If Ethiopia’s second richest person (among the hodam class), Samuel Tafesse, has even a speck of pride, he would feel great shame Saturday night when over half of those he invited to his lavish party failed to show up.
Ethiopian Review has learned that out of the 400 people who were invited, less than half went to the Mandarin Oriental, a luxury hotel in Washington DC to wine and dine with Azeb Mesfin’s business partner.
Two individuals who had received invitations told EthiopianReview.com that they didn’t go to the party because they do not want their photos to show up on web sites.
On Friday, Etete Restaurant managers were telling callers that their customers are mostly Americans and that they don’t really care if Ethiopians boycott them.
Meanwhile, sources of Ethiopian Review Investigation Unit have reported that the disgraced chairman of EDP Lidetu Ayalew was forced to leave a wedding party in Addis Ababa a few days before he arrived in the U.S. this month.
According to the sources, every one at the wedding stopped eating the food until the hosts ask Lidetu and friends to leave. Lidetu had no choice but to leave in disgrace.
Lidetu’s partner-in-shame, Hailu Shawel is expanding his business in Ethiopia after bowing down to Meles Zenawi. His company is currently building (see the photo below) a multi-million-dollar entertainment center for Woyanne families, as well as Arab sheiks who are tuning Addis Ababa into their favorite whorehouse. The facility has no use for most Ethiopians who are barely surviving.
Below, Hailu Shawel’s son, Shawel Hailu, poses for photo in front of the massive entertainment complex that his family’s company is building in Addis Ababa. This is one of the rewards Hailu Shawel Shewden has apparently received for betraying the people of Ethiopia.
Below is Hailu Shawel’s just completed night club, bowling and swimming facility in Addis Ababa to be used by famiiles of the ruling class, Woyannes and their children >>
ForeignLobbying.org, a web site run by ProPublica and Sunlight Foundation, has disclosed that the corrupt dictatorship in Ethiopia led by Meles Zenawi has so far paid the Washington DC-based law firm DLA Piper over $1.3 million.
The money has been used to make sure the U.S. Congress doesn’t pass any law that requires the Meles regime improve its human rights record for the U.S. assistance to continue.
The genocidal dictatorship in Ethiopia has also paid the following firms a total of $700,000 since December 2007, according to ForeignLobbying.org:
Dewey & LeBoeuf $511,949.98
Mark Saylor Co $328,040.18
Since late 2007, the Meles regime has squandered over $2 million on lobby firms, instead of using the money for the underfunded social services in the country.
Rodney King’s videotaped brutal beating by members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) eventually triggered the L.A. riots of 1992. Rodney made a public appearance on the third day of the anarchy and pleaded in his inimitable style:
People, I just want to say, can we all get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? It’s just not right…. Let’s try to work it out.
I never thought I would appeal to Rodney King for political wisdom and insight in seeking an end to the internecine warfare in the Ethiopian opposition and plead for reconciliation, understanding and common sense. True, Rodney King is no Martin King, but in this instance I am going to invoke Rodney while pleading Martin to get Ethiopia’s opposition leaders to re-think and re-examine their strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
It was amusing to read this past week a story about criminal charges filed against one faction of the Unity and Democracy Party [UDJ] (Andenet) by another faction of the same party in Ethiopia. Charged with disturbing the peace this past April are some of the prominent leaders and members of the UDJ. It is alleged that the defendants threw rocks at the party office and created disturbances while party members worked inside. Several witnesses testified for the prosecution at a hearing and the matter was continued to a later date.
There had been prior confrontations between UDJ members. In late 2009 when UDJ held its Extraordinary Congress at the Imperial Hotel, it was alleged that certain “expelled” members had attempted to disrupt the meetings. The police were reportedly called to intervene, but failed to show up. The meeting was cancelled and there were no prosecutions. But state-controlled television was on hand to record the bizarre spectacle for broadcast.
I am sure the whole zany rock-throwing affair gave dictator-in-chief Meles Zenawi and his crew much needed comic relief in the weeks before the May 2010 “election”. Today, Zenawi watches a command performance opera buffa of some of the champions of the Ethiopian opposition duking it out in kangaroo court. It is humiliating and embarrassing for many of us to see some of the giants of the opposition who have sacrificed so much of themselves pointing accusatory fingers at each other in the Zenawi’s Halls of Injustice. Of course, one would have expected all opposition leaders to get the message after the “election” and get their acts together. After all, Zenawi won by 99.6 percent, and they “lost” by 100 percent. But that is another matter. I only wish the accusers and the accused could see themselves from the outside as they spar in the three-ring circus of Zenawi’s kangaroo court.
