ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (ST) — Eight major Ethiopian opposition political parties, in an unexpected move, announced a new coalition on Thursday to challenge the ruling party, most expected to win, in the upcoming national election.
The new coalition is announced two days after the ruling, Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (Woyanne), party’s council decided its chairman and the Prime minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi to stay in power for one more term.
As its primary plan of action, the opposition umbrella named as Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia (FDDE) in a joint statement said that it will enter into negotiation with government for expansion of democratic space and transparency ahead of the elections.
Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator convoying Ethiopia’s New Year wishes yesterday reaffirmed that his government is dedicated to conduct democratic and fair election. But some opposition leaders who spoke recently to Sudan Tribune said that they are already being harassed by government cadres, which they said is making it impossible for them to conduct election campaigns.
Other opposition members allege that their potential candidates are being intimidated or arrested on false charges; their regional offices are being closed. Government officials reject the claims as “an empty allegation with no single concrete proof”.
Recently Ethiopia’s former president and opposition MP accused government of being behind disruption of a public political meeting in Adama town of the Oromiya region.
“Continuously endorsed new laws like the press laws, the passing of the civil society law and anti terror laws are leaving no democratic space to opposition political parties but arrest of political figures and journalists” the new coalition said in a joint statement
The FDDE also said that it will soon organize a public demonstration in Addis Ababa to push for the release of detained opposition leaders.
The new alliance comprises the Ethiopian Democratic Unity Movement, the Ethiopian and Oromo Federalist Movement, the Somali Democratic Alliance Forces, UDJ, the Arena Tigray Democratic and Sovereignty Party and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF).
Gebru Asrat, the former northern Tigray region’s president is elected to lead the new alliance. He is also the leader of the Arena Tigray party. His party strongly believes that the Eritrea’s port of Assab should be returned back to Ethiopia.
The parties under the new alliance make up 80 of the nation’s parliament’s total 547 seats.
Today Ethiopia is classified as having over 70% severe desertification, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). While there are several reasons, one major one is thanks (or no thanks) to eucalyptus brought over from Australia. But, the folks over at the Entoto National Park project, want to see that eucalyptus is replaced with indigenous plants in an effort to restore the soil and save water, as reported in Selamta.
The Entoto National Park project is not actually a national park, so tourists coming to see the hyena and lammergeyers are often disappointed as no such park exists. But the area is a 1300 hectare spot north of the capital Addis Ababa, which was decimated thanks to poor planning almost 150 years ago. The Emperor at the time, Menelik, ordered construction of the “new” city which meant the need for a lot of fuel and fast. The solution: import eucalyptus from Australia. 120 years later: Houston, we have a problem.
What’s Wrong with Eucalyptus?
Koalas love it and we’re losing tons of it through the drought in Australia. So why would the Entoto National Park project want to out and out destroy it? Eucalyptus needs water, and a lot of it. For a plant that is taking over to also be so demanding, kind of makes it hard to justify the cost of keeping it around, particularly in developing countries where the soil could be put to better use.
Which brings us to our next problem: erosion. The eucalyptus plants are thriving but also destroying the soil, which doesn’t help in an area that already suffers from “high gradients, heavy rainfall and…clay [soil].” Thus, restoring the landscape to more native species will also reduce flooding and soil loss.
How to Replace Eucalyptus
First, workers on the project have been planting trees native to Ethiopia, such as “Juniperus excelsa, Acacia abyssinica, Olea europaea cuspidata and Hagenia abyssinica. To stop the erosion, project workers are creating terraces and check dams along the hillsides. Neighbors to the park who allow their animals to roam free (and eat the new saplings) will be fined, thus the park has hired guards to monitor and protect the park.
The eucalyptus plants themselves can be “debarked” to prevent regrowth, but this takes a large amount of time and money. The eucalyptus stalks can also be sold for use as telephone poles and fence posts. The restoration plan is estimated to cost one Birr one million per year for the next five years.
In the short time since the program began, there have already been nice results. Areas that are already undergoing reforestation are thriving and animals like dik diks and jackals are starting to return to the area, along with birds. Workers at the Entoto National Park just hope that the good work keeps up and that they can afford to keep going.
LAS VEGAS (ReviewJournal.com) — Queen of Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant teaches you what your mother wouldn’t: How to eat with your fingers. Its place-settings feature no silverware — unless you ask.
“If you are unfamiliar with the cuisine, we’ll show you how to eat it,” says Semeneh Meshesha, who purchased the restaurant with a partner from its previous owners in May. (It opened last November in the corner of a Food 4 Less strip mall at 4001 S. Decatur Blvd.)
“For Ethiopian food, using your hand is the best way,” he says.
