Westerners do not understand the difference between Abyssinian and non-Abyssinian Ethiopia. It was only fairly recently that it was made known that 86% of the Nile’s water originated in the Ethiopian highlands. As the saying goes, ‘Ferenj na lij yenegerutin yamnal – roughly translated, ‘The white man and the child believe all they are told.’ Abyssinians still do not admit the reality about the origin of the Nile water. They also fail to mention that 50% of the White Nile arises from Ethiopia’s Black Nile, and that 100% of the Juba, Somalia’s big river, comes from Ethiopia. It is striking, to say the least, many people neglect to properly acknowledge Ethiopian rivers apart from the Abay River and the White Nile. As a result, there is little known information regarding how the utilization of the many key Ethiopian rivers could address the chronic food security issues in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has many big rivers, eleven lakes, nine saline lakes, four crater lakes and over twelve major swamps. Almost all of the rivers flow from highlands of Ethiopia to the lowland neighboring countries. The true equation for the analysis and understanding of these rivers can be depicted easily by describing the courses of the main rivers one by one. The mapping and presentation of these river basins are crude and subject to major errors. Eighteen Ethiopian rivers flow to the Sudan and cross the border at six different places: three of them being big perennial rivers from southern Ethiopia while the other three are seasonal rivers of the north. Also, four rivers from the Arsi-Bale highlands flow toward Somalia in different directions; three of them merging at the Ethio- Somali border to form the Juba River. The Omo River flows from the southwest highlands of Jimma to Kenya and forms Lake Turkana, the biggest desert lake in the world. The Awash River ends up in Lake Abbe at the Ethio-Djibouti border. Unlike what is traditional claimed, major Ethiopian rivers do not originate from the arid Semien highlands of Abyssinia or from the desert lowlands of Afar or Ogaden. Instead, Ethiopia’s primary water sources are formed from the streams and lakes of the country’s rainforest regions. Rivers that arise from the northern arid highlands of Amhara and Tigray regions do flow westwards in the direction of Sudan. Those rivers that arise from the west side of the Rift Valley in Arsi, Bale, Chercher and Gara- Mulata mountains flow towards Somalia. Those originating from Tulama (Shoa) and from the Rift Valley area flow towards Djibouti, whereas numerous others originating from the tropical rainforest highlands of southwestern Ethiopia flow in three directions: to the Blue Nile, to the Black Nile and to the Omo River. If we look closely at Ethiopia’s internal drainage systems, we can easily deduce a number of fundamental political realities. Before the creation of Ethiopia in the late 19th century, Abyssinians and some explorers considered Abay to be both the source of, and a major contributor to, the Nile River. This notion persisted even after the formation of contemporary Ethiopia. The problem remains that Abyssinians present Abay as equivalent to the Blue Nile and, by implication, mistakenly consider all Ethiopian rivers flowing into the Nile as tributaries of Abay. This leads them to the wrong assumption that the Blue Nile is nothing without Abay when, in fact, the opposite is true. The rhetoric of Abyssinian rulers has always been a false representation of the county as a whole, and its rivers in particular, with the aim of promoting the skewed political dichotomy between Abyssinia and the rest of Ethiopia. It is to be remembered that Abyssinians have managed to present terrorist-like shifta rulers Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik as noble leaders in Ethiopian history. Abay, a tributary of the Blue Nile, originates from Lake Tana. Lakes are reservoirs, and they discharge an amount of the river proportional to intakes coming from inflowing streams, rivers and precipitations. As such, Abay cannot have greater contribution than the White Nile, which arises from the tropical rainforest area of Lake Victoria. To understand the dynamics of the Nile River, one needs to raise the following question: if Ethiopia accounts for 86% of the Nile River, and the Abay River contributes only 6% of the river water, where does the remaining 80% come from, and why are other Ethiopian rivers only mentioned as small- scale contributors to Abay? The answer? Most of the contributing rivers come from Oromia and other subjugated Southern regions of Ethiopia.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 14:35:49 +0000
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