Master Stroke of Public Relations (Act II)
The timing of the UDJ “prosecution” is curious, to say the least. The final report of the European Union Election Observation Mission Team [EU EOM] is expected to be released sometime in September. Staging a three-ring kangaroo circus over a rock-throwing incident to coincide with the release of the EU EOM report is a master stroke of public relations. It provides a nice distraction to the findings and conclusions of the forthcoming report. The criminal case will be dragged out to coincide with the release of the report and cushion the hard landing Zenawi is going to have in the report. We already know from the from the preliminary statements of EU EOM that the May 2010 “election” “failed to provide a level playing field”. Major donor governments have declared the election “does not meet international standards”. That is just diplomatic-speak for a stolen election. Regardless of what the final report will document, the incontrovertible fact is that an “election” that gave Zenawi a victory of 99.6 percent is not an election; it is a travesty of election.
But the sting of the EU EOM report could be lessened and world attention distracted by depicting opposition leaders as a bunch of bumbling and bungling lightweights (or worse) who are not only incapable of leading the country but are spending their time like children throwing rocks at each other. It is a brilliant public relations move by Zenawi to make a complete laughing stock out of some of the most respected leaders of the opposition. Let us just watch Zenawi showcasing the “rock throwers” freak show in his kangaroo court circus as the release date for the EU EOM report draws near: “Come one, come all to the greatest show in Ethiopia! Marvel and thrill at the rock-throwing Ethiopian opposition leaders! Stare in awe… Do you want these guys to run the country!?” Barnum and Bailey never had so much fun!
Justice in Kangaroo Court? (Act III)
Time was that opposition leaders were dragged in chains into kangaroo court to become victims of injustice. Some of the UDJ members in this criminal case were sentenced together to long prison terms in kangaroo court not long ago and served nearly two years before being “pardoned”. It is an eerie feeling to see them now standing on their hind legs pointing accusatory fingers at each other. UDJ members going to kangaroo court to seek justice is like Rodney King going before LAPD’s Internal Affairs to press charges against the cops who beat him to a pulp. It just makes no sense. I am dismayed and embarrassed by the sight of UDJ members brawling in a kangaroo cage match as Zenawi calls the count. What a low-down dirty shame for all whoare toiling for democracy, human rights and justice in Ethiopia to view this spectacle. What comic relief for Zenawi and his crew. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I want to laugh too, but it hurts to laugh. In fact, I would like to cry at the sight of these distinguished members of the opposition wagging fingers and exchanging verbal missiles in kangaroo court. What were they thinking?
But to add humiliation to a crying shame, I agonize over the possible outcomes of the criminal case. If the UDJ defendants are convicted and sentenced to jail, who wins? Zenawi does. He will step up to the podium and announce to the world that his justice system worked “fairly” and the criminal wrongdoers were held to account. He can walk up to his Western donors (a/k/a partners-in-crime) and smugly say, “Behold my opposition (chuckle)! See real justice at work!”
Who loses if they are convicted? The opposition does. The people will shake their collective heads in dismay and disbelief and ask: “What were they thinking? Why can’t they get along? If they can’t get along out of power, how could they get along if they get into power?”
Who wins if the UDJ defendants are acquitted? Zenawi does. He can show the world that justice was served in his court with impartiality and the innocent set free. Who loses if they are acquitted? The opposition does. The people will scratch their collective heads and ask: “Why did they do it? Was it worth their humiliation in kangaroo court?” In short, the kangaroo court criminal case is a win-win for Zenawi, and a lose-lose for the opposition!
But there is a less obvious conclusion to be drawn to the credit of the UDJ members. In the heat of the moment, certain party members may or may not have thrown rocks or exchanged harsh words. But to their collective credit, there was no shooting or extreme violence, as it often happens among opposition elements in so many parts of Africa. The UDJ members did not take to street justice to resolve their disagreements; they went to court (admittedly the kangaroo variety). I applaud them for that. They had the right idea, but went to the wrong place. Courts of law (in contrast to kangaroo courts) are the proper and civilized place to bring disputes for resolution. Independent judges (in contrast to hacks wearing judicial robes) can properly administer justice impartially and neutrally.
