… and the hodams accept the money. The following is what Ethiopian Sports Federation in North America (ESFNA) posted on its web site:

THANK YOU DR. SHEIKH MOHAMMED HUSSIEN AL AMOUDI

The entire family of ESFNA, players, coaches, board members and Executive Committee members etc., would like to say “Thank You” to Dr. Sheikh Mohammed Hussien Alamudi for his generous gift of $300,000 to our organization. It should be noted that this is not the first time Sheikh Alamudi has given a large amount of money to help and encourage ESFNA. In the year 2002, he donated $450,000 that helped our organization reach new heights. Again, thank you and we wish you good health and long life.

ESFNA claims that it is a non-political organization, but accepts donation from a major financier of the Woyanne terrorist regime that is brutalizing our people. The photo below is Al Amoudi wearing a tee-shirt with Woyanne logo:

Al Amoudi wearing a tee-shirt with a logo of the Woyanne terrorist regime

Rahmona Ahmedin

(Islington Gazette) LONDON, U.K. — A YOUNG woman whose body was found dumped in a burning suitcase in Islington (a suburb of London) had not been seen for weeks by her friends and neighbours.

This week they spoke of their shock at the 23-year-old’s death, with one friend – who had been wondering why she had not been in contact – collapsing in tears when told what had happened.

Rahmona Ahmedin is thought to have been stabbed to death at her fourth-floor apartment in Peabody Square off Essex Road, Islington, between June 6 and June 18.

After receiving a fatal knife wound to her chest, she was bundled into a suitcase – which was then set alight in a lay-by about 50 miles away on the A1301 in Cambridgeshire.

Her body was discovered at about 3.30am last Wednesday after a lorry driver noticed the flames. She had been reported missing on June 14.

A man has been charged with her murder after walking into a Fulham police station on Friday.

Rahmona was born in Ethiopia but later fled with her family to Sweden. She came to the UK about five years ago and is thought to have lived in a hostel before moving to Peabody Square about a year ago. Although Rahmona’s family is thought to still be in Sweden, her mother and a younger brother were seen visiting her around Christmas.

One friend, who did not know about Rahmona’s death until contacted by the Gazette, was devastated.

The woman, who does not want to be named, said: “She was a quiet, nice girl – really nice. The last time we spent time together was around May 20. It was my friend’s birthday and she was having her nails done. Then I didn’t see her for a while.

“She said she had been away with a friend and would give me a call. But she never did. Her mum loved her so much. She always wanted her to go back to university to study but she never went.”

A neighbour in Peabody Square said: “I think the last time I saw her was about a month ago but I saw her rarely anyway. In the year she has lived here, I don’t think I have seen her more than 20 times. It’s more than just sad, it’s sickening. Everyone has been talking about this. We just want to know what happened.”

Acting Detective Sergeant Sion Hughes said: “We are interested in talking to anyone who knows her, anyone who saw anything suspicious around her home in the first week of June or around the time her body was discovered.”

Anyone with information should call police on 020 8345 1550 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

The film “Live and Become” opens in Los Angeles area on Friday, June 27 at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills and Laemmle’s Town Center 5 in Encino.

The film was a huge success with the Ethiopian community in Washington, D.C. and will do similarly with the Ethiopian community here in Los Angeles.

A short synopsis of the story line begins in 1985 with “Operation Moses”. At that time, one boy dies as another takes his place and begins his journey to Israel and within himself. Facing racial and religious discrimination, the journey is laden with difficulties. Yet a sense of hope pervades. Connecting with an Ethiopian rabbi, Schlomo (our young Ethiopian) learns Torah, debates the skin color of Adam and wrestles with his own identity. The four mothers in the film demonstrate that the love for a child goes well beyond color or religion.

The eventful, surprise-filled climax of Schlomo’s journey centers on the reconciliation of these particular sufferings and his bold action toward healing.

Many of the actors are non-professionals. Yet, their performances are dynamic and engaging, coming truly from their spirits and hearts.

The film has won audience awards internationally at film festivals in Berlin, Vancouver and Valenciennes. It has also won audience awards at 17 film festivals in the United States.

