INDEPENDENT AUDITOR’S REPORT
To The Ethiopian Community in Washington D.C. and Metropolitan Area:
I have audited the accompanying statement of revenues and expenses—cash basis of the Ethiopian National Election Campaign 2005 (the Committee) for the period ended on March 12, 2005. This financial statement is the responsibility of the Committee. My responsibility is to express an opinion on this financial statement based on my audit and to ascertain the distribution of these funds to the different political groups consistent with the Committee’s criteria.
I conducted my audit in accordance with auditing standards generally accepted in the United States of America.
INCOME STATEMENT
FOR THE PERIOD ENDED, MARCH 12, 2005
Revenue:
Ticket Sales $89,2001
Donations 51,513
Food and Beverages 2,317
Post March 12th Donations 5,900
Item sales 0
Total Sales $148,930
Expenses:
Promotion and Radio Advertisement 8,009
Convention Hall Rental and Security 5,694
Printing 2,313
Sound Systems and Video 1,710
Air Tickets 1,911
Banquet Service 1,904
Hotel 803
Other Miscellaneous Expenses 659
Insurance 140
Bank Charges for wire transfer 80
Total Expenses 23,223
Net Income $125,707
In-Kind Contributions
In-Kind contributions are the value of non-cash contributions provided by individuals, groups, and the business community. These contributions were examined and subsequently recognized since the value of the goods and services directly benefited the event. Furthermore, as part of the audit process, each in-kind contribution was valued based on the prevailing market price in the normal course of business in arms-length transaction. Famous Ethiopian musicians, poets, restaurant owners, and other individuals in all walks of life made these in-kind contributions. The proceeds from the sales of donated food and beverage totaling $2,317 is recorded in the income statement above.
Below is the listing of all in-kind contributors who provided goods (food and beverage), entertainment, and other invaluable services.
Name In-Kind contribution Value
Volunteer musicians and other artists $20,000
Voice of Ethiopian Unity 1,200
Etete Restaurant 400
Maaza Restaurant 400
Sodere Restaurant 400
Dama Restaurant 300
Dukem Restaurant 300
Lalibela Restaurant 300
Twins 200
Zelalem Enjera 75
Ergoye Enjera 50
Indipendent Auditor 1
Total In-Kind Contributions $23,626
ETHIOPIAN NATIONAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2005
NOTES TO THE FINANCIAL STATEMENT
NOTE A – ORGANIZATION
Ethiopian National Election Campaign 2005 is volunteer-based ad hoc committee formed to generate funds through fundraising and other legitimate activities to help “qualified political organizations” financially for the upcoming national election on May 15, 2005. This committee will cease to exist once the election is over on that day.
NOTE B – SUMMARY OF SIGNIFICANT ACCOUNTING POLICIES
Basis of Accounting
The income statement of Ethiopian National Election Campaign 2005 is prepared on the cash basis of accounting, which is a comprehensive basis of accounting other than accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America. The cash basis differs from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States primarily because revenues and related assets are recognized when received rather than earned and expenses are recorded when paid not when incurred. Non-cash transactions (in-kind contributions) are not recognized in the body of the income statement.
NOTE C – Revenue
Revenue in this case includes cash and cash equivalents deposited in the Committee’s account. Below is the listing of all ticket distributions and sales for the March 12, 2005 event.
ETHIOPIAN NATIONAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2005
Ticket Sales # of Tickets Sales Value
Tickets printed 4,000 200,000
Unsold Tickets 2,216 110,800
Ticket Sales 1,784 89,200
NOTE D – DONATIONS
During the fundraising event at the convention center on March 12, 2005 the following donations were obtained and collected and subsequently deposited in the Committee’s account.
CASH AND CHECK CONTRIBUTIONS during the Fundraising Event
Cash Contributions 28,063.00
Check Contributions 11,620.00
Credit Card Pledges 7,630
Less: Total Rejected Amount (2,300) 5,330.00
Total Cash and Check Contributions 1,784 45,013.00
The total donations contributed at the March 12, 2005 fundraising event (cash, checks, and credit cards) was $45,013. Furthermore additional $6,500 was collected after the event. Therefore, total donated amount is $51,513 and this amount does not include any pledges made or received on any of the weekend radio programs.
NOTE F – Item Sales
As part of the fundraising activity, the participants of the event held competitive bids for donated items. A T-shirt marked “Vote or Die” donated by an individual and Neway Debebe’s famous album was purchased by an individual for a total price of $3,000 and payment was tendered by Discover Card. Due to technical problems by the Committee and unbeknown to the purchaser, the transaction was not processed. The Committee tried to contact the individual with the telephone number he provided. However, that telephone number is no longer in service and every attempt is being made to contact him.
Furthermore, a gold necklace donated during the fundraising activity was also up for bidding and sold for $1,000. The purchaser has been contacted and the proceed was never collected as of today April 3, 2005, the audit report date.
