And According to the head of environmental research institute Worldwatch, Lester Brown, water scarcity is now “the single biggest threat to global food security”.
He says as the combined population of the riparian states increases, there is bound to be intense competition for increasingly limited water resources.
“There is already little water left when the Nile reaches the sea,” he says.
The ongoing controversy stems from
the pact, which ignores the upper countries’ rights and influence on the amount and pattern of water flow to the lower states.
Countries pressing for the treaty to be ignored argue that the treaty is obsolete and heavily skewed in favour of Egypt, denying upstream countries the chance to exploit the lake for their people’s socio-economic good.
The Nile basin states exist in a unique and complex arrangement because the downstream countries depend on the Nile for virtually all of their water needs, while their upstream counterparts are denied its use. The upper states, Ethiopia in particular, are increasingly demanding their fair share of the basin’s water resources.
If not resolved, the standoff could lead to conflict and tension among the riparian states.
In the absence of any comprehensive agreement on the allocation of the resources, unilateralism has prevailed, exacerbating inter-state tensions among riparian states. Rising and competitive demands on the waters from both the upper and the lower basin states make basin-wide planning and equitable water allocation and development imperative.
The alternative could be civil unrest, intra- and inter-state conflict, which would be difficult to control or reverse.
This draws attention to the need for serious engagement among the riparian states towards equitable allocation of the water resources, and the creation of a cooperative mechanism.
And this is exactly what poses the greatest challenge to all the concerned states. Despite the extraordinary natural endowments and rich cultural history of the Nile basin, its people face considerable challenges. The basin is characterised by poverty, instability, rapid population growth and environmental degradation.
Half of the riparian countries are among the world’s 10 poorest. Yet, the Nile holds great potential for sustained regional social and economic development through power generation, food production, transportation, industrial development, environmental conservation and other related activities.
To realise this potential, the Nile basin countries have to take concrete steps to address these challenges for the benefit of the whole region. The Nile basin is shared by 11 countries.
On July 22, this year, Kenya’s Roads, Public Works and Housing Minister Mr. Raila Odinga, in Parliament, called for a review of the Nile Treaty which bars East African countries from exploiting the lake’s waters for economic gains.
East African experts and politicians have over the last one decade been in the vanguard of questioning the enforcement of the May 1929 treaty signed between Britain and Italy that awarded the control of the Nile waters to Egypt and the 1959 one between Egypt and Sudan.
They argue that these pacts are completely unacceptable and should be reviewed as a matter of urgency with a view to repealing them.
In Uganda and Kenya, parliamentarians have said the two treaties are obsolete and not tenable in the current dispensation. Those who are against the treaties say they do not accord equitable distribution of the basin’s resources.
The pre-independence pact between Britain and Italy bars the upper riparian countries from commercially using Lake Victoria. Members of Parliament from western Kenya have now appealed to their government to challenge the treaty’s legality, saying it favours Egypt at the expense of the other Nile basin countries. They say the treaty denies East African states the right to use the lake.
They are angered by a section in the treaty which says: “Without the consent of the Egyptian government, no irrigation or hydro-electric works may be established on the tributaries of the Nile or their lakes if such works can cause a drop in water levels harmful to Egypt”.
The treaty gave Egypt the right to use 48 million cubic metres of water.
A new agreement signed in 1959 upped it to 55.5 billion cubic metres for Egypt and allocated Sudan 18.5 billion cubic metres.  This was after the Sudanese government protested against its exclusion from the treaty. In spite of the fact that 15 per cent of water flowing into the Nile comes from Lake Victoria, the three East African countries were kept out of all the treaties, but are bound by them.
More amazing is that Ethiopia, where 85 per cent of the Nile waters come from, has no share in the agreement. But even Sudan is trapped in a way because its utilization of the water is limited in the treaty.
Although, it uses a small portion of water coming from Nile, it is under obligation not to carry out any development projects along the river without a nod from Egypt.
Egypt has the right to veto any development projects by Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. Under the 1929 treaty the African-Arab country has the right to inspect any part of the Nile, from the source and the tributaries through Central Africa and the Ethiopian highlands to the Mediterranean.
Any deviation or project of major water out-takes is seen by Cairo as a violation of her rights over the river. The people of the three East African states were never consulted at all on the matter.
The pact entered between the British and the Egyptian government is viewed by the other Nile basin countries as one of the major impediments to economic prosperity in a region that has remained in the backwaters of development.
And its lackadaisical development progress is believed to be the cause of poverty on the continent where massive wealth could be generated through the manipulation of the lake.
Egyptian farming—the great irrigation works that have maintained that country ever since Pharaoh Menes-Narmer of 3100 BC— has depended entirely on extraordinary fertile alluvium which the two Niles scoop from Eastern Africa.
This is why the riparian countries were banned by the treaty from using the Nile waters to irrigate their land, a treaty that Egypt has clung to tenaciously, its out-and-out blatant violation of these countries’ rights notwithstanding.
Despite the amount of the socio-economic benefits Egypt has drawn from the Nile, she has never used even a small fraction of it to improve the river’s ecosystem. But Egypt denies accusations that the treaties support it at the expense of the other countries.
It has stated that other than the Nile waters, it has its own water
supply, including ground waters, which is not negligible. But it says the 1929 and 1959 treaties are international accords that give Egypt massive powers to regulate the waters in the Nile basin and should be respected.
This scenario has ecological constraints on the upstream countries and great advantages to their downstream counterparts. 
The Nile basin covers an area of around 3 million square kilometers, or 10 per cent of the surface area of the African continent.
It lies within the boundaries of 10 countries—Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Egypt and Sudan. The combined population is 255 million.
Among the 10, Rwanda, Burundi, Eritrea and the DRC are on the world’s list of the world’s poorest of the poor countries.
Egyptian leaders have in the past declared that anybody tampering with the flow of the Nile is provoking war. But the other riparian countries need the waters to irrigate their land and feed their people. Whereas it is common knowledge that the Nile waters have generated enormous wealth in Egypt, the country has made little effort to control the water hyacinth in the lake, the Nile source.
In Ethiopia and Eritrea hunger has been ravaging the people almost every year, leaving in its wake thousands dead. But Egypt insists that the two countries cannot irrigate their land using the Nile waters to which they contribute more than 80 per cent. In June, the East African Legislative Assembly, after a weeklong meeting in Western Kenyan town of Kisumu, called upon the three East African states to ignore the contentious 1929 treaty.
Their argument was that it is restrictive and too expensive and should be declared null and void.
Some legal scholars have argued it was signed between the colonial British and the Egyptian government, so it is not binding to the current governments.
The regional MPs, led by Speaker Abdulrahman Omar Kinana of Tanzania and Kenya’s Jared Kangwana, called for a review of the treaty to allow the region to sell the waters to Egypt and Sudan.
Their argument was that the three East African countries must be allowed to trade in the waters and benefit from them the same. But in March 2002, Kenya’s then Water Development Minister Mr. Kipngeno arap Ngeny, said the 1929 pact governing the Nile basin was still in force although the riparian states were renegotiating it.
But during the EALA forum, however, current Water Minister Ms Martha Karua was quoted as saying she believed the treaty of 1929 which was later revised, was just a note the Queen of England exchanged with the Egyptian administration allowing the latter to freely use the Nile waters, which originate from Lake Victoria.
Said she: “I have done thorough research and found that the queen just wrote a note to the Egyptian administration and there was nothing barring the East Africans from making use of the Lake Victoria waters.”