More more info contact:
Heidi Oshin, Menemsha Films
213 Rose Ave., 2nd Floor, Venice, CA 90291
Tel: 310.452.1775, Email: [email protected]

Network of Ethiopian Scholars (NES)

The Resolution of Food Crises in Africa Requires Building an Integrated African National Economy

People often say when Africans argue for an integrated national African economy, they are self-indulgent entertaining nothing but a futile illusion. They claim that to argue that Africa must unite economically, ‘knowledge-ically’, politically, and ’society-ically’ is to day-dream and to give in to fantasy. They assert that Africa does not exist in anything, form or shape other than as a geographical accident. Of course, they would hardly say this of the USA, for example, where ‘ the tribes of the whole world exist in it’, and people have united under one constitution and national flag, and right now seemingly poised to electing an African –American with a father from Kenya! To claim more than a geographical reality to Africa is often condemned and reproached. The pursuit of African integration is said to be a too pie in the sky dream, fantasy, utopian, unrealistic, which distracts from taking realistic incremental actions and thus by foreclosing such options by going for unity on a big scale is pronounced to be dangerous!

Africa is so rich but also so poor!

A brief overview of the African economic picture reveals a paradox where the continent that has rich mineral resources, nearly a billion people and a land mass which includes the sizes of China, USA, India, Western Europe, Argentina (see map below) together and still is larger than the sum of these regions is in the an unacceptable state of being an object of aid, debt and loans despite the vast resources both known and yet to be explored in it for the whole post- colonial period.

Africa should have been a production and innovation centre not a charity and aid centre of the world where currently ‘donorship’ has sadly replaced African national ownership’ of not just Africa’s resources, but even worse Africa’s own agency, autonomy and independence to shape and determine policy and direction to undertake national development. The main thrust of the African quest to unite such key ideas, projects, programmes and infrastructures connecting its politics, knowledge and the economy flows from a recognition that Africa must organise a production, economic and innovation system by integrating consumers with suppliers, producers with users, users with other users in Africa and for Africa. This is both desirable and possible and knowledge of how to do it- know-how- can be cultivated so that the continent emerges fully as a region free from the ‘donorship’ gaze it suffers from so cruelly at the moment under the enormous burden of a crippling fragmentation and dependency myopia.

This is no exaggeration to state that African political and economic arrangements today are characterized by internal pervasive and schizophrenic disconnections, mismatches, fragmentations and external dependence. Nearly 70 % of Africa’s overall population exist in subsistence and primary resource and agrarian condition. Where a region has the overwhelming portion of its production as agricultural, that region invariably remains vulnerable even to feeding itself, conversely where a few percentage of a nation’s population is working on the land and is engaged in knowledge, manufacture and services for the most part, that nation is more likely to feed itself whether it rains or not.
The main pattern of Africa’s economic relations with the world economy is through what makes Africa permanently to remain vulnerable unless it changes its conditions through continued unequal primary agriculture and mineral exports for the products with knowledge, technology and innovation value added manufactured elsewhere. African countries produce similar primary products for the same market and compete against each other thus accentuating and deepening their fragmentation. A key example is the horticulture produced by many East African countries today!

Africa faces a true dilemma: if it is able to insulate itself from the world economy, it can incur possible welfare, income and knowledge losses. If it continues to integrate as it does now based on current dominant patterns of relating on the basis of primary commodity transactions with the world economy, it faces continued economic dependence and fragmentation and lack of structural transformation of its fundamental economic, social and knowledge infrastructure.

Africa’s current pattern of insertion in the world economy comes at the cost of fragmenting the African economic, knowledge and political space. It appears the continued cost of fragmentation is supposed to be offset by Africa being in the international aid system. Whether African fragmentation can be offset by dependence on aid or national development should be a genuine issue for deep reflection and foresight for the AU and others with broad commitment to African freedom and unity.

Where is the African Strategy?

An African national project is necessary for launching the infrastructure for a comprehensive structural transformation of African economy, state, society, communities and people. What seems lacking is exactly what is most needed: an African national project and national spirit first and foremost to anchor the evolution and dynamics of an African strategy!

