The World Bank (WB) may send a team of specialists to hold meetings with Egyptian officials from foreign, irrigation and international cooperation ministries to boost ties between Egypt and the upstream nations which signed a Nile-sharing deal without Egypt and Sudan last month, Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said Sunday. "We have secret contacts with international parties over the Nile waster-sharing treaty that will be announced in the proper time. However, we had talks with The World Bank's Robert Zollick," Abul Gheit said Sunday. He added that Zollick could envoy a team of specialists to Egypt to discuss the issue. Abul Gheit said he also had talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on the sidelines of an Africa-France summit in the French city on Nice. "All my talks with the Ethiopian officials were very positive. I hope there could be more talks on this issue in the near future," the Egyptian official was quoted by the official Middle East News Agency (MENA) as saying. A war of words over control of the Nile has broken out between Egypt, which sees the river as its lifeblood, and countries upstream complaining they are denied a fair share of the river's water. Officials from five countries signed a water-sharing deal in Entebe, Uganda last month with Egypt and Sudan in the latest escalation of a decades-old dispute. At its heart lies a 1929 accord, signed during Britain's colonial rule in Africa, which gives Egypt and Sudan rights over all the water in the world's longest river. The Nile Waters Agreement, which still holds today, guarantees Egypt 55.5 billion cubic meters of the Nile's 84 billion total flow. Sudan gets the rest.
