A future hydro-democrat? This Egyptianfarmer, on a canal off the Nile, will haggle

with you endlessly over the price of hisown fresh-picked carrots. Soon, he’llhaggle with others over the price of

water used to irrigate them

JGW-12SOUTHERN AFRICA

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Shattered NilometersAfter 5,200 Years of Top-Down Rule,Can Water Scarcity Re-Democratize?

James Workman is a Donors’ Fellow of the Institutestudying the use, misuse, accretion and depletion offresh-water supplies in southern Africa.

James G. WorkmanFEBRUARY, 2003

CAIRO, Egypt – A few hours after the White House asserted its right to launch aunilateral preemptive war on Iraq I found myself the sole American sharing apacked auditorium with several hundred nervous Arabs.

All around me sat middle-aged officials. They hailed from Algeria, Jordan,Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen and, aboveall, Egypt. Excluding non-Arab Turkey and the markedly absent Israel, these au-tocracies allowed no opposition parties or welcomed dissent. Glancing about, Iestimated the crowd as 95 percent male, Muslim and agitated.

The imam’s calls to prayer filtered through the windows. Speakers grew shrill.Driven by modern man’s quest to exploit a precious liquid found in this MiddleEast-North African region, a political crisis loomed. It threatened to unleash in-stability, violence and refugee waves within and between Arab nations. Yet thissame risk united them in solidar-ity to address their shared pre-dicament. One after another, eachtook the microphone to vent hisopinion about the one indisput-able menace that really, trulyfrightened us.

Fresh water. For by their ownadmissions, Arab governmentscould no longer supply it.

With parched capitals ab-sorbing less than an inch of rainand hungry millions competingfor that scarce resource, this wasAfrica’s most water-stressed andvolatile region. I had been invitedhere by officials to compare po-litical responses to aridity in the continent’s dual deserts, Kalahari and Sahara.True, Egypt lay north of my primary ICWA focus. And water ‘talk-shops’ nor-mally made me snooze.

But this one — boringly titled and run by staid bureaucracies1 — had the

1 “Water Demand Management Forum: Decentralisation and Participatory Irrigation Man-agement,” hosted by the International Development Research Center, CanadianInternatioanl Development Agency, United Nations Development Programme, Japan Of-fice of Development, International Fund for Agricultural Development in collaborationwith the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, Egypt.

2 JGW-12

opposite affect. It quickened my pulse. It shed light onwater politics emerging throughout arid Africa. Its cri-ses spurred me, Walter Mitty archeologist, to dig deeperwhile interviewing my way up the banks of the Nile,wondering whether something buried so long ago be-neath the Sahara might re-emerge, be dusted off andhauled to the surface.

What I sought (with others) was less tangible yetmore precious than King Tut’s treasure: independent self-governance by irrigation farmers, a revival of hydro-de-mocracy.

* * *Admittedly, it was a quest worthy of Indiana Jones.

For its hypothesis rests on three shaky, un-Americanassumptions: First,that any democracyever existed in Africabefore it was buried;second, that it couldpeacefully surfacethrough self-deter-mination without‘help;’ and finally,that water, and infor-mation about water,may be the decisivevariable in this un-folding political pro-cess.

Before launch-ing my upstream ex-pedition to test it, I hadto update childhoodlessons. As kids welearned how the fertile,fluctuating, life-givingNile spawned the firstgreat civilization [al-though we bypassedexactly how water didthis, and at what orwhose expense]. Laterwe learned liberal de-mocracy was a West-ern ‘invention,’ born inslaveholding Athens,perfected in slave-holding America andthereafter ‘exported’by us everywhere frompost-royal France topost-WWII Japan to,presumably, post-war Iraq. Democracythus resembled acatalytic converter,waiting to be in-

stalled by skilled U.S. mechanics, clearing the air withunfettered trade, uncensored Internet and, say, unre-strained Emenem rap. Lastly, the historic modern incen-tive driving all policy was to expand the flow of and ac-cess to crude oil.

What about other depollution? These lessons ignoredIf, How, Why and Where water provided an evolution-ary force in political history. Specifically, in arid Africa:Did rivers foster democracy? Had human control of wa-ter smothered it? And could the pressure of aridity, ratherthan petroleum or even water, help revive it once again?

I found just enough tantalizing hints that it did, ithad, and it could. Water’s role depended on who reinedthe river. After digging through the historical sand, I un-

INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 3

Water-BreathingPowers That Be: Thisrecurring hieroglyph,here found at Luxor,

depicts Upper (left) andLower Egypt united by

the Nile, looped andknotted in the shape ofthe pharaoh’s lungs.

Rulers’ political fateswere indeed

intertwined with theriver’s flow.

covered this: Egypt before the pyramids was in fact alandscape filled with scattered, independent, self-govern-ing farm communities that eked out livelihoods from theflood and ebb of the Nile. While not rich and powerful,they were, by necessity, egalitarian.

