Malawian former president, Bakili Muluzi, has purposed to marshall regional arbitration efforts to resolve a long standing dispute of who owns Lake Nyasa to Tanzanians or Lake Malawi to the Malawians.
Similar efforts through SADC never bore any fruit, and were abandoned.
Malawi is armed to the teeth with an outdated colonial map to make a claim where the Lake boundary is, signifying how difficult Africa can erase the disruptive impacts of colonialism.
Tanzania hinges her Lake Nyasa territorial claims upon the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Lake Malawi/Niassa/Nyasa is the third deepest freshwater lake in the world.
This article dives deep into this colonial legacy which Malawians consider an urgent matter for resolution while in Tanzania it is a case of mistaken identity.
During the presidency of Banda wa Malawi in the mid 1960s, similar agitations to claim the whole of the Lake belonging to them were silenced with songs in the morning and in the evening to stop that irredentist in his tracks.
Until his removal from office, Banda wa Malawi did nothing to realize his wild dreams of chopping off a huge chunk of Tanzania, and make it part of his tiny country.
In those warlike songs, we cautioned Banda wa Malawi to be content with what God had given him or hell would break loose.
Our message was loud and clear: contentment or the barrel of gun would sort this border dispute, once and for all!
The border dispute dates back to colonial treaties, with Malawi relying on the 1890 Anglo-German Treaty that places the whole lake within its borders, while Tanzania invokes the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which suggests a median boundary.
The 1890 Anglo-German Treaty was not made by Africans but was crafted by colonial powers to suit their Imperial aims which African realities on ground were not taken into account.
Of more glaring fact was before colonisation, Africans had no demarcated borders in manner colonial powers had operationalized.
Whatever borders the colonial powers instituted defied traditional user rights of the people who were already there, eking out a decent living.
I will cite one example. Before the 1890 Anglo-German Treaty residents on either side of the Lake enjoyed user rights like fishing, domestic usage of waters and nobody curtailed those rights. However, under the 1890 Anglo- German Treaty which was revoked by 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea because that agreement had shortchanged traditional users on the other side of the Lake.
Of more significance, those traditional users on the side of Malawi called Lake Malawi while those on the Tanganyika side called it Lake Nyasa.
Those on our side prided the Lake based on their own ethnic identity while those on the other side did the same.
Interestingly, the locals on either side of the equation share vernacular identites.
Contrarian to that, Lake Tanganyika which borders four countries there is a consensus the name is not in dispute and does not define user rights.
The lake is shared among four countries namely Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Zambia, with DRC holding 45 % and Tanzania 41 %.
The major outflow is the Lukuga River, which empties into the Congo River system. Lake Tanganyika is the second largest fresh water lake in the world by volume and the second deepest lake after Lake Baikal in Siberia.
So, sticking to a name and some utopian colonial map to assert or deprive traditional user rights is courting unnecessary conflicts which will benefit nobody.
Of interest there is Mozambique that has claims to ownership of the Lake Malawi but Malawians do not challenge those rights raising a troubling concern that Malawi may have other hidden agendas stoking the dispute.
Historical origins of the problem.
Lake Malawi or Lake Nyasa – the Malawi and Tanzanian name preferences, respectively – dominates the eastern border of Malawi. It is the third largest lake in Africa at 568 km long and sometimes stretches to a width of 80 km.
The 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty between Great Britain and Imperial Germany agreed the boundary between the then British colony of Nyasaland – now Malawi – and German East Africa, which in time became Tanzania.
The treaty set the boundary along the Tanganyika side of the lake shore. The whole of the lake became part of Nyasaland.
But these decisions were taken without consulting Africans, who should have had a say. They created more problems in Africa than they solved.
People living around the northern shores of the lake are very much related.
They speak the same language, have the same culture, and share the same beliefs. Today’s challenge – who owns the lake – would not have existed at all were it not for the treaty.
The lake constitutes about a third of the entire territory of Malawi. Malawi’s economic life, culture, folklore and national sentiment are indistinguishably linked to the lake.
Tanzania, too, derives considerable value from the lake. It has navigation and fishing rights; the lake supports a large number of artisanal fishermen; and there are ancestral burial places that now lie under the water.
