TZ maintains owns half Lake Malawi
The African Forum for Former Heads of State delegation are scheduled to leave for Tanzania next week on a fact-finding mission regarding the wrangle over sovereignty of Lake Malawi, but Tanzania still maintains it owns half of the lake.
Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation spokesperson Mkumbwa Ally is quoted by that country’s Daily News of Tuesday reiterating that the border between the two countries runs in the middle of the lake.
Two former African presidents, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa on Sunday met President Joyce Banda and her entourage at Kamuzu Palace in Lilongwe on the same mission.
Banda notified Chissano and Mbeki that Malawi owns the entire lake except for a portion ceded to Mozambique in 1954 for mutually beneficial reasons.
But Ally said: “We didn’t expect anything new or different; neither are we going to change our position. Our position is that the border runs in the middle of Lake Nyasa [Malawi].
“The mediation team is gathering information, then they will give their statement, then each side will decide to take it further if they do not agree with the mediation team’s judgment.”
He, however, said there was an agreement that the status quo should be maintained while a solution to the dispute was being sought.
Malawi, which sits to the west of Africa’s third-largest lake, claims the entire northern half of the lake while Tanzania, to the east, says it owns half of the northern area. The southern half is shared between Malawi and Mozambique.
Chissano and Mbeki represent the 38-member African Forum for Former Heads of State that is mediating in the 50-year-old lake dispute.
The Malawi leader said she would take the matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) if the group failed to resolve the issue by the end of September.
Malawi had pulled out of talks on the issue in October, accusing its northern neighbour of intimidating its fishers, a charge Tanzania denied.
It returned to the negotiating table this year as the soured relations derailed exploration for oil and gas. In 2011, Malawi awarded exploration licences to British-based Surestream Petroleum to search for oil in Lake Malawi.
