A year ago, some Zanzibaris were reported by the press to want the Union constitution re-written in order to spell out clearly that gas and oil were Non-Union matters. Some Zanzibaris would even wish to revert back to the existence of international borders between Zanzibar and Tanzania Mainland so that Zanzibar may reserve for its exclusive use the gas and oil that may be discovered in Zanzibar, including discoveries in the deep ocean that belong to what an independent Zanzibar may then claim to be its by international maritime law.
Since a couple of months ago, oil and gas have yet again occasioned heightened media attention. Malawi granted a concession to a British Company to prospect for oil and gas in the whole of Lake Nyasa and Tanzania objected, claiming that half of the lake belonged to it.
The colonialists, who arbitrarily and illogically set about creating territorial entities that later became Tanganyika and Malawi, had in July 1890 entered into an agreement, known as the Anglo-German or Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty. By this treaty the international borders of Tanganyika and Malawi were fixed. Britain ceded Heligoland, an island off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein in the North Sea, to Germany, and in return Britain recognised German claims to territories that first became so-called German East Africa and later Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi.
The Germans were free to colonise the territory to the north of Lake Nyasa in a phrasing that definitely gave Malawi whole of the lake. The operative Treaty Article stated that the border was marked as follows: “Turning north, it continues along the eastern, northern, and western shores of the lake until it reaches the northern bank of the mouth of the Songwe River.”
The Malawi ruling political elite have stuck to the argument that the border between colonial Tanganyika and colonial Malawi was fixed by the Heligoland Treaty and that the Charter establishing the Organisation of African Unity, that later became the African Union, demands that where international border disputes arise between post-colonial African nation states, these disputes must be settled by appeal to strict adherence to the colonial international treaty provisions that set them up as nation states in the first place, irrespective of whether these international borders were illogical or not.
The Tanzania ruling political elite have, for their part, sought to appeal to internationally sanctioned logic and ethical principles that are summarised in “the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that stipulates that in case nations are bordered by a water body (sea or lake), the border of the two nations will always be in the middle of the water body.”
The problem with the appeal to internationally sanctioned logic is that most international borders in the world were fixed by international treaties as part of territorial gains accompanying wars of colonial occupation. Such borders are often illogical anyway and it will be opening a Pandora’s box to seek to rule in favour of logic-based border claims.
To cap it all, just last week, yet another media furore broke out relating to the issue of oil and gas.
Representatives of Tanzanians residing in the regions of Mtwara and Lindi held a big demonstration demanding that internationally sanctioned good governance principles demanded that the gas discovered in their regions should not be moved to Dar es Salaam without their explicit consent. Tanzania’s ruling political elite has hit back, claiming the gas and oil in these regions belong to all Tanzanians. Ironically, parts of what later became known as Tanganyika were actually under the rule of the Oman Arab Sultan of Zanzibar.
According to Article XI of the Heligoland Treaty Great Britain was to “bring to bear her full influence on the Sultan of Zanzibar to facilitate an amicable agreement by which the Sultan unconditionally cedes to Germany the Island of Mafia and his territories on the mainland (including dependencies).”
Without the Heligoland Treaty perhaps much of the area in Lindi Region that has huge reserves of gas may have remained part of Zanzibar and the agitation by sections of Zanzibari society to have gas and oil be removed from Union matters might now be causing even more deadly anxiety among the ruling political elite in Tanzania Mainland (formerly Tanganyika).
Is it not bizarre for Tanzania’s governing political elite to have gone as far as claiming that much of the gas so far discovered is in the deep part of the Indian Ocean close to but outside the borders of these two regions, though, apparently, within the territorial borders of Tanzania as whole?
The writer is a retired senior lecturer philosophy programme, the University of Dar es Salaam
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