By Prof. Alemayehu G. Mariam

More than two months after Herman Cohen made his unprovoked, depravedly hateful and  arrogantly insulting comments about the Amhara people, he has finally issued a twitter  apology “about the pain and discomfort he caused in the Amhara community”.

On June 26. 2019, I wrote  a commentary entitled “Herman (Harm Man) Cohen’s Second “Coup” in Ethiopia? We Demand an Apology!”

In that commentary I  lambasted Cohen for his insensitive and downright hateful comments about Amharas in Ethiopia.

In concluding my commentary I observed:

The teachable moment for Herman Cohen is this: Should he continue in his defamation, demonization and persecution campaign against Amharas or any Ethiopians, I am ready, willing and able to defend and wage a vigorous and unrelenting anti-defamation campaign against him and his ilk. We demand an apology from Herman Cohen for his defamation of Amhara people. Apology not forthcoming, NOTICE SERVED.

To me, what Herman Cohen tweeted in June was pure and simple hate speech.

He demonized an entire group as ethnic hegemons in exactly the same way others have demonized Jews over the centuries.

If Cohen had said what he said about Amharas about a religious or ethnic group in the United States, there would have been hell to pay.

But Cohen undeterred, expanded on his comments in a BBC interview.

Over two months later, Cohen now issues an apology.

Is that a “crocodile apology” or a genuine act of contrition?

In my June commentary, I noted, “Herman Cohen will be held accountable in the court of world public opinion!”

Cohen may be willfully ignorant but there is a massive anti-Cohen grassroots movement coalescing among Ethiopians globally to hold him accountable.

To be perfectly frank,  I  do not know if Cohen is apologizing now out of genuine remorse or because he sees a global gathering storm of grassroots campaign to hold him accountable and  expose him as a racist and a bigot.

I understand some Ethiopians have even taken their protest to his office door in Washington, DC.

Is it true contrition or damage control that has impelled Cohen to issue his apology?

Following my commentary in June,  Cohen was unrepentant. He ignored much of the outcry against his outrageous remarks.

Even when Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister H.E. Demeke Mekonen condemned his remarks publicly, Cohen remained tone deaf, dismissive and defiant.

What brought about the sudden change of heart?

Regardless, Cohen has apologized and as the first Ethiopian to respond to him following his outrageous remarks and demand an apology, I accept his words of contrition in good faith.

One of the most important lessons I have learned from observing H.E. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in action over the past year is the fact that we must forgive even in the absence of apology.

We must forgive because it is in our self-interest.

I do not want to carry with me anger and antipathy every time Herman Cohen’s name is mentioned. I don’t want to preface his name with a few choice expletives every time someone mentions his name.

That would be giving Cohen enormous power over my mental state.

Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

I am one strong Ethiopian.

By accepting his apology unconditionally, Herman Cohen to me becomes a figment of my imagination.

In other words, Cohen becomes one of those brain dead windbags and empty barrels in my book. I treat such people with my long standing policy of mind over matter. I don’t mind and they don’t matter.

I have buried the hatchet with respect to Cohen and have moved on to more important things.

But I offer Cohen free advice.

In the movie Magnum Force, Harry Callahan says, “A good man’s got to know his limitations.”

So should an 87 year-old man.

I urge all who have been offended by Herman Cohen to follow my policy of mind over matter.

The post Herman Cohen, I Accept Your Apology Though It Comes More Than Two Months Late! appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Recently, I read an article written by Asfaw Regasa which is an open letter to professor Alemayehu Gebre Mariam. I also read many articles by the same writer, whom I believe is a very dedicated and well-educated Ethiopian who wrote exceptionally constructive viewpoints for our country’s glaring issues with conceivable solutions. I commended Asfaw Regasa on his bold approach to write about Ethiopia’s current affair.

Yet, on this open letter to Professor Alemayehu Gebre Mariam, I scratched my head as to why Asfaw Regasa went too far to question professor Al’s integrity that he is passionately supporting the current prime minister of Ethiopia. He was also trying to raise doubt on Professor Al’s honesty and question professor Al’s motive why he doesn’t write with the same width and breadth about the current prime minister as he does with the late Meles Zenawi. I believe, professor Alemayehu has every right to adore and admire whomever he wants, and I will leave this to the respected professor to answer as he sees fit and defend his position.

In my opinion, almost all Ethiopian citizens believe that education is a best tool ever created to develop and enhance maturity of consciousness, perception and acumen of all humans who gets a chance to fulfill their quest for enlightenment. As a result, majority of Ethiopian poor farmers, who still uses two oxen to till their land paid dearly to educate their sons and daughters and greets their well-educated young with all respect and reverence.

Unfortunately, most who consider themselves as literate are not as insightful as many of us think that they are when it comes to politics. Those who thinks that they are on the know are the ones who created confusion and misery for Ethiopia and Ethiopians. People could pursue their academic study or other discipline and be graduated from some academia with one or more degrees. Those same people who studied basic algebra as 1 plus 1 equals 2 theory in their school day may not consent to a Boolean algebra or binary mathematics which is commonly called duality. Boolean laws are obtained by changing every AND to OR and every OR to AND alternatively. i.e. all 1 s and 0 s. This is the basic mathematics theory which creates our modern computer system that we all enjoy seeing the world as a small village today. Contrary to most of our cultured elites’ belief, one plus one may not always be two as there are hundreds of reasons and moving parts that refute one plus one equals two theory in politics.

If one chooses to be a politician, he should minimize the number of disgruntled people from his constituency at any cost or in other words the leader of a nation should bend backwards to appease the electorate.  This is where, one plus one is not equaling to two argument. There might be a very few politicians who could be remembered fairly in history, that they talk the truth to their people, solve most problems that were there when they took office and work hard to fulfill the citizen’s demand in seeking justice, equality, democracy and fair distribution of wealth within a limited terms that they’ve been elected for the office that they held or when they grab power the African way, by all means necessary.

Again, one plus one equals two approach is disastrous or a political suicide for any politician who are on the drive seats at this volatile world. One could argue that they should mean what they say or at least be in the right direction, but the truth of the matter is that we witnessed, year in and year out in any given geographical locations that they are the same old the same old, and it is disgusting. We, as a people need to have the quest for a silver bullet for all our issues? Yes. Do we need to fight for having a better politician? Sure, we do! but how, is the question I would like to ask those who think that they are concerned for the wellbeing of their people and country.

From my perspective, politics is a process and it has been always choosing the lesser of two evils, so I suggest not to be vile opposition figures and nasty detractors all the time to every politician who is there to work. We don’t have to be venomous to any leader who is working to the advancement of unity integration and prosperity of the nation as we used to be for Meles Zenawi, and Mengistu Hailemariam. We don’t need to be in a pause mode and oppose everything regardless. Do our adversaries who are working day and night to create havoc in Ethiopia see our fight as a blessing? Of course, they do and are more than happy to see this fight every single day.  Or do we think that opposing everything will make us look a better educated? No, I don’t think so!!

The educated ones are those with unfathomable wisdom who always see things in its entirety and suggest a workable solution. One should show his level of education by analyzing a situation, seeking alternatives and examine the pros and cons, considering peace and safety of the people and see eminent dangers at hindsight and show the way out or be part of a solution rather than being a barking opposition that seeks attention in every instance.  As the saying goes, “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. Everyone from the street can talk about the gloom and doom of a nation and complain all day along, but our educated ones should select their words and should not attack dignity of their fellow citizens who are trying to deliver but hand-tied. Instead, they should show us a way out from the depth of a hole that we all are in. It is easy to seat afar and complain without trying to understand the complexity of leading a nation of 105 million plus with tens of thousands of different mind-boggling issues. As we all could understand, cumulative distressed situation that all Ethiopians are living day in day out could not be fixed in months and years. Or if someone thinks bad mouthing and condemning the siting prime minister might be a boost for him to deliver a magic bullet to resolve all issues at once, that is deplorable to say the least.

Sky is near for those who sat is one of Ethiopian adage.  Currently, our situation goes from the subsistence farming, to eight million citizens who needs world’s food assistance, to the scarcity of clean drinking water, lack of health institutions, lack of a quality education, to an old and broken infrastructure, to inflation, to the mounting debt of the country and shortage of hard currency, to the 70 % of the population which is under the age of 35 with no future, wide spread of lawlessness and concern of disintegration as a country… etc. I want my respected fellow Ethiopians, to look again deep into a Boolean algebra theory and I will conclude my writing by saying the aged, but a beautiful aphorism practiced in northern part of our country and in Arabian Peninsula. “If my brother and my cousin are fighting each other, I stood by my brother even though my brother is at fault. If my cousin and a stranger are fighting each other, I stood by my cousin even though my cousin is at­­­ fault. This is a proven experimental bridge to a society and a Boolean algebra to me. If your opposition to one entity enhances and boost your adversary, it is better not to be a cannon fodder to hit your own home turf. We should not be an echo chamber for Woyane, OMN, Tigray online fake and hate news propaganda machine and disseminate hateful information about the prime minister who is doing his best to Ethiopia and we don’t have to be played on their hand to infuriate us, creating a wedge among us and see from afar how effective they become to disintegrate this nation.

There is no truth in politics, no permanent enemy or permanent friends, but there is permanent interest. So, as they say, you don’t need to throw the baby with the bath water. If you have concerns about the fate of your country, praise in public and criticize in private and address it to the right place. Unlike TPLF regime, there are many open channels these days.  Besides, there is a third dimension called time factor for everything in the world. In other words, if your vicious attack to the current prime minster emboldens woyane, and OLF, and consequently that causes a civil unrest, weakens and disintegrate your beloved country, you become a short sighted looser who works day and night for your demise. Please don’t shoot your leg.

As an educated person we always have a choice and we shouldn’t let our emotions blind our judgment. Ones we feel that we are clear from danger, then we have time and peaceful land where we can stand, confront and question our captain and we could ask him then, why you chose this route which causes us a relatively big loss, why you do that at this time, why you prefer to act this way…. if we, the people are not getting a worthwhile answer, then we will vote him out thru the ballot box. This is a process that we need to learn and educate our people. Don’t look far, if you turn around you will see the best constitution written ever and practiced for more than 229 years and considered as an envy of the world. Look at 45, more than half of the population believes that he is unfit for the highest office in the land, a disastrous and horrible leader in the history of this nation, but if we are fair and law-abiding citizen, and if we trust in the rule of law, we wait, go out and vote. Help our people, organize and create a society that could help changing the world to be a better place.

 

Yohannes E. Temesgen.

September 7, 2019

I can be reached at: yohannestemesgen@gmail.com

The post Searching for a silver bullet. appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Ethiopia Says Economy Imbalanced, Needs Corrective Actions

The post Plug $10 Billion Hole and Prosper, UN Economists Tell Ethiopia appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Damo Gotamo

Jawar Mohammed couldn’t handle his fifteen-minutes fame. He thinks he is a big shot and above the law. He says anything he wants and gets away with it. Everywhere he goes, he makes controversial statements and agitates the youth to resort to lawlessness. His reckless actions have divided people and caused deaths and destruction in the country. Jawar’s thoughtless speeches and reckless actions are nowhere more apparent than in the SNNPR.

Jawar, the self-appointed Oromo activist and shallow political analyst, has enraged many people in the Southern region. His close personal and business association with Sidama extremists and his support for their illegal activities has caused so much suffering to the people of the region. Jawar’s flirtation with Sidama extremists and his disdain for the rest of the people in the region has made him the most despised man in the region. Talk to anyone in Awassa about Jawar, and you will observe how quickly the expression on the face of the person changes.

In his recent interview with LTV, Jawar has tried to deflect and play down his role in the crimes in Awassa and Sidama zone. He vehemently denied any wrong doing and downplayed his role in inspiring and supporting the Sidama extremists to resort to violence if they wanted to achieve their political agenda. Instead of answering the question put to him by the interviewer, he tried to rebuke her and blamed the government authorities for the problem in the Southern region. Once again, he has shown no concern about the death and destruction in the region. The ethnic extremist’s contempt for the military and federal forces who have sacrificed their lives to restore law and order in the region was apparent in the interview.

Jawar’s role in supporting the crimes of Sidama youths dates back in his refugee days in the United States. In every illegal activity that has taken place in the SNNPR and lack of peace in the area, Jawar’s finger prints are all over the place.

Through his OMN (Oromia Media Network), Jawar played a pivotal role in radicalizing the Sidama youth and sowing the seeds of suspicion among the groups. From his base in Minnesota, home of Oromo extremists, Jawar used to invite people of Sidama origin in his programs to disseminate hateful messages against people in the SNNPR. On many occasions, the self-appointed Sidama activists appearing on OMN preached division and tried to undermine the unity of the people in the region. His guests belittled the current regional structure and disseminated hate against groups in the region. The Sidama ethnic entrepreneurs often made bizarre statements to divide the people of the region.

Jawar was responsible for instigating the conflict between the Sidama and Wolita youths in Awassa in 2018. My sources told me Jawar advised his friends, the leaders of the Ejjeetto, to follow Queros tactics to achieve their goals. He told his criminal friends to restore to violence.

Last year’s mayhem claimed the lives of many people and left thousands of people homeless. Jawar didn’t condemn the crimes. Instead, he sided with the Sidama extremists and defended their crimes.

Nothing good happens in places where Jawar sets his foot. After overseeing the horrid lynching of an innocent man by his followers in Shashmene many months ago, Jawar went to Awassa to agitate and give moral support to his extreme Sidama friends in the city. He advised the Sidama extremists to be persistent in causing lawlessness in Awassa to achieve their goals. As soon as he left Awassa, we saw the Sidama extremists wreak havoc in the city that lasted for more than a year. The extremists forced the closure of government institutions, Banks, and hotels. They committed many crimes in the city that reduced Awassa into an economically weak city.

Little did the Sidama extremists know that Jawar had been undermining the interest of the Sidama people and others to achieve his objectives. While the value of land and property in Shashmene and other cities Oromia regions has gone up, the real estate market in Awassa has declined significantly. The slowdown has affected everyone in the region. Because of the reckless acts of the Sidama ethnic entrepreneurs, people have avoided businesses owned by hardworking Sidama businessmen. Many Sidama businesses were forced to close their doors forever.

During the 2019 Chamebella Holiday celebration, Jawar Mohammed  made one of his divisive speeches to date. He encouraged the Sidama extremists to put more pressure on the government by resorting to violent tactics regularly. Inspired by the speech of the ethnic thug, the Sidama extremists unleashed a series of crimes in Awassa and cities in Sidama Zones.

The infamous 11-11-11 caused so much suffering to the non-Sidamas in the cites in Sidama zone. Among other crimes, the lynching of an 83-year grandfather; the murder of two brothers in Aleta Wondo; the brutal killing of a father and son that ended in cutting their genital caused anger and uproar among Ethiopias in the country and overseas.

Jawar didn’t condemn the crimes of the Sidama extremists. Rather, he poked fun at the misery of the people in the region and expressed his anger over the arrest of the perpetrators of the crimes. He pointed his finger at the members of SEPDM while praising the Ejjeettos and their criminal leaders. He laughed at the sacrifices of the military and the federal police forces.

Jawar is mentally unstable. He is a repeat offender and easily gets carried away if he is a center of attention. A few years ago, he made an inflammatory statement that angered many people. He made the following statement to a gathering of Oromo Muslims in Saint Paul Minnesota:

“What I say to the Oromos is this: I started talking about Islam after meeting
my friend from Gonder. At the place I live, 99% of the people are Muslims.
No one dares speak anything against us. If he does, we hit him with Mencha.’’

Jawar is a violent man. The above statement clearly shows how violent the man is. He won’t shy away from saying anything to instigate violence between different groups. In his speech in Saint Paul, Jawar was advising his fellow Muslims to resort to violence if a Christian said anything against them.

Jawar must know he is just another ethnic extremist. He should stop acting and behaving like the head of the country. His behaviors and actions are unacceptable and are hurting many people. If he doesn’t stop behaving erratically, he will further plunge the country into lawlessness. He reminds people of the first two years of the TPLF regime.

Some Tegdaleyes and their relatives were acting as if they had conquered the world soon after the TPLF took power in the country. They were loud and boastful. However, unlike Jawar and his friends, at least the TPLfies fought the Derge regime tooth and nail. Jawar’s empty bravado is an enigma to many people. Why is Jawar acting like a bigwig? Many believe Jawar’s bizarre behavior is because of the role he played in directing the young Oromo youth to throw dung at Woyane soldiers and instructing his friends in Addis Ababa to steal the 12th grade Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Examination (ESLCE) .

No ethnic group in the Southern region has asked Jawar to be its spokesperson. He should keep his activism to the Oromo cause and stop poking his nose in the affairs of the people in the region. People in the region don’t appreciate his attempt to divide the country’s ethnic group along Kusthtic and Semitic group. They are way far advanced than a narrow ethnic extremists like Jawar. They have lived together for generations and know how to coexistence.

If the people of the SNNPR need advice on any matter, Jawar will be the last person they will look for help. There is nothing in common between the people in the region and ethnic lords like Jawar. For the people of the region, Jawar is just another ethnic extremist. They won’t easily fall for a fast talker, ethnic and religious extremist who makes a living by pitting one group of people with another.

Jawar is a friend of ethnic extremists everywhere. By defending the Sidama extremists, he has shown his utter disdain for the 55 ethnic groups of the region. We haven’t heard him talk about Wolitas, Hadiyas, Kemebatta, and others in the region. He only talks about the Sidama extremists who have a business relationship with him. We know that he is nine million birrs richer today after brokering a deal for the acquisition of the SMN (Sidama Media Network).

Carrying an American passport won’t absolve Jawar from his destructive activities. Being an American citizen comes with responsibilities. From his divisive behavior and actions, it doesn’t appear Jawar has changed much even if he lived fifteen years in the United States.

Citizens everywhere are questioning the government why it has tolerated the destructive behavior of Jawar Mohammed. Many people believe the government should do something to stop the extremist from playing a destabilizing role in the country. He is severely undermining the efforts of the PM and hist team in restoring  peace and security in the country. He belittles government officials and the military. He doesn’t know the limits of his actions. Jailing people who haven’t done anything and leaving an ethnic extremist like Jawar to say anything that destabilizes the country is unacceptable.

Jawar is responsible for the criminal activities of Sidama extremists in the SNNPR. If he doesn’t stop his destructive behavior, he must be forced to join his Ejjeetto friends in jail. He shouldn’t be allowed to continue his reckless behavior. Innocent people and members of the armed forces shouldn’t die because of a dangerous lunatic who doesn’t care about human life. No one is above the law. Jawar must know either his fifteen-minutes fame or the Queros he loves to talk about will not protect him if he tries to break the country.

