Kenya talks to Ethipoia over Oromo River dam

[Samm999]

Foreign Affairs CS Amina Mohamed during a media briefing at Harambee House, Nairobi,

Most scientists say the Ethiopia dams will starve Lake Turkana of water and eventually kill it. Negotiators to find lasting solution
Kenya has restarted negotiations with the Ethiopean government to find a long lasting solution over the Gibe III Dams, which threaten Lake Turkana’s existence.
Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed said the negotiators are discussing scientific findings and will soon reach a solution.
Most scientists have opposed the dams Ethiopia is building on River Omo, saying they will starve Lake Turkana of water and slowly kill it.
Lake Turkana is the world’s biggest desert lake and supports more than three million Kenyans.
Mohamed said the negotiations will strike a balance between Ethiopea continuing to explore ways of meeting their energy demands and the impacts of the project on the Turkana basin.
Ethiopia wants to make hydropower its major national export, but climate change and ecological degradation could have a serious problem to the Turkana lake basin.
Kenya a few years ago signed an agreement to buy electricity from Ethiopia after the Gibe Dams are complete.
The dams and expanded large irrigated plantations in the lower Omo basin have been a major issue that will threaten the food security and economy of millions of people, especially on the shores of Lake Turkana.
Mohamed said climate change is a serious matter and awareness must be raised if its effects are to be mitigated.
“We as a country have done a lot in as far as addressing climate change issues is concerned. The message will be clear, the journey as a country has been long, but we have participated through our mission in New York,” she said.
Mohamed spoke at the ongoing second UN Environment Assembly in Gigiri, where she launched prototype postal stamps depicting 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The Postal Corporation of Kenya designed the stamps and the UN provided financial support.
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POLL OF THE DAY

 

[Geza Ulole]

And still Kenyans in here yap about LAPSSET project with Ethiopia? The dam is in addition to Ilemi triangle disputed by 3 countries i.e. South Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya.

 

[1 Africa]

Geza,LAPPSET will unfold before your eyes,very soon.

 

[1 Africa]

Where does Ethiopia expect to export that power?

 

[Geza Ulole]

1 Africa, if Kenya has discovered huge undeground water reservoir across the Turkana, why going into dispute with a neighbor u depend for ur LAPSSET prospects? It makes no brainer! IMHO

 

[1 Africa]

1 Africa, if Kenya has discovered huge undeground water reservoir across the Turkana, why going into dispute with a neighbor u depend for ur LAPSSET prospects? It makes no brainer! IMHO

So,because we are working on a project together,we should let them destroy our resources?
FYI,that underground water has no fish. Fishing is an economic activity.

 

[Dani5]

Where does Ethiopia expect to export that power?

To the same Kenyans whom the project will have an impact on..

We actually have an upper hand in this, if the negotiations don't go well we should back out on the power deal and see which neighbour they'll export it to..Somalia? South Sudan?

 

[1 Africa]

To the same Kenyans whom the project will have an impact on..

We actually have an upper hand in this, if the negotiations don't go well we should back out on the power deal and see which neighbour they'll export it to..Somalia? South Sudan?

Hahaha..but Kenya already has more than enough electricity na bado twaogezea.
But maybe we will need it because KENGEN manager yesterday said that Konza will take up 500MW,SGR 400-500MW(I think its only the Nai. Msa. section) a steel plant 1000MW...

 

[Kafrican]

huyo jounerlist ameongezea chumvi kwa hio article, lake turkana gets replenished after every cycle, it also looses water through river omo which goes to ethiopia and connects to the nile evenyually reaching Egypt which has been using that water....