NOTE G – Promotion and Advertisement
Advertising expenses are expenses incurred and paid to the three of the major radio programs held on the weekends by the Committee to reach out the Ethiopian community in the metropolitan area. These payments were made to cover the costs of air time these radio programs pay to the owners of the station.
The following are a listing the radio programs and payments made during the period under audit:
Hager Feker Radio $2,890
Ethiopiawinet Radio 2,619
AndEthiopia Radio 2,500
Total $8,009
________________________________________
This report as been condensed by ER
BBC NEWS – April 3, 2005 – Israel’s ambassador to Ethiopia has died in hospital days after shooting himself in an apparent act of suicide after news he had terminal cancer.
Doron Grossman, 48, was brought back to Israel after being found with a head wound at his home in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday night.
His own pistol was discovered by his side and local police said they did not believe anyone else was involved.
He did not recover consciousness before his death, Israeli media report.
Mr Grossman had been suffering from stomach pains and medical examinations determined that he had an incurable cancer condition, according to Haaretz newspaper.
A single man, he had served as ambassador to Ethiopia since 2002 and was shortly due to take up a posting in South Africa.
There is a small Israeli embassy in the Ethiopian capital, comprising four envoys and their spouses, who deal with diplomatic and economic matters.
Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, known pejoratively as Falashas, have emigrated to Israel since the 1980s.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom expressed his “deep regret” over Mr Grossman’s death.
FOR RELEASE FRIDAY APRIL 1, 2005
Contact: Lisa Gates IRI (202) 572-1546
Keenan Howell IFES (202) 350-6732
Jean Freedberg NDI (202) 728-5527
The International Republican Institute (IRI), IFES and the National Democratic Institute (NDI)regret the recent action by the government of Ethiopia to expel our representatives from the country on the grounds that they had not registered as nongovernmental organizations, even as all three of our organizations have been making good faith efforts to gain registration in accordance with established laws and procedures. We had been assured that our registration would be approved expeditiously.
On March 30, representatives from the three organizations were asked to attend a meeting at the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the meeting the director general for Europe and America informed the representatives that all programming must cease and all foreign nationals working for the organizations must leave Ethiopia within 48 hours.
With support from USAID, the three organizations had sought to assist the democratic process and preparations for the May 15 general elections. Programs were planned to support the work of the election commission, dialogue among political parties and election authorities as a means of enhancing confidence and participation in the electoral process, political party pollwatching, and the creation of a code of conduct for the elections.
Our organizations carry out nonpartisan programs and do not support any particular party in the May elections. We support a democratic environment in which the integrity of the election process is ensured and all parties understand their rights and responsibilities, and are able to freely communicate their views to the electorate. This is the first time in 20 years that a government has taken such collective action against our organizations. We are surprised by this move, particularly as it comes at a time when the government of Ethiopia has stated its intention to organize an open and democratic election process.
We continue to support the democratic aspirations of the Ethiopian people, and hope that the government of Ethiopia will reverse its decision.
First, the bad news: urban malaria in Africa is becoming a major health problem and looks set to get worse.
The problem is growing along with Africa’s cities. Urbanisation came relatively late to the continent, but the United Nations Environment Programme says Africa’s urban growth is now the fastest in the world – nearly twice the global average. In 1960 there were no African cities with one million inhabitants: today there are 40. The UN predicts that the number of Africans living in towns and cities will increase 20 per cent within 15 years, to 800 million.
Malaria has long been a scourge, responsible for approximately 1 million deaths a year in Africa, making many millions more ill and acting as a brake on economic development.
And the situation may be even worse than was thought. New research published in the science journal Nature this week (10 March) calculates that more than 500,000 million people – nearly double previous estimates – were infected by the deadliest form of malaria in 2002.
Richard Feacham, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the results confirm the “gross underestimation” of malaria in Africa and Asia.
Now for the good news: urban malaria is controllable – if action is taken quickly.
“We are keen to get across that this is a potentially avertable problem,” says Dr Martin Donnelly, a vector biologist at the Liverpool School.
“Urban malaria should be relatively easy to control,” agrees Dr Guy Barnish, the projects co-ordinator of the School’s Malaria Knowledge Programme. “There are more healthcare professionals in towns than in rural areas; it is easier for patients to get medicines, and hopefully you can tap into the private healthcare network”
In addition, he says, towns tend to have pockets of disease, which means areas and communities can be targeted, and insecticide-impregnated bednets are generally accepted more quickly in urban than in rural areas.
Even the pollution that can make cities so unpleasant to live in can be advantageous, because the Anopheles mosquito that carries the malaria parasite between people prefers relatively clean, if stagnant, water.
Until now, malaria has been seen as a rural disease, but that is changing, and last year a team of US and Swiss researchers estimated that 200 million Africans currently live in urban settings in which they are at risk of contracting the disease, with between 25 and 103 million malaria attacks occurring in towns every year.
