Some fact about Ethiopia’s new figure head president Mulatu Teshome Wirtu:
- Born in 1955 in Arjo town, Welega, western Ethiopia
- Received higher education in China in the 1970s, receiving a bachelor’s degree in political economy and a doctorate in international law from Peking University
- In the 1990s, served as Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Cooperation
- In 2001, was appointed Minister of Agriculture
- From 2002 – 2005, served as Speaker of the rubber-stamp House of Federation.
- In 2005, became ambassador to Japan, and in 2006 to Turkey
- On Oct. 7, 2013, he was sworn in by Ethiopia’s rubber-stump parliament as president
The Ethiopian president is appointed by the Tigrean People Liberation Front (TPLF), one of the 5 organizations that make up the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Real power in Ethiopia is in the hands of TPLF. The other parties in the governing “coalition” are puppets and TPLF is their puppet-master. TPLF controls the military (90 percent of the top officers are members of TPLF), the security (heads of the main security agencies, Debretsion Gebremichael and Getachew Assefa, are members of TPLF), the economy (TPLF-owned companies monopolize all the key industries in Ethiopia), and information (all the media in Ethiopia are controlled by TPLF).
As the person he replaced, President Girma Woldegiorgis, Mulatu will serve his masters in the TPLF while masquerading as an Oromo and an official of an Oromo organization named OPDO that was created by TPLF.
The reason TPLF is able to rule over Ethiopia with little challenge for the past two decades is that it has surrounded itself with people like Mulatu Teshome and Girma Woldegiorgis, who have surrendered the rights and will of the people they claim to represent for the crumbs that TPLF throws at them.
While serving TPLF as Deputy Minister of Economic Development, Mulatu’s job was to provide a cover for TPLF while the Meles Crime Family looted the region known as Oromiya and the entire Ethiopia. In one infamous case, under Mulatu’s and his boss Girma Birru’s watch, Meles Zenawi’s wife and cohorts stole 9 million kilograms of coffee (worth over $100 million USD), as Meles himself admitted in this video.
Mulatu was such a loyal puppet that he was then promoted to Minister of Agriculture in 2001 and continued to a give a blind eye while TPLF leased millions of hectares of fertile Ethiopian land to foreign investors after evicting Ethiopian farmers. Such policy brought what NGOs termed “Green Famine” to southwestern Ethiopia, the most fertile region of the country.
The Guardian Newspaper in London wrote: “The rains have come, the land is lush but Ethiopians still go hungry.” It is because the farmers were being evicted and their land was being leased to Chinese, Indian and TPLF investors. The Ethiopian “Green Famine” was caused by TPLF and its puppets like Girma Birru and Mulatu Teshome.
Before becoming the Minister of Agriculture in 2001, Mulatu had to prove his loyalty to his TPLF masters once more by calling for the arrest of President Negasso Gidada, his former mentor since his college days. Mulatu called for Dr Negasso’s arrest because the latter dared to confront TPLF boss Meles Zenawi on a number of issues. Such loyalty brought more “fortune” to Mulatu, while Negasso was stripped of all his privileges as former president, including his house and pension.
While in school, according to those who knew Mulatu, he was a mediocre student at best who left no impression on any one. But he excelled at one thing — wagging his tail to get what he wants. That seems to have served him “well.” After high school, he wagged his tail to China on scholarship, even though there were other students who had been more qualified than him. When Woyanne came to power, he rushed to volunteer as one of the new regime’s loyal ethnic puppets, and went on to be appointed “president” by TPLF. At what cost? In such context, does the word “president” has any more value that the word “prostitute”?