But the proper place for resolution of political disputes among Ethiopia’s opposition is never in kangaroo court, but in intra- and inter-organizational mediation and reconciliation processes or other civil society institutions. Throwing rocks or vilifying each other with abusive words is never justified. They do not need to beat each other up; they need to stand together and cover each other’s back. They need to shield each other from the ceaseless barrages of the slings and arrows of an outrageous dictatorship.
So I am going to “sermonize” a little bit here. If the bickering, name calling, rock throwing and all the other silly stuff continues, the opposition will end up in mutual assured destruction as the dictators look on with glee. It is mad to follow the path of MAD. The opposition has far too many important tasks to accomplish. They have already lost precious time in internal strife and fragmentation; they need to be doing more by way of uniting, mobilizing, motivating and inspiring the people with their ideas and plans. The people want to hear messages of hope and redemption from opposition leaders, not accusations and recriminations. The people want to be assured that it is possible, with dedication and effort, to overcome the seemingly insurmountable mountain of dictatorship; that change, peaceful democratic change, is possible and the people themselves hold their destiny in their collective hands. The people want to be shown these possibilities through leadership examples of optimism, dedication, tolerance, tenacity and patriotic zeal. That is the way to do it!
The kind of legal warfare we see in kangaroo court with opposition leaders and members is demoralizing; it is not uplifting for the people. It robs the people of their faith in the future and saps their energy, enthusiasm and hopes for democracy. Opposition leaders should be less concerned about their partisan interests and more engaged in addressing the needs of the masses of unemployed youth, the urban poor that have little to eat; the poor farmers scratching the earth for seedlings; the masses of women who face domestic violence daily; the educated professionals who can barely eke out an existence on salaries that are gobbled up by stratospheric inflation and the state workers who are forced to supplement their incomes by payments under the table. These people are looking for visionary leadership. They want to see clear-thinking and dignified opposition leaders charting the course to a better future. They do not want to see opposition leaders brawling in freak shows in a kangaroo circus court. Stated simply, opposition leaders and parties need consolidation, not fragmentation; they need reconciliation not accusation and recrimination.
Can’t We Just Get Along? (Act IV)
I see no need for opposition leaders to act in a vaudevillian comedy show directed by Zenawi. That is why I am asking them to develop and adopt a voluntary “code of conduct” to govern their relationships as they face a formidable common adversary. Such a code should address matters of civility, tolerance of dissent, non-use of inflammatory language, avoidance of personality clashes, constructive criticism of programs and policies, avoidance of personal attacks, establishment of formal and informal dispute resolution mechanisms, grievance complaint procedures and so on. Under no circumstances should they air their “dirty political laundry” in kangaroo court.
Political leaders and followers who are truly committed to democracy and human rights and work for the betterment of the Ethiopian people need to get along with each other and cooperate for a common purpose. They do not need to agree with each other on all issues or even the majority of issues. It is not even necessary for them to socialize and hang out together; but it is mandatory that they find effective ways of collaboration to advance their common causes of democracy, human rights, accountability, transparency and the rule of law.
Working together requires creating a harmonious working relationship founded on mutual respect, tolerance and understanding. If there are differences on issues, as there should be, all effort must be exerted to discuss and resolve them without degenerating into personal attacks. If issues cannot be resolved, it is best to agree to disagree and move on with other issues.
Teamwork and collegiality among opposition leaders are essential if dictatorship is to be defeated and real democracy established in Ethiopia. When opposition leaders attack and disrespect each other, they not only make themselves laughing stocks for the dictator and his crew but also look silly in the eyes of the public and set a bad example. The kind of dysfunctionality that is visible in the opposition today is not only pathetic but also harmful to the prospects of democracy in the future. Opposition leaders need to answer a simple question: How can they expect to work collaboratively in the interests of the country and fight dictatorship when they have hardened partisan politics among themselves so much? The road of hardened partisan politics leads to MAD. They may have been in separate boats before the May “election”, but now they are all in the same boat cruising up that famous creek without a paddle.
