The impact of colonial state engineering on water regime building in the Eastern Nile Basin

The competing needs and prejudicial consequences of a unilateral appropriation of shared rivers have created technical, juridical and political problems thereby triggering a search for acceptable criteria for defining the water rights of riparian states. This search has, ultimately, resulted in the formulation of diverse legal doctrines. However, hardly any of them could specify precisely how much of a state sovereignty should be forgone and none of such doctrines has attained universal legitimacy. The researcher contends that the cause of the incompatibility of sovereign right with the legal doctrines, especially in the Eastern Nile Basin of Africa, is due to the conceptual conflict triggered by the transplant effect of the colonial state system. Therefore, after analyzing the data collected from various sources using a historical causation approach, the researcher proposes the establishment of a new continental water regime which could lead towards the pan-Africanization of the content's rivers and states simultaneously.