AMMAN, Jordan — With defending champions Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba out with injuries, the field is wide open for Saturday’s World Cross Country Championships.
The Ethiopian pair have dominated the event, with Bekele winning six of the last seven men’s championships and Dibaba taking three women’s titles in 2005, 2006 and 2008.
The two also completed 5,000-10,000 sweeps at last year’s Beijing Olympics.
But Bekele is recovering from an ankle stress fracture, while Dibaba is sidelined with a leg injury.
Despite their absence, Ethiopians and Kenyans are still expected to battle for the medals as the championships take place in the Middle East for the first time.
More than 500 athletes from 63 countries are competing in the $300,000 championships, which feature senior men’s and women’s races and junior men’s and women’s events.
The Ethiopian senior team is led by Gebregziabher Gebremariam, who won the junior title in 2002, finished third in the long race in 2003 and took two silvers behind Bekele in 2004.
“We have a very strong and determined team and although Bekele will not be around, we are ready to keep the title another year,” Gebremariam said.
Bekele posted a record six victories over the classic 12-kilometer distance since 2001, with his streak interrupted only by Eritrea’s Zersenay Tadese in 2007.
Although Kenya has continued to dominate the team event, it has not had a long-course champion since Paul Tergat won the last of his five successive titles in 1999.
Ethiopia swept the individual titles and both women’s team titles last year in Scotland, leaving Kenya only the senior and junior men’s team gold.
Kenya’s Mark Kiptoo, who finished second in 2007, said his country is poised for victory this year.
“We’re extremely confident and well prepared for the event and we want to regain what we lost 10 years ago,” Kiptoo said. “We have the will to win.”
Among the women, Ethiopia is led by world indoor 1,500-meter champion Gelete Burka, a former world junior and world short course champion, and two-time bronze medalist Meselech Melkamu.
Kenya has 19-year-old Linet Masai, who won the junior race in 2007, took bronze in the senior event last year and was fourth in the Olympic 10,000-meter final in Beijing.
Kenyan-born Hilda Kebet, who was fifth last year, is now competing for the Netherlands.
“Last year, I was surprised to be in fifth place, so tomorrow I am very happy to be part of the event and I believe that all the hard work will eventually be rewarded,” she said.
The U.S. team includes 18-year-old German Fernandez, who last month set a junior world indoor record for the mile of 3:55.02. Fernandez hopes to help the U.S. improve on its sixth-place team finish from last year. ___
(By Jamal Halaby, Associated Press. Rofan Nahhas contributed to this report.)
By Luke Phillips | Middle East Online
AMMAN, Jordan — Gulf states Bahrain and Qatar, each boasting a raft of African-born runners, will attempt to break the stranglehold Ethiopia and Kenya enjoy in the IAAF World Cross Country Championships here on Saturday.
The absence of reigning champions and multiple title-winning Ethiopian duo, Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba, means that a host of other runners will have a chance to snatch victory in the two senior races.
More than 500 athletes from 70 countries will compete in the championships which comprise a men’s and female’s long course race over 12km and 8km respectively, for a total purse of 280,000 dollars, with 30,000 dollars going to the winner. There are also junior events for both sexes.
The only previous individual senior champions who will be racing for further honours in the Jordanian capital, hosting a major international athletics event for the first time, are Eritrean Zersenay Tadese and Ethiopian Gelete Burka.
Tadese, the bronze medallist at the worlds in Edinburgh last year, famously beat a heat-stroked Bekele in Mombasa in 2007, while Burka was the last champion of the now discontinued senior women’s short course race in 2006.
The Eritrean will face stiff competition from a raft of able rivals, not least Qatar’s world 3000m steeplechase champion in 2003 and 2005, Saif Saaeed Shaheen, and compatriot Ahmed Hassan Abdullah, Asian 10,000m record holder and cross-country champion.
Shaheen, who has spent most of the last two seasons out of competitive action due to injury, has finished in the top 10 at the World Cross Country Championships on four occasions, including a fourth place finish in 2005.
Aside from Abdullah, Qatar have also entered the reigning world marathon silver medallist Mubarak Hassan Shami for what has been described as a testing course over Amman’s hilly nine-hole Bisharat Golf Course.
Shami, who like Shaheen and Abdullah was once a Kenyan, has competed in each of the last three editions of the World Cross Country Championships and will be part of a Qatari effort to break African dominance over the event.