It is time now to transition to the politics of multi-partisanship, cooperation and collaboration. Practically, this means advancing the interests of the people over partisan politics or advancement of one’s agenda, status, career or ambitions. It means showing the people that the opposition is NOT the flip side of the ruling dictatorship. Stated simply, the people need to be reassured that in the opposition they are not swapping Tweedledee for Tweedledum. Democracy and dictatorship are not interchangeable. The most effective way of getting the trust and support fo the people is by proving to them what it means to work together harmoniously while opposition leaders and parties are on the outside, and before they have tasted the sweet intoxicating nectar of power.
That’s why I pose some simple questions to Ethiopia’s opposition leaders: “Why can’t you all just get along? Can you stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? It’s just not right…. Why can’t you try to work it out?”
As the old saying goes, “Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not ours, what we have is today.” Can we all begin to mend fences today and come together not only to oppose and defeat an ephemeral dictatorship, but most importantly, to put our collective shoulders to the grind wheel and work for democracy, justice and human rights in Ethiopia? Can we all get along!
FREE BIRTUKAN MIDEKSSA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN ETHIOPIA.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The beggar regime in Ethiopia led by Meles Zenawi pays the Washington DC-based DLP Piper lobby and law firm $50,000 per month. On top of that, officials of the regime and their partners take hundreds of millions of dollars (hard currency) out of the country to buy homes and other properties in the U.S. and other developed countries. I urge the author of the following report, Carol Leoning of Washington Post, and other media to investigate the flight of capital out of countries like Ethiopia. They can start with Samuel Tafesse, a business partner of Meles Zenawi and wife. — Elias Kifle
By Carol D. Leonnig | Washington Post
Over the past five years, the authoritarian regime of the Congo Republic has leaned on Washington lobbyists to help with an image problem.
Gen. Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the president of the country – one of the world’s poorest – had been accused in court and in lawsuits of diverting tens of millions of dollars in national oil profits to hidden bank accounts and then using the money to buy mansions in France and to finance spending sprees in Paris, Dubai and New York. His main antagonist was a New York investment firm that had accused him of misspending money in a lawsuit seeking repayment of an old debt.
Sassou-Nguesso reached out for help on Capitol Hill. In 2006, the Congo Republic began a Washington lobbying campaign that has now cost about $9 million and involved more than 100 conversations and meetings with members of Congress, their staffs and African advocacy groups, according to lobbying disclosure reports.
A main focus of the effort was to persuade Congress to stop the profitable business of investment funds like the one that had embarrassed Sassou-Nguesso.
Experts on the Congo Republic and African debt say the lobbying effort financed by the small nation in central Africa has been unusual in its cost and intensity. Impoverished countries struggling to provide food, water and medical care to residents rarely pay out millions to retain the services of high-powered D.C. lobbyists.
The Congo Republic made clear that its legislative priorities included “responding to allegations of misconduct directed at President Sassou-Nguesso by creditors of the Republic of Congo,” according to reports filed in Washington.
The Congo Republic’s lobbyists took the lead among African nations in pushing for Congress to enact “vulture fund” legislation that would prevent foreign investors from reaping windfall profits by buying up at basement prices the debts of poor countries and then suing the countries to repay in full. The Congo Republic, which settled most of its outstanding debts to investment firms in a confidential 2008 agreement, said it was seeking protection for all poor African nations, such as Rwanda, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone.
In the House, Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) stepped forward to sponsor a bill that won support from 33 co-sponsors, including many members of the Congressional Black Caucus. She introduced it in 2008 and reintroduced it in 2009.
Waters told the British news media a year ago that she was unaware that the Sassou-Nguesso government had been involved in pushing the legislation. Last week, she acknowledged that lobbyists for the Congo Republic submitted proposed language for the legislation to her office in 2007 and met with her and her staff to shape the final bill. Records show that the Congo Republic’s lobbying team has met or spoken with Waters’s office 40 times since 2006, including two meetings with the lawmaker.
Waters said the legislation is part of her long-standing effort to help impoverished African nations. She said the Congo Republic’s lobbying against these investors, paid for by state oil revenue, may well be in the interest of the Congolese people.
“Poor countries have the same right to hire lobbyists and lawyers as more affluent countries,” she said.