The post Why Jawar Mohammed is Responsible for the Unrest in the Southern Region of Ethiopia appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Author’s Note: Today, September 11 (12), 2019 is Meskerem1, Ethiopian New Year’s Day (Enqutatash “gift of jewels”).

I wish all Ethiopians a HAPPY, PEACEFUL AND PROSPEROUS MEDEMER NEW YEAR.

Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar consisting of 12 months of 30 days with a 5 or 6 day “13th month” (leap year, this year). The Ethiopian calendar is 7 years and 8 months behind  the Gregorian calendar which is used in most parts of the world.

In this commentary, I share my best wishes for peace, understanding and prosperity in Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Horn region.

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

9/11/2001—A date that shall live in infamy in American history

September 11 is a paradoxical date for me. It is a sad and a happy day.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a gang of 19 terrorists managed to coordinate four heinous attacks that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3 thousand people and injury to more than 6 thousand. Many hundreds died from 9/11 related illnesses. Damage to property exceeded $10 billion. The criminal mastermind of the terror attacks was killed in May 2010. The U.S. launched a “global war on terrorism” which continues to be waged today. Untold millions of innocents throughout the world continue to suffer the consequences of that vicious act of terror.

Only the survivors of that heinous crime can tell the horror of that day.

On 9/11/2001, I watched the Twin Towers crumbling on television in stunned disbelief.

In denial,  I tried to reassure myself I must be watching a sequel to the Towering Inferno.

Alas! The Twin Towers were the real towering inferno!

The genie that came out of the bottle on 9/11 haunts millions of people throughout the world every single day.

9/11 changed America as did 12/7/1941 (the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry in WW II).

We shall remember the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.

We shall remember all the innocents throughout the world who became collateral damage in the years following the 9/11 terror attacks.

9/11/2018 – A date that shall live in glory in Ethiopian- Eritrean history

Between 1998-2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a war that resulted in the deaths of an  estimated 50,000-100,000 people and displacement of nearly million.

The Ethio-Eritrean conflict inflicted “substantial damage to the economic growth and development of Ethiopia and Eritrea and has led to humanitarian suffering on both sides of the border.”

On September 11, 2018 (Meskerem 1, 2010 E.C.), Ethiopia and Eritrea opened their borders for the first time after a 20-year no-war, no-peace stalemate.

At the center of the prolonged conflict was a dispute over the implementation of the Ethio-Eritrean border arbitration commission decision which sought to “delimit and demarcate the colonial treaty border based on pertinent colonial treaties (1900, 1902 and 1908) and applicable international law.”

On September 11, 2018, I was privileged to accompany H.E. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, H.E. Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen, H.E. President Isaias Afeworki and other government officials during the opening of the borders between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the town of Zalambessa and an area called Bure.

It was an incredibly poignant moment for me.

After an absence of 48 years from Ethiopia and Africa, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to witness live and in person the official opening of the borders between the two countries.

For 20 years, leaders of the two countries exchanged salvos of bitter and acrimonious words. Their soldiers occasionally exchanged volleys of mortar and artillery rounds.

As the African saying goes, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

When the leaders of the two countries locked horns for two decades, the people suffered in unimaginable ways.

Families on both sides of the border suffered enforced separation. They were prevented from even attending funerals. All they could do was watch from a distance in sadness and despair.

There were mass expulsions and deportations of ethnic Eritreans from Ethiopia in flagrant violation of international human rights conventions.

Ethiopia could no longer access the ports of Assab and Massawa and had to seek less favorable alternatives.

Eritrea could not access Ethiopian markets and imports.

The U.S. put Eritrea on the list of countries not cooperating with its anti-terrorism efforts followed by U.N. sanctions.

The Ethio-Eritrea border became a theater of no-war and no-peace, and indeed a theater of the absurd.

Fear and loathing characterized the relationship between the two countries for twenty years.

All that changed in June 2018.

PM Abiy made a surprise game-changing announcement.

He declared Ethiopia will accept a 2000 peace agreement with Eritrea over their disputed borders.

In July 2018, he made a historic official state visit to Eritrea and finally broke the ice.

He received a reception fit for a rock star in Asmara.

After his three-day meeting with President Isaias, PM Abiy announced [auth. translation]:

We have agreed to have our airlines and ports to start working, our people to exchange [freely], our embassies to open and for us to come to Asmara with our families on the weekends and enjoy ourselves. Eritreans can come and visit their families in Ethiopia. The rest of the little items on the agenda we will solve by tearing down the border wall and building bridges. We have torn down the wall at the border and are building a bridge over it.

He said his core message to the people of Eritrea is

Medemer” (synergistically come together as force multipliers for each other). If we [engage in] medemer, we could surmount all [our challenges]. We have a broad range opportunities in Northeast Africa. We have amazing people who are brothers. What we need is to abandon hatred and come together in love in medemer.

Following PM Abiy’s visit, President Isaias traveled to Addis Ababa where the people gave him a reception fit for a rock star.

In his Millennium Hall speech, President Isaias said [auth. translation]:

I wish to express the happiness I feel as I bring the greetings, love and good wishes of the Eritrean people to you. I wish to congratulate you on the historic change you have achieved. Within the framework of our traditional and historic mutually beneficial relationship, we have defeated the conspiracy of those who sought to foster hatred and revenge among us. We are fully determined to now focus on development, prosperity and stability and march forward together in all fields of endeavor.  Who, who will dare to ruin our love, sow discord and instability among us, damage us or thwart and destroy our development and progress? We will not allow anyone to [get in our way]. Together, we will recover our losses, work hard together and achieve victory. We will strive for a better future. I am certain of it.

In just a few meetings, the two leaders managed to dissolve the hardened enmity that had kept their countries apart for 20 years.

On September 11, 2018, PM Abiy and President Isaias made history.

They busted down the border wall of hate, death and destruction that had separated them for two decades.

I was a witness at the moment the 20-year old wall was torn down and a new bridge built to reconnect the two peoples for ages to come.

The historic moment occurred at Bure, a desolate arid landscape with little vegetation on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea and Zalambessa, a town located in Tigray region on the Ethio-Eritrean border.

In the early morning hours of September 11, 2018, we flew from Addis Ababa to Assab where we met up with President Isaias and other government officials. From Assab to Bure was a short helicopter flight. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops lined the dusty road in Bure. We walked a few kilometers to reach the ceremonial site where a jubilant crowd of hundreds awaited with great expectation.

As we walked by, I tried to read the faces of the soldiers who stood at attention. They greeted us with welcoming smiles. Some waved their hands. There was not a hint of tension. PM Abiy and President Isaias walked at pretty good clips as the rest of us tried to keep up with them. Women ululated joyously. We shared traditional bread and water under the canopy as the border opening ceremony was conducted.

Following the Bure ceremony, we flew to Asmara and then to Zalambessa.

The turnout in Zalambessa was incredible.

In my estimation, there were at least ten thousand people and possibly more. Women were out in their best traditional dresses ululating, crying, wiping tears from their faces, singing and waving their hands and the flags of the two countries. The crowd shouted out the names of the two leaders. Throngs of young people followed the vehicles carrying the VIPs to the ceremonial site.

It was truly a joyous event.

For me, it was absolute sensory overload.

It was an overwhelming experience of which I will probably write at length in the future.

The border opening event was also a moment of sober reflection and great expectation for me.

If ever someone had told me I would be present at the opening of the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, I would have had that person involuntarily committed for psychiatric observation.

There were many poignant moments that gave me pause for reflection.

As I saw PM Abiy and President Isaias walking side by side on the dusty road in Bure to bury the hatchet at the border, I came to understand the futility and absurdity of war.

Is war ever necessary?

I remembered the lines from Robert Graves: “To you who’d read my songs of War/ And only hear of blood and fame,/ I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)/ “War’s Hell!”

It must have been hell in Bure in February 1999. No one knows for sure how many died in that parched wasteland.

How many were buried or left abandoned in the trackless sand and turned to dust?

Bure is a surreal place. It reminded me of the sun-scorched Death Valley desert in Eastern California.

I tried to imagine the thousands from both sides who died in that desolate desert and their surviving families and loved ones.

What was gained for all the lives lost, for the broken bones and mangled and maimed bodies?

I paused to look for evidence of enmity between the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the rocks and sands of Bure.

Dead men speak never. But if only the rocks could speak. What horrors they would have related.

The sands of time speak only in the hourglass and rocks are stone deaf.

Thomas Hobbes opined the rule of human existence in the state of nature was “the war of all against all.”

In two countries that were one for eons, with their civilization that goes back for thousands of years, the rule should be “the peace of all for all.”

When I returned to Ethiopia after nearly five decades, the only greeting I heard everywhere was “Selam neh?” (Are you at peace?) “Selam hun” (stay in peace).

No one ever asked me, “Are you at war?” Nor wished me, “War be upon you.”

It is always “Peace be upon you.”

In my youth, the greeting “Selam Neh” did not exist. For us, it was “Tadias?” (What’s happening?)  The response was “Alena!” (the equivalent of “hanging in there”).

I remember a special moment when we were all walking to the ceremonial event venue in Zalambessa.

As I looked back, thousands of people were following them at a distance.

I paused for a moment and asked myself, “Who is really leading this march for peace? Are the people leading the leaders from behind or the leaders leading the people from the front?”

There was no question in my mind that the people were leading the leaders to peace from behind, thousands strong. The two leaders and their officials were being shepherded by the people.

I lapsed poetic. “How beautiful to see the sheep finally herding their shepherds!”

If the two leaders for any reason had wanted to change their minds that day and decided not to go through with it, could they have done so?

I had agonized over the Ethio-Eritrean conflict for a very long time because I have always believed the two people are one and the same.

Kings, princes, presidents, prime ministers and even colonial powers had reasons to divide the two peoples.

I agonized because untold numbers of Ethiopians have died defending Eritrea and untold number of Eritreans have died defending Ethiopia.

If only the dead could speak.

I always hoped (to a point of conviction) peace will reign between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the not too distant future.

But often, my hopes for peace were dashed.

In a 2016 commentary, I vented the leaders of both countries were not having a war, just playing war games of mass distraction.

But I never imagined I would live to see, feel and experience my own prophesy for myself.

In my June 10, 2018 commentary entitled, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers”, I wrote of my deepest wishes for peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia:

The guns silenced, the suffering people of Ethiopia and Eritrea may now speak, shout out, that the two countries hereafter “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Witnessing swords beaten into plowshares is a source of great joy for me.

On September 11, 2018, almost exactly 4 months to the day I wrote that commentary, I was blessed to experience the great joy I yearned as I witnessed the leaders of the two countries officially open their borders, bury their hatchets and take a vow before the world that they will beat their swords into ploughshares and become a beacon of peace for the Horn and the rest of Africa.

All I can say is, “my cup runneth over”.

War and peace

It is said “war is hell”.

I say, “To hell with war.”

What I saw in Bure and Zalambessa on September 11, 2018 was that war can destroy the human body and crush bones, annihilate and lay waste to the landscape, but it can do nothing to the human spirit to survive and thrive in peace.

What was the cause of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that resulted in so many deaths?

Was it really about resetting of the colonial border?

Irredentism?

Wounded pride?

One-upmanship?

Brinksmanship?

Gamesmanship?

Revenge?

Peace is not about leaders and what they do or do not.

In history, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers and generals have started wars but there is nary an example in history where the people rose up on their own and demanded to go to war.

History also shows that those who have started wars are rarely the ones to finish it.

In my view, peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea was inevitable.

I would like to think of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea as a family feud that sometimes gets way out of hand.

Desmond Tutu said, “You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”

That I believe is the case in the Ethiopian-Eritrean families.

Ethiopians and Eritreans are God’s gift to each other.

They must come together in a process of atonement, healing and reconciliation.

Ending the no-war, no-peace situation could have taken longer, but it was destined to occur.

That is because the flip side of the peace coin is brotherhood and sisterhood.

Peace is not simply the absence of war. Is the Middle East today at peace or at war?

Peace is not an option for the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea, indeed for the whole Horn region. It is the only thing.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the people in the Horn of Africa “must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

Regardless of the propaganda of the war and hatemongers, the people of Ethiopian and Eritrea are brothers and sisters who have been manipulated into becoming enemies of each other.

They are part of a single garment of destiny.

To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Ethiopians and Eritreans are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Put simply, Ethiopians and Eritreans will swim or sink together.

I shall prophesy in a few years Ethiopia and Eritrea will neither swim nor sink.

They shall spread their wings and soar over the borderless African skies to the amazement of all.

The naysayers, the prophets of doom and gloom, the cynics, defeatist, skeptics, pessimists, losers, bellyachers, grumblers, dogmatists, fanatics, bigots and the haters will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Ethiopians and Eritreans do not have a separate racial or ethnic identity or even nationality. Such classifications are “social constructs”, artificial institutions created by societies.

Their natural and irrevocable identity is their humanity.

But their natural identity is infected by the deadly man-made diseases of ethnocentrism, sectarianism, tribalism, nationalism, authoritarianism, chauvinism, dogmatism, egotism, fanaticism, etc.

We must support peace, reconciliation and good relations between the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea not because of their leaders but despite them.

Our support for peace must not be based on our perception of the actions or inactions of the leaders.

Leaders come and go, but the people stay, and as new generations come, the prospect for peace increases.

At the elementary level, peace to me is an existential condition in which people resolve their differences without violence but through dialogue, discussion, negotiation and compromise.

In America, there is a popular slogan of dissent, “No justice, no peace.”

In other words, if there is no justice, there will be violence.

If justice and peace are related, then the rule of law must reign supreme to protect the rights of people.

There must be accountability and political, social, legal and gender equality. The people have a natural right to personal security and equal opportunity to meet their basic needs.

Over the past year, I have mulled over the teachable moments in the Ethio-Eritrean war.

As elementary and obvious the lessons are, they have profound significance for me.

Lesson #1:

Ethiopians and Eritreans are not enemies. They are brothers and sisters. They have family feuds, but what family doesn’t?

Ethiopians and Eritreans are one people divided by misunderstanding, misinformation, miscommunication and miscalculation.

Both peoples have deadly common enemies called poverty, ignorance, disease, bigotry, gender inequality, youth unemployment, etc.

Lesson #2:

The borders between the two countries exist in the minds of people who want to keep the two peoples separate and at each other’s throats. The physical borders are mere reflections of the narrow borders of the minds of those who want to keep the two peoples in a state of fear and loathing. What is the point of having open borders but closed minds? I am greatly inspired by the firm commitment of the two leaders to tear down the mental wall of hate, distrust, suspicion and doubt separating them and build bridges of love, friendship, good will and good faith.

Lesson # 3:

The war of bullets and words must now be replaced by a battle for hearts and minds of the people. Leaders must reach out to the people and engage them in shaping the destines of their countries. The alternative will leave the people in perpetual poverty.

Karl Marx in the 19th century warned, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.”

Today, I would say, “A specter is haunting the world – the specter of globalization.”

In the 19th century, it was the “scramble for Africa”. In the 21st, it is a scramble for the globalization of Africa.

Global inequality is accelerating at breakneck pace. In Africa, millions of people continue to suffer from limited access to education and basic health care services. Africa carries crushing foreign debt, and without some massive debt forgiveness program, I can see only the darkness of poverty and privation at the end of the endless tunnel.

Leaders must create channels for the people to communicate with them. They must listen to the people and engage them in give and take. Leaders not only lead but also teach. The best way to teach the people is by exemplary leadership.

Lesson #4: The future belongs to the youth. The greatest challenge for all leaders in the Horn and throughout Africa is to win the hearts and minds of their youth. While Africa has the youngest population in the world, youth unemployment remains high and the prospect for youth economic development is dismal. Leaders must leave a lasting legacy for the next generation. They must put the interests of the new generation in front of the last. John Donne wrote, “the dust of great persons’ graves is speechless.” Only the changed and improved lives of the youth will speak of the greatness of their leaders. Nations do not die from wars nor live because of peace. They die when their youth lose hope and confidence in their future and live when their youth have faith, optimism and conviction that tomorrow will be better than today and next year better than this year.

Lesson # 5:  The only way for Ethiopians and Eritreans to survive and thrive is through Medemer. They can become force multipliers for each other if they work together for mutual benefit. PM Abiy has spoken about his ideas of “Medemer”.

As I explained in my recent commentary, “‘Medemer’” is the road map out of the wilderness of the Valley of Fools in the Horn of Africa.

In that commentary, I speculatively explained how PM Abiy and President Isaias did the impossible.

I concluded as follows:

As goes the Horn of Africa, so goes the rest of Africa.

The Horn is the laboratory, the proving grounds, for all of Africa.

Will there be endless wars and conflicts that will bury the continent in the abyss of poverty?

Are we on the cusp of a new era of collective prosperity and progress that will ensure Africa’s rightful place on the international stage?

If the Horn countries can come together (Medemer), make peace and build the foundation for peaceful and prosperous relations, the rest of Africa will follow in their footsteps.

Wishing all Ethiopians and Eritreans a Happy Prosperous Medemer 2012!

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Asmelash Yohannes, PhD
Mekelle University School of Law)

We are pretty pre-occupied with politics.  Our life is consumed with political rumours. Social media posts are awash with ADP said this; Jawar Mohammed  said that; Lemma Megersa said this: Getachew Reda blurted this or that …..  However, there is something that must be dealt with immediately.

Our universities are becoming a place for extremism and intolerance as a result of the unbridled participation of university instructors in politics. University instructors are spending a large chunk of their time and energy licking their political masters’ tails.  It is not an exaggeration to say that an entire generation is being sacrificed for cheap political gains. You have university instructors who have been teaching at public universities for more than a decade. These people are dominating the social media and main stream media. You see them almost on daily basis on national and regional TVs. They don’t talk anything new. They are like parrots: they simply repeat what they said year ago. You see them uttering words that you don’t expect from a university instructor. Moreover, they post facebook messages almost on daily basis.

However, if you dig deep into their academic records, you quickly realize that most of them were mediocre students and you wonder how they have landed an academic position. These people have been teaching at public universities for more than a decade. But they miserably failed to publish a single article worth of academic discourse. Their world vision is very narrow. They defend a political party that is based in their respective regions. For example, a university instructor based in Tigray fiercely defends TPLF. Another instructor based in Gondar or Bahirdar is engrossed disappointedly in the politics of ADP and his unhinged criticism of TPLF or ODP is appalling. A university instructor from Ambo or Jimma is acting submissively as a mouthpiece for ODP.