(we shud be more worried abt global warming and clinate change which has aleady affected lake turkana over the years)

its during the course of Ethiopia filling the dam that turkana (among other supply chanels)will drain the water from the lake, it will take about 3 years for the dam to be filled if I rem correctly. after that the lake will go back to normal volume of water flowing in river omo. now we can either make a deal for Ethiopia to drain in small volumes which will take longer, or we can use it as a bargaining chip to force ethiopia to sell us cheap electricity for every ounce of water they had drained while filling the dam. however, we cant stop ethiopia since the river naturally flows into Ethiopia, and stoping the flow of that water not only means breaking international law (we've been ti hague too many times already) but also means stopping the flow of water to the nile river which supplies water to sudan and Egypt. ... that is tantamount to an act of war with Egypt who have no other source of water....


just imagin a war btn Egypt and Kenya, we will be crushed so quickly it will be the shortest movie ever. it will be like what Israel did to Egypt, Syria, Kuwait in "the six days of war"

for every fighter jet we have they have 14times that amount. and thiers are technologically 2 generations above ours.

while we boast of having like 600 amoured vehicles, just this year alone, they will be recieving 732 MRAPs from USA!

when it comes to ships, while we boast of atleast having a navy worth taking about in this indian ocean side of the sea, compared to Egypt, our ships look like pirate fishing boats. they recently acqured two ships bult in France worth 2billion dollars!!! , thats our whole military budget plus change, the ships are so huge they can carry 500 apcs plus troops and deliver them on our coastline.

anyways, you get the picture

 

[Kafrican]

Hahaha..but Kenya already has more than enough electricity na bado twaogezea.
But maybe we will need it because KENGEN manager yesterday said that Konza will take up 500MW,SGR 400-500MW(I think its only the Nai. Msa. section) a steel plant 1000MW...

not to forget that the 300MW produced by lake turkana wind turbines is more than enough for the whole northern Kenya, which means the power from Ethiopia will have to go to othet parts of kenya and not the imidiate boder area.

but its said that the ethiopian electricity will be way cheaper than anything, so that alone will be their selling point, and bieng the capitalists that we are, we cant refuse anything cheap and quality

 

[Kafrican]

I have faith in our beaty with brains lady to reach a favourable solution .


If Alai (number 1 hater of Jubelee govt) has this to say about her, then we all know if we had civil servants of her calibre for like 10 years, the world would be waking up to the rise of kenyan muscel into the global scene sooner rather than later

 

[Geza Ulole]

1 Africa, u need to think in a bigger picture as u can't have ur own cake n eat it! Actually on that same area Ilemi triangle is located.

 

[Kafrican]

1 Africa, u need to things in a bigger picture as u can't have ur own cake n eat it! Actually on that same area Ilemi triangle is located.

the problem with ilemi triangle is between Kenya and S.Sudan.... Ethiopia withdrew their unofficial claim long time ago and concede officialy that the land belonged to Sudan (former sudan) Ethiopia is only a witness in that dispute, its govt was present when former Sudan willingly gave temporary administration of that land to Kenya to police and then for years never asked for it, untill it was too late, by that time kenya had assumed permanent ownership of the triangle, hense the dispute,


however, that triangle does not touch lake turkana, there is a small section of lake turkana that is inside ethiopia, just a few meters from the ilemi triangle

the pink line is kenyas original border as a colony of Britain, as years whent by, a chunk was added each time there was a survey until after independence, it had reached the green line


S.sudan shud just leave that chunk to us. our original dispute was with Sudan. we helped south Sudan gain independence from Sudan for god's sake, we even supplied them with tanks and weapons in preparation for them to be able to defend themselves against aggression from Sudan. they shud repay us by withdrawing their claim

 

[1 Africa]

1 Africa, u need to things in a bigger picture as u can't have ur own cake n eat it! Actually on that same area Ilemi triangle is located.

So,what are you insinuating?

 

[Samm999]

geza
The Ilemi Triangle is an area of disputed land in
East Africa. Arbitrarily defined, it measures between 10,320 and 14,000 square kilometres (3,985 and 5,405 sq mi). Named after Anuak chief Ilemi Akwon, the territory is claimed by
South Sudan and Kenya and borders Ethiopia . Despite use and raids by tribes within Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has never made an official claim on any of the Ilemi and in fact agreed that the land was all Sudanese in the 1902, 1907, and 1972 treaties. [1][2][3]