To groups that support the legislation, such as TransAfrica Forum and Jubilee USA, Waters and her colleagues are taking on a powerful segment of the financial industry and preserving scarce African resources for their people. Every year, African nations p ay about $14 billion in debt costs to wealthy nations and international institutions while receiving less than $13 billion in international aid, advocacy groups estimate.
But John Clark, a professor at Florida International University and an expert on the Congo Republic, said members of Congress should be wary of lobbyists for Sassou-Nguesso.
“The purpose of the lobbying is to cover up this nasty reality of authoritarian politics and to protect the leadership’s personal finances,” Clark said.
The trail of Congo Republic money was exposed by Elliott Management, a New York hedge fund that sued the country for repayment of an estimated $100 million in debt. The firm declined to discuss the dispute.
In 2005, it alleged in court that it found that the Sassou-Nguesso regime had diverted money into shell companies secretly owned by a top presidential deputy. (A British court agreed that the country had oil assets in hidden accounts.) Serge Mombouli, the Congo Republic’s ambassador to the United States, said embezzlement charges are unproved.
Other groups then alleged that Sassou-Nguesso used oil profits for his personal benefit. A lawsuit brought by French humanitarian organizations claimed that three African leaders, including Sassou-Nguesso, misused state money for personal luxuries. A preliminary French police investigation in 2007 found Sassou-Nguesso family holdings that included five mansions in or near Paris and a car worth $224,492.
ad_icon
In France last year, Sassou-Nguesso said the assets were typical for a world leader.
“All the leaders of the world have castles and palaces in France, whether they are from the gulf, Europe or Africa,” he said.
In 2006, the Congo Republic retained the D.C. law firm Trout Cacheris to handle several assignments, including working with the International Monetary Fund to win impoverished-nation status and dealing with charges made against Sassou-Nguesso. For help, Trout Cacheris hired the Livingston Group, run by former congressman Bob Livingston (R-La.); Chlopak Leonard Schechter and Associates; the former Amani Group, led by former congressman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.); and the communications firm Public Private Solutions.
John Richards, the main Congo Republic lobbyist, said Sassou-Nguesso properly sought to stop “a global smear campaign against the Congolese government.”
Lobbyists for the Congo Republic worked closely with Waters as well as a coalition of U.S.-based religious, human rights and environmental groups.
Melinda St. Louis, a deputy director of Jubilee USA, a coalition of religious and human rights groups, said the organization relied on Richards for expertise. But she said her group has tried to “keep an arm’s-length relationship” with the Congo Republic government.
In an interview last year, Waters said poor nations need protection from vulture funds. At that time, she said that she would not seek legislation to shield dictators who are “known to be stealing” from their people and that she was not aware that the Congo Republic’s lobbying team was involved in the push for legislation.
Waters, who is facing an ethics charge on a separate matter before the House ethics committee, now says her comments did not accurately describe her staff’s dealings wit h the lobbying team.
In a statement last week, she confirmed that lobbyists had submitted proposed legislation and were consulted in vetting her measure.
Poverty is Ethiopia’s persistent reality and has long been the country’s definer. The country’s mainstay, agriculture, is predominantly subsistence and is still only one drought season away from a multimillion killer famine unless we beg in time. Meles Zenawi often talks of poverty as being the number one problem of the country. I have yet to meet any Ethiopian who disagrees with this. But there are disagreements on the kinds of approaches, economic and political governance and accountability and the kind of policy tools we must use to fight poverty. Had we been a lucky, vibrant and freely debating country, these disagreements and debates should have been considered healthy and encouraged.
There are a number of people outside of the government, including myself, who doubt the double digit growth claim and the validity of the coming five year plan that promises ‘cows in the sky’. Many including non-Ethiopians believe it is exaggerated at best or fabricated at worst for political purposes. Obviously, the regime and its cronies have the motive of justifying their proposed authoritarian nanny-state solution, the so called developmental state, which is to be led by a vanguard party – the EPRDF with Mr. Zenawi at the helm. Mr. Zenawi’s recent argument against the neoliberal and market fundamentalist boogeyman which he created out of thin air may be laughable but indicates how much he failed to wrench himself off of his long held but debunked Marxian authoritarian methods. I haven’t heard any Ethiopian politician who argues the state should not intervene in the country’s economic development or anyone who argues to leave the economy to market forces. There may be argument in the level and kind of intervention. This has even ceased to be an argument in developed democracies anymore let alone in Ethiopia. But as increases in accusations about human rights violations and closure of democratic space become intensified, Mr. Zenawi, his officials and supporters seem to keep clinging to non existing challenges and phantom statistics as a means of offsetting that.