Queen of Sheba’s traditional dishes — meant to be shared — are evenly split between vegetarian and meat. They’re mostly butter-sauteed and spicy, and all served on 16-inch round injera, a pizzalike bread made from an ancient grain called teff.
“You will have never tasted this before, because it’s special,” promises Meshesha, who hails from the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa. “We do it in our own traditional way, which makes the food very tasty.”
According to Meshesha, 95 percent of his American customers either have eaten Ethiopian food before or acclimate immediately. Some of them, however, “will ask for a fork.”
The restaurant — decorated, surprisingly, in a modern American style — seats 125. Hours are from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. daily. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, Ethiopian music is performed live. On Fridays, it’s reggae; on Saturdays, Caribbean. Reservations are recommended but not required.
EDITOR’S NOTE: World Bank crooks must be chewing khat with Meles.
ADDIS ABABA (Fortune) — A new report on ease of doing business around the world has been published by the World Bank and it shows that Ethiopia has improved its environment for doing business with the country moving up nine places on the index table from position 116 to 107. Wow! Incredible!
[The truth of the matter is that Ethiopia’s economy under the Woyanne tribal junta is growing down like a carrot.]
The development comes barely a month after another World Bank report on competitiveness where Ethiopia’s business environment was found wanting in many areas.
“Ethiopia reduced court delays through a combination of better case management and internal training, as well as an expanded role for enforcement judges. The government has simplified property transfers by decentralizing administrative tasks to sub-cities and merging procedures performed by the land registry and municipalities,” said World Bank in a report released in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, September 9, 2009.
Reforms at the company registry and the streamlining of procedures have also made it easier to start a business in Ethiopia over the past year, says the report compiled by the Bank’s branch, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Ethiopia has over the past year ranked poorly on the index as it moved from 109 in 2008 to 116 in this year, 2009.
“Major areas of reform [in 2008/2009] have been in areas of starting a business, registering property, and enforcing contracts,” the Bank notes in the report.
Ethiopia is also named to have lowered taxes on domestic firms in 2008/2009.
This new report vindicates State Minister of Trade and Industry Tedesse Hailu, who on August 20, 2009, doubted the findings of the first World Bank report titled Ethiopia Investment Climate: Towards the Competitive Frontier which showed that government preferences, access to capital, coupled with low productivity, low wages, land allocation and inefficiency in allocation of resources were some factors that were slowing down Ethiopia’s competitiveness to attract business and investment on the world market.
The Trade and Industry Minister indicated that Ethiopia was improving in many areas like making resources such as land available to investors and reforming some of its trade rules.
“This is good development for Ethiopia as 2009 was difficult year for many countries,” an economist told Fortune on Wednesday, September 9, 2009.
The Bank dubbed 2009 as a year of fast-paced reform with 67 regulatory reforms recorded in 29 of 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Doing Business 2010: ‘Reforming through Difficult Times’, as the report is named, is the seventh in a series of Doing Business annual reports published by IFC and the World Bank.
For the first time a Sub-Saharan African country-Rwanda-was the world’s top reformer, based on the number and impact of reforms implemented between June 2008 and May 2009. Rwanda, a repeat reformer, reformed in seven of the 10 business regulation areas measured by Doing Business.
It now takes a Rwandan entrepreneur just two procedures and three days to start a business. Imports and exports are more efficient, and transferring property takes less time thanks to reorganized registries and statutory time limits. Investors have more protection, insolvency reorganization has been streamlined, and a wider range of assets can be used as collateral to access credit.
Mauritius, ranked 17 of the 183 economies covered by the report, is the top Sub-Saharan economy for the second year in a row in terms of the overall regulatory ease of doing business. It adopted a new insolvency law, established a specialized commercial division within the court, eased property transfers and expedited trade processes.
“In times overshadowed by the global financial and economic crisis, business regulation can make an important difference for how easy it is to reorganize troubled firms to help them survive, to rebuild when demand rebounds, and to get new businesses started,” said Penelope Brook, acting vice president for Financial and Private Sector Development at the World Bank Group in a statement made available to Fortune on Wednesday.
Doing Business analyzes regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycles, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and closing a business. Doing Business does not measure all aspects of the business environment that matter to firms and investors.
For example, it does not measure security, macroeconomic stability, corruption, skill level, or the strength of financial systems.
“The report shows that some post conflict economies [like Ethiopia and Rwanda] in the region are actively improving the regulatory framework for private sector-led development,” said Brooks.
This transcript is a record of the Radio National broadcast. – ABC.net
TONY EASTLEY: In Australia, international adoptions are handled by the Government and are highly regulated, but that’s not the case elsewhere in the world.
In the United States international adoptions are a big business, where a large number of private international adoption agencies are paid on average $30,000 a time to find a child for hopeful parents.