Kenya now has de facto control of the area.
The dispute arose from unclear wording of the 1914 treaty in which the provisional straight parallel was a temporary line to be used only until a new line (not finalised until the 1930's) could allow for the movements of the Turkana people
—nomadic herders who had traditionally grazed the area. The perceived economic marginality of the land as well as decades of Sudanese conflicts are two factors that have delayed the resolution of the dispute.
Peoples
The nomadic Turkana move in the territory between South Sudan and Kenya and have been vulnerable to attacks from surrounding peoples. The other peoples in this area are the
Didinga and Topasa in South Sudan, and the
Nyangatom (Inyangatom) who move between South Sudan and Ethiopia, and the Dassanech who live east of the triangle in Ethiopia.
These pastoral people have historically engaged in razzia raids on livestock. While in the past they used traditional weapons, since the nineteenth century onwards the use of firearms has been common.





History
A map of the Ilemi Triangle showing 1938 "red line", 1947 "blue line" and Sudan's 1950 patrol line (green).
To the southeast of the Ilemi, Ethiopian emperor
Menelik laid claim to Lake Turkana and proposed a boundary with the British to run from the southern end of the lake eastward to the Indian Ocean , which was shifted northward when the British and Ethiopian governments signed a treaty in 1907, reaffirmed by a 1970 Ethiopia-Kenya treaty.
The Ethiopia-Sudan boundary, the "Maud Line", was surveyed by Captain Philip Maud of the
Royal Engineers in 1902-3. It was adopted by Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement treaty of December 6, 1907 between Ethiopia and British East Africa. Though vague on the precise details of where the Kenya-Sudan border was located, it clearly placed the entire Ilemi on the west side of the Ethiopia-Sudan line.
In 1914 the Uganda-Sudan Boundary Commission agreement provided Sudan access to Lake Turkana via the now-dry Sanderson Gulf at the southeast corner of the Ilemi. After the First World War the Ethiopians armed the Nyangatom and Dassanech peoples, whereby the traditional raids turned into battles where hundreds died.
1920s
Representatives of Sudan, Uganda and Kenya in April 1924 in Kitgum agreed that Sudan should hand over some territory north of the 1914 line to either Kenya or Uganda, who could give protection to the Turkana people. However, Britain was jointly administering Sudan with Egypt, and did not want to pressure Egypt to concede Sudanese territory since relations were poor after Sir Lee Stack, the British Governor-General of Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo in November 1924.
Sudan in 1928 agreed to allow Kenyan military units across the 1914 line to protect the Turkana against the Dassanech and Nyangatom, although it cost £30,000 per year. In 1929 Kenya began subsidising Sudan to occupy the territory, which it did not wish to continue because of the perceived useless nature of it. In 1931 it was Sudan which agreed to subsidise Kenya to occupy the territory.
The Ilemi Triangle in different maps
1930s
In 1931 the Red Line (the Glenday Line) was drawn to represent the northern boundary of Turkana grazing. "In a series of agreements from 1929 to 1934, the Governor-General of the Sudan and the Governor of Kenya agreed that this Red Line should be accepted as the Turkana grazing boundary." [4][5]
After Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936, Italy briefly claimed the area of the Ilemi triangle. A joint Kenya-Sudan survey team in 1938 demarcated the "Red Line" or "Wakefield Line", very close to the delimitation a few years earlier of this Red Line, marking the northern limit of grazing of Turkana.
While Egypt and Britain agreed on this, Italy did not. The Dassanetch and Inyangatom had suffered because of the Italian occupation, and wished to recoup their losses by making a raid against the Turkana. Several hundred Turkana people were killed in a raid in July 1939 by the Inyangatom and Dassanech peoples. Italy gave up their claim on the Ilemi subsequently, and allowed the British to respond with a raid on the Inyangatom and Dassanech supported by the
Royal Air Force.

1940s
British troops of the King's African Rifles occupied Ilemi in 1941 after the British invasion of Ethiopia during World War II . The KAR passed through Ilemi on their way to southwestern Ethiopia. In 1944 Britain's Foreign Office surveyed a "blue line" which was further northwest than the "red line".