“Throughout history, aridity has in most cases led todemocratic decision-making on use of water, water allo-cation and conservation,” said Paul Van Hovwegen, awater-management expert who has spent decades in Ara-bic countries. “Traditional social entities were often fullyrun on such democratic principles.”

Digging deeper, I discovered how and why thoseprinciples got buried. Riparian farmers be-gan to grow enough grain to store. A fewopportunists used surplus grain to arm mer-cenary thugs. With thugs, they took overneighboring lands and controlled sections ofthe river. More grain led to more hired hoo-ligans and priests who duly assured “Daboss” (and everyone else) of direct descentfrom the gods, until, presto! Civilization.

In this Hobbesian world water was nolonger the benign democratic force it beganas a river; water monopoly allowed rulersto crystallize their status quo. Anyone want-ing land or water was beholden to The Man.This primitive trickle-down economic policy,of course, had no patience for self-rule andcollective responsibility. By commandingand controlling water, any arid state couldgrow (and tax) enough to feed its people andstill keep the armed, water-controlling bu-reaucracy prosperous and in control. Thisformula for irrigated-food security helpedthe world’s first nation-state unite upper andlower Egypt along the Nile. Water controlenabled an unbroken chain of pharaohs (andlater imperial usurpers) to grasp and clingto power, right up to Egypt’s one-party rulers of today.

Western development banks and agencies were os-tensibly set up to grow democracy. But by funding gov-ernment water schemes, they often retarded it. “The do-nor-aid system worsened the situation,” Van Hovwegenwarned me, “because it focused on assistance throughthese central agencies, creating new perverse interest intop-down water-management changes. As long as thislast system is prevalent, the democratization of watermanagement will be difficult.”

Yet the trickle-down system required a monopolyover water. Without it, cracks appeared, and the edifice

weakened. Against water-rule’s powerful status quo camean equally potent force, aridity. Speakers lamented how,for the first time since the pharaoh Menes united Upperand Lower Egypt in 3100 BC, they were losing to the lat-ter. There was no longer enough water for the Arab Stateto use as compelling political, economic or spiritual le-verage over its urbanizing, industrializing and expand-ing populations.2 Speakers from Yemen, Jordan and thePalestinian territories acknowledged that their peoples“hit the wall” years ago, consuming more water than na-ture supplies. Those from Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Tuni-sia and Syria confessed they too are hitting the bottom ofa dry well. After 50 centuries of central rule, knowl-edgable forecasters said Egypt was being forced to shift

back toward something resembling its ear-lier water-democratic self.

* * *Why now? Day after day I watched the

timeless Nile flow through Cairo, just out-side the window and across the street. Itseemed strong, but slow. So much water gotsiphoned off or evaporated upstream, thathere I saw only 18 percent of what enteredEgypt above. Later I visited Alexandria onthe coast. Skirting the Delta’s edge, I wit-nessed huge pipes disgorging vast quanti-ties of Nile water into open canals that fedgreen fields, bordered by desert. I reachedthe sea, but in dry years, the Nile never does.It may be the world’s longest river, but itwas also, as it turns out, maxxed out. Finite.

Pushed and pulled in 61 million direc-tions, the nation’s water autocracy could nolonger absorb the strain of water’s innatecentrifugal forces. Water falls apart; the cen-ter cannot hold.

“Government has played the role of ahelpful big brother for irrigated agriculture

for a long time,” said an Egyptian hydrocrat (perhapsunfamiliar with George Orwell’s novel). “But today wecan’t count on big brother alone [to provide water] any-more but rather only as one small partner.” Later, allparticipants agreed when a keynote speaker3 cited “a tacitrecognition of the inability of the public sector to providethe requisite financial resources and institutional capa-bility” to allocate water as it always had.

Tacit or no, any admission of the problem — that gov-ernments were failing to command-and-control their fi-nite water — was a first step toward recovery. The Arabsingle-party state still possessed the will to dictate irri-

2 Conspicuously missing from the Forum were certain Arab autocracies like Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait. These of coursedon’t feel obliged to manage demand of water. Abundant oil lets them build exorbitant desalination plants, or mine finite ancientaquifers, then water the desert to export wheat.3 Abdelmajid Slama, IFAD’s MENA Regional Director.

Continued on page 5

4 JGW-12

Aswan Dam, FacingUpstream Side

Today, Mubarak’s National Democratic Party harnessesmore volumes of raw bulk-water supply than any previousEgyptian ruler — Pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Mamluk,Ottoman, Napoleonic, British colonist or puppet king — be-fore it. In theory, that should ensure peace of mind at longlast. Instead, the ruling party is still losing sleep.

