Conformist wrote:revolutions wrote:I don't think the students were able to make a judgment about what the future holds for them before enrolling in college. Unfortunately, fate always has a different plan for people than they have for themselves, and the graduates met their fate on the receiving end of Woyane's apartheid policy that favors the Adwans over the rest of Ethiopians. The prevalent discrimination against the overwhelming majority of students in the country would have been unthinkable under normal circumstances, with a responsible government and leadership. In my humble opinion, afraid to call a spade a spade and blaming the victims is the same as validating the injustices suffered by the victims.
Dear Rev,
Unfortunately this ethnic discrimation by Woyane is nothing new, except in Derg and imperial times the discremination was not according to tribe, but according to your loyalty to the regime. I am old enough to remember the resentment of the AA University graduates during Janhoy times who were full of rage for being kept out of the loop. That was actually one of the causes of the revolution. During Derg times if you were unwilling to become a member of ኢሰፓአኮ no job for you. So in all fairness discimination is nothing new, except that now it has reached an unreasonable magnitude.
On the other hand both during imperial times and Derg times, those youngsters who were dignified and wise enough to seek vocational training never had to beg for a job. Every ትግባረ እድ graduate either had an instant employment or started his own business. It is the same today, in Ethiopia there is no unemployed carpenter, bricklayer, metal worker or auto mechanic. They all have secure and well paying jobs. The ones who are unemployed are the fools who wasted their years on useless academic pursuits such as political science, history and other useless tripe you can teach yourself by reading the appropriate books you can download off the internet.
I understand you a Tigrayan, so perhaps you may not have had a lot of experience with the degraded thinking of the parents of Addis Ababa who would be horrified if their son aspires to become a farmer, or desires to be a day laborer to earn extra cash when school's out. The people of Addis Ababa have been infected with some kind of virus that makes them despise manual labor. They have no idea of how ennobling it can be to the soul to work with your hand and to sweat from labor.
Those youngsters who rent newspapers seeking nonexistent office jobs would be horrified if they were to be offered jobs to clean the city. They would think of it below their dignity to get their hands dirty.
To a varying extent I agree that past injustices, real or imagined, can have a lasting negative impact on society, but the new generation of Ethiopians also have a moral obligation and duty not to be held hostage to the paralyzing past if a more equal Ethiopian society is to be created. Just because successive regimes of the past committed gross historical injustices doesn't absolve the current TPLF regime of exacerbating the same situation, albeit with entirely different ethnic makeup, leading to the overt discrimination that has reached a boiled point today.
I also agree that technical and vocational skills are very crucial for the development of any African nation, but in woyane-occupied Ethiopia where donor nations build all the schools and make all the decisions for the students about what kind of education they should get, the students don't have any other choice but to attend the donor-built and funded universities and become part of the brain drain problem that is costing the continent $4 billion dollars a year. It's for this reason that there are more Ethiopian doctors in the city of Chicago than in the whole of Ethiopia. By contrast, technical college graduates are much less likely to flee the country for economical reasons, unless the hardship is caused by domestic political turmoil or external factors beyond the government's control.
It's indeed very sad that, today, contracts to all major donor funded development projects in Ethiopia are awarded to Chinese or Indian nationals -- graduates of 2-year technical college -- while Ethiopian university graduates are fleeing the country en masse to South Africa in search for low-end, unskilled jobs and earn more than those in Ethiopia doing the same kind of unskilled jobs for a meager pay. Yes, there's probably an element of pride involved with their refusal to do the menial jobs in Ethiopia, but for the most part, money seems to be the underlying factor in their mass migration.