It is shame to see colleagues being used by political parties to make cheap political points.  I have sympathy and sometimes an absolute disdain for my colleagues. My sympathy is based on the fact that my colleagues cannot survive on their meagre government salary.  Inflation is skyrocketing and life has become unbearable for them. Thus, they have to do some odd jobs to support their family. This in fact includes writing what they are being instructed to write by their money masters.  TPLF, ODD and ADP understand my colleagues’ loopholes. These parties have the money and my colleagues need that money. Consequently, Ethiopian politics have created a new market that is not doing any favour to the democratic transition of the country.

On the other hand, my disdain emanates from two facts.  For one thing, my colleagues are not writing something that could be used as an input to the economic and democratic development of the country. They write rubbish posts on facebook and they talk nonsense on their TV appearances. For the other thing, they are not allocating sufficient time for academic works. They are always short of time. You cannot even have a proper talk with them during coffee time. Their eyes are always stuck on their facebook pages. They spend their time counting the number of likes they get for their facebook posts. This is really embarrassing.  My colleagues’ obsession with social media fame is destroying a generation right in front of our eyes. Being a university instructor is a prestigious position. Our students come from different corners of the country. Some of our students may be supporters of TPLF while others may support ADP or ODP. However, when a university instructor posts extreme ideas on social media and stands in front of his students to teach the next day, he definitely loses the respect and trust of his students. They do not believe that he would treat them equally with the other students who share the instructor’s political views. I had numerous discussions on this matter with several students over the past few years. One of the issues that repeatedly pop up during our discussion is that university instructors are giving them the lowest grades (‘C’ or ‘D’ or even ‘F’) because they are from a certain ethnic background or because they support a certain political party.  I always take their complaints with a pinch of salt. I don’t believe that my colleagues would go that low to hurt their students. But university instructors should blame themselves for creating such perception due to the toxic messages they are posting on social media.

My advice to colleagues all over the country is that you can support any political party that you like. As a human rights lawyer, I understand that you are entitled to hold or express any political view. But it should not be at the expense of the future of the country and your insatiable appetite for 15 minutes political fame is destroying an entire generation.  My concern is that the views you are promoting on social media are biased and imbalanced. Some of the views border extremism and they are not based on facts. I also urge the ministry of education to come up with some kind of guideline on the use of social media and main stream media by university instructors. At the end of the day, these colleagues are employees of the federal government irrespective of the location of the university where they teach. Therefore, the ministry of education needs to get to grips with the gravity of the current situation as quickly as possible.

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This is short English summery of Wazema Radio 20 pages assessment report on Ethiopian economy.

[Wazema Radio] – With his election as the chairperson of the ruling EPRDF, Abiy Ahmed (PhD) instantly become the Prime Minister of Ethiopia. He came to the throne as three years of wide spread public protest, accompanied by two State of Emergency Declarations, pushed the ruling elite to look inward and undertake adjustment. One among the many promises of reform that Abiy made in his election was reforming the economy in a way that could create jobs for the youth, ensure macro stability, reform State-Owned Enterprises (SoEs), bring the private sector to the fore and open key sectors of the economy for private investment. And at the core of these promises lay the objectives of resolving the imbalances of the economy, increasing the inclusiveness of the economy and maintaining the growth momentum of the past 16 years.

In light of this, Abiy’s administration has spent the last year grappling with an economy that hosts serious structural as well as transitory challenges. In terms of actions, the administration has brought peace with Eritrea, opened the logistic sector for foreign investment, approved a Public Private Partnership (PPP) law, issued a law that reforms the telecom sector, embarked on massive Doing Business reform and has given Ethiopians living abroad a chance to engage in various investments previously out of their reach.

If one is to scrutinize Abiy’s first year in office, in light of structural and transient economic affairs, it could be concluded that the year was one with more talks, but less did. Abiy’s promises of restrained fiscal policy, for instance, has not materialized. What has been visible over the past year was that recurrent expenditure of the state has been increasing, new (formally unappraised) projects are coming to the scene, multiple events and ceremonies are being held and massive renovation of public offices (including the PMO) is going on. As such, it is puzzling where the budgetary restraint is going to come.

Although monetary stability is one of the areas of promise of Abiy, it failed to achieve it in the last year, with the gap between the formal and parallel markets staying around 13 Br and inflation standing at 18%. The administrative measure taken by law enforcement on parallel market has pushed it to evolve to a decentralized function.

Ethiopia’s debt distress remains in the moderately high regime. Although Abiy’s administration managed to reschedule some outstanding debt payments, it did not bring fundamental change in the debt management framework. Total debt stock remains increasing, although new additions are largely concessional. In this regard, the strain in the relationship with China is putting huge pressure on the administration.

With export remaining static, at around 2.8 billion dollars, and import continuing to increase, debt repayment has become a huge challenge for the administration. Nothing new has come in changing the performance of exports.

A major challenge for the administration, however, comes from massive youth unemployment. As such, the administration, except institutionalizing the problem under a newly formed Job Creation Commission, is yet to introduce a new jobs pack with defined focus areas, operational mechanisms, business development support and financing backup. The trend is that of using the old, but largely inefficiency and confused, systems of organizing SMEs. Although the state still funds the Revolving Youth Fund, a dedicated financing window, the effectiveness of the fund is hugely challenged by poor administration, lack of business development support, inflexibility in list of businesses financed, mismatch between financing demand and supply, lag between approval and disbursement, and many more. Weak and infant private sector means that the job creation impact of the sector remains low.

In terms of industrialization, too, the approach has been to attract as much FDI as possible. But many of the Industrial Parks, developed by use of financing obtained through Ethiopia’s debut Euro Bond, are still looking for investors. Total annual export of the Parks stays at 110 million dollars, way lower than the 2 billon dollar target. Although it is decided that the Parks will be privatized, the process and whether it is feasible is not yet clear.
The financial sector also remains under distress. The way forward for Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) is not clear, with its NPL standing at 33%. CBE also hosts huge state related liability, although its credit portfolio is not public. The private banks are well capitalized for the current market, but this does not mean that they can withstand competitive pressure from outside, if the sector is liberalized. As such, the guidance from the central bank in terms of creating competitive banks was no different than before.
In line with this, it is recommended that:

1. The government ought to indicate clear policy lines to address structural challenges (such as lower productivity, static export, unemployment, low industrial growth, high trade deficit, expanding current account deficit, inflation, exchange rate depreciation….).
2. Support to private sector ought to be aligned with the national job creation agenda.
3. Suspicion between the federal and regional governments ought to be resolved as this hampers effective economic policy implementation.
4. Expenditure saving fiscal policy ought to be the day-to-day norm in the state.
5. Supply chains of basic consumables ought to be returned back to the private sector.
6. Debt management policy ought to be reviewed
7. Monetary policy ought to be disentangled from fiscal policy and it needed to get away from its long overdue deficit financing orientation.
8. Job creation schemes ought to be integrated and so should the financing of SMEs.
9. Relation with neighbors, particularly with Eritrea, ought to be based on principles and ought to be arranged in a way that avoids economic meddling.
10. Overall market reform should precede privatization.

Wazema Radio, 2019

You can access full Amharic version report here

The post Ethiopia’s Economy under Abiy Ahmed: Hopeful Trajectory or Distant Dream? appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Prof. Alemayehu G. Mariam

Africa’s First Responder for Peace, Ethiopia’s Globetrotter for Investment and Hardest Working Man in Politics

We are beginning to see hard evidence of PM Abiy Ahmed’s return on investments in domestic and regional peace initiatives, good governance and structural reforms and his unrelenting campaign to change the global image of Ethiopia as a land of opportunity for citizens and non-citizens alike.

I call this a “peace dividend”.

When you invest in peace at home and abroad, peace invests in you in ways that are infinite.

Peace and prosperity go hand in hand.

In July 2012, I issued my prescription for peace in Ethiopia in my commentary, “Dreams of an Ethiopia in Peace:

To restore Ethiopia to good health, we must begin national dialogue, not only in the halls of power, the corridors of the bureaucracy and the military barracks but also in the remotest villages, the church and masjid meeting halls and other places of worship,  the schools and colleges, the neighborhood associations and in the taverns, the streets and markets and wherever two or more people congregate.  We have no choice but to begin talking to each other with good will and in good faith.

Peace talks and peace actions are taking place all over Ethiopia despite the secret conspiracies and machinations of the warlords and lords of war to spread rumors of war, fear, loathing, strife and civil war.

The “peace infection” incubated in Ethiopia is spreading all over the Horn of Africa.

World leaders like what Ethiopia is doing with peace at home and abroad and are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Over the past, several weeks, I have been observing with sheer amazement as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed crisscrossed the globe trying to cash in his peace dividend by being Ethiopia’s drum major for trade, investment, business and tourism. 

“He’s here in Africa. No, he’s there in Asia. Yes, he’s in the Middle East.”

Now, you see him, now you don’t. But when you need him, he’s always going around the world as Ethiopia’s promoter-in-chief.

The amazing thing about Abiy Ahmed is this: If he is not chasing peace in the Horn of Africa, he is chasing investors, business people and tourists all over the world and doing his best to bring them back to Ethiopia.

But that’s not all.

Whenever he goes abroad, he never comes back empty handed. He will at least bring back with him Ethiopian migrants held prisoners  in foreign jails without due process of law or makes deals to send young Ethiopians to study on scholarships.

If James Brown was the “hardest working man in showbusiness”, Abiy Ahmed is surely the hardest working man in politics.

“People are looking at Ethiopia in a new way.”

When PM Abiy visited Israel on September 1, 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu was quick to register his amazement:

During the year-and-a-half that you took office, you’ve become one of the most important and influential leaders in Africa. Your courage in promoting the standing of Ethiopia both internationally and regionally is exemplary, and I commend you on your achievements. You are making every effort to change the economy inside Ethiopia. I commend you for that, because frankly, Mr. Prime Minister, I do the same here, and it has results. People are looking at Ethiopia in a new way.

Our trade is small, only $300 million, and can grow 10 times [and] can cooperate  trade and investments, as well as cooperation in security, agriculture, water management and technology.

Deciphering Netenyahu’s “diplomatese” (the esoteric language of diplomats), the message is this: Abiy Ahmed in a very short time became an African leader, primus inter pares (first among equals) through courage, integrity, decisiveness, consensus-building and sharing the limelight. He is “exemplary” because all other African leaders should follow in his footsteps. He is “changing the economy” just as Netenyahu did in 2004, by aggressively pushing free-market economic reforms and by reducing the public sector, privatizing major state owned industries including banks, the national airline and shipping.

Today, “people (around the world) are looking” at Ethiopia as a land of business and investment opportunity and a prized tourism spot.

According to the May 2019 World Travel & Tourism Council, Ethiopia recorded the biggest growth in its tourism economy with growth by 48.6% in 2018, the largest of any country in the world.

Just get a load of that!!

Israeli investors are willing, able and ready to put their money where their mouth is and increase investments and trade by ten-fold.

I am puzzled by Netenyahu’s cryptic remark the “people are looking at Ethiopia in a new way?

Pray tell, “What is the old way people looked at Ethiopia before PM Abiy took office?

Let the truth be told.

For the past  27 years, people looked at Ethiopia as Africa’s beggar nation, the land of famine and starvation, the land of corruption, the (4th worst jailor) jailhouse of journalists and the land of ethnic apartheid.

What did Netanyahu really mean when he said, “People are looking at Ethiopia in a new way.”

He did not explain, but his words are self-evident.

People are looking at Ethiopia in a new way because Ethiopia now has 1) a courageous leader who has risen to the very top of African leadership totem pole as a statesman and peacemaker, 2) a salesman-in-chief who is always promoting investments, trade, tourism and business in Ethiopia, 3) a reformer who has taken significant steps to change the domestic economy to make it more attractive to investors and businesses and 4) a visionary who has made Ethiopia a bellwether of change in Africa.

What gave Netenyahu so much confidence and certainty to say Ethio-Israeli trade and investment could expand ten-fold?

All I can say is the blunt-talking Netenyahu knows what he knows and means what he says.

I can also say Abiy Ahmed has no problems playing at the poker table of the card sharks of the Middle East.  

When PM Abiy visited South Korea on August 26, 2018, he told the South Korean business community and investors that Ethiopia is open for business and they are all invited to take part in the country’s expansive growth:

Ethiopia has many features that make it attractive to foreign investment. The reform of business climate currently being implemented involves opening up sectors that were previously closed to foreign investors We hope to create more opportunities for attracting foreign direct investment, especially from our friendly country — Korea.

Ethiopia and South Korea have a very special common history written in blood, sweat and tears.

When North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel 1950 to invade South Korea, 6,037 Ethiopian soldiers fought for 5 years to stop and repel them. Some 122 Ethiopians lost their lives defending South Korea and 500 were wounded. None were taken prisoner.

An Ethiopian veteran of the Kagnew Battalion who fought in the Korean War observed, “ We went with Americans to the front line and fought together. From that, we helped a great nation, South Korea, to survive.”

South Korea not only survived but today thrives as the fourth largest economy in Asia and the eleventh in the world.

Korean African Foundation (KAF) Ambassador Yeon-ho Choi was reassuring: “I believe the visit of His Excellency Abiy Ahmed Ali … and this business forum organized on the occasion of the visit of His Excellency will serve as an important opportunity to discuss further economic and business cooperation between Korea and Ethiopia.”

During PM Abiy’s visit to Japan on August 29, 2019 (the Seventh Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD7)), Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his full support for PM Abiy’s domestic economic reforms and encouraged Ethiopia to take a leadership role:

I highly value Prime Minister Abiy’s efforts to promote harmony within Ethiopia and to realize peace and stability in the region. I hope that Ethiopia will play a role in TICAD7 to promote business taking into account Ethiopia’s experiences in achieving economic development.

PM Abe commended PM Abiy for his role and “efforts to achieve the peace and stability of the Horn of Africa including the promotion of peace with Eritrea.” He said Japan will support democratization reforms in Ethiopia and will support the election in Ethiopia through “The Project for Electoral Support in Ethiopia”. He pledged to support Ethiopia in improving agricultural productivity and health and medical services and human resources development.

PM Abiy expressed his appreciation “for Japan’s cooperation in the Horn of Africa, and   briefed Prime Minister Abe on Ethiopia’s ongoing political and economic reforms. He shared the vision of making Ethiopia one of the top 5 leading economies in Africa through “homegrown economic reforms” currently in the pipeline and called for increased Japanese investments in the Ethiopia’s agriculture, tourism, technology and mining sectors. He asked for educational and training opportunities for Ethiopia youth in Japan.

PM Abiy and PM Abe were on the same page moving forward in strengthened partnership and collaboration.

Abiy Ahmed’s peace dividend

Investments in peace yield returns in prosperity and progress.

Investment in war yields returns in death and destruction.

PM Abiy is using purposeful conflict resolution at home and in the Horn region to create conditions for free markets, investments, trade and tourism.

Let’s face facts.

No one wants to invest in a country that is wracked with conflict and strife.

No one wants to invest in a country whose leaders babble infantile complaints against neoliberalism or believe they can bring economic growth by sloganeering about  “revolutionary democracy” and “developmental state”.

Ethiopia’s phrase-mongering rulers over the past 27 years fantasized about making Ethiopia an African tiger (patterned after the Asian tiger states).

They thought they could bring about rapid economic growth and improvements in living standards by practicing voodoo economics in an empire of corruption.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Foreign  direct  investment  (FDI), trade and tourism are the only viable options available to Ethiopia for long term economic growth.

Ethiopia is a country that has long suffered under central socialist economic planning and kleptocratic developmental state  (state should lead economy development, not free market) corruption.

The “developmental state” and “revolutionary democracy” have saddled Ethiopia with crushing debt at 60 percent of GDP.

In July, the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance reported Ethiopia’s total debt from foreign and local lenders surpassed $52.3 billion

Last week, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa told Ethiopia it “must attract new investment and reduce its debt if it’s to achieve the government’s economic growth and job creation targets.”

Bloating debt will create “debt distress” and discourage the “private sector because Ethiopia will not be a creditworthy country.”

In the World Bank’s 2019 “Doing Business” report, Ethiopia ranks 159/194 in the world and 29/48 out of Africa.

Having tried and miserably failed with centralized state economic planning, foreign direct investment (FDI) (open trade and business and tourism) seems to be the only practical lifeline for Ethiopia to become “an African lion”. (Let the tiger stay in Asia).

FDIs are generally regarded as the most efficient, stable and effective sources of capital for developing countries. They are a much better alternative to addiction to borrowing and foreign handouts.

As the experiences of the Asian tigers have shown, FDIs have a dynamic effect on the local economy by providing a source of direct capital, transforming existing domestic capacities,facilitating  knowledge/technology transfer, improving use of existing  resources, access to global markets and  growth  in productivity and so on.

Countries interested in attracting FDI have provided a variety of fiscal (tax holidays/lower taxes) and financial incentives (grants,  subsidized credits, building of infrastructure, equity participation and other preferential treatment),  and other preferential treatment. They have also used  other  incentives  including subsidization of infrastructure projects, foreign  exchange  privileges,  and in some cases even granting them monopoly rights.

Prosper Africa, Prosper Ethiopia

Ethiopian Americans are in a unique position to help their motherland with investment, trade, business and tourism.

The old African saying is, “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

I think we in Ethiopia have an opportunity to put that old adage on its head by showing the grass could indeed benefit from the rivalry of two elephants, better yet the rivalry of the eagle and the dragon.

The Trump Administration launched its “Prosper Africa” program at the Corporate Council on Africa’s U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Mozambique on June 19, 2019.

“Prosper Africa” seeks to promote prosperity, security, and stability in U.S.-Africa relations and use trade and investment as vehicles.

The recently-resigned National Security Advisor, John Bolton said the U.S. must counter the “predatory practices” of China and Russia by building up ties with African economies and creating opportunities for American businesses in Africa.

In March 2013, I wrote a commentary entitled, “The Dragon Eating the Eagle’s Lunch in Africa?” and noted:

For the past decade, the U.S. has been nonchalant and complacent about China’s “invasion” and lightning-fast penetration of Africa. It was a complacency born of a combination of underestimation, miscalculation, hubris and dismissive thinking that often comes with being a superpower. But the U.S. is finally reading the memo.