Contributory factors include the rise of urban agriculture, as city dwellers increasingly grow vegetables for sale to the public. “Watering crops helps create suitable breeding conditions for malaria-carrying mosquitoes,” warns Barnish.
Now that what the Liverpool School has described as “an old disease in a new environment” has been identified, the question is how to tackle it.
The School has helped spread the word: its malaria programme sponsored an international conference in South Africa last December. Action priorities were set out, and another meeting will be held in Marseilles, France, in September.
One area of action pinpointed by the meeting in South Africa is the need to move away from the policy of treating virtually all fevers as malaria, as generally happens in rural areas. To carry on this policy in towns, said the South Africa conference statement, “would likely result in a significant waste of resources through misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment”, because se fevers may be caused by other common infections apart from malaria.
Participants were drawing attention to the fact that misdiagnosis can mean that up to three-quarters of patients with a fever decide or are advised to take anti-malarial tablets although they do not have malaria. The tablets fail to treat whatever is the real cause of the fever, and are becoming more expensive as the malaria parasite develops resistance. This in turn makes poor people iller, poorer and puts more strain on already over-stretched health services. “Misdiagnosis probably contributes to a vicious cycle of increasing ill-health and deepening poverty,” say Barnish and colleagues at the Liverpool School.
Instead, quick and simple blood tests could be used to confirm malaria cases. Testing equipment and staff costs money, but the expense has to be weighed against the money saved by not treating non-malaria fevers with increasingly expensive malaria drugs. A cost-benefit analysis of diagnosis and drug delivery in urban settings is required.
________________________________________________ Daniel Nelson is a freelance journalist specialising in development issues who has worked on newspapers, magazines, newsagencies and online operations in Europe, Africa and Asia.
The State Department said Thursday the United States is very disappointed over the Ethiopian government’s announced expulsion of three U.S. non-governmental democracy groups. They had been helping prepare the African country for elections in May.
The State Department says it has lodged a direct complaint with the Ethiopian government over its decision to expel the three groups, which had been working on a U.S.-sponsored program to lay groundwork for the country’s May 15th general elections.
The groups are the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The latter two are affiliated with the U.S. Republican and Democratic Parties.
News reports from Addis Ababa said their staff members, who had been in Ethiopia for several weeks, were told by government officials Wednesday they had 48 hours to leave.
The reason given for the move was that they had not been registered with the Ethiopian government.
But at a news briefing here, State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said they had been operating openly with the knowledge of the government, and that their efforts to get proper accreditation had been rebuffed by officials.
“These three groups have worked diligently and very closely with various government of Ethiopia ministries to try to register, and they’ve worked with the National Election Board of Ethiopia,” said Mr. Boucher. “And so they’ve tried to get registration and they haven’t been able to secure it. So frankly we find this decision disappointing. We’ve expressed that directly to the Ethiopian government.”
Mr. Boucher said other non-governmental groups working in Ethiopia on the elections have also not been able to register.
Officials here would not speculate on any underlying motives for the Ethiopian decision beyond the stated reason for the expulsion.
But some of the affected workers said they believed they were being expelled in retaliation for U.S. criticism of Ethiopia in the State Department’s annual report on human rights world-wide issued in late February.
That report credited Ethiopia with progress on human rights in 2004, but said among other things that the country’s police continued to use excessive force, and that freedom of the press was restricted.
The May 15 elections, for a national parliament and regional assemblies, are only the third of their kind in the country’s history.
The previous two have been swept by the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Movement, which along with affiliated parties controls all but a handful of seats in the 548-member parliament.
A spokesman for the 14-party opposition coalition, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces, said the expulsion of the U.S. democracy workers was a very bad sign, and an indication of a lack of seriousness by the ruling party in making the election free and fair.
The three U.S. groups had been working under a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to train voters and election observers and promote election cooperation among the Ethiopian parties.
ADDIS ABABA (Ethiopian Reporter) — Political parties started discussion on the draft code of conduct prepared by the National Electoral Board (NEB) yesterday and decided to continue the discussion on the coming Tuesday.
The draft code of conduct contains major articles of immunities of candidates, purpose of campaigning activities, period of campaign activities, freedom of campaigning, right of using the mass media, obligation of government organs, places forbidden to campaigning activities and code of conduct during campaigning.
According to the draft code, the Board would issue the directives in consultation with independent candidates, political parties, the mass media and concerned groups.
The draft code of conduct said that political parties and independent candidates should have access to the mass media by way of freely obtaining airtime on the radio and television and columns in the print media. “The activities of the government and party must clearly be separate,” the draft code of conduct indicated.
It added that “government organs and officials at any level shall have the obligation to promote equal access to candidates in respect of such facilities as radio and television stations, assembly halls and newspapers under their respective authority.”
It is to be recalled that the proclamation which was issued and came into effect in January providing for the amendment of the electoral law of Ethiopia stipulated that the mode of utilization of the media should be in accordance with the allocation made by the Ministry of Information jointly with the NEB.