The number of Americans adopting Ethiopian children has quadrupled, especially since American celebrities adopted African children.
A Foreign Correspondent team has been investigating American adoption agencies operating in Ethiopia and has uncovered some alarming practices.
Africa correspondent Andrew Geoghegan reports.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Famine, disease and war have orphaned around five million Ethiopian children. It’s not surprising then that the business of international adoptions is thriving here and Americans in particular are queuing up to adopt a child.
EXCERPT FROM DVD: This is Yabets. He’s five years old and both of his parents died; it says they died of tuberculosis. Can you smile? Oh, nice smile.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: This is the sales pitch from an American agency Christian World Adoption. In a remote village in Ethiopia’s south the agency has compiled a DVD catalogue of children for its clients in the United States.
EXCERPT FROM DVD: Father has died. I’m not certain what he died of and this is the mother. Hoping for a family who can provide for them, they’re just really desperate for people to take care of their children.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Incredibly though, many of the children being advertised are not orphans at all. American Lisa Boe was told by Christian World Adoption that the little boy she’d adopted was an orphan, but she soon had doubts.
LISA BOE: There was a picture of the people that had found him, and there’s a man and a woman in the picture. I point to the woman and he calls her mamma. I would never, never have brought home a child that has a mum. Never.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: At least 70 adoption agencies have set up business in Ethiopia. Almost half are unregistered, but there’s scant regulation anyway and fraud and deception are rife. Some agencies actively recruit children in a process known as harvesting.
EXCERPT FROM DVD: If you want your child to be adopted by a family in America, you may stay. If you do not want your child to go to America, you should take your child away.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Parents give up their children in the belief they’ll have better lives overseas. But many have little understanding of the process or that that they may never see their children again.
EYOB KOLCHA: It was considered good for the children in the community and the people came.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Eyob Kolcha worked for Christian World Adoption before quitting in December 2007.
EYOB KOLCHA: There was no information before that time, there was no information after that.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Did their parents realise that they were now legally someone else’s children?
EYOB KOLCHA: They didn’t understand that. I don’t think most people, most parents understand even elsewhere in Ethiopia right now.
MUNERA AHMED (translated): I have no words to express my feelings and my anguish about what happened to my children and what I did.
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: After her husband left, Munera Ahmed gave up two sons – one 12 months old and the other five through another adoption agency.
She has had no word about her children since she handed them over; that’s despite guarantees that she’d be kept informed. The agency has now closed.
MUNERA AHMED (translated): As a mother not to be able to know my kids’ situation hurts me so much, I have no words, no words to express my emotions (crying).
ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: About 30 Ethiopian children are leaving the country every week, bound for a new home, new parents and an uncertain future.
This is Andrew Geoghegan in Addis Ababa for AM.
TONY EASTLEY: And you can watch the full story tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm.
NAIROBI (The East African) — The government’s emphasis on ethnic identity could trigger a “violent eruption” in the run-up to Ethiopia’s scheduled elections in June, an international conflict-prevention group warned in a report last week.
“Paranoia” on the part of the former guerrilla fighters who now lead the country is cited as an impediment to a democratic system.
The ruling party’s “obsession with controlling political processes from the federal to the local level” is inciting opposition groups to consider taking up arms, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says.
“Without genuine multiparty democracy,” the report suggests, “the tensions and pressures in Ethiopia’s polities will only grow, greatly increasing the possibility of a violent eruption that would destabilize the country and region.”
The report is intended to pressure Ethiopia’s leading benefactors to tie development aid more closely to political reform.
“Some donors appear to consider food security more important than democracy in Ethiopia, but they neglect the increased ethnic awareness and tensions created by the regionalisation policy and their potentially explosive consequences,” the Crisis Group says.
Ethiopia ranks as one of the United States’ chief allies in Africa. Washington annually provides Addis Ababa with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid while defending the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front from charges such as those levelled by the Crisis Group.
The Crisis Group’s report acknowledges that Ethiopia has made economic progress under the rule of the party that overthrew a repressive Marxist-Leninist regime 18 years ago. The report also refrains from questioning the government’s motives in promoting a system of ethnic federalism.
“But while the ruling EPRDF Tigrean People Liberation Front promises democracy,” the 40-page analysis continues, “it has not accepted that the opposition is qualified to take power via the ballot box and tends to regard the expression of differing views and interests as a form of betrayal.”
Feeling threatened by the emergence of a significant opposition, the ruling party resorted to repressive measures prior to the 2005 national elections.One paradoxical aspect of the report is its finding that the ruling party’s authoritarian actions have not prevented opposition groups from proliferating in recent years.
This broadening of the political spectrum, coupled with the promotion of ethnic awareness and the government’s unwillingness to share power, are identified by the Crisis Group as the factors that could push Ethiopia to a break point.