I concluded:

So far, we have heard a screaming Eagle grousing about the unfair advantage, immorality, amorality, opportunism and new colonialism of the Dragon. But will we ever see a fightin’ Eagle standing up to a fire-breathin’ Dragon in Africa and “win”?

I am gratified to say my “memo” was “delivered” to the White House  six years after I wrote it.

To me, Prosper Africa is proof that the screaming eagle has become a fighting eagle in Africa.

There is no more fiddling around with AGOA (The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which passed in 2000 and offered as a one-way, non-reciprocal preference program that rewards about 40 African countries with a significant degree of duty-free access to U.S. markets.

AGOA essentially seeks to enhance select Sub-Saharan African countries’ access to U.S. markets provided they meet certain criteria such as establishing a market-based economy, an implementation of the rule of law, elimination of barriers to U.S. trade and investment,   system to combat corruption and bribery etc.

Prosper Africa is a two-way trade and investment program.

The aim is to create a 200 percent increase in investment, trade and business between the U.S.  and Africa by helping  companies, investors, and workers both in Africa and the United States.

Prosper Africa aims to provide a one-stop shop that makes the full range of services available to U.S. and African businesses and investors. Among important services include “loan guarantees, market intelligence, building greater awareness of African investment opportunities in the U.S., matching US and African companies, expanding and  strengthening US trade and investment hub, leveraging USAID’s private sector teams to help facilitate deals and providing support for trade and regulatory reform in African countries.”

Prosper Africa should deliver on the promise of the 1903 Treaty of Commerce Between the United States and Ethiopia.

There is little doubt that trade, investment and business are the most direct productive paths for the future relations  of the U.S and Ethiopia/Africa.

US businesses and investors have many reasons to invest in Ethiopia and the rest of  Africa:

Six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world (including Ethiopia) are in Africa.

There is a large African diaspora community in the U.S. that can facilitate business, trade, investment and tourism with Africa.

African countries have a large consumer market for U.S. businesses to access.

American companies can bring significant capital, innovation, and proven solutions, and adhere to the highest standards of transparency, quality, and social responsibility.

American companies are increasingly recognizing that Africa’s growth presents immense opportunities.  Many U.S. companies are beginning to expand their investments in Africa.

U.S. businesses can help build Africa’s infrastructure and other development projects and expand economic growth.

Africa can benefit from a diversified investor pool. The European Union and China have large investments, but American companies can bring quality, state-of-the-art products and services, and ethical business practices to Africa.

The US wants to grow Africa’s middle class, promote youth employment opportunities, improve the business climate, and fairly compete with China and other nations who have business interests in Africa.

U.S. tourist activity to Africa is on the rise and with better information and promotions, the continent can be a magnate in the American tourism industry.

Prosper Africa for Progress in Ethiopia  

There are many different kinds of Ethiopians today:

those who do the heavy lifting and make sure Ethiopia prosper and those who prefer to see Ethiopia wallowing in a vortex of poverty;
those who take responsibility and make things happen and those who let things happen and squirm like a worm in silence;
those who make things happen and those who wonder what happened, scratch their heads and chase their tails;
those who say what they mean and mean what they say and those empty barrels who windbag about what they did not say and did not mean;
those who are filled with optimism and hope and those who languish in pessimism and despair;
those losers who sob and mope around moaning and groaning and those who joyously shriek out “Eureka! The sky is not the limit in Ethiopia!” and are sick and tired of the moaner and groaners;|
those who see Ethiopia as a rising state and those who see her as a failed state;
those who believe Ethiopia’s best days are yet to come and those who believe Ethiopia will never have a good day; and
those who see things as they are in Ethiopia and ask “Why?” and those who dream of things and ask “Why not?”

Abiy Ahmed is the kind of Ethiopian who makes things happen and does the heavy lifting to get it done.

He means what he says and says what he means.

He sees Ethiopia as a rising state on the African horizon. He believes Ethiopia’s best days are yet to come. He dreams of things that never were and asks, “Why not?”

That is why world leaders are pledging their support for Ethiopia.

That is why investors, businesspeople, traders and tourists will flock to Ethiopia.

I shall prophesy that in the next few years, the world will beat a path to Ethiopia’s door!

That is because Ethiopia will be open for business to anyone with the good will,  good faith and good sense to invest and Prosper in Ethiopia.

Let’s make Ethiopia the African economic lion and not a shadow image of the Asian tiger!

Ask not what Abiy Ahmed is doing to improve the Ethiopian economy, ask if you are doing your fair share to help Ethiopia to become economically strong.

The post The Peace Dividend of Abiy Ahmed’s Global Diplomacy in Ethiopia appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

The upcoming Sidama referendum should trigger a much-needed nationwide conversation on ethnic and Ethiopian identity.

by Adem K Abebe

18 Sept 2019

By the end of November 2019, Ethiopia may have one more autonomous regional state within its borders. Late last month, the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia has announced that a referendum to decide on the Sidama ethnic group’s request for statehood will be held on November 13. The announcement came on the back of deadly clashes between Ethiopian security forces and activists seeking to unilaterally proclaim a Sidama regional state.

The Sidama are hoping to become the 10th member state of the Ethiopian Federation and they are almost certain to get their wish following the referendum. Nevertheless, giving the Sidama the autonomy they seek within the Ethiopian Federation is going to take a lot more than just a referendum, and delays and frustrations on the way may be unavoidable.

Formal decentralisation and de facto centralisation

Ethnicity has been central to Ethiopia‘s political discourse since the emergence of the “nationality” question in the 1960s. The attempts of the former communist Derg regime to forge a common national identity around “scientific socialism” failed spectacularly and the regime was forced to allocate a great deal of human and material resources to battle rebel groups formed around ethnic identities throughout its reign.

Despite its repeated attempts to suppress many ethnic identities of the peoples of Ethiopia, in May 1991 forces loyal to various ethnic groups within the country took over control and formed a democratic republic based on ethnic federalism.

The Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of four ethnic-based parties led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, formed a transitional government and started governing the country. The biggest opposition force at the time, the Oromo Liberation Front, was similarly an ethnonationalist entity. The Ethiopianist/nationalist voices were in disarray and systematically excluded.

The transitional government constituted 14 regions, principally along ethnic lines. The 1995 constitution continued the ethnic-based federal arrangement, with a critical adjustment. The five regions that occupied the southern part of the country, including Sidama region, were merged into a single multi-ethnic Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPR).

The Sidama resisted the merger to no avail. The discontent was exacerbated by the fact that two ethnic groups with significantly lower population sizes, the Afar and Harari, were granted their own regional states.

The formation of SNNPR against the wishes of the Sidama was not the end of the story. Ethiopia’s ethnicity-based constitution allows for ethnic groups without their own regional states to form regional states, and those with a regional state to secede from the country.

Most audaciously, these guarantees are demand-based, requiring nothing more than overcoming remarkably flexible procedural hurdles. So for the Sidama, at least on paper, getting autonomy was a done deal.

However, there was one major catch. The highly decentralised formal constitutional framework was designed to function in a context where a ruling party founded on “democratic centralism” – the same governing concept that the Derg enamoured – is in power.

This centralist reflex within the governing coalition was antithetical to the decentralised nature of the constitution and took no time to replace it. In the long term, the de facto supreme authority of the EPRDF was used to persuade and at times outright suppress demands for new statehood, including notably from the Sidama.

The on-demand secession provision (both internal and external) of the constitution, therefore, was crafted with a certain political context in mind. This meant that no systematic effort was made to deliberate upon and establish detailed legislative and administrative procedures to give effect to the constitutional provisions for secession. It was assumed the EPRDF would nip these demands in the bud anyway.

Ethiopia never adopted a law to regulate the division of assets and debts between an old state and a new one. Nor was a referendum law formulated. There is even no clarity on who pays for referendums to decide on statehood demands. Until now, the party structure rather than the law mediated ethnic and other demands.

The serious popular protest movement that began in 2015 precipitated an internal party struggle and birthed the April 2018 transition and the emergence of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister. The internal rupture and consequent breakdown of party discipline and Abiy’s respect for the “federal spirit” of the country have seen the re-emergence of old demands. The party structure can no longer mediate or address these demands.

Referendum risks and challenges

The absence of a proper legal framework to regulate secession demands has immersed the newly constituted Electoral Board into an unenviable political volcano. As any responsible institution, the Board has taken it upon itself to create some order out of the constitutional and legal chaos in relation to secession.

Accordingly, while confirming a date for the Sidama referendum, the board required the SNNPR to produce a legal, administrative and institutional framework before October 13 to regulate key issues, notably the protection of ethnic minorities in a future Sidama state, division of assets and debts, as well as the status of Hawassa city, the centre of the Sidama demand and capital of SNNPR.

The board also requested the SNNPR, rather than the federal government or even the Sidama Zone, which is seeking statehood, to disburse the needed budget (close to three million dollars) to organise the referendum.

Subsequently, the board announced that all citizens residing in Sidama Zone, rather than just those of Sidama origin, would vote in the planned referendum. While this will not affect the outcome of the referendum, it sets precedence and has proved very controversial.

Unfortunately, while the efforts of the board to clarify the applicable rules are commendable, its decisions have provoked the ire of critics and political activists for exceeding its constitutional mandate or misinterpreting constitutional provisions. While the referendum has provided the newly minted board with a critical opportunity to test its capabilities in advance of the much larger and complicated 2020 elections, it could also potentially damage its reputation.

Fortunately, the SNNPR government, as well as the Sidama Zone, has so far cooperated with the board. To contain any long-term damage to its reputation, the relevant federal institutions should publicly express their support for its work. In the long term, relevant laws should be adopted to regulate, based on the lessons from the Sidama referendum, the process of addressing demands for statehood and the consequences arising from it.

While the Electoral Board has addressed some of the preliminary issues, it cannot decide on the consequences of the referendum. Under the constitution, a positive referendum outcome would automatically make Sidama the 10th regional state. Nevertheless, this needs the SNNPR to formally transfer its powers to the new Sidama state.

As the SNNPR has already supported the Sidama statehood aspiration, this support could be expected. Nevertheless, discussion over the status of Hawassa, division of assets and debts and the rights of ethnic minorities may prove controversial. Already, the SNNPR has requested two extensions from the board to finalise the framework. It is not clear if such an agreement would be achieved before October 13.

Moreover, the SNNPR remains under military command, which may create further hiccups.

Delay in agreement on these issues would also delay the referendum. As the 2020 elections are fast approaching, a pragmatic decision may be taken to hold the Sidama referendum alongside the elections.

Crucially, the prime minister has indicated that the formation of a Sidama state would require a constitutional amendment, which requires two-thirds approval in a joint sitting of the two federal legislative houses, and by six of the current nine regional states. This raises a massive procedural hurdle and even higher risk for Sidama aspirations.

The prime minister has on earlier occasions precluded the possibility of amending the constitution before the elections, as that could open pandora’s box. If Sidama statehood is not achieved before the 2020 elections, the expected emergence of new political forces would further complicate the process, with higher risks of instability.

The issues related to demands for Sidama statehood have been complicated by the passage of time. Notably, as the capital of the SNNPR, Hawassa has been the preferred destination for regional and federal investment, and place of residence for people from across the country. Had a Sidama state been formed in 1995, any secession would have been less fractious.

This provides a key lesson in addressing existing and emerging demands of other ethnic groups. If the current ethnic setup continues, as it is likely to, the earlier the demands are addressed the better. Attempts to discourage pursuits of statehood, as the prime minister has recently made in relation to the Kaffa ethnic group, may only create further disenchantment and complications.

A systematic response to budding statehood demands could perhaps be achieved through the recently established Administrative Boundaries and Identity Issues Commission. Alternatively, a new consensus may be forged.

While Ethiopia’s ethnic structure is likely to stay, the changed political context has unravelled the constitutional dispensation and ethnic competition has at times led to deadly skirmishes. The time may have come to deliberate the need for a countrywide conversation on the lessons learned so far and the adjustments needed to reimagine the ethnic and broader constitutional framework and forge a new consensus towards a complementary, rather than competitive, ethnic and Ethiopian identity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

Adem K Abebe

Dr Adem K Abebe is advisor and commentator on the African Union, and governance and democracy in Africa.

The post What Ethiopians can learn from Sidama’s thorny statehood journey appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Alemayehu G. Mariam

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a special place in my heart for Nelson Mandela and South Africa.

That is understandable because Mandela in his autobiography, “The Long Walk to Freedom” wrote:

Ethiopia always has a special place in my imagination and the prospect of visiting Ethiopia attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England, and America combined. I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African.

Mandela’s passing in December 2013 was a personal loss for me.

In his memory, I wrote a commentary entitled, “Farewell, My African Prince”.

Mandela was a bridge builder. He built bridges across racial, ethnic and class divides. He was a fireman. He saved the South African house by dousing the smoldering embers of racial and ethnic strife with truth and reconciliation. Nelson Mandela was a pathfinder. He built two roads named Goodness and Reconciliation for the long walk to freedom and walked the talk.

Lately, accusatory fingers are pointing at South Africa and there is much demonizing of South Africans for being virulently xenophobic against African immigrants in their midst.

That is painful for me because during the anti-apartheid struggle Africans throughout the continent gave shelter to exiled South African freedom fighters and African governments provided material and diplomatic support.

H.I.M. Haile Selassie in his 1963 speech said without peace in Southern Africa, there will be no peace in Africa:

Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, the dream of lasting peace will remain but a fleeting illusion. Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed the African continent will not know peace.

As a college student in the mid-1970s, I was a passionate anti-apartheid advocate, joined demonstrations pushing disinvestment in apartheid South Africa and opposed the so-called Sullivan Principles and constructive engagement.

Our mantra I remember to this day: “Hey, ho ho, apartheid has got to go! Brick by brick, wall by wall, apartheid has to fall!”

To see and hear some South Africans today looting and burning while chanting “Hey, ho, ho, African immigrant must go!” breaks my heart.

Since the advent of majority rule in 1994, many Africans who took a long walk to freedom from their countries to escape political persecution or seek economic opportunity have faced violence, intimidation and persecution in South Africa.

When an outbreak of xenophobic violence occurred in South of Africa earlier this month, 12 “foreign nationals” were confirmed dead and 639 suspects were reportedly arrested. Some 1,000 “foreign-owned” businesses were damaged or destroyed.

Violence against foreign-nationals in South Africa has been taking place since 1994.

Incidents of xenophobic violence in South Africa are well-documented.

In 1998, three “foreign nationals” were thrown out of a moving train between Johannesburg and Pretoria because they were accused of “bringing diseases, taking jobs, the same rhetoric we hear today.”

According to a 1998 Human Rights Watch report, “armed gangs of black South Africans attacked foreign nationals from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique living in the Alexandra township near Johannesburg for several weeks in 1995 in a drive to ‘clean the township of foreigners’”.

In an outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008, at least 62 people, including South Africans, were killed, thousands were displaced and many businesses and stores owned by “foreign nationals” were looted and destroyed.

In 2015, African immigrants were burned alive in an act of unspeakable xenophobic  savagery.

Much of the xenophobic violence is directed at “foreign nationals” operating small shops and stores in the townships or settlements around them.

Most of the violent attacks have been carried out by black South Africans.

Most of the incidents have taken place in areas experiencing high levels of poverty, unemployment and low levels of social, community and public safety services.

Foreign nationals in these areas are particularly disadvantaged because of language problems, ignorance and fear of reporting crimes to police authorities and inability to access the justice system.

The South African government has long denied the existence of xenophobic attacks.

In 2008, former president Thabo Mbeki declared South Africans are not xenophobic but foreign nationals have been victims of  “naked criminal activity”. Mbeki claimed, “There isn’t a population of South Africans who attack other Africans simply because of their nationality.”

In 2015, his successor Jacob Zuma repeated the disclaimer stating, “South Africans are not xenophobic. We do not believe that the actions of a few out of more than 50 million citizens justify the label of xenophobia.”

Current president Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged the violence is driven by xenophobia and in a statement “condemned violence against foreign nationals in South Africa” and argued “African development depends on the increased movement of people, goods and services between different countries for all of us to benefit.”

Ramaphosa offered “profuse apologies” to Nigeria. “The incident does not represent what we stand for and the South African police leave no stone unturned, that those involved must be brought to book”.

The one South Africa leader who has not minced words about xenophobic violence is the colorful firebrand leader of Economic Freedom Fighters Party, Julius Malema.

In March 2019, Malema offered his explanation for xenophobia in South Africa:

You say the people from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are taking our jobs. But here are whites in South Africa who don’t have papers. They entered here legally. The Chinese, some of them do not have papers. You don’t call them Amakwerekwere. You don’t beat them up but you beat fellow Africans, why? You hate yourself.

Malema issued a stern warning:

Once you are done with Nigerians, Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Zambians, you are going to go for Shangaans from Giyani. I have to stop you now before you come for me. We are going to be victims. ‘They’re going to say, ‘The reason we don’t have jobs here is because of these Zulus. They must go back to Natal. Xhosas must go back to Eastern Cape, Shangaans must go back to Limpopo.’ Because there will be no foreigners left to fight.”

His remedial prescription is simple:

We are all Africans. We must love one another. Showing love to those who come from Mozambique, showing love to those who come from Guinea, from Egypt, from Nigeria is self-love. When you love yourself, you will love fellow South Africans.

For the most recent xenophobic violence earlier this month, Malema apologized:

Find it in your good hearts to forgive us, we are sorry, we are ashamed of ourselves and sincerely apologise for this madness.

Is there rampant xenophobia in South Africa?

Independent surveys on xenophobia in South Africa point to an endemic problem.

The most comprehensive study on xenophobia in South Africa is found in a 2016 doctoral dissertation.

Several opinion surveys over the past two decades have shown South Africans have low levels of tolerance of immigration or immigrants.

“A 1997 survey showed that just six percent of South Africans were tolerant to immigration. In another survey, 75 percent of South Africans held negative perceptions about black African foreigners.”

“A 2004 study by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) of attitudes among police officers in the Johannesburg area found that 87% of respondents believed most undocumented immigrants in Johannesburg are involved in crime, despite there being no statistical evidence to substantiate the perception.”

“A national survey of the attitudes of the South African population towards foreign nationals in the country by the South African Migration Project in 2006 found xenophobia to be widespread: South Africans do not want it to be easier for foreign nationals to trade informally with South Africa (59 percent opposed), to start small businesses in South Africa (61 percent opposed) or to obtain South African citizenship (68 percent opposed).”