The Kenyan bid to nail a first individual long-course title since Paul Tergat in 1999 will be launched by 2009 Kenyan champion Moses Mosop, who won silver in Mombasa behind Tadese, and Leonard Komon, the runner-up in Edinburgh 12 months ago.
“I feel in top form,” said Mosop, nicknamed the ‘big engine’ for his heavy breathing while running.
“I’m relishing the challenge in Jordan. The weather and humidity in Amman is just like it was in Mombasa. I missed the gold medal two years ago and this is my time.”
There is a similar story in the women’s race, with Bahrain naming Asian cross-country champion and world 1500m title holder Maryam Yusuf Jamal for the first time since 2006.
The Ethiopian-born runner, who finished fifth in the Beijing Olympic 1500m final, comes to Amman on the back of a five-race winning streak that includes her fourth World Athletics Final 1500m victory in Stuttgart last September and a solo victory in her only indoor appearance in 2009 in Birmingham over the 1500m.
She will be joined in Amman by former Ethiopian Mimi Belete, who finished second behind Jamal in the senior Asian women’s 8km race.
Competition will come from Burka, the Netherlands’ Kenyan-born European champion Hilda Kibet and former world junior cross-country champions Meselech Melkamu of Ethiopia (2004) and Kenya’s Linet Masai (2007), who was the senior bronze medallist last year.
Schedule (all times GMT)
1130 – Women’s Junior Race, 6km; 1200 – Men’s Junior Race, 8km; 1240 – Women’s Senior Race, 8km; 1330 – Men’s Senior Race, 12km.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The flower farms in Ethiopia are destroying the land by using chemical fertilizers that are destroying the land.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Afrik.com) — Ethiopian flower producers and exporters have used their exhibition, which opened Wednesday, to call on Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi to urge state owned development bank to reschedule installments of their due balance as well as a cutback on freight tariffs.
This is the very first time exhibitors have met with the Prime Minister, who opened the second international exhibition organized by the growers and exporters association of Ethiopia. The massive involvement of some 130 exhibitors, including foreign buyers, companies involved in flower seed and chemical supplies have contributed to the opening success of the exhibition.
Tsegaye Abebe, Chairman of the Ethiopian Horticulture Producers Exporters Association (EHPEA), lauds the proposal for rescheduling of debts. “It is unfeasible to service our debts with the current economic downturn unless banks become willing to reschedule our obligation and freighters cutback their tariff” Tsegaye addressed attendants.
Though he did not categorically specify banks and freighters in his speech, he was seen busy deliberating with the Prime Minister who finally commended stockholders operating in the sub-sector to synchronize efforts toward ensuring the sustainable development of the flower sector since it is an important foreign currency earner for the country.
The state owned Development Bank of Ethiopia which has lent over 800 million birr since the flower sector boom have been met with heavy setbacks in a backdrop of growing economic strains on the flower industry that has hampered the honouring of debts from the borrowers. This situation led the bank to issue public foreclosures a few months ago, but again they are faced with another hurdle: finding buyers.
The global economic downturn coupled with a severe winter season in Europe, which has affected the transportation and preservation of exported flowers, has greatly affected the flower producing eastern African region, known to be among the oldest flower producing regions in the world.
Ethiopia announced last February that it had registered a 40 per cent slump in its set target from the last 18 months.
The slump is, however, largely blamed on the weakened currencies of export destinations, which have impacted prices. The United Kingdom Pound Sterling has weakened by nearly 30 per cent in the last year alone, while the Russian currency, the Rubble, has also, reportedly, lost about 35 per cent of its value. The Euro Zone, which is yet to experience a currency pitfall, is said to have resorted to auctions, an action that is open to unexpected results, due to oversupply.
Meanwhile, dismayed Ethiopian exporters and growers who addressed their complaints to top government officials have still not received any positive feedback to date. This, according to the association, is what pushed them to use the exhibition as a platform to address this growing concern. According to them, the Prime Minister’s intervention has sparked renewed optimism among some exporters.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a must read article to understand how aid by Western countries to dictatorial regime’s is devastating Ethiopia and the whole of Africa.
By DAMBISA MOYO
A month ago I visited Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. This suburb of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to more than one million people, who eke out a living in an area of about one square mile — roughly 75% the size of New York’s Central Park. It is a sea of aluminum and cardboard shacks that forgotten families call home. The idea of a slum conjures up an image of children playing amidst piles of garbage, with no running water and the rank, rife stench of sewage. Kibera does not disappoint.