Africans continue to experience fragmentation that reproduced dependence on outside powers. But they have not tried a unified African national project yet that inspires their self- composition, self-organisation and self-definition and self-recognition as Africans in order to undertake challenges together, deal with those that they have to deal with and respond to opportunities together. Their ‘advisors’ provide hundreds of reasons why Africans are different from each other. Why they cannot come together. The fact that under conditions of fragmentation and dependency, the existing fractured states have not succeeded to transform structurally and undertake a credible national development strategy is very often conveniently ignored. Strategies that accentuate fragmentation continue to be devised.

No one says or counsels that going on a path of fragmentation that leads to nowhere is even more unrealistic and utopian than a united strategy that can work which has not been tried yet in spite of the compelling recognition over half a century now that either Africa unites or perishes!(Dr. Kwame Nkrumah).. Instead the search for a united African national alternative gets castigated for being futile and utopian. But when too many fragmented states scramble for resources carefully doled out to them from an international aid regime to pursue goals they can hardly meet, no one dares to say this path is even more utopian than the alternative African national project that has never been tried. Where there is no African national project in place, means a big void and vacuum at the heart of Africa’s confident march to the future where there will be no clear African national strategy to guide policy and practice!
Africans are now treated to admonishments from the likes of Bono and Wolfensohn, who are now calling openly for African unity. At the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Lecture in Accra, Ghana under the title “Africa in the Global Century: Partnerships for Success”, the former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, argued for Africa to unite:

“Africa can make the best of the opportunities and wealth available to it to grow its people and economy if it unites.” (Wolfensohn quoted in Dogbevi, 2008)

The World Bank has also begun to echo the ‘integration line’ by recognising that the flow of goods, capital and people are so limited that inter-African collaboration and integration remains largely untenable also. It has produced: New Development Strategy Focuses on Regional Integration in Sub-Saharan Africa: see http://go.worldbank.org/VJ7PSXVTP0

In addition a number of countries far and near to Africa appear to develop their own Africa strategy based on their understanding or mis-understanding of what they think Africa is and may or may not be or become. The list continues. The EU has an Africa strategy since 2005. The Chinese have theirs. The Indians had a Summit in March 2008. The Japanese held a summit on May 28, 2008. Even a small country- Denmark, has set up an Africa Commission like the Blair commission before to organise its own mode of intervention into Africa. It looks more countries will develop strategies on, for and to Africa and probably not with Africa despite the abundant talk of partnership, national ownership the Paris terms and such like rhetoric and discourse.

What seems to be lacking in all these is the African strategy for Africa and the combined African strategy on those who make strategies for Africa and others that are involved and continue to do their business to, for and on Africa.

The time is long overdue to make each of the nearly billion Africans in the continent to develop an African national spirit and unite on the shared experience, challenges and a grand national project to transform Africa from an agrarian economy to a knowledge-service and knowledge- industrial economy to achieve food security and improve the health, education and well being of all the people, and not just a few elites. Only then can Africa achieve the freedom, security and stability to emerge with its own voice and act with policy and practice to secure its independence without fear or favour in a complex world.

National spirit necessary to offset pervasive fragmentation and donor dependency

The problem is that after nearly 50 years of post- colonial independence African economies continue to be fragmented in spite of the AU/NEPAD salutary processes. The more the fragmentation amongst African economies deepens the harder for each of the fragments not to be supplicants to the aid system. Africa thus also faces another critical dilemma of being an unequal ‘partner’ with the burgeoning aid industry that has created a business of what is known as ‘technical assistance,’ where those who provide the aid consume a sizeable portion of the resources allocated, and the recipient Africans continue to be in a vulnerable position as long-term the aid receivers are unable to get out of this dependency situation.

In general, it may not be easy to disprove aid is not useful to some within the recipient countries, this does not validate, however, aid or the international aid system per se, since it is not also difficult to show, that the long term impact of aid is negative, if we proceed from the normative preference that the recipient countries options to plan their development free from conditions imposed that often do not take the specific context of the countries can be misdirected by the international aid system. In the long term, it is better to take the suffering to learn how to fish rather than receive fish. Recently Tanzania announced to all the donors that they want time to think and cope with the influx of hundreds of donor inputs. They said they needed time to work out what this all means and made a moratorium on donors’ visits to Tanzania!