Rulers have always been subject to whims of the Nile.History indicates how their political fortunes coincided almostunswervingly with fluctuations in the level of that river. Lowwaters left fields dry and barren; floods damaged irrigationsystems; silting cut hydroelectric production; salting cut cropyields States rose and fell at its mercy. So sovereigns andtheir elite prayed for steady flows to Sobek, Aten, Isis, Zeus,Apollo, Jaweh, God or Allah.

Alas, their prayers often fell on deaf sandstone. To keeptheir grip, rulers hedged their bets and put faith in technology.They developed tools, pumps, ditches. More recently theybuilt an intricate system of barrages, locks, pumping stations,canals. A century ago they built the first Aswan Dam.

In the 1960s Nasser’s newly indepen-dent nation decided to construct its modernWonder, a piece de resistance. The ‘HighDam’ used 18 times the building material ofCheops’ pyramid and created the world’s larg-est artificial lake. I could not come to Egyptwithout seeing it, and arranged an official tour,complete with propaganda tape showingKhruschev and Nasser expressing Egypt-So-viet alliance, and the muddy water channel-ing a new force. It was an awesome thing towitness.

The dam’s force relies on rockfill massover concrete curvature. It’s scale is difficultto take in, though. Atop the dam, it is so long(3 km) across, that it doesn’t seem “high” atall. Lake Nasser stretches so far, acrossborders, that its stark purity of mass can’tbe absorbed. The distant hydroelectricpower station doubled the nation’s power supply.

Today, thanks to the High Dam, Egypt commands 55 cu-bic kilometers — or 809 cubic meters per person — of water

from the Nile. That’s obscenely more than any nation on thecontinent, let alone arid regions. By comparison, Botswanacommands .11 cubic kilometers, Namibia, .25.

So, why isn’t it enough? First, evaporation increases.Second, sediment is rising behind the dam. Third, many claim

the dam system now buries as much fertilecultivable land as it has newly irrigated. Third,it has also trapped the rich black silt that farm-ers relied on, forcing a turn to artificial fertiliz-ers and increasing salinity. A predictable cur-rent stops floods, but also slows flows, leadingto a rise in infection in canals with bilharziasparasite.

But the main reason is less technical thanpolitical. Perhaps because here, more thananywhere, water is power, and power by itsnature, corrupts. Providing water ensures loy-alty to the state that provides it. But allocat-ing free state water, like allocating free statemoney, not only breeds corruption. It breedswaste.

Water evaporates, leaks, or runs to thewrong places at the wrong time. Seepage andevaporation account for a loss of about 12-

14 percent of the annual input into Aswan’s Lake Nasser, withthree times that again lost from open irrigation canals andchannels downstream.

What’s more, the state’s technological, supply-side op-tions have run out; there’s no place left to dam, no space toraise barrages higher. There’s also no money. State-sponsoredengineering solutions like dams, pipelines and canals, so pro-hibitively expensive already, prove even more costly as newsupplies grow scarcer and cities must reach father away fornew sources.

In short, the supply of water from the Nile has maxxedout. This has not stopped the state from proposing to divertsome of the Nile into a “Toshka Spillway” northwest off LakeNasser. But most observers see that as delaying and worsen-ing the situation; the water it wants to divert belongs to up-stream countries. In short, there’s nothing extra to “spill.”

High Dam, Huge Lake

High Dam, looking toward power station

Lake Nasser, looking up from High Dam

IN TAMING NATURE, SIZE ISN’T EVERYTHING

INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 5

Nubian Washerwoman: Displaced by the dam upstream of Aswan, she competes with 61million others for her share to use of the precious finite waters of the Nile.

gation and use. It just lacked the water.

Such hydro-impotence was not hypothetical. It be-came real as I narrowed the scope and focus of my exca-vation. The dominant player of these Arab nations wasEgypt. The dominant element of Egypt was irrigation,The dominant instrument of irrigation was water, whichsucks up 85 percent of the Nile. Now water is vanishingunder unprecedented stress.

One stress-point is population. Growing from six tosixty million thirsty and hungry people in a century putsa hell of a strain on any water source, even the mightyNile, which slakes 96 percent of Egypt’s thirst (the restcomes from fossil groundwater and desalination). A sec-ond stress is booming cities and industry. These consume4.6 and 7.9 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year, respec-tively, and bite into irrigation’s lion’s share (61 bcm) ofthe water pie. A third is waste, which has ballooned indirect proportion to the age and complexity of the hy-draulic irrigation system, losing 23.3 bcm. Then there’sevaporation: the sun god, Ra, still devours as his due 4bcm a year from the irrigation network. Finally, there’sthe Nile itself, which stubbornly resists attempts to tameit.

All this stress might seem wonk-ish were it not forthe disturbing math. The average amount of water in theNile as it enters Egypt is 84 bcm per year; internationaltreaties mean Egypt’s annual share of water from the Niledrops to 55.5 bcm. The balance sheet (55.5 minus 76.13)reveals that Egypt is burdened by a negative 20.63 bcmannual water deficit, amounting to one-fourth of the Nile.