In my view, there is no more disgusting sin than playing politics with Ethiopia’s massive and obscene poverty. Ethiopia’s poverty is too grim, too widespread, too sad and tragic to play political propaganda games with it. The exaggeration and in many instances the fabrication of the growth statistics is not making any dent on the lives of the millions of Ethiopians — as much as 90% of them who are absolutely poor as some recent estimates put it. Nor is it creating any hope for the mass of young people who concluded that their best bets for improving their lives is to leave the country in droves by taking risky journeys to foreign lands. A recent survey by Gallup shows nearly half the adult population of Ethiopia wants to leave the country. This doesn’t sound like coming from a country that is growing at the rate claimed by the government, fool of hope and great promise. We have enough to suffer from real poverty, we will only add to our misery if we pile lies on to that.
There are some striking independent evaluations that shade light into the amount of data manipulation and exaggeration by the government. Some are expatriate independent scholars who cannot be accused of having any Ethiopian political axe to grind. If you want an illustration of how the Ethiopian authorities play games with statistics to create an illusion of stratospheric economic growth, read this study by experts Stefan Dercon and Ruth Vegas Hill from Oxford University who collaborated with DFID of the UK to evaluate the performance of Ethiopia’s agriculture and checked the official numbers. The experts who made the study concluded that:
“The scale of output expansion in Ethiopia in the last 10 years is unprecedented. According to the data, it involved dramatic increases in areas cultivated with cereals, up 44 percent in the last 10 years, without any clear record or reporting on the process by which more land was obtained. Yields increased by 40 percent in the same period, with most of this growth in the last 5 years, but without any sign of intensification via fertilizer, improved seeds or irrigation and limited increases in land under the extension program. As yield growth has fast outpaced the experience elsewhere in Africa or during the Green Revolution in Asia but without input intensification, the sources of yield growth should be understood to restore trust in the current data. In general, more effort should be expanded to ensure the auditing of these key data sources on the Ethiopian economy”.
One of the major recommendations of the authors of this study states, “New, targeted data collection, and independent verification and auditing procedures are required to allow the necessary confidence in the current data”. In fact, they sound even more puzzled as to how these exaggerations were made since the crop- cutting method using a statistical sampling design that often generate superior data to other methods was used. The ferenjis seem to have been so polite not to use the word lie.
Using the official data and comparing it to international experience, the authors have found out that the Ethiopian government claimed to achieve in 10 years far more than what countries in East Asia achieved in longer years of the Green Revolution. At the end of the Green Revolution in the case of the Asians, we know that they overcame their food insecurity and started to fund their industrialization. On the contrary in Ethiopia’s case, the number of people on food handouts has grown to one in ten, the number of the absolute poor has increased and the structure of the economy remains basically unchanged. No official or expert of the Ethiopian government has so far attempted to explain these discrepancies. As the authoritarians that they are, they have the luxury of unaccountability and never feel responsible to explain it. In tragic Ethiopia, often it is the critic that gets in trouble than those who do the blunder. When you catch them with their hands in the cookie jar, they get angry and accuse you of some malicious intent. Some years ago Meles promised that he will shortly create an economy where all Ethiopians will have three meals a day. He never told us why that prediction failed miserably. With this propensity for exaggeration and unaccountability, I am surprised why they promised us only a 15% GDP growth during the next five-year plan that they just announced.
An Ethiopian economist who lives in Ethiopia whose comments I often value told me recently that anyone who would come up with a finding of 9.9% growth would be in trouble in Ethiopia today. It has to be double digit to sound mouthful and of propaganda value for the donors to like it. Most objective experts I talked to say the growth is anywhere near five or six percent which, of course, doesn’t mean it is not remarkable. I am sure any World Bank and IMF expert will not give you more than a 6% rate, if they talk to you in private and promise them you will not disclose their name. (By the way the IMF and the World Bank do not collect their own data or replicate the official survey, but Meles keeps claiming they agree with him). It is simply a pity.
