Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki is invited to visit Egypt this month at the invitation of Egypt's Foreign Ministry for talks over the Nile Basin framework treaty as seven Nile states threatened to sign a deal without Egypt and Sudan later this month, a senior official at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday. "Mr Kibaki and his Prime Minister Raila Odinga have accepted an Egyptian invitation for Cairo talks this month. However, the date of the visit is still under way," said Mona Omar, the assistant Foreign Minister for African affairs. She added that the talks with Kenyan senior officials would focus on the Nile Basin treaty, whose endorsement is rejected by Egypt and Sudan due to the reduction of Egypt's historic quota of the Nile water. The latest chapter in the long-running feud over waters from the Nile, worshipped as a deity in ancient Egypt, came when upstream countries declared after a water meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh last month that they would launch separate talks on May 14 since Egypt and Sudan refused to revise water pacts dating to 1929. “Egypt's historic rights to Nile waters are a matter of life and death. We will not compromise them,” Moufid Shehab, minister of legal and assembly affairs, told parliament after the talks. The 1929 deal, brokered on one side by British colonial powers in Africa, gives Egypt 55.5 billion cubic metres a year, the biggest share of a flow of some 84 billion cubic metres. It also gives Cairo the power to veto dams and other water projects in upstream countries that include six of the world's poorest nations. “We will not sign on to any agreement that does not clearly state and acknowledge our historical rights,” Egyptian Water Minister Mohamed Nasreddin Allam said after the meeting. But analysts say Egypt must improve ties with upstream countries that in the future may take on greater economic and commercial importance. “Egypt has tried in the past to complicate the issue. They are dragging their heels,” Shimeles Kemal, spokesman for the government of Ethiopia, source of the Blue Nile.