That figure becomes even more frightening when youinclude the legitimate needs of navigation, fisheries, ornature, or the fact that current demand is projected toincrease by 30 percent in the decades ahead. It ignoreshow Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, et al have begunto use ‘their share’ of the Nile. Unless Egypt was pre-pared to engage in an aggressive, even hostile, nine-wayconflict with its upstream neighbors and water rivals,something had to give.

* * *Perhaps something has already given. After a bit

more digging, I found that Egyptian conflicts were boil-ing up and down the Nile,albeit not the variety I’dassumed. Every visitorknows how as late as1997, Muslim fanaticsfirebombed and machine-gunned dozens of for-eigners to cripple whathad been a booming tour-ist economy. Post 9/11,that industry still reels. Torestore confidence, Egyptclaims to have “utterlycrushed” Islamic terror-ism with a heavy hand,and the police state re-mains omnipresent. Inone week traveling up theNile, I crossed severaldozen well-armed check-points, and was requiredto join four scheduledmilitary convoys.

Disaffected Islamismis one destabilizing force.But it’s minor, compared

Water Falls Apart, The Center Cannot Hold: TheEgyptian government will still operate these

irrigation pumps, but increasingly at the commandof those below, not above, as responsibility for watershifts, democratically, away from the bureaucracy

toward independent water users.

6 JGW-12

to aridity. Aridity leads to quiet eruptionscrackling among eternally-loyal-to-the-state irrigation farmers, as well as be-tween those farmers and other state-sup-porting sectors. The anger belongs to noparty, no agenda, no creed, no organiza-tion. Yet scattered water disputes havebeen mounting, building, consolidatingalong the water diversions. In contrast toEgypt’s bellicose water rhetoric with itsneighbors abroad — which can be nego-tiated diplomatically through interstatetreaties — real fissures were appearingbetween locals inside Egypt’s own bor-ders. This required a fresh, subtle andlight-handed approach. Neither Egypt’smilitary nor police can ‘utterly crush’water-use by force.

Granted, conflicts were neither newnor unique here. People argue over wa-ter, as people always will. In the past,government delivered ‘its’ Nile through‘its’ canal system to ‘its’ farmers, but leftothers to sort out the messy bickering thatarose. Three traditional systems tried.The ‘Munawaba’ organizational unit, ledby a respected landowner, allocated thewater flowing in the ‘mesqa,’ or servicearea where the canal fans out to farms.At a smaller level, organization orbitedthe animal-powered water lift, or ‘Saqia,’where a dozen families shared the samesystem, taking turns according to acre-age. As a fallback, Egyptians turned to‘Haq ul Arab,’ an old, informal system oflocal law based on Islamic principles offairness in the use of scarce collective re-sources, like water.

To work, these systems needed small,manageable disputes. They also de-pended on top-down hierarchy—gettingdirectives, signals and authority from onhigh, backed by the ability to grant orwithhold water. No longer. Water sourcesare finite. Competition grows. Egypt hasreached the limits of technology. Unem-ployed farmers depart for cities. Irriga-tors retain their political clout, but theireconomic value is waning, dipping be-low a fifth of gross domestic income. Tra-ditional systems alone have proven toofew, weak, marginal and simple to resolvethe mounting water pressure. “AlthoughEgypt’s Ministry of Water Resources andIrrigation (MWRI) is responsible for wa-ter management,” said Yehya Abdel-Aziz, Director of the country’s WaterBoards Project, “linkage and coordination

Fightin’ WordsEGYPT AND ITS “WATERWARS,” REAL OR IMAGINED

At the height of the Cold War, when the anti-communist West withdrewfunds to build the High Dam across the Nile, Egypt seized the Suez Canal,thus leveraging one water-related conflict with another. Such disputes havebeen seen in the region for 5,000 years, and it may be too much to expectthem to disappear soon. Yet despite all the bellicose rhetoric, there has neverbeen a ‘war’ fought strictly over water. Then again, there was never a warfought over oil before the late 19th century; no nation had depended on it sointensely before it grew so scarce.

Still, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a pioneer in environmental security, hasmaintained that for any war to erupt over a river’s fresh water in the future,four conditions must apply: the downstream state must be entirely depen-dent on that source; that downstream state must be stronger than its up-stream neighbors; upstream neighbors must have the capacity and need tocut off that water supply for themselves; and the states cannot be demo-cratic. Of 150 transboundary rivers around the world, only one place meetsthese criteria.

Egypt on the Nile.

Depending on the source you believe, there already have been someclose calls:

1. Consider the Bible. A little known side-incident from Exodus occurredwhen Moses dammed a tributary of the Nile to the Egyptian Plains to preventthe Egyptians from reaching the Jews as they retreated through the Sinai inapproximately 1200 BC.