“A 2012 independent survey showed Distrust of foreigners has increased in South Africa in the four years since a wave of xenophobic violence swept the country. Some 67 percent of South Africans say they do not trust foreigners at all, compared to 60 percent in 2008. Nearly a third of the 2,400 respondents would take action to prevent migrants from moving into their neighbourhood and 36 percent would try to stop them from operating businesses. Forty-four percent were opposed to their country providing protection to asylum seekers. 45 percent saying foreigners should not be allowed to live in the country because they take jobs and benefits away from South Africans.”

Holier-than-thou South Africa?

The old saw it true. “Remember, when you point a finger at someone, there are three more fingers pointing at you.”

Since all eyes are on South Africa today, it is appropriate to ask whether xenophobia is a “mental disease” that afflicts only South Africans.

I should like to argue xenophobia and ethnophobia afflict all African countries to varying degrees.

In the not-too-distant past, there have been instances of xenophobic violence and discrimination against “foreign nationals” in Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, South Sudan, Botswana, Angola and Zambia.

When global oil prices collapsed in 1983, Nigeria ordered the massive expulsion of illegal Ghanaian migrants working in the country. The argument then is not much different than what the South Africans are saying today. Ghanaians were accused of taking jobs from Nigerians and depressing the labor market.

In 2001, Cote d’Ivoire, home to large numbers of West Africans representing more than a quarter of the population, was accused of failing to curb the growth of xenophobia.

In 2006, the Government of Niger “ordered the expulsion of 150,000 Arab refugees from Chad and neighboring countries who have lived in this West African nation for decades.”

In 2010, concerns were expressed about the rise of “extensive” xenophobic attitudes towards Zimbabweans by Botswanans.

In 2013, there were serious concerns of xenophobia in South Sudan, Africa’s newest state.

In 2016, there were xenophobic attacks in Zambia.

In 2017, in an act of reprisal for an alleged murder, Ghanaians attacked and killed 5 Nigerians.

In 2018, Angola denied the occurrence of xenophobic violence against Congolese migrant workers.

In 1998, following the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the government of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia undertook a mass expulsion of 20 thousand people alleged to be of Eritrean national origin.

TPLF Prime Minister Meles Zenawi at the time justified his arbitrary expulsion claiming “As long as any foreign national, whether Eritrean or Japanese etc . . . lives in Ethiopia [it is] because of the goodwill of the Ethiopian government. If we say ‘Go, because we do not like the colour of your eyes,’ they have to leave.”

There is no better example of xenophobia that deporting a person because of the color of his eyes or national origin.

Xenophobes and criminals?

Xenophobia (Greek xeno “stranger”, phobia “fear”) is not a crime. It is the “irrational, pathological fear or distrust of strangers”. Often, it manifests itself in acts of hostility, violence and discrimination against foreigners.

Are the South Africans who committed the acts of violence against other African “foreign nationals” xenophobes and/or hooligans/criminals?

The survey evidence is clear that xenophobia is a problem in South Africa, but I believe the infinitesimally small number of individuals who commit acts of violence, intimidation and looting are criminals, thugs, gangsters and hooligans.

I cannot believe the mainstream opinion of South Africans supports violent criminal activity against foreigners or others.

But I am not surprised to see anti-immigrant sentiment and violence in a nation where the unemployment rate is nearly 30 percent.

I believe many of the violent acts are committed by poor unemployed youth who have joined either criminal gangs or engage in crimes of opportunity.

Burning immigrants alive, looting and rioting will not create more jobs in South Africa. It will certainly drive away investors and tourists who could be sources of employment.

Foreign nationals are easy victims in South Africa because they have neither a voice nor representation in government and society.

The failure of the South African national government to take effective preventive and prosecutorial action against such criminals is deplorable.

Ethnophobia in Ethiopia

If xenophobia is the “irrational fear or distrust of strangers”, ethnophobia is the irrational fear and hatred of any ethnicity different to one’s own.

In 2018, Ethiopia topped the “global list of highest internal displacement”, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

Internal displacement in Ethiopia has been fully documented and has multiple causes. “High levels of vulnerability among rural populations exposed to severe drought and floods, political and resource-based conflict and overstretched government capacity create a high-risk environment in which significant new displacements take place each year.”

However, the principal reason for internal displacement in Ethiopia, in my view, is the structure of internal colonialism created by the TPLF in the ethnic Kilil-istans (similar to South Africa’s Bantustans) which singularly accentuate and exploit ethnic and cultural differences in the country creating conflict and strife. 

For instance, the dispute between the Oromia and Somali kilils (regions) resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people is the outcome of Kililistan politics.

Over 100,000 people fled ethnic violence and became internally displaced persons in Benishangul Gumuz in Western Ethiopia for the same reason.

However, the government of PM Abiy Ahmed effectively implemented an IDP return program in May 2019 “following the announcement of the Federal Government’s Strategic Plan to Address Internal Displacement and a costed Re-covery/Rehabilitation Plan. By the end of May, most IDP sites/camps were dismantled, in East/West Wollega and Gedeo/West Guji zones.”

It is interesting to note that those who howled and growled about internal displacement in Ethiopia suddenly fell silent when the government of PM Abiy Ahmed returned the displaced persons to their places of origin.

For the past 27 years, the regime of the TPLF has exploited and manipulated the political situation in Ethiopia to maintain itself in power.

Using the kilil system, the TPLF has poisoned the interaction between and among ethnic groups, cultures, traditions, religions and sown ethnic and political misunderstanding, mistrust, unrest and conflict.

Today, the legacy of 27 years of ethnophobic propaganda by the TPLF and the fear, suspicion, intolerance, disinformation and false grievances that are perpetuated by empty barrel pseudo-intellectuals and hordes of social media ignoramuses continue to be a source of aggravation and anxiety.

Xenophobia in South Africa and ethnophobia in Ethiopia are products of racial/ethnic apartheid

Apartheid a virulent form and vestige of European colonialism.

In 1948, the minority white National Party (NP) introduced “apartheid” (“apartness”) as an ideology for the separate development of the various racial groups in South Africa.

NP prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd transformed apartheid into a full-fledged de jure separate development system with the passage of the Promotion of Bantu Self­  Government Act of 1959 creating 10 Bantu black homelands known as Bantustans.

The central aim of this Act was to fragment and separate black South Africans into small groups so that there would be no black majority aspiring or competing for power, and to make it impossible for them to unify under a single national organization. The Act also aimed to psychologically isolate the black majority while simultaneously de-nationalizing them and depriving them of a common identity.

Strictly enforcing the passbook laws, promoting trial consciousness and using a strategy of divide and rule, the minority white apartheid regime for over four decades succeeded in creating a society riven by ethnic, tribal, religious and regional divisions in South Africa.

Following the apartheid South African model, the TPLF regime created 9 kilils (kililistans or ethnic homelands) and two “chartered cities” in Ethiopia to geographically dismember and fragment regions while establishing a hegemonic regime of ethnic supremacy.

Put simply, the TPLF regime copied the racial apartheid system of South Africa to create an ethnic-based  system of internal colonialism.

I have discussed the TPLF’s system of  internal colonialism in previous commentaries at length.

I have also discussed the Bantustanization (Kililistanization) of Ethiopia in a previous commentary at length.

Suffice it to say that for 27 years, the TPLF’s internal colonialism succeeded through a systematic campaign of de-Ethiopianization similar to the way the colonial masters de-nationalized the people in their African colonies, created artificial ethnic and other boundaries (kilil homelands) and imposed their version of ethnic identities on the diverse people of Ethiopia.

The T-TPLF achieved control and exploitation of the majority populations by creating a bogus ethnic federalism and dividing them along ethnic, regional, religious lines using the politics of identity, historical grievances, ethnic demonization and ethnic fear and smear.

Until its ouster in 2018, the minority TPLF regime using a shell organization called “Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front” managed to establish total economic and political dominance in Ethiopia.

What is to be done about xenophobia and ethnophobia?

Xenophobic attacks in South Africa have already strained relations between South Africa and countries whose nationals have been subjected to criminal violence.

For instance, fearing reprisals, the South African government closed its Embassy in Nigeria.

Xenophobic attacks will have severe implications for the future of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement which aims to “create a single continental market for goods and services as well as a customs union with free movement of capital and business travelers.”

South Africa with its large manufacturing base could benefit significantly from the Agreement, but with a reputation of endemic xenophobia, that benefit could be in grave peril.

When President Ramaphosa signed the Free Trade Agreement he said, “it would create many opportunities and benefits for South Africa and moreover, would grow and diversify the South African economy through the reduction of inequality and unemployment.”

Xenophobia denialism in South African officialdom must be replaced with increased preventive and investigative law enforcement action and prosecution of suspects.

The newly enacted hate crimes and speech law should be vigorously enforced to protect the rights of foreign nationals.

Because foreign nationals have limited access or fear accessing the justice system, there should be official efforts to reach out to victims and communities affected by xenophobic violence and a system of monitoring and anonymous reporting established.

Civil society institutions in South Africa should maintain independent monitoring and reporting mechanisms on incidents of xenophobic violence and should be first responders to assist victims of mob violence.

South African political, religious, cultural and academic leaders must take an uncompromising stand on xenophobia in much the same way as EFF party leader Julius Malema. They must publicly and and without hesitation condemn criminal actions against foreign nationals.

What is to be done about ethnophobia in Ethiopia?

The antidote to the legacy of ethnic apartheid/ethnic federalism in Ethiopia is Medemer philosophy.

Medemer aims to bring syntheses and synergy to Ethiopia’s contrived ethno-tribal politics. It aims to bring into harmony the politics of identity, communalism and sectarianism into syntheses with nation-building, civility, tolerance, love, understanding and forgiveness.

Medemer creates a simple calculus: Without Oromos, there are no Amharas; without Amharas, there are no Tigreans; without Tigreans there are no Somalis; without Somalis, there are no Sidama; without Sidama, there are not Woleyita; without Woleyita, there are no Afari; without Afari, there are no Harari; without Harari, there are no Anuak; without Anuak, there are no Gurage and on and on. Amharas, Oromos, Tigreans…. and the other groups can work cooperatively and even competitively for their collective betterment and prosperity.

Xenophobia is a global problem

Racism, xenophobia and ethnophobia are “sicknesses of the soul”.

Scapegoating the weak, powerless and defenseless “foreign nationals” is a growing trend.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech said three great challenges faced mankind: “the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”

In 2019, mankind, in addition to the evils mentioned by Dr. King, also faces the evils of xenophobia and ethnophobia, especially in Africa.

In my February 2017 commentary entitled, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ in the Land of Immigrants?”, I wrote about the xenophobia, discrimination, prejudice and unfairness towards “undesirable aliens” and vulnerable groups in America.

Recently, the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli proposed a re-writing of the words on the Statute of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

According to Cuccinelli, it should be revised to read, “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

Huddled masses to be replaced by huddled elites of the world!

Over a century ago, Gandhi wrote:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.

Could Gandhi have inspired the King of Pop to write the lyrics to his song Man in the Mirror?

I’m starting with the man in the mirror (Who?)
I’m asking him to change his ways (Who?)
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that change

Let all Africans start to change their ways with the (wo)man in the mirror.

Let is be the change we want to see.

Let us not forget every time we point a finger at others, three more are pointing at us.

The post Xeno(Afro)Phobia in South Africa, Ethnophobia in Ethiopia? appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

by Alemayehu Biru (PhD.)

This topic bears a very common binary way of putting complex sociopolitical issues by politicians and, at times, even by scholars, as if those concepts are as distinct entities as orange and banana.

This is expressed in its most rudimentary form in the current Ethiopian political discourse. Raise any kind of sociopolitical issue, you are prone to be categorized either as citizenship or identitypolitics promoter. The binary choices are considered to be the only two alternatives in representing political interests or ideologies of the country; And they are often presented not just as two different concepts but rather as antonyms. We are told, those who are pro citizenship are more of a political, rational and universal perspective, while those with identity politics are more of a primordial, particularistic and emotionally charged perspective. Such categorization makes no exception: It applies almost to all positions in respect to every specific policy issues such as education, economy, environment, election, democracy or any other roadmap issues that are related to the future political course the country ought to follow. Such a very general but ironically a narrow categorization has been pronounced even by the regime whose coming into being was justified by its opening-up of the political space. Opening up the political space while narrowing down the horizons of political thought itself! An interestingly baffling paradox!

This article aims at examining whether this “either or” way of understanding the political reality is, theoretically, tenable and, practically, helpful in resolving the major political issues of the country. Let me embark on the issue at once, without much methodological pedantry, by asking: Can the so called “Citizenship Politics” be exclusive to that of Identity? In order to provide answer to the question, we need to know first what citizenship is in the first place.

Citizenship as Membership

I don’t think there is a single conception of citizenship as such. Leaving aside the historical disparities, there are different conceptions by different political thoughts such as liberals, social democrats, socialists or republicans. For liberals citizenship is a membership to a given political community whose primary responsibility is to fairly distribute, secure and protect the basic liberties of each member. Republicans see it as a membership to a political community that should have a practical expression in collectively participating in the decision-making-process and the corollary sense of patriotism based on a historically established public moral virtues. Social democrats and socialists give much emphasis to equality, welfare and solidarity as the most binding elements of citizenship.

Whatever differences these conceptions may mean, there is one common understanding among all of them: citizenship as membership to a political community.

Membership is not however a wholesale affair. As much as it designates inclusiveness to those it is conferred upon, it also implies exclusivity to those not. The best example to mention here is the conception of the Ancient Greek, generally, much eulogized to be the source of modern understanding of citizenship and democracy.

In ancient democracy, citizenship means membership to the free male inhabitants of the city states. The adjective free immediately implies the unfree, the slaves, who were mostly war prisoners, as much as the adjective male outrightly disqualifies the female. Citizenship is valued for the privileges it bestows upon some in exclusion of others. In other words, what makes one appreciate or enjoy the value of citizenship lies more in its exclusivity than in its inclusivity, in its negativity than in its positivity. A citizen is one who is not a slave or a female. A citizen is defined by what he is not. This is because the talk about citizenship makes little or no sense, if all human beings in that community are equally citizens.

As the saying goes “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows”, the privilege of the citizens can only feed itself on the inhibition of the non-citizens.  All those rights of citizenship – be it property right, social, legal or political rights, can only be realized by and through those who are deprived of those very rights. The liberty to be a proprietor, a politician, an artist or a philosopher presuppose in practice, as Aristotle honestly remarked, the existence of physical laborers for them to have the necessary leisure time to exercise their privileged activity. The liberty to be a slave master presuppose the existence of slaves and the necessary jurisdiction and theoretical justification for the relationship. The concept citizenship was conjoined therefore with membership to each city-state as defined and justified in its legal, political and philosophical system.

As long as this membership is in respect to individual-state relationship, not in respect to ethnic or religious identities, one may argue that the Ancient Greek conception of citizenship is purely political. But this is to miss the point as the issue of ethnic or cultural diversity was not at all an issue in ancient Greek city states. All city states were culturally, linguistically and even ethnically homogeneous. Besides this fact, there is nothing political about female-exclusion, for example, except, on the contrary, that ascriptive identity is politicized in order to justify male domination. What is political about a war captive to become a slave, if it is not the otherness in him be politicized in order to justify social stratification, political domination and thereby economic exploitation? This shows clearly that political membership was eventually determined by identity (by gender identity or the city state to which one belongs), since each city state was considered to be a sovereign political entity albeit parallel to the nation-states of the modern time. Therefore, the interplay between political and identity based membership in defining citizenship is already apparent in Greek democracy itself. It came to be even more manifest in the Eras of the Roman Empire and the subsequent aristocratic European colonial empires.

Citizenship as Kinship

Under the Roman Empire and all the subsequent empires, social stratification and the corresponding privileges have been diversified with more hierarchical membership to the state. Though that hierarchy has been changing with the ever expansion of the empire, there were generally four kinds of membership to the Roman Empire: proper citizens of Rome who were called cives, Latins, the surrounding Latin language speaking people (who had some abrogated rights with the possibility of promotion to cives), the so called peregrines, the alien or outlandish, and finally the slaves, the conquered, devoid of any human rights whatsoever. The qualification for citizenship emanated not merely from residence membership to Rome but rather from the status of parents. It was to be inherited by birth. Membership to a political community is pre-determined by kinship relations.

The Roman Empire is known, after all, for its creation of what we know today in the Western world as a three-part name – whereby the last one should bear the name of the tribe from which the individual under discussion descended all through generations. The tria nomina, as it was called, was a sign of Roman citizenship, legally prohibited for others to adopt it, in order to protect and preserve the purity of the Roman citizenship.

This tradition has descended to the emerging feudal systems to the point the concept citizenship be identified only with the aristocratic class by reducing all others to mere subjects. Later on, even the aristocratic class came to be denied that status with the ascendance of absolute monarchy to the point the very purpose of State and politics itself became nothing but to full fil the Will of God in and through the Emperor. Since the Emperor was constitutionally above the law, there was no any sort of right or liberty of any one that could be taken for granted. Even members of the ruling class were not all citizens as long as their liberties and rights are ultimately dependent on the Will of the Emperor – not on the law of the state. The law itself is an institutionalized expression of the Emperor’s Will, which was tantamount to the Will of God as the Emperor was proclaimed to be an elect of God Himself. So there was no basis of the concept citizenship under the system of empires, which were basically territorial states rather than nation-states.

Ethiopian Political Orthodoxy

There is no a more perfect example in the modern time than the Ethiopian Empire in demonstrating the alienation of the entire political community itself to the status of subject,  not to speak of the mass of peoples.

I don’t really know the etymological root of the Amharic word zega or zeginet, equivalent of the concept citizen and citizenship, respectively. But we all know for sure that the concept must be alien to Ethiopia since there have never been citizens in the entire history of the country to this date. A minister or a senate dignitary in the parliament oaths and presents himself as a personal servant of the Emperor, never of the Nation-State. This tradition has continued to be practiced even after the abolition of the monarchy under the personal dictatorship of Mengistu and Meles Zenawi. Loyalty to the leader is the most important measure for public office. Government and heads of government are the only sovereign entities.

Even the concept state is missing in Ethiopian vocabulary in the sense that the modern world understand state as an organized political community based on the will of its people. The Amharic word for government is Mengist, but it also means state. It appears therefore that government and state are conceptually interchangeable as they have been in political practice. Mengist in Ethiopia is apriori to society and state both in its practical importance and logical primacy. In other words, Mengist has always been the raison d’etre for the existence of state and society, not vice versa. This is true not more about Ethiopian political history than it is about its present political condition.

