The Crocodile’s Tears!

The crocodile's tears
Nigussie Meshesha (PhD)

Why Egypt becomes as such over selfish and a complete liar in the bid to use the Nile alone? Why does it want to mislead the world with unlived truth?

One, however, ought not to be destructed by the false allegations of Egypt on Ethiopia. As a matter of fact, Egypt is simply making a false cry with “the crocodile’s tears” as in the famous Amharic expression, for such pretentious acts of Egypt.

It’s a prevailing truth that Egypt electrifies its 99 % of its people, and using much of the Nile for its irrigation in its deserts, and even let much of the water evaporate in its desert areas, mismanaging the water.

On the other hand, it is an existing fact that the Nile is the natural gift for Ethiopia created on Ethiopian land, but left as unused resource though it can be a means to curb poverty as majority of Ethiopian citizens suffer from the abject of poverty.

Besides, though Ethiopia contributes 86% of the total amount of the Nile, it has not used its water for development needs where most of its rural areas (60%) live in complete darkness of the second populous nation in Africa. Majority of citizens even do not get a bulb light even during the nights to take care of kids, make supper, or go to bed with light, at least.

Still, in Ethiopia, as almost all of the citizens even in the towns let alone the rural areas are not able to prepare their foods using electric stoves or utensils, consequently, many of the households depend on fire woods and wood charcoal for making their foods. This has, of course, a direct influence on the cutting down of trees which, certainly dwindles the forest resources of the country and leads to exacerbating the drying up of many areas, which, in turn, reduces the annual rainfall that enters into the rivers, including the tributaries of Abay or the blue Nile.

In fact, not the potential, but with regards to the use of water there is serious shortage of water in Ethiopia except in certain places that use running water and water springs or streams. That means, those people who use pipe water in Ethiopia are quite limited, and of course limited to cities and towns, where urbanization is a very recent phenomenon in the country, of course, with quite low percentage for a nation with 120 million populations.

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Water access is also a problem even in wetland areas as it cannot be supplied in modern system for an ever increasing population since electric energy is not available for distribution. Consequently, water access becomes a critical problem due to the unavailability of energy for pulling out and supplying the water for towns and rural areas.

Thence, such lack of water in Ethiopia becomes a mystery though hydrologists, geographers and environmentalists named the country as the “water tower of Africa” just theoretically. Due to shortages of water citizens become victims of sanitary health problems with lack of pure drinking water where low level of electric supply is the major cause for the related problems in reaching out people who live in many highland areas and many rural places of Ethiopia.

In other words, only less than 40% of Ethiopians get potable water. They effort to provide clean water cannot be made possible without electric energy as the country does not have any other means of energy. Besides, sanitation efforts made by the government and NGOS cannot be achieved without energy. For example, INGOs such as Wash projects make meager attempts to deal with water and sanitary matters for citizens, but even that attempt is deterred because of poor electrifications. Besides, the need to use underground water or surface water has been affected by lack of energy just to pull out the water.

Here, one can easily see the absence of electricity hampers the government’s and NGOs efforts to provide good public amenities to the poor citizens. This has the direct influence on the health of citizens and exhibits poor sanitations of areas. This can be epitomized by the lower level in the use of modern latrine even in sub-Saharan Africa level as water sources cannot be easily made available from far or near places because of the unavailability of electricity to pump water from many of the highland areas of the country.

What is more, many of the schools do not have electricity; as a result, students cannot even learn their education using laboratories since they need electric system and even cannot study their subjects in the night with its unavailability. One can easily figure out how the problem would be more serious to school teachers, researchers, health professionals, agricultural experts, etc.

Not only this, but also Ethiopia still depends on agrarian economy and the effort to industrialize the country without electricity is a far cry. The country has started to open just very limited industrial parks, but they will be left only as fenced places with buildings if electricity is not made available to attract investors.

Still, the modern grinding mills are very rare and mothers in rural and suburban areas even today are forced to use the traditional grinding stones in making cereal flour to take care of their kids and children’s foods, and the entire families, leaving much burden on the rural mothers. This is really a paradox for citizens who live in the nation that contributes 86 % of the total Nile water.

Now it’s time for the Egyptian government and activists stop lying to say that the source of the Nile is Egypt and run out of breath to lie even innocent Egyptians. It is a known fact that the source of the Blue Nile is Ethiopia, contributing 86 % as the of the total Nile water.

If that is the case, why Egypt stands in its feet to mislead the world? What is the point for Egypt to mislead the world by fabricating fake news using social media, world forums, UN agencies, paid lobbyists, and biased world media and biased influential groups? Why is Egypt defiant about Ethiopian legitimate rights to use the Nile? Why is Egypt circumvented only with its own interest by bringing up those colonial agreements as the center of their arguments?

The answers are simple. It’s just Egypt’s lust for one’s own development at the expense of others just as those good days of innocence, or perhaps, call it foolishness. However, this cannot really get its practicality in our modern days at all.

Therefore, it now becomes vivid that Egypt follows the philosophy of development at the expense of other poorer neighboring states. So every problem emanates from Egypt’s over selfishness, and that is why Egypt is lying the world and its own people. Now, it becomes the time for all world governments and people to get into learning why is Egypt over crying and lying the world.

Generally, the truth is what has been stated above, and so Egypt stop lying the world and your own people!

It’s just the crocodile’s tears!

That is it!

(By: Nigussie Meshesha (PhD)