By Messay Kebede

Opening Remarks

I originally intended to send this paper to a professional journal. I changed my mind because its message deserves to be read by a wider public. And since the best way to reach a wider public is through the Web, I sent the paper to popular Ethiopian websites without altering its academic form and diluting its contents, except for some theoretical ramifications.

In many ways, the ideas that Aleqa Aseres Yenesew develops in the book that I am analyzing directly deal with the problems that Ethiopia and Ethiopian society face today. The book is highly interesting because it suggests that the mess we are in now has its seed in the adoption of a wrong educational policy since the end of the Italian war. Asres proposes solutions in which he discloses the elementary fact that the heritage of a legacy and the assumption of a common destiny define a nation rather than its ethnic or linguistic oneness. He shows this in his defense of Ge’ez language: for him, this Tigrean legacy is the essence of Ethiopian identity. Consequently, what makes you Ethiopian is less your identity as Amhara (he himself is an Amhara of Gojjam) than the heritage of Ge’ez legacy. Unity lies in the acceptance of a common heritage and destiny.

But what about the southern peoples of Ethiopia who do not trace their identity back to Ge’ez? Here Asres advances a bold assertion by questioning the Western qualification of Ge’ez as a Semitic language that invaders from South Arabia brought with them. He emphatically argues that Ethiopians are black and that Ge’ez is an African language. For him, the Semitic thesis is a Western machination intended to create a divide between northern and southern Ethiopia. The direction of history is clear: the torch of Ge’ez––which is then an idea, a divine mission, and not an ethnic identity––must pass to southern peoples. And it cannot do so unless Ethiopians present themselves as the descendants of Ham.

The objection that Asres’s reasoning lacks scientific credibility because it is filled with biblical references and argumentations would miss the important point that what matters in this case is not that facts justify the discourse, but whether the discourse is empowering, whether it organizes the world in such a way that it gives us strength, unity, and historical destiny. Besides, one can take away the biblical content and only retain the logic of national unity and empowerment. When I wrote my book, Survival and Modernization, I was not even remotely aware of Asres’s works. Yet what a delightful surprise when I discovered that many of my findings reproduce Asres’s thought! I take this opportunity to thank Aleme Tadesse for introducing me to Asres’s writings.

Introduction

The opposition of traditional scholars to the proliferation of modern schools is a fact known to all those who are familiar with the difficult beginning of Ethiopia’s modernization. Besides the opposition of the nobility and the church hierarchy, traditional scholars known as debtera had used all their influence to convince the country of the perilous nature of Western education. Emperor Haile Selassie and those who supported him often had to battle energetically to neutralize their opposition. To the youngsters sent to Western schools before and soon after the Italian invasion of 1935, the opposition of the debtera appeared as a pathetic attempt to stop what was unstoppable, namely, the march of the long-awaited modernization of Ethiopia. They easily figured out that the debtera’s ignorance of the modern world and the anger against the loss of their traditional influence aroused the resistance. To them, the defense of the traditional schooling betrayed the most stubborn form of traditionalism, which was nothing else but a wrong-headed endeavor to shield Ethiopia from the benefits of modernization in the name of tradition and the status quo.

Ethiopian Review Editorial

Ethiopian hospitals are currently causing more suffering and death than healing. People who go to hospital for minor ailments end up gravely sick or dead. It is common to see patients, even infants, die in hospital emergency rooms unable to get treatment. Health workers are overwhelmed, and many of them do not care any more. Physicians in Ethiopia do not face malpractice lawsuits as in the U.S. and are becoming too careless in treating their patients. Private clinics are more concerned about making profit than treating their patients since there is no supervision by the government. Led by the Woyanne-appointed incompetent Minister, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Ministry of Health is a non-functioning government department whose officials are busy enriching themselves instead of carrying out their responsibilities. Government officials do not care because they and their families go to Western countries to get the treatment they need if they get sick.

Under the Woyanne regime, for example, malaria has reached an epidemic level. Malaria has returned to Ethiopia when Woyanne came to power. Under the Haileselassie regime, the Ethiopian Malaria Prevention Center had succeeded in completely eradicating malaria. In 1992, the Woyanne tribal junta dismantled the center saying that each region (killil) should have its own Malaria Prevention Center. But what Woyanne did was simply move the Center to Mekele and ignore the other regions. As a result, malaria now kills tens of thousands of Ethiopians each year in Amhara, Oromia, and other regions.

Although tens of millions of dollars donated from other countries are allocated for combating HIV/AIDS, the number of individuals contracting the virus and the death toll from the disease have not decreased. The reason is that there is no political will to focus on the problem. Under the Woyanne regime, government officials are busy acquiring personal wealth and transferring it out of the country. They are not public servants. They are parasites that suck the life blood of the people of Ethiopia.

Once these ‘public servants’ think they made enough money, they go to Western countries and seek political asylum claiming persecution. It is becoming common for members of the Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne) to seek political asylum in the United States. Some claim that they are members of Kinijit or OLF, the same organizations whose members they torture and kill in Ethiopia. Fabricating the necessary evidence for their political asylum cases is easy for them for the obvious reason.

Dental care is in a worse state. Ethiopians dentists should be named deathtists. We are hearing cases where people who receive a simple dental treatment end up terribly sick, disfigured, or dead because of infections that can easily be prevented. The dentists don’t even use anaesthesia when they treat their patients. Getting dental treatment in Addis Ababa is as traumatic as being tortured by Workneh Gebeyehu’s sadistic thugs at the Federal Police headquarters.

One of the most notorious dentists (deathtists) in Ethiopia who is known for deadly incompetence is Dr. Asheber Woldegiorgis. Yes, it is the same guy who was recently fired from his position as chairman of the Ethiopian Football Federation. This Russian-educated dentist makes tones of money from his private dental clinics. According to ER Research Unit, none of Dr Asheber’s clinics has ever been inspected by the Ministry of Health. Dr Asheber himself is too busy playing soccer and exploiting teenage girls with his friend Al Amoudi to properly run his dental practice. His close friendship with Al Amoudi makes Dr Asheber immune from any accountability for his malpractice. His patients (victims) have no recourse for being made sick and disfigured from severe dental infections that result from poor or careless treatment. In some cases, the infection spreads to lung through the sinus and kill the patient after horrible suffering.

It is reported that there are more Ethiopian doctors in eastern United States alone than in Ethiopia. Who can blame these physicians? The Woyanne tribal junta has made the country unlivable to all Ethiopians, except those who are members and affiliates of the ruling class. What these physicians who are currently in Western countries are accountable for is for ignoring the plight of the poor people they left behind. Many of them go back to Ethiopia for visits, flash their dollars on the poor, stay at Sheraton and come back to their luxurious life — made possible by those who bled and died to make the U.S. a free country.

It is not unusual for a lot of Ethiopians to say “I don’t want to get involved in politics.” What these people do not realize is that when they go to get a simple dental treatment, for example, and instead get sick from it, they have no recourse because those politicians who are in power do not care for politics, too, and there is no body to make any body accountable. In the final analysis, the responsibility for the endless nightmare in our country falls on the lap of every Ethiopian who puts his/her head in the sand.