In Ethiopia, citizenship has never been a reality so far in which ever form it may be. However, it became everything all of a sudden in the current Ethiopian political discourse, particularly, for those political forces who consider themselves unitarist as opposed to those federalists. The reason is obvious. The unitarists consider the issue of citizenship as uniting, but not clear as to how it can be uniting without appealing to the issues of identity which much of the largest political community consider of the essence in defining the very concept of citizenship itself. In order for the concept of citizenship to be uniting, universal and political, as the unitarists often claim it to be, it needs at least, conceptually, to be inclusive of what it considers to be particular, primordial and sentimental. Otherwise, the concept citizenship would turn out to be a universalized particularity, to the best, or an empty abstract concept which has no political relevance whatsoever.

The issue at hand is not whether the question of citizenship should occupy a central importance in the future Ethiopian politics but, rather, whether it should be all inclusive or not. All federalist forces recognize its importance but not as a means of self-negation. They conceptualize citizenship as membership to a political community in which different interests are considered to be independent agents in determining the very nature and form of that political community. That means citizenship is more of a substantive right than being merely a procedural one. It must include among others the right to make the political community itself, not just the right to maintain it as unitarists consider it to be. According to the unitarists, citizenship right in Ethiopia would be achieved, if fair and free election takes place without much structural change. According to the federalists, however, citizenship cannot be achieved short of making a socio-political contract that guarantees the sovereignty of the peoples as it is the case with all modern democratic societies. Citizenship should be understood as authorship.

Citizenship as Authorship

It was only in 18^th century pioneered by the Enlightenment movement that nation-state started to emerge as a reaction to the extremely suffocating empires. Nationalism became the new galvanizing ideology that gave birth to democracy and nation-states. As Habermas correctly put it “The nation-State and democracy are twins born out of the French Revolution. From a cultural point of view, both have been growing in the shadow of nationalism”. Freedom of the individual from the tyranny of the state and society, on the one hand, and freedom of nations from the yoke of empires, on the other, are considered to be necessary corollaries.  Thus a new conception of citizenship as authorship.

Since the French Revolution, democratic nation-states started to understand themselves as associations of free and equal citizens. Membership to a political community depends on the principle of voluntarism as it has been articulated in socio-political contract theories by the great minds – ranging from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke through the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the contemporary American political philosopher, John Rawls. They all underlined in their theories that no state or political authority should any longer be justified by appealing to Nature or God. Because all human beings are by nature rational and therefore free and equal, they are autonomous agents whose will and only will matters in the creation and maintenance of a political community. The social agreement made among its inhabitants is the only source of legitimacy both for its coming into being and further maintenance. All the institutions such as state and government emerged thereof are only instruments of that popular covenant and, therefore, means never ends in themselves. Peoples’ sovereignty is sacrosanct. It is precisely this sovereignty which is the bedrock of citizenship. Citizenship is not just a set of rights that enable citizens only to elect their government every four or five years but essentially authorship to the very law that creates and governs a political community. Freedom and authority are no longer contradictory in this case since people should abide only to their own will.

Those great contractarian theorists assumed ethnic and cultural homogeneity for their theories to be true. Nation-State was both their premise and objective. In case assimilation is successful, as it was with in France, the nation-state is the premise from which the contract should proceed. If a nation failed to be a state as it is the case with pre-Bismarck Germany, the contract theory provided the rational to create it. And in empire states like Austro-Hungary, the contract theory has justified their disintegration and encouraged, instead, the emergence of new nation-states as natural course of socio-political development.

Alternatively, it also envisioned federal system as a means to coup-up with the new reality in those empires like Great Britain, Spain, Belgium etc. so that group identities be preserved, protected and promoted within the larger political union. Multicultural citizenship is taken, in this last case, as a mediating concept between the universal values of freedom of the individual, on the one hand, and freedom of cultural, linguistic or ethnic communities, on the other. Self-determination (voluntarism) both at the level of individuals and communities became the key to understand what modern citizenship should be. This has become an international norm particularly in post 2^nd World War and even more so in post “Cold War”. With the ever globalization of democracy as a World order, it became imperative to recognize collective identities such as race, ethnic, culture, gender etc. Ironic as it may sound, globalization must be conjoined with pluralism – as the coming into being of the European Union became the main reason to thematize pluralism as the most important concept of political philosophy in our time.

Liberalism, communitarianism & Pluralism

In the last three decades, there have been a steadily growing interest in the issue of group diversity by political philosophers. Tension between globalism and nationalism, mass immigration and the rise of minority rights, ethnic conflicts and breakup of nations in  Eastern Europe, increasing integration of the European Union conjoined with the persistence of sense of distinctness among members, ever rising strive of gender, sexual orientation, environmental movement etc. are some of the major practical reasons for this. Explaining the issue of how right claims of those diverse forms of group identities be related or connected to the established liberal-democratic principles of freedom is the major theoretical issue of our time. Basically, liberalism and communitarianism are the two contending school of thoughts in that regard – theoretically initiated by an American philosopher John Rawls in his monumental work A Theory of Justice. The third line of thinking I termed above as pluralism is a dialectical outgrowth of the debate between the two.

Liberals are generally well known for their individualism.  As they are here represented by John Rawls, the individual, as free and rational being, is said to be autonomous by his/her nature. The practical implication is that liberty of the individual must be protected not only from political authority but also from the cultural one – as social norms and traditions have been oppressive to the development of human rationality.  Not only state is oppressive but also customs and cultural values. Therefore, individual liberty and freedom should be seen in contradistinction to any particular collective identity. As John Rawls aptly puts it, the priority of individual liberty is uncompromising “that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” As the self is prior to its ends, individual right should be pursued independent of any conception of good. According to Rawls, the essence of citizenship lies in the liberty of the individual to form, revise and change social conceptions of the good – not in sharing definite moral values or some distant collective or national goals. Otherwise, he argues, the whole idea of social contract does make little or no sense. The social contract should serve not to come up with a pre-shared conception of Social-Good but rather to make possible a difference-blind social arrangement that can promote the right of each contracting parties to form, revise, change or pursue her/his conception of good.

For such a neutral standpoint be achieved, Rawls assumed a hypothetical society he called the Original Position. He further assumed what he calls “the veil of ignorance” in representing the contracting individuals’ ignorance about their conception of the Good or social identity prior to the agreement.  Both assumptions are justified by the need to achieve an impartial state of mind of the contracting parties in order to arrive at a neutral principles of social arrangement. It is based on these two important assumptions that Rawls later arrived on his famous two principles of justice.

The reaction to Rawls’ work was so immense that it awakened political philosophy from its long time slumber. His critics can generally be classified into two schools of thought, namely, communitarianism and pluralism. Both critics refuse to accept Rawls’ individualism. They consider his conception of individual autonomy as utopian to the best and tricky and manipulative to the worst. According to them, real individuals are not “unencumbered selves” as the priority of right to social good, the self to its ends or the assumption of the veil of ignorance under the original position suggest. In actual life, our identity is a given one, not even a matter of choice. It is often what Martin Heidegger calls “thrownness”. In real life, we all are with dense identity, as bearers of particular social role, as someone’s son or daughter, a member of this clan or that tribe, this or that nation, whose native language is this or that etc.

Although both streams of critics concede to the liberal’s main thesis that individuals are indeed the only living social agents, they simultaneously claim that collective identities are not less real than the individuals themselves. This is because, they argue, individuals are not born and raised in void. Family, neighboring and local communities, stories, tales and languages, schools and childhood memories etc. are all constitutive of the very agency of the individual. Individuals become agents only as social beings. The fact that their agency itself presuppose society as a field of self-realization shows that the rationality and freedom of the individual is anchored in being social by nature. Individual human beings are embodiments of their natural and social environment as much as they are rational agents in adopting to or changing those environments. Therefore, collective identities are real and objective as forms of social relations if not as entities.

For communitarians, particularly, those social relations are stable as a cultural or moral mark of the group under discussion. They are comprehensive and historical by their nature to be constitutive, in the strongest sense of the term, of its individual members. In this sense, communitarianism clearly stands in a diametrically opposite direction to liberalism. It postulates the primacy of community over the individual, the importance of particularism over universalism. It tends to classify and rank collective identities according to certain established meritocratic values. Communitarianism appears therefore to be a modern version of republicanism in its conception of citizenship too. Sharing a virtuous moral life, forging collective responsibility and common goals are the mark. Difference is seen as a social challenge, not as an opportunity. Here depart the pluralists.

Unlike communitarians, the pluralists value group identity not just for its own sake but, rather, for the practical relevance it has in determining the life of the individual. Its version of communitarianism is, therefore, not primordial or essentialist.  Collective identities are fluid social relations – not given and static as communitarians assume. Group identities can be better understood, according to pluralists, as dialectical phenomena – relational and changing.

We always talk of group identity visa-vice another group. Their relation is often marked by conflict and hierarchy. Institutionalized oppression and domination are the major forms of socio-political relations in determining group identities. The strength of self-awareness as a group hinges most of the time on the strength and intensity of domination-relation perpetuated by another group. This is not because groups have their own sense of rivalry by nature, but essentially because the position of the group has a direct effect on the individual members of the groups.

The opportunities and challenges of the individual agency would ultimately be determined by the position of the group to which the individual belongs or associated. A group identity can be an enabling or disabling to the individual agency depending on the power-position of the group to which one belongs. The distribution of opportunities and challenges is therefore predetermined in a multi-cultural state. This means the individual in its relation to the state is mediated through group identity to which the individual belongs (be it race, cultural, ethnic, gender or even sexual orientation).  Therefore, citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a simple unilinear individual-state relationship without considering that mediation.

Instituting equal citizenship requires, first of all, the recognition of difference as a fact of life in general. It requires the recognition of those collective identities as political agents – in order to enable individual members can redress their disadvantaged standing vis-vice the state. For example, recognizing the Oromo language as a state language would enable an individual Oromo, who is not in good command of Amharic, to have equal access to public office or public hearing. Here we need to emphasize that the recognition of the collective identity, in our case the Oromo language, should not be made for its own sake or for the value one may attach to it. It is rather for its mediating role in enabling or empowering the individual to have equal opportunity, by removing the unjustly created institutional obstacle. There can be no reason consequently to consider that such recognition is not consistent with universal values of democracy which puts individual agency at the center of its conception of citizenship. There is no theoretical inconsistency between federalism as a multi-cultural conception of citizenship and that of the liberal conception based on universal freedom. Pluralism in this sense is a splendid synthesis of the two extreme doctrines, individualism and communitarianism.

This brings me back to reconsider the Ethiopian political discourse in the light of this lately developed conception of “multicultural citizenship”.

Indifference to Difference

I assume there is no question or debate about the multiethnic or multicultural nature of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a self-declared empire just four decades ago and, a multi- nations-state since the monarchy was abolished in 1974. It was only in the last 25 years that those multi-nations and nationalities were acknowledged as political entities to govern themselves and take part in the affairs of the federal. This is just to mention the official policy of the ruling EPRDF regime as articulated in the constitution, not to imply anything further. Ethiopia is also one of the most backward countries in its overall economic development and therefore with little or no liberal or republican democratic tradition. The autonomous individual of liberalism is not yet born – as the proletariat class was not during the Proletarian Revolution in the 1960s.

Given these facts, it is simply perplexing to continuously hear an ever increasing louder voice by those unitarist forces and the new government in charge of the “transition” about the citizenship politics as a magical remedy to all problems of the country in the way it reminds us of scientific socialism and revolutionary democracy during Mengistu and Meles Zenawi, respectively. More perplexing is the fact their conception of citizenship often contrasted to federalism.

In a country where inequality and, as a result, a long standing conflict alongside ethnic, cultural or religious identities have had deeper root, I hope they are not imagining that Rawls’ veil of ignorance is at its magical mission in letting those living people abandon their collective identity for the difference-blind-principle to rule. There is a common man temptation to consider blindness to difference as impartiality or neutrality, though. But blindness to an existing difference is to ignore the difference so that it should further be perpetuated unnoticed. Particularly differences as a result of past inequalities and domination-relation, as it has  been the case with Ethiopian polity, need full attention – not just blatant indifference called difference-blind-principle. How indifference to difference can result in principles of justice that promote equal citizenship in the first place?

Indifference to difference is not an innocent standpoint as it appears to be. It is rather an active coverup in diffusing strives of those marginalized or dominated identities. It is an ideological maneuver in maintaining the already existing overall structure by means of reducing all group identities to what is common to all, namely, the individual. But then they portray the individual after their own image as a yardstick for all individuals so that the larger unity continue to be reproduced in the old way. It goes on camouflaging the particular for the universal.

Liberal individualism is just a recipe to forced assimilation as communitarianism is to segregation. Both consider difference as otherness but, differently. Liberalism wants to do away with it through assimilation. Communitarianism wants to essentialize difference so that hierarchical social form of organization be maintained.

The Ethiopian state have attempted so far both ways: exclusion and assimilation by the Monarchy and the Dergue, respectively. But both failed; and they failed devastatingly in the way they can never resuscitate again. It is absolutely beyond the scope of this paper to explain why. But it may suffice here to echo the famous statement: “an empire dies of indigestion”. The indigestion is even more likely when the minority tries to swallow the majority as it has been the case with Ethiopia. Ethiopia has died as an empire, already, long time ago. It only continued to persist as a state. It may has been deformed or disfigured for some of us who remained nostalgic of her past but, still persisting. Another trial to swallow the different, the otherness, may even result in a very risky business of getting her chocked up for ever.

Therefore, compromise on middle ground should be a categorical imperative for co-existence of diversity in unity and vice versa. The middle ground is to adopt a dual system of rights: liberal universal rights which are the same for all and specific empowering rights to group identities. The middle ground is a position that forwards an ideal of deliberative or “talk centric” democracy alternatively to “vote centric” or just liberal democracy that depoliticizes public life in general. That is precisely what I tried to term so long as a pluralist conception of citizenship as opposed to the monolithic one proposed by those who call themselves “unitarists” – while continue assuming speaking Amharic language, dancing eskista, adhering to a Coptic Church, adoring Menelik II, promoting the legendary tale of Queen Sheba and the Jewish descent of the Ethiopian dynasty etc. as a measure of a true Ethiopian citizen, Ethiopiawinet.

The author can be reached at alemayehubiru@gmail.com

The post Citizenship versus Identity the current political discourse in Ethiopia appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Belayneh Abate

As African rulers look wealthier than the leaders of prosperous nations at the annual United Nations Assembly, the National Public Radio (NPR) of America reported on September 27, 2019 that the People of Gambia suffer from pain after complicated surgeries because no pain medicine in the country.  NPR news should know that many other African dictators treat their people worse than the Gambian rulers. The peoples of Africa suffer from many forms of physical and mental pains because they are held in chains and their wealth is robbed by their rulers.

The heinous African Rulers! I don’t have to say dears because you are not Africans dears; neither do I need to say leaders precisely because you are not leaders.  If I must address you by name, I would rather say the monstrous dictators.

As usual, you are enjoying New York City while your people are suffering from endless starvation and preventable diseases. Are you here to promote the interests of Africa or to promote your interests? Are you here to solve Africa’s health problems or to look for the best health care providers for you and your families? Are you here to solve Africa’s economic and social problems or to find Western and Eastern banks where you can store the money you robbed? Are you here to talk about freedom of speech or to lobby human right activities and good leaders that accuse you of heinous crimes?  Are you here to shop for feasible technology or to shop for jewelry and dresses for you wives and mistresses? Are you here to make sure your voices are heard or to take orders from your superpower masters?

Do you think you represent Africans? Alas representation! Let’s forget the phony representation and talk about your attires. Look at your ties!  Nice ties; aren’t they? Who purchased them for you? Look at your suits! Marvelous!  Where did you get them from?  What do the labels scratching the back of your chunky necks read? I am sure, the labels do not pronounce made in Abuja, Kinshasa, Lagos, Addis Ababa or Nairobi; do they?  While considering yourselves as “African leaders” you are promoting the commodities of France, Italy, Great Britain, USA and others, and you are proud of it; Aren’t you?  Look at your shirts! They are unequivocally classical; aren’t they?  Allah wua Kiber! Look at your shoes! Astoundingly archetypal and shimmering! Am I not correct? How much you shelled out for these distinctive shoes? Who paid for these luxurious outfits?

What percent of the people, you disgracefully claim to represent, wear these types of ties, suits, shirts and shoes like you do? Representation by definition is symbolizing the whole. In other words, representatives are samples of the whole.  Do you really consider yourselves as samples of the whole Africa?

I request each of you to look at each other for one moment.  I believe you observed pumpkin cheeks, chunky necks and distended bellies; Didn’t you? I also demand that you compare the pictures you had before assuming your power with the current ones. May I ask what you regularly put in your plates in the palaces you luxuriously live in? Is it interfering in your personal life if we want to know the beverages you enjoy, the couches you park yourselves on and the beds you snooze in?  What portions of the people in your tyrannical rule obtain access to one meal and a glass of water in a day? What portion of your general population is homeless?  What proportions of the African infants, the young and the elderly die from man-made starvation?

Unlike your mind, your flesh looks healthy; doesn’t it? Where do you get your quality health care services? Ehi… that is right! Even when you have temporary indigestion from gulping down too much, you dash to Europe, America, and Israel by chartered airplanes; don’t you?  On the other hand, what portion of African population has access to the minimum health care services even once in 25 years? What fraction of African population dies from communicable diseases, which basically are turned to history and locked up in museum in western countries?  What segments of African population still utilize stone-age technologies to farm, communicate and travel?  Despite this colossal lifestyle discrepancy between you and ordinary Africans, you still think you represent destitute Africans; don’t you?  O lord! Even those of you who came from East Africa are raising your hands to profess that you represent your people! I shall say at this juncture that your conscience plates are either congenitally absent or surgically removed.

Please close your eyes and review your administrations (if you call them administrations at all), in silence.  Do not your ministers, congressmen, senators and managers serve like water pipes that do not leak or rust whatever corrosive material you pass through them?  Do not they convey your unholy orders and commands unaltered as long as you feed them? Do not you invest substantial amount of your budget to spy your own people? Do not you bridle your people like horses and mules? Do not you place your peoples under nonstop restraining orders to deprive them of using their sense organs and processing brains? Do not most of you beg on behalf of your people and exploit the baloney you received to strengthen your dictatorial power?

