Saturday, May 29, 2010

Do Not Damn The Dam

This is a very old newsreel showing the commence of high dam construction works , you can see late President Nasser of Egypt and King Mohamed V of Morocco as a guest of honor. "From British Pathe Archives"

WORK COMMENCES ON THE ASWAN HIGH DAM


Of course we can't remember these days now and I bet some of the anti-Nasser camp will say that we should not have built that dam which saved us from a whole decade of droughts and deadly floods we can't imagine because we are very lucky , well we were very lucky . Already historically Adrian Daninos had proposed the high dam project to the government pre-1952 which refused its project as it seemed to huge too implement and crazy then,w hat will be those haters' reaction if it were built by the orders of his majesty king Farouk of Egypt and Sudan; here I am speaking about the "We hate the Dam coz it is a Nasser's achievement" not about the serious experts who oppose the high dam for its cons.
I believe the high dam is not fully used by us so we can get benefit from , we still have villages with no water nor electricity access at all , the basis elements of living in any country. For 3 decades sewage has been using for irrigation in Egypt and the ministry of agriculture along with the regime kept watching. The dam built to improve and upgrade life conditions in Egypt but all those years the regime regardless of the president did not adopt policies to do so , the welfare of the citizen and the country has not been the number no.1 priority I am afraid at least in the last years of the country.
I still believe we can solve cons of the high dam if we as citizens want to ,we can form a public committee from scientists ,experts and ecologists to search for solutions ; it is never too late to do anything. That committee can use the new media to deliver its message and force the regime in to its findings. This is not a romantic dream but rather a suggestion for whoever interested and God is my witness.
The dam may save us if we want to save ourselves too , we should not waste the water of the Nile saved by the dam , we should start to construct real eco-friendly water infrastructure in the villages with no water access in the first place , we should cut off the water from all those fancy useless swimming pools in the North Coast and new communities in 6th of October governorate and the 5th Compound not to mention the Orabi Palaces city !!  We must demand the government to start recycling grey water for irrigation and the reclamation of the desert starting from Sinai , the old plan of Sadat which for some reason was forgotten.
Do not blame the dam or its builders but blame the regime which does not plan for tomorrow and for once start to act.

2 comments:

  1. Sudanese Observer5/30/2010 08:49:00 AM

    Referring to any King of Egypt, as the King of Egypt and Sudan, after the 1899 Re-conquest is deluded and funny to read.
    In the words of as-seyyid AbdalRahman Al-Mahdi when speaking to an Egyptian journalist:
    "we would like to deal with the coachmaster whose carriage came onto our land (The British Imperial Administration at the time) and not the horse that pulls the cart (The Egyptian Monarchy)."

    Yet again you sing the praises of your dam in Aswan without mentioning the negative transboundary impacts it had on Sudan and the lack of tangible benefit the Sudanese got from it.

    Upstream Nile States (Sudan being Midstream) often point to the paltry benefit that Sudan got from the construction of the dam as an example of why they should not trust Egypt and act collectively - with or without Egypt - because if Egypt's supposedly closest neighbour (Sudan) got such a rotten deal in its Nile dealings with it - what hope was there for them?

    President Nasser played a very dirty game in his support for the first military administration in Sudan in order to sign the 1959 Agreement which is now being undermined.

    Your dam is an infrastructural achievement whose tangible benefit to your country is outweighed by the losses it has caused and continues to cause to any semblance of 'soft power' Egypt has in the Nile Basin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with the Sudanese Observer's comments and think that the dam was ill conceived, planned and executed to satisfy Nasser's megalomaniac ego.
    I wonder if Toshka has any semblance to the High Dam project?

    ReplyDelete

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