Water and Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Emerging Concepts and their Implications for Effective Water Resource Management in the Southern African Region

Africa has 63 river basins that cross the international political borders demarcating the 48 countries making up the African continent (Pakenham 1991: 15). Each of these river basins is shared by between two and ten states and this feature poses several strategic implications for the future economic development aspirations of the countries concerned. Significantly, large areas of Africa are arid or water scarce, where the spatial and temporal distribution of surface water is tightly controlled by the interplay between sparse and erratic rainfall and high evaporation rates. In these areas, the availability of surface water seldom matches the water needs of the respective countries and greater reliance is placed on water drawn from underground aquifers for domestic, agricultural, and industrial use (UNESCO-ISARM 2004: 4). In the extremely dry areas of North Africa, every country re-lies heavily on water drawn from the large shared aquifer systems that characterize this region. Here, the “Great Man-Made River Project” in Libya provides a classical example of this dependence, where the large volumes of water drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer (shared by Chad, Egypt, Libya, and Sudan) contribute over 90 % of Libya’s national water budget (Kuwairi 2004: 8). The dilemma posed by the erratic availability of water in many African countries has prompted re-searchers to pose two interrelated questions. First, will governments go to war over scarce water re-sources as the finite limits of available supplies are approached? Or will they choose instead to cooperate in the development of joint water management schemes in order to optimize benefits to all? In the context of post Cold War Sub-Saharan Africa, more and more countries are engaging with their neighbours to share their common water resources (Turton 2003a: 32). Increasingly, this process is taking place though sets of negotiated water-sharing regimes that are most easily understood within the frame-work of a Hydropolitical Complex. The best example of this in sub-Saharan Africa is the Southern African Hydropolitical Complex, where water-sharing agreements between states are now a prominent feature of the international relations of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Indeed, such is the importance of these agreements that water resource management is now widely considered as a driver of regional cooperation in its own right (Heyns 2002: 158, 176; Ramoeli 2002: 107; Turton 2003b: 281). In this chapter, we argue that the answer to the dilemma posed above requires an understanding of two critical elements relating to the strategic access to water in the context of water and security in subSaharan Africa. The first element concerns security of supply (of water), with the hydraulic mission of the state being aimed at achieving this fundamental development objective as a foundation for economic growth, social wellbeing and political stability. The second element relates to the need for each state to choose an appropriate strategy or mix of strategies that will achieve and sustain a high level of security of supply. In our analysis, we explore the relevance of the Southern African Hydropolitical Complex, both as an analytical concept and as a possible mechanism for building and sustaining inter-state cooperation, and thereby avoiding possible conflicts over water.