Who owns the mass- media?  Will your mass-media speak the truth ever? Do people believe even the date and the time portrayed at the bottom of your TV screen?  Are not your people suffering from suppurative chronic ear infections as a result of your eternal lies and irksome voices? Are not your people sick of watching you acting like experts in economics, engineering, agriculture, public health, medicine, journalism and other professions while you, in fact, employ your muscles as solitary organs of thinking?  Don’t you hound, silence or put experts in exile if they don’t agree with your callous and precarious behaviors?

Do you mind looking at your own hands at this moment, please?   Aha! Your decorated wrists and fingers with diamond and gold trinkets look soft and clean! However; are your hands really unsoiled and shiny as they appear in this bogusly garnished United Nation’s hall? How many of you have hands doused with blood?  How many of you eliminated even your own colleagues and comrades, during your journeys and ascensions towards power? How often you direct your soldiers to kill your fellow Africans for no apparent reason?  How many of you wreak ethnic fracas to stay in power? How often you coerce your flunky judges to rule in favor of your chair? How many million innocent people die, languish in jails, and suffer from torture under your wicked rules? How many children live under orphanage because you wiped out their parents? How many parents shed tears as we speak because you executed, arrested and locked up their children? Do people elect robbers, butchers and murderers?  Do you still assume that you represent Africans? Shame on you!

I wish we had the opportunity to discuss concepts and ideas that foster development and annihilate misery in Africa. Unfortunately, however; what most of the African rules that fly to New York every September are collections of heads engorged with lusts of power and material treasure. Sorry for wasting your WHISKY and STEAK time.  Enjoy the Africans’ flesh and blood until you face the final call known as death-a natural conqueror that cannot be embezzled, tortured or exterminated.

With best disregards,

Belayneh Abate

The writer can be reached at abatebelai@yahoo.com

The post Addressing the African Rulers appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Prof. Alemayehu G. Mariam

Battle of the social media troglodytes and the intellectual
In this commentary, I salute and pay tribute to Taye Bogale.
It is hard for me to describe Taye Bogale, whom I have neither met or spoken.
But his name may be telling: Taye (He is seen) and Bogale (burst of brilliance as in lightning).
He is a burst of brilliance on the social media Forces of Darkness
Here is a man whose destiny seems to be shaped by his name.

Taye Bogale is a man with a mission: Search, find, expose, challenge and take down pseudo-intellectuals and frauds, those who parade fairy tales as Ethiopian history, fabricators of falsehoods, empty barrels, political opportunists, self-promoting con-artists with bogus academic acronyms after their names and social media twits, nitwits and dimwits.

To this horde of wretches, Taye Bogale is a the wrath of God.

To those who admire him, he is the quintessential intellectual whose lips drip with torrents of indisputable facts and razor-sharp analysis about Ethiopian history.

He speaks truth, not just to power, but most importantly to those who are power hungry, power thirsty, power brokers, power crazy and brain power challenged.

Taye Bogale recently burst on the Ethiopian intellectual scene like a thunderbolt on a clear summer afternoon.

He has been quietly, out of public view, preaching the virtues of Ethiopiawinet, unity and public accountability for years as a teacher and an occasional government official. He has taught in high schools and colleges. He says his greatest blessing is to be a teacher.

But he was not widely known in the Ethiopian diaspora.

Today, no one, especially social media trolls, can pretend not to know or easily dismiss their indefatigable nemesis Taye Bogale.

He has emerged as a one-man army in the cause of Ethiopian unity, fraternity, liberty, identity, dignity, nationality and authenticity.

His passion for all things Ethiopian is peerless and stunning.

He does not negotiate on Ethiopiawinet.

Not only that, when push comes to shove on Ethiopia, he takes no prisoners.

He does not mince his words but will make mincemeat out of the brokers of hate and coaches of division and strife in and out of Ethiopia.

He is passionate about the honor, dignity and sanctity of Ethiopian identity.

He will confront and give a whipping to anyone who dares to scandalize Ethiopia’s history, demean and divide the Ethiopian people or engage in the trash-talk politics of tribalism, communalism and sectarianism.

He is fearless, gutsy and relentless in his attack against the merchants of hate and death, financiers of ethnic division, vendors of communalism, peddlers of sectarianism, hucksters of opportunism and paid agents of negativity, defeatism and fatalism in and out of Ethiopia.

Taye Bogale talks about Ethiopia, the Ethiopian people, Ethiopian honor, history, tradition and culture with supreme pride, spiritual reverence and absolute delight.

Taye Bogale has become a force of nature on the Ethiopian intellectual landscape.

No merchant of lies has yet dared to challenge him in a battle of ideas or historical analysis.

No trash-talking tribalist has dared to meet and debate him in an open forum.

They all avoid him and show up to play their dirty games of hate and division only when he is not around. Just like the old saying, “When the cat’s away, the mice play.”

But Taye Bogale don’t play. When he is around, the colony of mice know it’s time to scurry and hide in their holes or under a rock.

He is one of a kind.

I hate to admit it, but it is true. He puts all of us to shame.

His intellectual courage in defense of Ethiopiawinet and Ethiopian unity illuminates our shameful intellectual cowardice.

I have often wondered. If America is “home of the brave”, is Ethiopia home of intellectual cowards?

By “us”, I mean to refer to those of us, the effete elite, who strut on conference stages, sit in arm chairs in the public forums and exhibit ourselves as intellectuals, academics, scholars and men and women of knowledge.

We are content to add acronyms after our names and call ourselves “Doctors”, “Professors” and such and pontificate endlessly about what should be done. “Why doesn’t Abiy Ahmed do this or that? Whey doesn’t he take action? Why doesn’t he do something?”

We are ready to issue orders and commands but are self-paralyzed from standing up and taking a stand or taking any action.

In private, we all talk about Ethiopiawinet, Ethiopian unity and the rest of it. But few of us have the courage to stand up in public and proudly defend Ethiopiawinet and Ethiopian unity facing the slings and arrows of those whose life’s mission is to destroy Ethiopia.

I have talked about the AWOL Ethiopian intellectuals in my April 2018 commentary, “Ask What You Can Do for Your Country”.

How many of us so-called intellectuals dare to stand up alone for what we believe in like Taye Bogale?

Sadly, we are victims of our own self-inflicted herd (tribal/ethnic) mentality.

We have traded courage, duty, honor and country for self-interest and safety in numbers.

We tow the line blindly and follow the tribal flock like sheep just because that is what the harebrained elite herders want us to do.

Herd mentality drives us into circling the ethnic/tribal wagons.

We organize our ethnic herd to battle the other ethnic herds.

Taye Bogale does not need acronyms after his name.

Taye Bogale does not follow the herd. He stalks it.

He is a one-man army in the cause of Ethiopian unity, dignity, nationality and identity.

He is the wrath of God on the purveyors hate on social media and the blathering sponsored stooges off social media.

For us “intellectuals”, Ethiopian unity, dignity, etc. are negotiable. They are available to the highest bidder.

I know many “intellectuals” who have sold their souls for a grant of 500 square meters of land to build a house.

I know many “intellectuals” who have sold Ethiopia’s honor, unity and dignity for the privilege of starting a business; and they have licked  the boots of thugs for it.

Not unlike Judas Iscariot, they sold out Mother Ethiopia hoping to live like kings among a nation of paupers.

I know them all. They are my Janus-faced “frenemies”.

I wrote about them in 2010 in my commentary, “Where Have the Ethiopian Intellectuals Gone?”

I knew where they had gone.

I also wrote about them in my July 2019 commentary, “Now is the Time for All Good Ethiopian Men and Women to Come to the Aid of Their Country!”

Ethiopia’s so-called intellectuals by and large were no where to be seen to wage a battle of ideas against thugs in power. They had sold out.

When I battled thugs in the battlefield of ideas with my pen and keyboard every week for 13 years, without missing a single week, they were no where to be seen.

Truth be told, they used to tell me in my face, “You are crying in the wilderness. Nothing you do will make a difference. Only with the power of the gun can you get rid of the thugs in power.”

I told them, “We will get rid of the thugs with the invincible power of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance.”

I knew the pen was mightier than the sword.

In 2012, defending press freedom  against thug repression, I prophesied:

The final struggle between the dictators who wield swords and the journalists who wield pens, pencils and computer keyboards will be decided in a war for the hearts and minds of the Ethiopian people. I have no doubts whatsoever that the outcome of that war is foreordained. In fact, I believe that war has already been won. For as Edward Bulwer-Lytton penned in his verse, in the war between swordholders and penholders, final victory always goes to the penholders.

But today Ethiopia has an intellectual of unrivaled courage, prodigious knowledge of his country’s history and spellbinding oratorical skills.

When the s _ _t hits the fan, we hit the road running.

Taye Bogale stands his ground in the battlefield of ideas and won’t back down.

Ethiopia today is a theater of war, a battlefield of ideas.

Of course, they are those holed up under a rock doing their doggone best to start shooting and unleash a civil war.

They think they can spread their stolen loot to set Ethiopia on fire.

But the era of 27 years of the fire of corruption and criminality in Ethiopia is over.

I prophesied in 2007 the thugs would be swept out and dumped on the trash heap of history by young Ethiopian firefighters. Today, they are all holed up under a rock from whence they came.

We need to tell our young firefighters they are the towers of our power. Let’s uplift their spirits. Let’s assure them they can put out the fire, and we are right there behind them manning the water lines. Sure, it is not going to be easy for the young firefighters. But they must fight the fire, the power. They have choice. They must rescue the fire victims. Let’s reach out to them, talk to them, inspire them and build their confidence. Because in the long run, it is their forest home — their future — that is on fire.

Let us never doubt that our young firefighters, though they may inherit a society devastated by decades of political repression and human rights abuse, will one day be able to build a City Upon a Hill — a just, humane and pious society — where no man or woman will fear his or her government, where government will dutifully respect the rights and liberties of its citizens, where every person can stand tall and freely speak his or her mind, and where no man, woman or child will ever lose life, liberty of property without due process of just laws.

My prophesy has come to pass, and all can stand and witness.

Ethiopia is fast becoming the City Upon the Hill for the African continent.

Ethiopia’s young people have doused out the fire though it flares up here and there. But that is temporary.

Those who fanned the flames over the past 27 years should heed the old saying: “Those who play with fire end up getting burned.”

It is written “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”

Indeed, Ethiopia stretched her hands and was plucked out of the crucible of thugtatorshp miraculously and cured of the malignant cancer in her soul.

But the Forces of Darkness will never stop trying to pull her back to hell, their eternal resting place.

They will succeed only when hell freezes over and the devil goes ice skating.

No need to preach to the choir of the Prince of Darkness!

Today, the Forces of Evil grovel on social media and yelp on YouTube every day agitating conflict, strife and war.

They accuse PM Abiy Ahmed for not “taking action.”

They are never clear what they mean by that phrase.

“Why doesn’t Abiy take action?” is the refrain of the social media ignoramuses?

What they mean, of course, is why doesn’t he jail, kill, torture and terrorize the people just like they did for 27 years and soak his hands in blood.

These modern-day troglodytes (cave dwellers, under rock crawlers) have no clue that Ethiopia will never return to the killing fields of the last 27 years. This should be clear to anyone being groomed by the washed up thugtators.

Suffice it to day, Taye Bogale is a force of nature on the Ethiopian intellectual landscape.

He is a hurricane on the Ethiopian ethnic landscape.

He is a tornadic force that wipes the floor with the dregs of social media.

When the battle and war of ideas is raging in Ethiopia, Taye Bogale is just one of a handful of individuals who stands in the battlefield and duke it out with the merchants of lies come hell or high water.

My highest respect for a man who says what he means and means what he says.

My highest respect for a man who says you can stand me up at the gates of hell but I won’t back down against anyone who challenges my Ethiopiawinet!

That is exactly how a  PROUD ETHIOPIAN feels and lives!

Taye Bogale is killin’ them with the truth…

Below are snippets of statements taken from Taye’s public speeches and presentations. The translation is my own. Advance apologies my inability to capture Taye’s eloquence in my translation. 

Ethiopia is meshed into my flesh and soul. I came forward into the public space to stand up to the social media activists who are inciting hate, strife and conflict in Ethiopia with the ultimate aim of destroying Ethiopia and our age old way of life. I took a stand because as the saying goes, “All that is needed for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to remain silent.” [I would add Dr. King’s words: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.]

The one thing that ties us all together is Ethiopiawinet. Nothing can change that because Ethiopiawinet is something that grew in me for ages. Other things may be taken out of my blood but not my Ethiopiawinet.

Ethiopia is at the crossroads. There is struggle between Ethiopiawinet and ethnonationalism. The aim of the ethnonationalists is to destroy Ethiopia. Approximately, 85% of the people, Oromo, Amhara and others, are farmers. They love Ethiopia like I do and they do their work. Out of the 15% leftover, 10 million of them suffer malnutrition. The elites who play politics are a miniscule number.

The way they’re talking, it is like Emperor Menelik II is running for election in 2012 (EC). Why do they attack Menelik? It is a stratagem used to deceive the people. In fact, they have demonized the name of Menelik to internally displace 2 million people and commit hundreds of ethnic killings. Their plan is not only to destroy the country but also destroy families.

Money is behind all of the instability in the country. People who could barely operate their businesses not long ago today are buying all sorts of businesses. Where’s the money coming from? There is effort at the highest levels to destroy Ethiopia. There is a global effort currently underway. Egypt provides a lot of money. Other Middle Eastern countries spend a lot of money for the purpose of destroying Ethiopia.

Let’s talk real history. Menelik is Oromo. His mother is Oromo. His leading generals were Oromos including Ras Gobena Dache.

It is said Menelik cut off women’s breast. If such things did happen, who did the cutting? Gojjam, Gonder and Wello were under the rule of Atse Yohannes. This is incontrovertible history. Nine-tenths of Menelik’s soldiers were composed of Oromos and people from the South. One-tenths came from North Shewa. That happened in 1896. If forgiveness must be asked about the cutting of breasts, it should come from Shewa Oromo, Wellega Oromo, Jimma Oromo and people of the South. People from Gojjam, Gonder, Borena and Guji can stand on the side and watch them exchange forgiveness.

Since we’re talking about chopping off breasts, in our area (Borena), there was an odious practice in which young men preparing for marriage would go out and cut off the testicles of other men. I know people will have suffered such misfortune. Why do we raise the alleged one-time breast cutting atrocity of Menelik while remaining silent about those who have been cutting testicles for ages?

I just don’t understand. Those who write so many bad things about Menelik never bother to write good things about our Geda system? Why is that?

Addis Ababa belongs to all Ethiopians collectively and the residents of Addis Ababa, which has as much population as the country of Israel. It is like a large country. To say that someone should come from outside the city to administer it making Afan Oromo the official language is blatant apartheid. It will not happen.

I don’t have a quarrel with the people of Tigray. That is why I took a big risk and traveled 600 km to Negele Borena to defend an individual of Tigray origin. I went there because I love the people of Tigray.

Many high-rise buildings are owned by individuals who come from Tigray region. These are the people who deposit large sums in the banks. But when a question is asked, it just said the bank is Amhara-owned. Is the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia an Amhara-owned bank? METEC owned that bank for 27 years.

Jawahr is inciting insurrection using the Amharic language. Ezekiel Gabissa said he does not know Atse Menelik. Bekele Gerba who urges his followers not to speak in Amharic published a book in Amharic and sold it. It is a shame for us to communicate in English with the rest of the world why we’re being told not to speak in Amharic with each other. We have given unnecessary importance to such persons.

I will not respond to comments on my social media pages as I used to but delete them. Responding to lowlifes will turn you into a lowlife. I have the commanding moral Heights and will not lower myself to their level.

Ethiopia is a paradox. She is first in the world and receiving refugees. She’s also the first in the world in creating refugees.

Those who do evil fall by their evil deeds. Those who live by the sword, fall by the sword. The only way to administer Ethiopia is through love.

There is no Derg Army. Only an Ethiopian army that protects the country.

The woman who owns the Morning Star Building in Addis Ababa today got it because of me. After she had won the lease in a bid, the federal police stopped her construction claiming they had made a numerical error. Various ministers called me since I was the chairman of the city district. I told them  they will take it away from her and give it to someone else over my dead body. She won it fair and square. Later she offered me a tip for helping her. I told her to give it to the beggars at the church.

The common people feel differently. When the 175th birthday of Menelik was celebrated, I and others attended the event. We were greeted by Shewa Oromo horsemen. When I told them people say Menelik is bad, they told me they don’t want to hear any of it.

The mentality of the Oromo people I know was seen during the crash of the Boeing Max 8 airplane in Bishoftu, not in those who kill and rob banks. When that airplane crashed, the Oromo people cried their eyes out. They did all of the traditional mourning for the dead.

Today, those who promote hate, violence, killing and plunder are held to be heroes. Those who preach peace reconciliation are considered to be enemies.

Woyane used force for 27 years to stay in power. But God plucked them up from power suddenly and dumped them in Mekele without any bloodshed. He incapacitated these fat cats (tuba people). They sold the country’s gold, metals  and the country itself. Suddenly, unexpected people rose from under their feet and swept them off. And they said Oromo’s are simple-minded!

I have stopped working to do research and writing. I have four books planned for publication. I have a 1000-page book ready for publication. We have established an organization called “Love Conquers All.”

Where are all of the “Taye Bogales” of Ethiopia?

In 2010, I asked, “Where Have the Ethiopian Intellectuals Gone?”

In 2019, I ask, “Where are all of the ‘Taye Bogales’ of Ethiopia?”

By singling out Taye Bogale for special tribute, I do not mean to discount the efforts of those who have made their contributions.

There are a few, mostly young, courageous Ethiopians today who are manning the trenches every day on the battlefield of ideas. Everyone knows who they are because we can count them all on the fingers of two hands.

There are a few in the older generation who make an effort to stand up and speak up.

I appreciate them all.

But in my view, none can match the knowledge, passion, audacity, resolve, forensic skills and determination of Taye Bogale.

That is why I am singling out Taye Bogale for a special personal tribute.

I do not doubt there will be some who will moan and groan about my tribute to Taye Bogale.

They will say, I should not endorse him because “He is so divisive. He is a ‘nationalist’. He is not true to ethnic roots. Blah, blah, blah…”

In anticipatory response to those who will yelp on social media, let them be be forewarned of my longstanding policy of mind over matter. I don’t mind and whatever they say does not matter to me.

