocated to Sudan in compensation for land flooded by the Assouan dam in Egypt and the displacement of more than 60,000 Nubians. The remaining 10% is allocated to countries lying downstream of the White Nile basin: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia, cradle of the Blue Nile and in reality responsible for 85% of the Nile that actually has its source in Khartoum where the White and Blue Niles meet. 

Since 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative has been trying to take account of the growing demand for water from countries lying downstream. Most of these countries have ratified the Initiative. Cairo, hitherto opposed, now seems ready to accept a compromise. The idea is to revitalise the project to build the Jonglei Canal. Launched in 1973 this canal, 360 km in length, was designed to allow the White Nile to avoid passing through the Sudd marshes in South Sudan, thereby recovering 10 billion m3 of water a year. Work on such a project was halted by the civil war in 1983 and the Egyptian minister now plans to relaunch it with his new South Sudanese partners.  
 
Marie-Martine Buckens