The mighty Victoria Falls. The water sector is critical in helping build regional integration in Southern Africa. / Zukiswa Zimela/IPS

By Thabani Okwenjani
HARARE, Jun 5 2012 (IPS)

The Southern African Development Community’s protocol on shared watercourses is recognised as one of the world’s best. But sound agreements on the sustainable and equitable management of joint water resources require effective means to implement them.

Water officials from across Southern Africa are meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Jun 5-6 to develop a mechanism to monitor the implementation of the regional agreement.

SADC’s 2003 Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses stresses a basin-wide approach to managing transboundary waters, rather than an emphasis on territorial sovereignty. It spells out the objectives of sound management as including coordinated management, sustainable use, and environmental protection.

The river basin organisations that are holding their fifth meeting in Harare are charged with promoting equitable use, setting out strategies for the development of shared rivers and lakes, and developing a policy for monitoring shared watercourses.

Armed conflict over water has long been predicted; most recently the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence said such wars would break out within the next decade. But although many parts of the region are already facing water stress, SADC expects its numerous transboundary watercourses to be the basis of closer cooperation rather than conflict.

“They say the next wars will be fought over water,” Dr Kenneth Msibi told IPS in Harare, ” but with these agreements, we are making sure that water will instead be an instrument of peace.”

Msibi, a water policy and strategy expert at the SADC Secretariat, said the water sector is critical in helping build regional integration. “Cooperation will also lead to further integration and water is an engine for development and this means a tool for poverty reduction. This means protocols for shared water are critical for regional integration.”

Msibi believes managing shared river basins in line with integrated water resource management principles – recognising that water management encompasses both social and economic goals, and should involve policy-makers, managers and users – contributes to SADC’s three key objectives: regional integration, peace and stability, and poverty reduction.

Sipho Nkambule, the chief executive officer of the Komati Basin Authority, which coordinates management of a river system that extends across South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique, said he would use the Harare meeting as a chance to compare notes on how other river basin authorities were monitoring implementation.

He said the main challenge was explaining management of a shared river to people living along its banks.

“People are struggling to understand why they should share the resource with others,” Nkambule said. “Those upstream are not happy to be told to allow water to pass, when they want to trap it for their own needs.”

Sergio Sitoe, the Interim Executive Secretary of LIMCOM, the Limpopo Watercourse Commission, said he hoped the new monitoring tool would emphasise communication among member states sharing a river basin.

“Member states should notify each other on development projects along the basin, as notification is crucial and failure to do so may create problems downstream and might impact negatively on other members,” he said.

As an example, Sitoe mentioned a recent complaint in which the Botswana government felt their South African counterparts should have officially informed them before beginning a development in the river basin.

The LIMCOM head said that while regional agreements allowed for disputes to be taken to the SADC Tribunal, there were a number of conflicts in the region that were being discussed behind closed doors.

“It’s good that we are trying to prevent these conflicts,” Sitoe said, “and we are building trust so that everything runs smoothly.”

Officials from across the region are agreed that implementation of the 2003 Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses will promote peace and stability in the region.

Msibi said the river basin organisation meeting – which welcomed its latest full member, the Zambezi Watercourse Commission, whose founding agreement was ratified in September last year – was meant to provide guidelines and reach a consensus on what indicators would be used and how these could be applied in each of the region’s transboundary river systems.

“We are taking input from all the stakeholders, we will discuss the tool and indicators to monitor progress,” Msibi said.

“This agreement can unlock potential for member states, and it creates an opportunity for member states to work together to beat economies of scale,” he said.

Despite early warnings about higher-than-usual flooding of the Okavango Delta in 2010, homes, fields, latrines and boreholes in the delta were flooded.

Beginning in May, gradually rising waters destroyed crops, disrupted the water supply and sanitation facilities, threatening public health with increased incidence of malaria and diarrhoea.

The flooding marks a return to high water levels last seen thirty or forty years ago, and even with advance notice, local government’s disaster management strategy proved inadequate to the task.

Dr Piotr Wolski, Associate Professor at the Okavango Research Institute (ORI) of the University of Botswana in Maun, who is an expert in hydrology, says he warned government already in April of the risk of severe flooding in the area, but nobody paid heed to his advice.

Wolski was able to predict the advent of the flood because he had been studying the delta’s weather patterns for years. He says the flood was caused by cyclic weather patterns and not by – largely unpredictable – climate change.

According to Wolski, the flooding in the delta is based on a 30-year cycle of flooding and drought which has been occurring for the past 800 years. After having experienced drought for three decades, the delta is now likely to enter a 30-year-period of flooding, he reckons.

Wolski says the phenomenon correlates to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a shift between phases of warmer and cooler surface temperatures half a world away in the Pacific Ocean. “Pacific Decadal Oscillation affects temperatures over the Pacific and this [in turn] affects rainfall in Botswana,” he explains.

“There has been no cyclicity change,” Wolski further notes. “A change in climate would be a modification of the cycle, and so far we have not seen that.”

It’s a reminder that while the broad predictions of increasing drought for Southern Africa are valid, they don’t simply translate into reduced rainfall in every locale. Careful study and interpretation of data is vital to guide planning.

Government officials – and indeed hydrologists – long assumed the decades-long dry spell in the Okavango was a permanent effect of climate change and were caught by surprise when the floodwaters began rising higher.

“There has been no water for the past number of years,” confirms Olebeng Balapi, head of hydrology at the provincial Department of Water Affairs in Maun. “Only the past two years have seen a tremendous amount of water, particularly this year. Because of the dryness, we have seen people built in the middle of the river where they have been allocated land

Wolski’s study of the data meant he was the amongst the first to recognise the error; his April predictions for 2010’s record flooding were remarkably accurate.

But relatively little could be done to prepare the community in line with Wolski’s warning. For one thing, limited availability of funds blocked local government from effectively dealing with the situation.

“No assistance was provided because of [lack of] money. Money is a factor, and we don’t have much,” said Balapi.

Wolski agreed with Balapi that local government’s hands are often bound by red tape and lengthy tender processes. For example, he predicts it will take a long time before the boreholes submerged by the flood will be fixed or new ones will be built: “Construction of more boreholes could take months or years due to tender procedures.”

Also complicating a comprehensive response is the very broad nature of the problem. Over the decades of dryness, the local population has grown and low-lying land had been allocated for use on the assumption that it would remain above the flood line.

People have made private investments in properties that now seem set for regular inundation; public works such as boreholes and sewage infrastructure are inappropriately sited; disaster management will need thoughtful, long-term intervention from numerous departments.

Responding to the upturn in the annual flooding of the Okavango is clearly not one day’s work – or even one months-long flood season, as the challenges of 2010 demonstrate.

Yet the return of high waters is welcome, accompanied as it is by returning fish and fowl, and economic opportunities. The data and analysis by hydrologists like Wolski, as well as the evidence-based scenarios put out by the river basin’s coordinating body, the Permanent Okavango River Basin Commission, will be vital to designing immediate and long-term plans for the entire Okavango delta.