It is thus no exaggeration that a country relying on aid is most likely not to develop a national strategy without the interference and the factorings of the interests and policies of the aid system. Being a recipient in an international aid system for many African countries has not brought development but corruption and poverty. It undermines a given state in Africa from making mistakes and learning from the routines and practices of creating an integrated African national economy. Africa cannot afford to continue to suffer the opportunity cost from continuing to receive aid only to defer building the much needed ability to create the capacity, capability, competence, learning and innovation to transform the largely agrarian and subsistence economic system.

Concluding Remarks

Over half century has passed; Africa suffers from myopia of a particularly pernicious ‘fragmentation-dependence’ situation. The root problem for its unchanging African predicament lies in the state of fragmentation that invites dependency and conversely dependency that continues to prevent the evolution of an African national spirit, purpose, project and strategy.
There is a need for a fresh approach, a new departure to embark on a roadmap to convert the ‘fragmentation-dependence’ dilemma into an enabling ‘integration-self-sustaining, learning, innovation, capabilities building’ national system, national project, national spirit and national strategy to re- launch African development on a secure pedigree with confidence and inspiration.

Mammo Muchie, PhD
Coordinator of DIIPER
Research Centre on Development Innovation and IPER and also
NRF/DST SARCHI Chair Holder, TUT, South Africa
Aalborg University, Fibigertraede 2, 9220-Aalborg East, Aalborg, Denmark

By Teddy Fikre

During the most trying times, when hope is a glimmer that seems too distant to be tangible, it is our children that serve as our bridge to hope. We — Ethiopian-Americans — immigrated to the United States for this very purpose. As the generation who benefited from the toil of our parents, we often don’t fully appreciate the tremendous sacrifices our parents have made so that we could attain the American dream. Not only should we never forget the sacrifices of our parents, we should extend every effort ourselves so that the our future generations can ascend higher. This will be our legacy as a people; this will be our legacy as Ethiopian-Americans.

Individually, we have some of the brightest minds; we have attended some of the finest universities and amassed a wealth of intellectual capital. However, if we do not come together and work for the common good, we will continue to be lone men and women on an island. Solidarity — one that transcends gender, ethnicity and religion — should be the clarion call for all Ethiopians. There are untold hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians in the United States; yet, our inability to coalesce and work together for the common good from coast to coast in America has prevented us from building a coalition for the betterment of all. Whether it is socially, economically, or politically, our inability to unite is a detriment for us; more importantly, it can be a detriment for our children and generations yet to be born.

I was reminded of this paradigm when Ethiopians for Obama deployed to Lideta Mariam and Kidus Gabriel Church to register Ethiopian-Americans to vote. Once the registration drive was completed at Lideta Mariam, I headed over to the Kidus Gabriel Church for the second registration drive. After the registration table was set up inside the church, I noticed how many Ethiopian children were there. One particular girl, 4 year-old, Hanna, came over and asked me what I was doing. Here was a child–barely old enough to count to 10 — asking me what a registration was. After I explained what we were doing, she said “I want to help” and proceeded to bring over more of her friends. Another amazing girl, 7 year old Merekat and 5 year old Leah, came over to the table. They asked me what they could do to help, and I told them I needed people to come over and register to vote.

In one of the most amazing scenes I have ever witnessed, each one of these girls started pulling random men and women by the hands and bringing them to the table to register as the church was letting out!! It was touching; there they were — Hanna, Merekat, and Leah, the Joshua generation — leading men and women by the hand to register. All told, these amazing girls helped register five Ethiopian-Americans and sign up 10 volunteers. The lessons we could learn from these children is beyond words; sometimes age does not add wisdom but pessimism. If we observe our children, we will see in their spirits the true soul of God. A spirit that does not ask about ethnicity, religion, or any other intangible barrier that serves to separate one from another instead of working for the common good. We are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and we should be reaching out to every single man and woman to encourage them to take their rightful place among the ranks of citizenship by registering to vote. Engagement in the American political process is not just our privilege — it is our right. The time is now and the moment is ours to make a difference is this our United States of America. Barack Obama isn’t just asking us to believe in his ability to change Washington; he’s asking us to believe in our own ability to do so. The time really is now and the moment really is ours — ahun kalohne, meche naw emihonew?

Let us all follow our Joshua Generation, heed this call to action and respond with a resounding “Yechalal .

Please join Ethiopians for Obama: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiansforobama/