The Face of Truth: The Story of Merowe Dam… Targeting Trust
Ibrahim Shaglawi
The story began from a small margin on social media, where a rumor emerged claiming that Sudanese engineers had been excluded from maintenance work at the Merowe Dam in favor of a Chinese company that had been contracted.
At first glance, it seemed like a technical piece of news open to debate and perhaps belief. However, it quickly expanded into a complete narrative, touching a sense of anxiety about what remains of state institutions. Soon after, an official denial came from the Electricity Holding Company, confirming the inaccuracy of the claim and emphasizing the competence of national cadres.
Yet what happened after the denial was more telling than the rumor itself: the narrative did not die, but continued to circulate, as if expressing a collective psychological need to believe it, alongside a feeling that it was the work of a media machine investing in a charged atmosphere.
Here, the question is no longer: is the rumor true or not? Rather: why did it seem believable in the first place? In this article, dear reader, we seek to unpack this phenomenon and understand its background, so that the full picture becomes clear.
In times of war, the function of news changes. It is no longer merely a transmission of facts, but becomes a tool for reshaping public opinion. The rumor targeting the Merowe Dam was not innocent in its structure; it carried three messages at once: that national competence is questionable, that the management of a strategic resource has implicitly shifted abroad, and that the state no longer holds full control over its service sectors. In political terms, these are keys to redefining the image of the state in the minds of its citizens.
More dangerously, this pattern of targeting has moved beyond its traditional domain. Disinformation, which often revolved around military fronts or political conflicts, has now found its way into development projects. This is a qualitative shift that demands attention, because targeting security destabilizes the state, but targeting development destabilizes society. When people begin to doubt electricity, water, and services, that doubt does not stop at the level of services, but extends to the very idea of the state itself.
On the other hand, the facts stand firm. The Merowe Dam has not collapsed, nor has it gone out of service; rather, it continues to produce approximately 980 megawatts through eight units operating efficiently. The two units that are offline were directly damaged in transformers due to drone attacks during aggression by the Rapid Support Forces militia, a forced damage unrelated to the engineers’ capability or the soundness of the design. Yet these facts appear less appealing than the dramatic narrative portraying the situation as a collapse.
The painful paradox is that the core of the crisis does not lie in generation itself, but in what comes after. Transmission and distribution networks, which have suffered widespread destruction at key sites, are what hinder electricity from reaching people. Here, the gap between reality and lived experience emerges: the state says production is ongoing, while the citizen sees darkness. Between these two levels, rumors are born and find fertile ground.
As for cooperation with foreign companies, it comes as a natural response to the scale of damage, which requires complex equipment, substantial funding, and manufacturing time. However, in an environment saturated with doubt, this cooperation is reinterpreted as concession rather than partnership, and exclusion rather than support. Here, the fragility of the official narrative becomes evident—not in its weakness, but in its delay in keeping pace with the meaning being formed in the public mind.
Politically, we are facing a deeper layer of crisis: not only in managing a vital sector heavily affected by the war’s repercussions, but in managing the “meaning” of this sector. A state that does not explain what is happening leaves others to explain it on its behalf. In a time of multiplying platforms and accelerating news cycles, silence or delayed clarification becomes an implicit relinquishment of the right to shape the true narrative.
From a broader perspective, this incident reveals a struggle over defining the state at this stage: is it a state that is eroding, or a state that is resisting? The truth is more complex than either option. There is erosion in some joints, yes, but there is also resilience in others. The Merowe Dam is one of the most prominent of these resilient pillars, still functioning despite all that has targeted it—evidenced by its production, which covers demand in the near-total absence of most thermal power stations from service.
If we move from narrative to reality, the picture becomes harsher. The crisis in the electricity sector today is not limited to technical faults, but is tied to massive losses in transmission and distribution systems, where the network has lost transformers and strategic equipment at key stations such as Khartoum East, Souq Al-Mahali, Afra, Al-Shajara, Al-Mogran, Maqaber Farouk, due to direct attacks.
These deliberate attacks have left vast areas—from Nile Street to South Al-Sahafa, and from Al-Mogran to Al-Manshiya, Al-Jereif, and Al-Maamoura—without electricity. Despite this, electricity engineers, through tremendous efforts, managed to rehabilitate the Mogran transformer and extend alternative lines from Soba, partially restoring power and reviving the lifeline of services in some neighborhoods. This is in addition to Omdurman, Bahri, and others.
But the reality goes deeper than that; it is the result of political accumulations that preceded the current crisis. Significant resources were spent on unjustified settlements, such as the payment of 335 million dollars in compensation to the families of victims of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, during the government of Dr. Abdalla Hamdok, as part of the agreement to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. These funds could have been directed toward developing the electricity sector and increasing its generation and transmission capacity.
Moreover, policies known as “dismantling empowerment” led to the displacement of a number of qualified engineers and the loss of years of training and capacity-building, leaving a sharp gap in national expertise and weakening the sector’s ability to respond to crises.
Thus, war intersects with the legacy of politics to shape a fragile reality—one that cannot be explained by rumors alone, nor resolved by official denials. What is required is a reordering of priorities, development of competencies, and protection of development projects from the polarizations that weaken them. The battle over the Merowe Dam is a battle of trust: that the citizen believes what is said because they see it reflected in reality, and that they feel the state still holds its responsibilities.
In conclusion, according to #The_Face_of_Truth, engineering teams may succeed in restoring power within hours, but rebuilding trust requires more time, greater honesty, and a discourse in which people see themselves, not merely numbers. States do not fall only when their stations go dark, but when the trust of their citizens fades.
Wishing you health and well-being.
Thursday, April 9, 2026
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