By Teodros Kiros
The miserable life of Ethiopians is replete with facts such as:
Ethiopian girl looks for food at a city dump in Addis Ababa
- Ethiopia is ranked at 210th out of a total of 210 countries.
- That Ethiopia by any measure is the 2nd poorest nation in the world.
- That it is at the bottom of the list of the three weighed indicators of well-being.
- That 64.9% of school children are not enrolled.
- In health, child mortality, it stands at 38%.
- 85.7% lack electricity.
- 54% do not get any clean water.
- 89.5% do not have any cooking oil.
- It has one of the smallest economies in Africa inspite of its population, accounting only for the continent’s 1% National domestic product.
- 90% of the nation’s 77 million people live below the poverty line (Getachew Begashaw, “Acute Poverty amidst “Double Digit Economic Growth”: Contradiction in Terms, Addis Voice, 2010)
Yet the regime is daring us, when it has selected Boston and Los Angeles as cities in which to display its vacuous new five-year plan.
The gruesome facts above should have been attended to twenty years ago, and by now nine of the points above could have been reduced to at least one half and yet twenty years later Ethiopians are still saddled with this primitive existence unfit for animals. The Prime Minister is more concerned to clean his legacy in four more years and fool the Ethiopian people, again and shamelessly with false promises.
Which transformational strategy is going to make Ethiopia free of famine in five years, when the regime had twenty long years of attending to them slowly, carefully and intelligently? Instead, the reality on the ground can be changed only by a total regime change, consisting of new faces, new thoughts, and new transformational strategies.
The new plan may aim at embarrassing the Diaspora opposition but the regime forgets that it will only embarrass itself when its plans are logically attacked by those who know and by those who see through the aim of the caravan of another five year plan and will subject it to a vigorous scrutiny and demand that the regime gives a regime change a real chance for the love and respect of the Ethiopian people.
The new plan does not address the existential and political rights of the people, the violation of their dignities and economic opportunities. Only a civilized uprising can change the reality on the ground, with a new vision of the Ethiopian person, a new political party and most importantly replacing ethnocracy with Ethiopianity.
(Teodros Kiros, PhD, can be reached at [email protected])