The truth of the matter is that Ethiopia is still a predominantly subsistence farming agricultural country that depends heavily on rainfall. Good old coffee and other agricultural products are still the products that fetch hard currency as they did during the Emperor’s time. Thanks to our dispersal around the world we in the Diaspora send a lot of money home every year. Yes, a lot construction of roads and buildings has taken place and a few people have stricken it filthy rich in the service and construction sectors. Most of them, we are told, are the well connected and the powerful. Yet, we have more poor people than at any time in our history. Little of this growth is trickling down to the tragically destitute.
Meaningful economic development and ending or reducing poverty requires looking at and affecting a web of interacting variables and factors. It is not as easy as making some linear extrapolation. True, there has been growth in the economy over the past several years. But we also know that this growth has made little dent on the lives of the mass of the suffering people. We also know that none of this increase is due to any innovative work or advance in technology or structural changes in the economy as the government wants us to blindly believe. We know exactly which sectors of the economy have shown growth and why. It is also important to note that Ethiopia is not the only country in Africa that has achieved considerable increase in GDP. Many African countries, most of our neighbors to the south and west, recorded considerable growth numbers during the same period. It is a result of part good weather, part foreign aid, part local effort. You can apply enough chemical fertilizer and grow the yield per unit area if the rains are good. Or you can play nice with donors and be their darling and get billions of dollars in aid, as the Ethiopian authorities successfully did, and can register considerable quantitative increase in GDP. But then again this is not a sustainable way of fighting endemic poverty or basing your future forecasts on.
The only way out of Ethiopia’s poverty is the prevalence of the rule of law and democracy. It is the making of a confident people in the institutions of the country and the accountability of the government. There is no country that has prospered without resolving outstanding political and other conflicts within themselves through a democratic and lawful way. The models Meles often loves to cite have done that. They have reduced their conflicts to manageable levels through tolerance and the rule of law and not by trying to crush them through the use of force. Even China couldn’t have done it without allowing a level of diversity of views and dissent inside the communist party. All emerging economies are those that have liberalized themselves and achieved at least a patriotic unity of their people.
Some supporter of the government recently told me boastfully that the number of universities in the country has grown more than ten times. I asked him if he knows that the research output from these universities is less than when we had only two, and if he knows more than 50% of the instructors are first degree holders and in some cases undergraduate senior students and asked him to define a university for me. My friend, who was happy to play the numbers game could not say a word about any of the substance.
Let me leave you with an example of how people play games with numbers and statistics that my Indian professor once told me. He told me about a 100 people who were trying to cross a river. They all couldn’t swim and were afraid of drowning as they did not know the depth of the river. Finally there was some mathematically endowed person among them who set out to measure the depth of the river and the height of all hundred of them. He made the necessary calculations and found that the average height of the people was above the river’s depth. He then told all of them that everybody can cross on the average. Unfortunately the 25 of them who were very tall have influenced the average. Seventy five of them drowned. There wasn’t even a mistake on the mathematical computation. It was a failure of thinking.
Ethiopia has a herculean challenge of getting out of poverty. Its rapidly growing population, the environmental degradation, and the challenges of plugging in to a globalized world, to mention just a few, are not easy. Yes, poverty is the number one problem of the country that all of us seem to agree on. But you cannot solve a number one problem by making it secondary to absolute political control. Those who tried that it in the past have failed miserably. I pray for my country and for wisdom.
Etete Ethiopian Restaurant in Washington DC is hired to feed 500 Woyannes and hodams this coming Saturday at a lavish party thrown by the second richest man in Ethiopia and a business partner of Ethiopia’s brutal dictator Meles Zenawi (click here to read details).
If Etete owners need our business, they need to be sensitive to our pain, the pain of Ethiopians who have been forced into exile by Woyanne looters and murderers who continue to brutalize our people back home.
Let’s call Etete owners at 202 232 7600 and politely ask them to cancel their contract to provide food at the party.
Ethiopian Review has established a hotline for those who have information about every one who will attend the party. Please send us names, addresses, and photos of those who will be dining and wining with the looters:
According to the sources, every one at the wedding stopped eating the food until the hosts ask Lidetu and friends to leave. Lidetu had no choice but to leave in disgrace.