What is incredibly disappointing is the fact that just a few yards from Kibera stands the headquarters of the United Nations’ agency for human settlements which, with an annual budget of millions of dollars, is mandated to “promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.” Kibera festers in Kenya, a country that has one of the highest ratios of development workers per capita. This is also the country where in 2004, British envoy Sir Edward Clay apologized for underestimating the scale of government corruption and failing to speak out earlier.
Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.
Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
Few will deny that there is a clear moral imperative for humanitarian and charity-based aid to step in when necessary, such as during the 2004 tsunami in Asia. Nevertheless, it’s worth reminding ourselves what emergency and charity-based aid can and cannot do. Aid-supported scholarships have certainly helped send African girls to school (never mind that they won’t be able to find a job in their own countries once they have graduated). This kind of aid can provide band-aid solutions to alleviate immediate suffering, but by its very nature cannot be the platform for long-term sustainable growth.
Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, such charity-based aid is relatively small beer when compared to the sea of money that floods Africa each year in government-to-government aid or aid from large development institutions such as the World Bank.
Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.
Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again.
In 2005, just weeks ahead of a G8 conference that had Africa at the top of its agenda, the International Monetary Fund published a report entitled “Aid Will Not Lift Growth in Africa.” The report cautioned that governments, donors and campaigners should be more modest in their claims that increased aid will solve Africa’s problems. Despite such comments, no serious efforts have been made to wean Africa off this debilitating drug.
The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations. In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2004, Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University, argued that the World Bank had participated in the corruption of roughly $100 billion of its loan funds intended for development.
As recently as 2002, the African Union, an organization of African nations, estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year, as international donors were apparently turning a blind eye to the simple fact that aid money was inadvertently fueling graft. With few or no strings attached, it has been all too easy for the funds to be used for anything, save the developmental purpose for which they were intended.
In Zaire — known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo — Irwin Blumenthal (whom the IMF had appointed to a post in the country’s central bank) warned in 1978 that the system was so corrupt that there was “no (repeat, no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back.” Still, the IMF soon gave the country the largest loan it had ever given an African nation. According to corruption watchdog agency Transparency International, Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s president from 1965 to 1997, is reputed to have stolen at least $5 billion from the country.
It’s scarcely better today. A month ago, Malawi’s former President Bakili Muluzi was charged with embezzling aid money worth $12 million. Zambia’s former President Frederick Chiluba (a development darling during his 1991 to 2001 tenure) remains embroiled in a court case that has revealed millions of dollars frittered away from health, education and infrastructure toward his personal cash dispenser. Yet the aid keeps on coming.
A nascent economy needs a transparent and accountable government and an efficient civil service to help meet social needs. Its people need jobs and a belief in their country’s future. A surfeit of aid has been shown to be unable to help achieve these goals.
A constant stream of “free” money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power. As aid flows in, there is nothing more for the government to do — it doesn’t need to raise taxes, and as long as it pays the army, it doesn’t have to take account of its disgruntled citizens. No matter that its citizens are disenfranchised (as with no taxation there can be no representation). All the government really needs to do is to court and cater to its foreign donors to stay in power.
Stuck in an aid world of no incentives, there is no reason for governments to seek other, better, more transparent ways of raising development finance (such as accessing the bond market, despite how hard that might be). The aid system encourages poor-country governments to pick up the phone and ask the donor agencies for next capital infusion. It is no wonder that across Africa, over 70% of the public purse comes from foreign aid.
In Ethiopia, where aid constitutes more than 90% of the government budget, a mere 2% of the country’s population has access to mobile phones. (The African country average is around 30%.) Might it not be preferable for the government to earn money by selling its mobile phone license, thereby generating much-needed development income and also providing its citizens with telephone service that could, in turn, spur economic activity?
Look what has happened in Ghana, a country where after decades of military rule brought about by a coup, a pro-market government has yielded encouraging developments. Farmers and fishermen now use mobile phones to communicate with their agents and customers across the country to find out where prices are most competitive. This translates into numerous opportunities for self-sustainability and income generation — which, with encouragement, could be easily replicated across the continent.
To advance a country’s economic prospects, governments need efficient civil service. But civil service is naturally prone to bureaucracy, and there is always the incipient danger of self-serving cronyism and the desire to bind citizens in endless, time-consuming red tape. What aid does is to make that danger a grim reality. This helps to explain why doing business across much of Africa is a nightmare. In Cameroon, it takes a potential investor around 426 days to perform 15 procedures to gain a business license. What entrepreneur wants to spend 119 days filling out forms to start a business in Angola? He’s much more likely to consider the U.S. (40 days and 19 procedures) or South Korea (17 days and 10 procedures).
Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They’ll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.
In a similar vein has been the approach to food aid, which historically has done little to support African farmers. Under the auspices of the U.S. Food for Peace program, each year millions of dollars are used to buy American-grown food that has to then be shipped across oceans. One wonders how a system of flooding foreign markets with American food, which puts local farmers out of business, actually helps better Africa. A better strategy would be to use aid money to buy food from farmers within the country, and then distribute that food to the local citizens in need.
Then there is the issue of “Dutch disease,” a term that describes how large inflows of money can kill off a country’s export sector, by driving up home prices and thus making their goods too expensive for export. Aid has the same effect. Large dollar-denominated aid windfalls that envelop fragile developing economies cause the domestic currency to strengthen against foreign currencies. This is catastrophic for jobs in the poor country where people’s livelihoods depend on being relatively competitive in the global market.
To fight aid-induced inflation, countries have to issue bonds to soak up the subsequent glut of money swamping the economy. In 2005, for example, Uganda was forced to issue such bonds to mop up excess liquidity to the tune of $700 million. The interest payments alone on this were a staggering $110 million, to be paid annually.
The stigma associated with countries relying on aid should also not be underestimated or ignored. It is the rare investor that wants to risk money in a country that is unable to stand on its own feet and manage its own affairs in a sustainable way.
Africa remains the most unstable continent in the world, beset by civil strife and war. Since 1996, 11 countries have been embroiled in civil wars. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the 1990s, Africa had more wars than the rest of the world combined. Although my country, Zambia, has not had the unfortunate experience of an outright civil war, growing up I experienced first-hand the discomfort of living under curfew (where everyone had to be in their homes between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., which meant racing from work and school) and faced the fear of the uncertain outcomes of an attempted coup in 1991 — sadly, experiences not uncommon to many Africans.
Civil clashes are often motivated by the knowledge that by seizing the seat of power, the victor gains virtually unfettered access to the package of aid that comes with it. In the last few months alone, there have been at least three political upheavals across the continent, in Mauritania, Guinea and Guinea Bissau (each of which remains reliant on foreign aid). Madagascar’s government was just overthrown in a coup this past week. The ongoing political volatility across the continent serves as a reminder that aid-financed efforts to force-feed democracy to economies facing ever-growing poverty and difficult economic prospects remain, at best, precariously vulnerable. Long-term political success can only be achieved once a solid economic trajectory has been established.
Proponents of aid are quick to argue that the $13 billion ($100 billion in today’s terms) aid of the post-World War II Marshall Plan helped pull back a broken Europe from the brink of an economic abyss, and that aid could work, and would work, if Africa had a good policy environment.
The aid advocates skirt over the point that the Marshall Plan interventions were short, sharp and finite, unlike the open-ended commitments which imbue governments with a sense of entitlement rather than encouraging innovation. And aid supporters spend little time addressing the mystery of why a country in good working order would seek aid rather than other, better forms of financing. No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do.
The good news is we know what works; what delivers growth and reduces poverty. We know that economies that rely on open-ended commitments of aid almost universally fail, and those that do not depend on aid succeed. The latter is true for economically successful countries such as China and India, and even closer to home, in South Africa and Botswana. Their strategy of development finance emphasizes the important role of entrepreneurship and markets over a staid aid-system of development that preaches hand-outs.
African countries could start by issuing bonds to raise cash. To be sure, the traditional capital markets of the U.S. and Europe remain challenging. However, African countries could explore opportunities to raise capital in more non-traditional markets such as the Middle East and China (whose foreign exchange reserves are more than $4 trillion). Moreover, the current market malaise provides an opening for African countries to focus on acquiring credit ratings (a prerequisite to accessing the bond markets), and preparing themselves for the time when the capital markets return to some semblance of normalcy.
Governments need to attract more foreign direct investment by creating attractive tax structures and reducing the red tape and complex regulations for businesses. African nations should also focus on increasing trade; China is one promising partner. And Western countries can help by cutting off the cycle of giving something for nothing. It’s time for a change.
(Dambisa Moyo, a former economist at Goldman Sachs, is the author of “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.”)
Hargeisa, SOMALILAND (Somalilandpress) — Ethiopian Airlines will bring back scheduled flights to Somaliland soon, Somaliland Aviation Minister Mr Ali Waran Adde told local media on Thursday.