2. Military conflict nearly erupted between Britain and France in 1898when a French expedition attempted to gain control of the headwaters of theWhite Nile. While the parties ultimately negotiated a settlement,, the incidenthas been characterized by Homer-Dixon as having “dramatized Egypt’s vul-nerable dependence on the Nile, and fixed the attitude of Egyptian policymakers ever since.”

3. In 1958, Egypt sent an unsuccessful military expedition into disputedterritory in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan amid pending negotiations over Nilewater, Sudanese general elections, and an Egyptian vote on Sudan-Egyptunification; the Nile Water Treaty was signed when a pro-Egyptian govern-ment was elected in Sudan.

4. On paper, the Sudan has a vast amount of water available on aver-age, but it is compelled by treaty to pass on much of the water it receives,from upstream nations. In recent years, internal turmoil and civil war haveprevented the Sudan from using even its legal share form the Nile WaterTreaty.

5. In 1978 Ethiopia’s proposed construction of dams on the headwatersof the Blue Nile led Egypt to repeatedly declare the vital importance of water.“The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water,” said PresidentAnwar Sadat, in 1979. His words set off a chain reaction of predictions:

“The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not poli-tics,” said Egypt’s Foreign Minister (later UN Director-General) BoutrosBoutros-Ghali in 1988.

In the 1990s, another Egyptian, now director of the Alexandria Library,then World-Bank VP Ismail Serageldin, proclaimed, “The wars of the nextcentury will be fought over water, not oil, unless we take preventative actiontoday.”

INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 7

Overhauling Tradition: Feluccas were once used to haulstone and farm produce; now their lucrative payload is

tourism. They adapt to the Nile, and adapt the Nile to theirneeds, but tradition is not enough to meet modern water demands.

with other stakeholders are not strong enough to elimi-nate conflicts.”

* * *After millennia of large-scale, centralized water man-

agement, Egypt found itself up to its neck in water debt.Hydro-bankrupt. The government began foundering. Butmisery loves company, and necessity breeds invention.Judging from the texts of speakers here, aquatic insol-vency was forcing bold experiments across ahalf-dozen arid landscapes. From the Strait ofGibraltar to the Strait of Bab al Mandab, the wa-ter-indebted Arab State was finding little alter-native but to re-allocate its water, and thus re-allocate its authority. No, not to oppositionparties, but to self-regulating, autonomous en-tities, called “Water Boards (WB’s),” and “Wa-ter User Associations (WUA’s).”

Defining one of these entities is seldomeasy. Professional Egyptologists decipher his-tory by reading ‘between the hieroglyphics.’ Asan amateur, I employed this method to decodebureaucratic water-jargon such as “participa-tory irrigation management (PIM)” or “fee-based structural mechanism for water alloca-tion services.” As it happens, both clunkersobscured a linked pair of revolutionary notions.

Water Boards (WB’s) meant that lowlyfarmers, rather than rulers, would drive poli-cies on how to develop and use scarce watersupplies, dredging up decisions from belowrather than swallowing them from above. Howthey do so leads to Water Users Associations(WUA’s): farmers’ new, decentralized and au-tonomous assemblies. Cobbling together some ofthe Saqia, Munawaba and Haq ul Arab systems de-scribed above would essentially soak up some

water authority. WUA’s would water-tax themselvesthrough elected representatives rather than receive un-limited free water from the baksheesh-hungry bureau-cracy that had been making paternalistic decisions ‘ontheir behalf.’ In bottom-line practice, this meant thatWUA’s would absorb from the State at least half of theoperation and maintenance of their irrigation systems.In return, they would no longer pay land tax.

These steps mark radical departures from the past.It grew evident, to me anyway, that a fresh “hydro-socialcontract” was quietly being written within Arab states.As my weeklong workshop demonstrated, drafting sucha contract is slow and clumsy and messy and a complexprocess. But so far it has been a peaceful one. As eachspeaker talked about his nation’s needs you could almostsee the outcome — representative democracy — seepingup through the floors even as state taxes leaked away.

No wonder water bureaucrats seemed nervous. Nowonder, as discussions heated up, more than one speakerrose from the floor to insist, “This process, this sharing ofpower over water, really cannot, and should not, be con-fused with democracy.” Hours later another echoed suchclaims, adamant in the position that “Decentralization ofdecision-making has nothing to do with democracy!”

No? Methinks they doth protest too much. Later, ask-ing sotto voce questions at a Canadian-embassy reception,I found the opposing view from several participants and

Camel Men (Left): One ofthe issues being debated is,which water users mighthave a stake in a Water

User Assocation? (Below)Not Too Thirsty: Can youlead a camel to water?

Yeah, but you can’t makeit drink much, or often.

8 JGW-12

speakers. “It has everything to do with democracy,” con-fided Van Hovwegen, the regional water expert. “Ofcourse, they just can’t say that here. But it’s true.”

* * *In 450 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus first linked

the fate of a nation with the flow of its river. “Egypt is thegift of the Nile,” he famously wrote. Less eloquently, Egyptis also the gift of information about the Nile. If water ispower, water-knowledge is omnipotent.

To remain economically solvent and politically legiti-mate, the government (like those of other Arab states)must do more with less water, shrinking budgets andlooser control of information. It must eliminate waste andincrease efficiency; squeeze more crops per drops. It can’tdo so by force. So the bureaucracy is being forced to con-cede ground — literally — to those historically most adeptat watering it. As it happens, that means farming com-munities, who haven’t been independent since before thepyramids. Now it would have to share both water andinformation with WUA’s, turning Herodotus on his head:The Nile would be the gift of Egypt.

Only by increasing farmers’ water-knowledge can thenew bubble-up hydro-democracy arise from trickle-downcivilization. There’s one sticky issue, though. After 5,000years of water dependence, farmers havegrown rusty at management.

This became painfully obvious at the work-shops. I expected the one-party bureaucrats ofEgypt (and other Arab states) to be despondentabout surrendering their grip on the Nile tofarmers. Sure enough, they dragged their heels;most convinced themselves that all farmersmust be led like oxen, by the nose. As one putit, “We tell farmers what to do with our water,and they do it. Otherwise there would bechaos.”

What surprised me was how some farm-ers felt reluctant to embrace their newfoundclout. Rather than seize control, I heard themcomplain, voice doubts and hesitate. Perhapsthey don’t trust the State. Or perhaps their wa-vering reflects the insecurity that accompaniesany democratic reform. They never have hadreal responsibility, and many did not appearto want it. Well, too bad, farmer Ahmed. TheNile has run out. Free water is over. Because itis finite, key decisions over its precious flowwill now be foisted upon your reluctant butcompetent shoulders.

Through new Water User Associations,farmers are suddenly expected to determinequantities and qualities of water: what cropsthey will use it for, when they need it, how theywill distribute it, why they can manage it, and

who they will choose to represent their needs. Critically,they will decide how much to pay as fees in exchangefor the precious water.

This last brings the most anxiety to Egyptians I met,and their paralysis amuses me. They live and breathe amarket culture where men and women eagerly hagglefor hours or days over prices of: water-dependent cam-els and sheep; water-taxis and felucca tours; water-irri-gated carrots and alfalfa; water-laundered clothes;water boiled for Arabic coffee or tea; water-grownpapyrus or lotus; water bubbling in hooka-likesheeshas. Haggling is the Arab trademark, a cliché.Yet facing the prospect of negotiating the price ofwater itself, they fall silent. Then apoplectic. Theydon’t know where to start. It has always been free. “Wedon’t want to pay for the Aswan High Dam!” wailedirrigators from one nascent WUA.

How on earth, they asked, can we set the price, and taxes,and volumes for something no one knows the value of? Theirseemingly simple question was first asked by those earlyEgyptian opportunists, 5,000 years ago. They developeda very, very old answer. I wanted to see it.

* * *So I set my compass south, upstream, via water-taxi,

It has sunk in that the region must now produce more with lesswater.Desperate water times lead to desperate water measures.

“With water scarcity, the hardest hit will likely be irrigatedagriculture,” said Abdelmajid Slama, IFAD’s MENA RegionalDirector. “In contrast to top-down allocations, experiments withfarmer-managed irrigation systems demonstrated the potentialfor substantial improvements in system efficiency through activeparticipation of users in water distribution and in systemoperation and maintenance-related decisions.”

Why and how do WUA’s do that? By decentralizing authorityand empowering local decision-making, they:

• Reduce financial and institutional burdens on the government;• Promote economic use of water and increase in productivity

by giving water users the opportunity to appreciate first handthe true scarcity and cost of delivering water to the farmgate;

• Develop a sense of ownership and responsibility over theirrigation system, which supplies that scarce resource;

• Promote system sustainability by enabling water users toadapt to requirements of cropping patterns

• Provide a basis for fair allocation of a scarce resource throughthe collective effort of a group with common interest,operating on the basis of mutually agreed and binding rules.

Promoting water user associations

WHY DEMOCRATIZE WATER?

INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 9

bus, train, ferry and (my favorite) felucca. Any well-ad-justed visitor to Egypt would stand agape at the Pyra-mids, mesmerized by the Sphinx, awestruck at AbuSimbel. Not your waterlogged correspondent. No, ratherthan race toward the gargantuan Wonders of the AncientWorld, he trundled away from tour buses toward an in-spirational… hole in the ground.

Not just any hole. Various remnant incarnations ofthis stone-hole structure still exist up and down the river,from Geziret el-Rhoda in Cairo, to Memphis, Edfu, KomOmbo, Philae Island and Elephantine Island. It’s a well-like gauge called a ‘Nilometer.’

Nilometers varied in size and shape; three steps orninety, round or square. They may have been open,flanked by walls, or covered by a roof. They typicallyappeared on the upstream side of an island or promon-tory, often as part of a temple structure. Each was essen-tially a cistern connected to the Nile; the water level inthe nilometer was the same as that in the river. Such di-rect equivalency appears droll, plain, even boring.

Simplicity concealed power. As the name implies, aNilometer measured the height or depth of the Nile as itrose up and down the cistern. As a combined predictiveand political tool, each Nilometer became the cornerstoneupon which Egypt’s various rich and enduring civiliza-tions rose, or fell.

Consider location. On the East bank of the Nile, luxu-rious temples rose to honor immortal gods, with gold-tipped obelisks igniting each dawn with the sunrise. Onthe West bank, pyramids and tombs ushered dead pha-raohs and their families into the afterlife as the goddessNut swallowed the sunset. Smack dab in the middle satyour average Nilometer. It cared less about the afterlife;it was concerned with today. It disregarded the east-west

trajectory of the sun except as a calendar to record whatreally mattered: the south-north trajectory of movingwater.

It is a truism that water is life. But in a dry land po-litical life — of the Guns, Germs and Steel variety, in whichstates organize and tax a society’s excess food in exchangefor military protection — could exist only with accuratedata about water. To know when to plant, when to har-vest, what to grow, how often, and how much seed touse, they had to know when the seasonal floods wouldmost likely arrive, and just how high or low those floodsmight be.

Wet countries like Russia, New Zealand or Canadaget such information directly: Step outside; check the clouds;get wet; act accordingly. Uniquely, Egypt relied on water fall-ing 2,000 miles away, well beyond its political reach.

A mighty egotist like Pharaoh Ramses II could crushthe Nubians and Hittites, keep Upper and Lower Egyptunited along the Nile from the delta to the 4th Cataract inmodern Sudan, and erect hundreds of colossal statues tohonor his exploits and warn rival kingdoms. ButOzymandias was a wimp compared to that river. Hehadn’t a clue whether it was raining in the highlands ofEthiopia or Burundi, whether the Nile would rise or fall.To indicate upstream weather, he had only theNilometers, and paid his elite officials to study past andpresent readings of flows and fluctuations as if their livesdepended on it.

Their lives did. Access to the Nilometer’s secrets, asrevealed on its wet walls, was guarded, restricted to theliterate and elite. Special officials kept a regular watch,trudging up and down Nilometer stairways hour by hour,collecting data, calculating in an exact metric of cubits,and writing down figures on papyrus that they wouldlater compare across the weeks, months, years, centuries.

As such, Nilometers became the world’s oldest con-tinuous weather record.4 But they calibrated far more than

Location, location,location: Smack dabbetween left and rightbanks, oblivious to the

east-west rise and fall of thesun, the Nilometer at KomOmbo measured the only

trajectory that reallymattered: the up-down

level of the river.

4 Scientists today are taking a second close look at these records to compare modern and ancient patterns of El Niño. ApparentlyEl Nino behaved then as it does today, lasting one or two years and returning every four to seven years. The Nilometer may alsoindicate signs of climate change.

A Time To Sail:Among other wateruses, navigation onthe Nile depended

on informationabout when the

river would ebb orflood. But where did

that informationcome from?

10 JGW-12

that. Nilometers were early-warning systems for floods.They were crop-determinants. They told how much grainto store, how much to plant. Architects and astronomersstudied readings before placing temples, installing irri-gation systems and establishing effective transportationschedules for stones and obelisks.

There was, of course, a reverse and sinister flip side:Nilometers propped up Big Brother. They gave central-authoritarian rulers the god-like power to tax, control anddestroy.

They did this in part through religion. The only croco-diles I saw along the banks of the Nile were 3,000 yearsold, mummified. The crocodile, hunted-out today, was formillennia the sacred animal of Sobek, god of water and fertil-ity. The most important cult for Sobek was at Kom Ombo,where the ancient Egyptians raised and veneratedcrocs. They were kept in a pool dug in the precinctof the temple, right next to the Nilometer. Locatedalongside temples, like this, the Nilometer was alsoused by priests to gauge the god’s favor, or thepharaoh’s performance as god-like intermediary.Tombs and temples measured him for eternity;Nilometers measured him alive.

But Nilometers were grimmest at their most prag-matic: they alone determined the scale of taxation. If thelevel rose high, it meant the river would deposit morewater and more rich and fertile silt, cover vast areas alongthe banks, and subside slowly for a long growing sea-son. That meant a good harvest. It also meant the statewould exact high taxes. Conversely, if the Nilometergauge stayed low, so would be the predicted harvest andtaxes from it. If you grew more than expected, great. If

less, too bad. In any case, itwas infinitely simpler than anIRS 1040.

