An EPLF song goes like this: �temmtto teazebo meret adebokha, adi weheyez adi ruba.� I have a peculiar habit. I often tend to remember neither the title of songs, nor their entire lyric. At the most, a couple of lines remain registered in my memory. This song, which gets repeatedly played by the regime�s media, can only be about �imagining Eritrea."

We have no perennial rivers or streams at all. Except the short strip of the Tekeze, that we call the Setit. Water consumption per capita in our country has, therefore, been one of the lowest in the world. Health hazards from this shortage are many. The cause for the recent Ethio-Eritrea war have not been exhaustively discussed yet.

But conflict over the use of the water resources from the Tekeze/Setit has not been discounted. There were a quite few rumors about this in Asmera among knowledgeable people, besides the quarrel about the border, tax and the custom duties, and the use of the Asab oil refinery. An allegedly promising cooperation to use the water resource jointly was dropped. However, projects for dams in Tembien, Tigray region, continued.

Disillusioned about the state of affairs after the post liberation period, many have disparaged the �Singapore model� adopted briefly by the regime. None have critiqued the soundness of the Eritrean salt trade from the bygone era. In the mid-sixties, and afterwards, salt was the talk of the day for the fronts, and the public in general. On hindsight, nobody appears to have seriously asked about the viability of a salt based economy in the modern times.

In the distant era, trade in salt was indeed the mainstay of the economy of the kingdom centered around Timbuktu in west Africa. But salt was believed to have been exchanged for its weight in gold. Who among us now thinks twice about the price before buying a few pounds of a bag of salt? Salt is a bulky commodity to trade with, especially with far countries. The Sudan and Djibouti have plenty of it. Ethiopia is possibly the only one that structurally suffers from a sudden disruption of this trade. After the recent war, Ethiopia boycotted the salt from Eritrea, and depends largely from Lake Asale, Djibouti, and from the amole salt mined internally near the Danakil Depression. Did our compatriots consider this to happen? A simple possible scenario! A country in dispute or at war with you may simply choose to put up with your commodity, or worse your ports, even at enormous cost to it.

Our ports, or Wedebat Adey, as the singer Yemane popularly put it were considered our strategic assets. We were exhilarated about the potential wealth to be obtained from them. We had no clue about the figures. For the most part, after the closure of the Suez Canal, the sea traffic in the Red Sea area was hampered. To make matters worse, huge container ships were increasingly chosen over the much smaller ones. The traditional ports, were bypassed and were left to slumber.

Oil was the other commodity we thought we were blessed with. We were not alone to dream about this. Many of the folks in our neighborhood were in the same craze. Propaganda leaflets in the early seventies featured various conspiracy stories about it. The Imperial regime, afraid of the escalating war had, according to this propaganda allegedly capped the oil wells. Our Fronts� elite did not own up to having said this. When the current energy minister was asked about this �conspiracy� in one of the seminars convened in the late 90s in Asmera, he lied about it. �No sane government would do such a thing against its own interest�, said the minister without blinking.

That is not all. Remember the stuff about the various miracles performed by the EPLF in the meda? According to one of the propaganda chits of the times, the survival rate of the wounded  EPLF fighters was better than those for the American soldiers in the Vietnam war. This is an outrage. To imagine, a superpower capable of deploying scores of helicopters and many doctors in one battle, and to rank it in efficiency behind our rag-tag army, is to hallucinate.

For comparison, observe the minimal battlefield causalities of the U.S army in Iraq, and the losses inflicted on our army in the recent conflict. The EPLF�s strength was simply this. It never released any reliable data on the ratio of the saved to the dead. It kept it secret. The legend about the other self-reliance activities was also questionable. For instance, what had the EPLF Agricultural Commission to show for its work in all those years? How many thousands of quintals of bultug or sorghum did it help harvest, and what percentage of the needs did it cover? And how many thousands of hens or liters of milk were produced by the farms? We have no figures. What came of the �famous� R.I.C.E. that gained the reputation of meticulously inventory work in the meda - for instance the flora of Eritrea. Despite the dearth of the data, the propaganda is still well and alive.

The victims of such exaggerated propaganda were largely the foot-soldiers and the outside world. The war for liberation had lasted a long time, and there were many youth, who had no clue about the outside world. Thousands having joined or been drafted in their late teens were easily impressionable, and had almost become noble savages.

The EPLF often organized a tour from the trenches for these chaps to see m�ebale in the dejen. The show pieces were mostly flour mills, and a small pasta and pills factory. This is to me a similar ploy to the Khmer Rouge�s publication showing Cambodian teens assembling electronic machines in their strongholds. This from an organization that was to show its true nature later. That is, it did away with all tools of modern civilization! In the mid 90s, notwithstanding the �miracles� in technology achieved, the authorities had to depend on a contractor from Ethiopia, to improve and update the obsolescent traffic lights in Asmera.

One of the senior cadres of the EPLF, Haile Deru, who has now been incarcerated or made to disappear was asked about these claims during the gedli era in the early 90s. He owned to it, and is believed to have said, �had we not told you this, would you have struggled?� This bitter truth but rare openness from an ex-member of the secretive politburo was repeated very often in the later years.

The bounty from the salt trade was not entirely forgotten. It surfaced again, after the fall of the Mobutu regime in the then Zaire. Rumors were rife in Asmera about the existence of a huge market for our salt surplus to unload. There are, it was said, mostly through the 09, millions of salt-starved Congolese. Not only that the story goes, our plastic shoes factories will also have to shod the millions of barefoot people from the same country.

My late uncle, who lived in Asmera, while waiting for a Tigrean sheep-butcher said, �hizbena whud eyu.� Unbeknownst to him, the census for 1997 was completed. But not available to him and the rest of his countrymen. It was a secret! And this secrecy was from a government that ad nauseam says, �our people are our only resource.�  His insight had do with the diminishing of his nuclear family. Two of his sons had died fighting for the EPLF, one had died years ago from a massive bee sting, and another has left to live abroad.

We were raised believing that Eritrea�s population was 3 or 3.5 million people for almost two decades. The Fronts were responsible for this. The EPLF did not correct this when it seized power. It kept on churning this figure, before secretly conducting this census- and then sat on it.

I was often amazed about the small demographic characteristics of our country during my stay there. You travel from Asmera to Massawa, or Keren, or Barentu, and very often meet people you knew. Another curious explanation for the �absence� of monuments, and huge photographs of our native tyrant is that he runs a small country with a small population.

Eritrea is a small country with one time zone unlike Mao�s China or the former Stalinist soviet union. He had also close to 20 years to build his cult in the gedli times. The small demographic characteristics seems to be working in favor of the kebeles, and the spy networks of hafash wdbat abroad.

Thanks to Awate.com, we now have an inkling of the size of our population. It seems that we neither have a population crush nor a population explosion, but a deliberate overestimation of our population base, for some nefarious reasons. We suffered from a gross mis-leading narrative.