Energy, wealth and peace to flow from Sudanese dam

THE 20,000-strong crowd of men in white robes, women in colourful wraps and children in Western clothes danced before the main platform on the Merowe desert in Sudan, in what looked like a massive rock concert under the baking sun.
  The Sudanese from the Nile state revelled in the fiery Arabic speech of President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, chanting in response: "The dam is our answer!"
  Set against the foreboding backdrop of a warrant of arrest on their leader from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the people seemed more concerned with being set free from poverty.
  Certainly, the desert dwellers - farmers who had lived on and worked this land since the Pharaohs - saw the US$2 billion (RM7 billion) Merowe Dam as a catalyst for change.
  One of them, economics graduate Sarah Omer, 29, had returned to her hometown in Merowe after completing her studies in Khartoum to work with one of the engineering companies at the dam, Lahmeyer International.
  Omer belongs to the Shaygia tribe. Her ancestors had once ruled northern Sudan and built pyramids along the Nile to mark their rule over Egypt for more than a century.
  The "Black Pharaohs", as they were dubbed by Western archaeologists, were in no way inferior to the Egyptians when it came to intellect and technology, and had built more pyramids along the Nile than their neighbours.
  Once a bustling kingdom, the area is today filled with mud-house villages.
  While most development is centralised in Khartoum, the dam project is like a window to a whole new world of piped water, electricity and roads for the people of the Merowe region.
  Sarah said: "When I was a child, the children from the villages had to come to Merowe to go to primary school. There were no schools in their village."
  Children as young as 10 had to live in a halfway house on their own, if they did not have relatives to stay with, returning to their villages on weekends.
  "There were also no hospitals. People used to die on their way to the hospital because the road was bad and the journey was rough. I often heard that pregnant women with birth complications would never arrive in time at the hospital. It was sad."
  Omer, who is reading for a Master in Business Administration at a local university, said it used to be a four-hour drive from Merowe to Hamdab, where the dam was built, but now it takes about 40 minutes.
  An aerial view of the Nile downstream towards the dam reveals a snaking green belt of palm trees and padi fields and other crops against an arid red desert.
  The river irrigates the banks, but nearer Merowe, improved irrigation has allowed agricultural activities to penetrate deeper into the more rural areas.
  Minister in the Federal Government Osama Abdullah, the executive director of the Sudan Dams Implementation Unit, said the government was confident that the dam would do much to eradicate poverty in Sudan.
  "The power supply will reach all parts of the country, including southern Sudan and Darfur, by April next year," Abdullah said in a press conference with journalists from Africa, Arabic nations, Japan, China and Malaysia, invited to cover the inauguration of the dam.
  He was confident that the power supply would generate wealth through improved output in agriculture and manufacturing. It would mean more jobs and higher incomes for the people, and, most importantly, it could help bring peace to Darfur and southern Sudan.
  Abdullah lashed out at Western countries that viewed Africa as a stock of raw resources to be yielded as and when they wished, "like turning on the tap water".
  He described the ICC move to indict Bashir as a "new form of white imperialism".
  More than 600 workers and professionals from Darfur have been hired to work on the dam project, which offers better remuneration than other jobs.
  Civil engineer Mohamed at-Tahir from Shairia in northern Darfur observed that the lack of natural resources was one of the underlying causes of the Darfur conflict.
  Tahir, whose village was ravaged by that conflict, leaving its families to languish in two refugee camps, remarked that wealth alone could not guarantee peace.
  "The people in Darfur came to work here because they need to rebuild their family lives in the villages.
  "We need education to get out of poverty and progress.Without it, peace in Darfur will remain elusive."
  Omer, who has occasionally unearthed archaeological artifacts in her backyard, was not bitter that half-a-million square kilometres of territory was being inundated by the dam, along with the legacy of the Black Pharaohs who had once ruled Egypt and fended off the Assyrian army three millenniums ago.
  "We had a civilisation, but now we need to survive. It is a loss we can
absorb, I think."