* * *Nilometers range from

1,300 to 4,000 years old, but,given their dual predictiveand political role, remained inuse continuously throughGreek, Roman, Ottoman andArab-Islamic states. Time shat-tered, humans rebuilt.

Returning to Cairo, I spentone late afternoon wanderingin, down and around the fa-mous and elaborate Rhoda Is-land Nilometer, with no oneelse around. Built in 861, theMikyas al-Nil is the oldest Is-lamic structure in Egypt, tak-ing the form of an octagonalcolumn within a stone-stair-lined pit connected to the Nile

by three tunnels. It toppled shortly after construction ina flood, and was rebuilt. It crumbled again in 1092 andwas rebuilt. In 1798, as a makeshift fort for Mamluk of-ficers, it was bombarded by Napoleon’s troops, and re-built. In 1825, following an explosion in a nearby pow-

More elegant and effective than a 1040 IRS form: Nilometers were power.

Shatter-Proof? The functional concept behind theNilometer — measuring and using information about theNile for governance — may endure in WUA’s long after

their structural use has become obsolete.

INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 11

Net Losses on the Nile: Food grown from water diverted for upstream irrigationsubtracts protein from downstream fishermen in the delta.

der factory, it was repairedonce again. The most recent re-pairs and additions came in thelate 1870s, two decades beforeconstruction of the first AswanDam made all Nilometersdownstream apparently obso-lete. A century later, construc-tion of the 1970 High Dam in-undated upstream Nilometersbeneath the wide, calm surfaceof Lake Nasser.

Replacing Nilometers withthe High Aswan Dam was likereplacing barometers and ther-mometers with one centralthermostat-linked air condi-tioning. The old tool helpedmeasure and adapt to unseenheat and water pressure, thenew one adapted climate to us.There’s nothing wrong withthat progression, in theory. Butcomfort requires infinitelymore energy, money, work andrepairs. Comfort varies from room to room, person to per-son. You have to turn it off when not using it, then laterflip it on again. You have to adjust the dial to taste, whichchanges with the mood. With 61 million people sharingthe same Aswan “thermostat,” and energy prices rising,the conflict over ‘who controls the remote’ has grown uglyon a national and international scale.

So in one sense, these emerging, democratic WaterUser Associations were taking both a revolutionary stepforward and a reactionary step back. The independentfarmers’ groups appeared to be shattering, then recon-structing hundreds of their own durable Nilometer/WUAs, not of stone, but of paper and computer. Theywere adapting water-use to their local needs and limitsand conditions. To adapt, they could not hoard criticalwater information among a secretive elite; they had toshare it with others in the open arena of debate.

No one can predict how the ripples from such de-centralization of decisions may make waves in the formof a broader, nation-wide democracy. But if control ofwater indeed influences control of power here, the con-cept may not be all that far-fetched.

In any case, based on what I could tell during myNile expedition, the centripetal shift that democratized

water allocation appeared as inevitable as it was gradual,subtle, and nonviolent. This was illustrated during aworkshop where we tried to hammer out the “institu-tional parameters of a Water User Association.”

Our moderator asked us to contribute suggestions—ideas like planks in a party platform—and said she wouldthen write them on a wall sheet. Standard workshop op-erating procedure, to me. But others voiced objections.Right off the bat, a gruff Egyptian hydrocrat announced,“Okay. And whichever idea gets the most votes, all oth-ers must be erased.” His friends nodded.

“No,” replied the facilitator, a soft-spoken and ratherattractive Egyptian female, one of the few I have seenwho did not cover her head.

“But why? It wins. The others lose.”“Because,” she gently answered, “What we’re trying

to do is encourage tolerance. If there is a minority view,we cannot throw it out.”

Confusion. “Why not?”“It’s called a liberal democracy,” she continued,

“where every view counts. If clarification is needed, wedon’t disqualify one opinion.”

In the dumbstruck silence that followed, I smiled intomy jacket lapel. And wafting up through the open win-dow, from a hundred yards away, I distinctly heard theNile gurgle. ❏

Institute Fellows are chosen onthe basis of character, previousexperience and promise. They

are young professionals fundedto spend a minimum of two

years carrying out self-designedprograms of study and writingoutside the United States. TheFellows are required to reporttheir findings and experiencesfrom the field once a month.

They can write on any subject,as formally or informally as

they wish. The result is a uniqueform of reporting, analysis andperiodic assessment of interna-

tional events and issues.

Author: Workman, James GTitle: ICWA Letters - Sub-Saharan AfricaISSN: 1083-429XImprint: Institute of Current World

Affairs, Hanover, NHMaterial Type: SerialLanguage: EnglishFrequency: MonthlyOther Regions: East Asia; South Asia;

Mideast/North Africa; Europe/Russia;The Americas

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©2003 Institute of Current World Af-fairs, The Crane-Rogers Foundation.The information contained in thispublication may not be reproducedwithout the writer’s permission.