1950s
Sudan, in 1950, established their own patrol line even further northwest into Sudan where they prohibited Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists from moving west of it, giving up policing and development to the area east of it. However, that Kenya-Sudan agreement specified that this patrol line in no way affected sovereignty; that it was not an international boundary, and money continued to be paid to Kenya to patrol this Sudanese territory.
There was fighting between 1949 and 1953 as Sudan attempted to keep the Nyangatom behind this line. After Sudanese independence in 1956, Sudan has not administered Ilemi or much of the southern part of the country due to the First Sudanese Civil War there.
1960s and 1970s
In 1967 President Jomo Kenyatta's administration had made overtures to the British in order to secure support for the cession of the Triangle to Kenya. The British were unresponsive and the results amounted to little. The matter was sidelined and successive Kenyan administrations have been seemingly willing to accept the territorial status quo and their de facto territorial control, even if the Kenyan influence did diminish after the relocation of the Sudan People's Liberation Army to Sudan in the 1980s-90s. [6]
A 1978 topographic map of the Ilemi triangle.
In 1964 Kenya and Ethiopia reaffirmed their boundary, confirming Kenyan sovereignty to Namuruputh, which is just south of the southeastern point of the triangle. In 1972 a Sudan-Ethiopia boundary alteration did not solve the Ilemi issue because it did not involve Kenya, but did confirm that Ethiopia had no claim to the Ilemi Triangle.
In 1978 Kenya began to publicly, unilaterally regard the Turkana grazing line of 1938 (Wakefield Line) as an international boundary between Kenya and Sudan. [7]
1990s to present
In the 1990s Ethiopia armed the Dassanech with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, perhaps in response to Kenyan government arming in 1978 of the Turkana. Beginning in the 1960s, many Kenyan maps have marked the Red Line as the official boundary of Kenya, rather than a dotted boundary which it had been previously. More recently, many Kenyan maps depict the 1950 patrol line, the furthest northwest, as the boundary. There was a question as to whether a secret agreement was broached between Kenya and South Sudan to allow Kenya to administer this territory, in return for support in the
Sudanese Civil War. [8] In recent decades, the countries involved have had other priorities, delaying a resolution to the issue.
With the independence of South Sudan in 2011, the Sudanese claim to the Ilemi Triangle was transferred to the new national government in
Juba .

The KAR fought in several campaigns during the
War of 1939–1945 . It fought against the
Italians in Italian East Africa during the East African Campaign , against the Vichy French in Madagascar during the Battle of Madagascar, and against the Japanese in Burma during the
Burma Campaign .
Initially the KAR was deployed as the 1st East African Infantry Brigade and the 2nd East African Infantry Brigade. The first brigade was responsible for coastal defence and the second for the defence of the interior. (See 1st SA Infantry Division) By the end of July 1940, two additional East African brigades were formed, the 3rd East African Infantry Brigade and the 6th East African Infantry Brigade. Initially a Coastal Division and a Northern Frontier District Division were planned, but, instead, the 11th African Division and the 12th African Division were formed.

 

[Samm999]

In short Kenyans fought their way and occupied Ilemi triangle it wasn't just handed over geza

 

[Geza Ulole]

A reason Kenyan Massai herders in the Serengeti n Loliondo hav been given a matching orders by our vice President before they start claiming having ancestral rights.

 

[Samm999]

A reason Kenyan Massai herders in the Serengeti n Loliondo hav been given a matching orders by our vice President before they start claiming having ancestral rights.

I know you desperately want to make this issue to include Tanzania sadly its not about your news less irrelevant country its about Ethiopia Kenya Sudan. SSudan Uganda and maybe Somalia not Tanzania sleep it off

 

[Geza Ulole]

sam999, just highlighted how a dispute started! Grazing land is the source of Ilemi triangle fights n now transboundary dispute. It is funny Kenyans in here believe the area should remain with them just b'se they helped SS get their Independence, should Ugana do the same also? Since Museveni helped SS too! Shame on Kenya for that occupation on that young nation.

 

[Geza Ulole]

Its funny when same Kenyans r making noises over UPDF presence in Migingo Island while r occupying Ilemi triangle that legally belongs to SS!