The major problems with ownership rights in this dispute is not disposal rights since they are nonexistent but user and exclusionary ones.
If Malawi has its way, it means traditional user rights of those in Tanzania side would be permanently extinguished contrary to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that has preserved those rights.
It is inconceivable that such rights will begin to be exercised and secured through Malawian permits and payment of taxes!
Tanzania has also made arguments on the basis of its fishing economy, historical claims, and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Yet Malawi’s challenge to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was not actively pursued as government policy, and it effectively lapsed. Instead, in line with the Cairo Declaration, Malawi refused to recognise the the revocation of the The 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty between Great Britain and Imperial Germany.
Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, never conceded the boundary as I have strenuously dilated much earlier in this discussion.
Tanzania on her part has began building Mbamba Bay port.
The port of Mbamba Bay will be an important driver of the Southern market, increasing cargo and efficiency at Mtwara’s port.
The Mtwara Development Project is a major infrastructure development project involving southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique, eastern Malawi and Eastern Zambia. The goal of this project is to provide road, rail and waterway access from the surrounding region to the Port of Mtwara.
Cargo from Mtwara Port will be transported by road to Mbamba Bay Port, which has the shortest distance and the lowest cost for transferring cargo to Malawi.
The procurement process to find a contractor is on-going and compensation payments to people who were relocated to pave the way for the project have been made.
The Mbamba Bay project was crucial for economic growth in the southern part of Tanzania. Malawi has formally requested Tanzania to suspend the project, a move likely to escalate tensions between the neighbouring countries.
Tanzania has also issued a geographical map which shows the median line was the boundary of Lake Nyasa adding fears to the Malawians who would love colonial legacies upheld in their favour!
Potential Fossil riches now stoking the dispute.
Malawi long had resigned about their fate until the then Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika came to power in October 2011 awarded a a UK company a contract to start oil and gas exploration in the eastern part of the lake.
The contract included exploration within the Tanzanian-claimed area.
Tanzania resisted but Bingu wa Mutharika persisted until his death in April 2012. His brother, Peter Mutharika succeeded him but sought SADC mediation effort to resolve the border dispute.
SADC appointed former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano as chief mediator, alongside former South African and Botswana presidents Thabo Mbeki and Festus Mogae.
In 2017, the mediators gave the disputants three months to come to a final resolution after both countries stuck to their positions.
The SADC didn’t make headway and presidents of Malawi, Lazarus Chakwera and his Tanzanian counterpart declared the border dispute was a nonstarter.
Fearing the Lake Malawi border dispute would soar relationship with Tanzania, landlocked Malawi hamstrung with poverty has attempted to diversify her access to the Indian Ocean through Beira port in Mozambique but internal squabbles stoked by official graft allegations, political instability in Mozambique, devastated by Tropical Storm Freddy (2023) has constrained it.
Malawi is in a hot soup and has to decide how to carry out a balancing act of forging fossil extractions in Lake Nyasa without jeopardizing the relationship with her mightier neighbour, Tanzania.
The two countries could even consider become one country and dissolve potential colonial alienation of indigenous rights instead of legitimising those colonial injustices.
Once a one country, Malawians will not lay claim to Lake Nyasa only but will call all large waters as Malawians that include Lake Victoria, Tanganyika, Eyasi, Manyara, Natron and the Indian Ocean too. How delightful that could be?
Malawi may take a leaf how the British solved a potential border dispute between Kenya and Sultan of Oman who was a ruler of Zanzibar where the 1892 Treat that Malawi touts her territorial claims was inked.
The British quickly before granting Kenya independence in 1964 knew unless a border dispute with Zanzibar was resolved they would be leaving behind a
potential border dispute. The British told the Oman Sultan to relinquish any claims to the coastal areas for a compensation of a piece of cloth of similar size of the land forgone.
The British in their wisdom told the Oman Sultan, Kenyans would not accept that the coastal areas were not part of Kenya based upon their traditional user rights.
The Oman Sultan was understanding and he accepted the offer. Malawians ought to learn Tanzania will never extinguish user rights to Lake Nyasa based on some colonial relic.
The Lake was given to us to exploit its natural resources from the Beginning to the End, and nobody else would tell us otherwise.
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Malawi needs TZ for its economic devt. currently it is committing suicide