In more literary form, paraphrasing Shakespeare in Macbeth:

All the social media ignoramuses could strut and fret their hour upon the social media stage
And whatever tale they tell about me or Taye Bogale is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Onward and forward, Taye Bogale….

Taye Bogale YouTube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKNqn–jn7Y&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fBBqm2DV1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV-T-7X–WU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fBBqm2DV1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKNqn–jn7Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr0Kbz2RtMk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSqzz9O4f4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJYPW8Bsthc

The post The AMAZING Taye Bogale: A Force of Nature on the Ethiopian Intellectual Landscape appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By  Damo Gotamo

Diplomacy is an art. People who engage in the old profession are required to have a range of abilities, including negotiation, communication, and conflict resolution skills. The way a diplomat conducts himself when representing his country abroad is critical to the success of his mission. Many countries select their diplomats carefully and provide rigorous training regimes before they send them to overseas posts. It is both an honor and a privilege to serve one’s country as a diplomat. However, under the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) regime, the country’s diplomatic missions were used to advance the interest of the TPLF and its members, and the professionals who practiced the trade were harassed, abused, and their diplomatic careers cut short.

Ethiopia’s diplomatic mission during the 27 years of the TPLF authoritarian rule was used to advance the interest of the TPLF and its members. The gun-wielding ragtag group that controlled the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), misused the foreign service of the country, which was  supposedly be serving the interest of the Ethiopian people. The diplomatic sector, which had been represented by dignified and skilled people like Ras Imuru Haile Selasie, Yilma Deresa, Bitwoded Zewede Gebrhiwot, and Mikael Imuru, was overrun by illiterate thugs who spent half of their lives in Dedebit pit. We witnessed one embarrassing spectacle after another in the countries missions abroad by the TPLF agents masquerading as diplomats.

In the TPLF Ethiopia, the country’s embassies became private clubs to the creme de la creme of the TPLF and their hand-picked minions. Instead of serving the interest of the country and its citizens abroad, the missions served the TPLF members and their families. While citizens who required services from embassies that operated under their name were prevented from entering their embassies’ compounds, the members of the TPLF were free to enter them any time. The TPLF members often gathered at the embassies to conduct secret meetings targeting Ethiopians who opposed the criminal regime. Many offices of the missions were used as night clubs and places where relatives of the TPLF members celebrated the birth date of the TPLF and their families. In many of the missions, the former TPLF fighters served as security guards, allowing only the members of the TPLF to enter into the buildings. People who went to   Ethiopian embassies on business told me they felt they were inside the TPLF’s headquarter in Mekele!

Under the TPLF of Ethiopia, assignment to foreign missions was largely political rather than merit. Most of the people who were posted abroad as emissaries were either the members of the TPLF or the lickspittles of the TPLF honchos. The TPLF cadres who barely finished third grade education, let alone understood the art of diplomacy, were assigned in many embassies. Career diplomats who were appointed to cover up for the deficiencies of the TPLF cadres were constantly harassed and abused by TPLF agents.

The MOFA and Ethiopian embassies under the TPLF regime were not convenient places for the country’s diplomats to practice their profession. Diplomats were frequently subjected to harassment, and their activities were strictly monitored by the TPLF spies. Even ambassadors with the plenipotentiary powers were not at liberty to carry out their duties with freedom. Every activity, including the off-duty conduct of a diplomat, was closely monitored by the TPLF moles and reported to the head office. For example, ten years ago, two diplomats who worked at the Ethiopian mission in New York were prevented from entering the building by a TPLF agent. The agent alleged the diplomats of participating at an opposition rally in the District of Columbia a day before. Diplomats who opposed the TPLF’s way of doing things were, most often, shown the doors and advised not to return to work the next day. The careers of many diplomats were ruined by the TPLF ignoramuses and the country’s resources to train them wasted. Ethiopia missed out on the services of its skilled diplomats, who would have immensely contributed to the development of the country.

According to the former diplomats whom I spoke, working at the Ethiopian embassies felt like working in a war zone. Conflicts frequently broke out between the career diplomats and the TPLF informants. Trust was in short supply. The infamous Ande Lamest, the TPLF crooks brought from Dedebit and foisted on Ethiopians, was effectively exercised in the country’s missions. In some embassies, the TPLF moles installed listening devices to monitor the activities of the diplomats they mistrusted.

Ethiopian’s diplomatic missions became the ‘graveyards’ to the country’s diplomats. Unable to carry out their duties, hundreds of career diplomats who were posted in Asmera, Kampala, Egypt, Amsterdam, London, Washington DC, New York and other locations had left their posts. Many fled to a third country, and a few remained in the host countries to seek political asylum. It isn’t difficult to comprehend how difficult for the Ethiopian diplomats and their families to start life from scratch after their careers were cut short by the criminals who had controlled the country.

Things at the MF and Ethiopian missions were relatively better in the first three years of the TPLF reign. During the first three years, the TPLF leaders didn’t show any clue that they would make the MF and the embassies their exclusive clubs. Although many Tegadalyes were posted as ambassadors, important diplomatic activities were covered by professionals who were recruited based on their academic qualifications. However, things started to change, after the Coalition for Unity and Democratic Party (Kinijit) thumped the TPLF in the 2005 National Elections.

After rigging the election and taking the result from the winning party through the barrel of the gun, the TPLF goons started filling overseas diplomatic missions exclusively with their members. Patronage appointments became the norm. People who had no clue about foreign relations and diplomacy were brought from the far corners of Tigraye province and posted in Ethiopian missions abroad. Most of the appointees didn’t have formal educational credentials, let alone, training in foreign policy and diplomacy. Even worse, most of the appointees didn’t serve at the head office for a day. The only time they entered the building of the MF was to receive their diplomatic passports.

Employees at the MF used to call the practice of assigning people to overseas missions who didn’t serve at the MF and qualify to serve as diplomats as ‘Ayer ba ayer medeba.’The shameless Woyane leaders sent many of their agents and family members as diplomats and local employees through ‘Ayer ba ayer.’ It was impossible to verify the relationships of the TPLF informants and the people they took with them to overseas posts as their relatives.

It was because of the incompetent TPLF former fighters that overrun the Ethiopian embassies overseas that many embarrassing and unpleasant incidents occurred over the years that tarnished the image of the country. Among the embarrassing incidents that involved the TPLF’s diplomats, I will mention a few that attracted the attention of many people.

In 2014, a former TPLF fighter who was assigned ‘Ayer ba ayer’ to the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC, as a security chief, fired several shots at the Ethiopians who were peacefully protesting against the TPLF crimes in Ethiopia. Apparently, the Tegadalay took the embassy’s building for a Woyane bunker in Dedebit and the protesting Ethiopians as the Derge soldiers. Solomon Tadese Gebre Silasse was a close relative of the former foreign minister of Ethiopia, Seyoum Mesfin. He was posted at the embassy as a favor for his service as the TPLF fighter. Solomon had nothing to show about his qualifications that would have enabled him to represent the country as a diplomat. He was a thug who shouldn’t have left the Dedebit pit in the first place.

Another embarrassing incident involving a TPLF mole masquerading as a diplomat took place in Ankara, Turkey. In December 2017, an inebriated former TPLF fighter threatened to ‘start a war’ between Ethiopia and Turkey unless he was let go. Tesfakiros Hailu Gebremariam was involved in two car accidents and had made a threat against the police officers who tried to arrest him. There were many TPLF fighters like Solomon and Tesfakiros who were assigned in Ethiopian missions abroad to spy on career diplomats and end up damaging the image of the country.

Diplomats who disagreed with the TPLF way of doing things at the MF and embassies were called by different terms to demonize and intimidate them. For example, Amharas were called ‘Neftegas ’ if they tried promoting ideas that were different from the TPLF. The Oromos were tagged as OLFites and narrow nationalities. Others were given different terms and attacked by the TPLF moles stationed at the MF and embassies overseas.

Employees at the MOFA who were considered to have different political views with the TPLF would never be allowed to serve in the country’s foreign missions and only be permitted to stay at the ministry at the discretion of the TPLF bosses. Many intelligent diplomats saw their careers and lives cut short by the TPLF operatives at the MOFA. It takes many pages to list the names of all the victims and describe their trouble at the hands of the TPLF. I would mention, here, a case many former and current diplomats at the ministry are familiar with.

Amare Lebese, an outstanding student of Political Science and International Relations, a graduate of Addis Ababa University from the class of 1985/86, was a prominent victim of the TPLF crimes at the MOFA. Amare, originally from Gojam, was never called up to serve his country in overseas missions because he was considered a ‘Neftgas’ sympathizer. The TPLF goons wanted to use his skills and kept him at the head office until he passed away. He was a classmate of professors Merara Gudina and Kasshun Berhanu. Amare was a top student from his class and had the same grade points as the two professors. He was an intelligent young man who would have been a great asset to the country’s diplomatic mission.

Opposing the TPLF policies and its practices while working at embassies abroad would entail catastrophic consequences on a diplomat. Nothing epitomized the TPLF’s abuse of its diplomats and how its agents go to great lengths to hurt Ethiopians who opposed them as the drama that unfolded at the Ethiopian consulate in California two years ago.

The TPLF head of mission at the California consulate, Berhane Kidanmeria, who had never served at the MOFA tipped off the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) of the United States about an alleged visa fraud involving one of the diplomats at the consulate. The case involved ambassador Dr Desta Woledyahnes Delkasso, who had been serving as the Minister for Political Affairs, Economic and Business Diplomacy at the consulate since 2016. Who is Desta and why did the TPLF agents scrambled to slander her reputation and hurt her after serving her country for several decades?

Ambassador Desta has carried out her responsibilities with due diligence and the utmost care in every sector she has been called up to serve. Before she became a diplomat, she had worked as a gynecologist at the Zewditu Hospital for several years. Then, she became the head of HIV in Ethiopia before she was kicked out of her position by Tedros Adhanom. The former TPLF Health Minister sensed that Desta would blow-the-whistle about the miss management of foreign aid by the TPLF members at the Ministry of Health.

When it was time to look for another challenge, ambassador Desta took several training courses in foreign policy and diplomacy and availed herself to serve her country. She joined the MF and served in different capacities, including as head of a department before she was appointed as an ambassador to South Africa.

As an ambassador to South Africa, Desta carried out her duties with great care. She went above and beyond the call of duty to serve her country and the Ethiopian diaspora in South Africa. Several people who returned from South Africa told me Desta frequently visited prisons in Johannesburg, Cap-town, and Pretoria where Ethiopians and Eritreans were incarcerated. She helped to secure their release and gave consul to those who remained behind bars.

I don’t know ambassador Desta personally. But, I spoke to several people who had known her professionally in preparing to write this piece. They told me ambassador Desta wasn’t the kind of person who would silently watch when she sensed something nefarious. She spoke her mind and called a spade a spade. They suspect, they told me, something sinister was taking place behind the embassy walls which involved the TPLF moles. The TPLF agents at the consulate must have known that Desta knew what was going on and they felt threatened and decided to attack her.

I also share the accounts of Dest’s former colleagues about their suspicions. Based on the TPLF’s modus operandi, something wicked was taking place at the consulate involving the big TPLF officials in Addis Ababa that forced its agent to take a preemptive attack against Desta. Because of her strong personality, Desta must have been at loggerheads with the head of the mission at the embassy. The TPLF agent, Berhane Kidanemariam, instead of resolving whatever differences transpired at the embassy, chose to be a snitch and contacted the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) to inform about the visa status of ambassador’s families. Had Desta been a Woayne we wouldn’t have heard all the commotion the TPLF members and their vassals staged.

Serving one’s country in foreign missions entails esprit de corpus among the members of the diplomatic core. When disagreements and differences arise, they should be resolved peacefully and diplomatically. However, the TPLF agent who had neither the diplomatic skills nor the culture of teamwork chose to throw one of the members of his mission under the bus. Rather than being exposed for the scam that was taking place at the embassy, the TPLF agent chose to make the woman a sacrificial lamb. What the TPLF mole did at Ethiopian consulate in California to destroy the life of a fellow Ethiopian who was serving her country was criminal. What is embarrassing and wrong was as if he had done something extraordinary, Berhane Kidanmeria was moved to Washington DC to serve in the country’s embassy.

Taking dependent relatives with them to overseas missions isn’t new to the Ethiopian diplomats. Many had taken their families and dependents. The TPLF Tegadalyes took their relatives, including their, cousins, concubines, and distant relatives when they were undeservedly posted overseas. Whenever the TPLF officials visited Europe and the US, they often took their relatives with them. How have many of the relatives of the former TPLF fighters who have been congesting the streets of big cities in the western countries got there? Whose relatives are attending schools and owning businesses in the United States and Europe?

Desta took with her a couple of sick relatives who were dependent on her. Why the TPLF goons everywhere made a big fuss about it and didn’t utter a word when Seyoum Mesfin was encouraging the TPLF members to request for political asylums in the west , who travelled using diplomatic visas? I strongly believe Desta was undeservedly prosecuted and didn’t receive support from her own government when she was attacked by the TPLF crooks.

What really perplexed many people was the alleged charge that ambassador Desta was trying to bring 20 people to the United States from Ethiopia. I have looked everywhere and couldn’t find any information about ambassador Desta opening an employment agency in the United States. How the MF would have allowed a letter to leave its building requesting a visa for a single diplomat to take additional twenty people to the United States? Still, how could the embassy of the United States would have approved the request? The TPLF agents through aiga forum and other websites they owned had spread their lies, and sadly many people fell victim to their scam.

The TPLF dominated MF foreign was riddled with corruption and nepotism. Corruption was worse under Seyoum Mesfin, a TPLF henchman, who run the MF affairs over twenty years as if it was his private corporation. To get a foreign assignment, for example, some diplomats had to promise their first three months of salary to pay to the people who were directly responsible for foreign assignments. Furthermore, some diplomats who were already serving abroad and whose diplomatic mission was about to end had to pay bribes if they wanted to extend their stay by a year or two.

When Seyoum Mesfin was in charge, he did everything he wanted. He sent hundreds of his relatives and the relatives of TPLF officials to foreign diplomatic posts as local employees. It was a long practice of the MF to send drivers, cooks, guards, and others to foreign missions as local employees. Mesfin also allowed his wife and the wives of other TPLF officials to seat with diplomats to take foreign language courses at the MF as if the ministry was a tuition-free language school open to anyone.

In conclusion, Ethiopian’s diplomatic mission and its diplomats under the TPLF regime were subjected to unprecedented mismanagement and abuse. The country’s embassies were used as business centers, night clubs, political venues for the TPLF members and their lackeys. At the MOFA and Ethiopian embassies, career diplomats were abused and framed for the crimes they didn’t commit. The cases involving Amare Lebese and Desta Delkasso mentioned above were just the tips of the iceberg with many of the crimes of the TPLF agents at the MF and embassies going unreported. Amare was a young man with a bright future, and his career was cut short by Seyoum Mesfin. Ambassador Desta, who served her country tirelessly for decades, was a victim of the TPLF scam.

The government of Abiy should clean the MOFA and the country’s missions abroad from the TPLF agents. They shouldn’t be allowed to drag the country and its diplomats. There are still many TPLF operatives in overseas missions who are engaged in spying and sabotaging the change undergoing in the country. Making the working environment conducive for the country’s diplomats should be one of the priorities of the government. Given the opportunity, there are many former diplomats who are willing to serve their country. Instead of relying on cadres, allowing trained professionals to serve at the head offices and missions abroad will help the country achieve its foreign policy objectives.

The post The Misuse of Ethiopia’s Diplomatic Missions and the Misfortune of the Country’s Diplomats Under the TPLF Regime  appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Belayneh Abate

The Polish philosopher, Leskzek Kolakowski, once said, “in politics, being deceived is no excuse.”* Kolakowski died in 2009, but his teachings about excuses are evergreen and describes the current gullible Ethiopian Elites, especially the credulous Amara intellectuals.

A year ago, the credulous Amara elites beat the drums behind the serpent Abiy Ahemed  forgetting what this serpent and his devil masters did to the Amaras in the Garden of Aden for three decades. The gullible Amara elites forgot that Abiy Ahmed’s criminal party, the Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Front (EPRDF), was established to franchise republics of nations and nationalities on the graves of Amaras.

The credulous Amara elites blamed only the Tigre Peoples Libration Front (TPLF), not the long-time slaves such as Abiy Ahmed, for the massacre, imprisonment, torture, displacement and sterilization of Amaras.

Despite his past wicked deeds, most Amara elites were completely blinded by the serpent’s cunning “Ethiopia” rhetoric when he was systematically installed to power by foreign agents last year. The credulous Amara elites forgot that the serpent was a high-ranking spy director and Legesesse Zenawi’s right hand when Amaras were facing massacres, tortures, displacement and ethnic cleansing in every corner of the nation.

Like immature and uncultured teenagers, the gullible Amara elites were terribly seduced by pastor Abiy Ahmed’s fake preaching about love, unity, reconciliation and forgiveness. Most Amara elites did not want to recall that the serpent pastor was the leader of EPRDF that hanged water bottles on testicles of Amara men, and administered unique birth control programs to sterilize Amara women.

In fact, many opportunist Amara elites considered him as the Mosses of the biblical Exudes forgetting the surmountable crimes he and his masters did to the Amaras. These opportunist Amara elites did not want to admit that the fake preacher served like a jack ass to the ruthless EPRDF, a front established to break the backs and the hips of Amaras. The Gullible Amara elites failed to acknowledge that their preacher pastor built an ugly breast monument based on fire-place folktales to separate the Amaras from the people the pastor claims to represent.

Most Amara elites forgot that the architect of the anti-Amara EPRDF, Legesess Zenawi, never ordained cadres, spy agents or high-ranking officials unless they exhibit deep hate for Amaras or show strong love affair to their voracious large stomachs.  The gullible Amara elites failed to predict that the pastor was preaching phony love and unity to buy time and strengthen his power to control Amaras.

Like Kolakowsk’s soul, Timothy Snyder ‘s heart is saddened by the gullible nature of most amara elites because they failed to see his red-warning sign, which reads “anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy”*. Like the fools who anticipate eggs of doves from the wombs of serpents, the gullible Amara elites expected a glitter of hope from the spy agents and cadres of the Legesse Zenawi’s EPRDF, who were chasing, killing, sterilizing and starving Amaras for decades. In fact, some Amara elites bowed like arcs below the knees of these criminals, and others became their full-time cadres and propagandists.

How difficult was it to comprehend that Legesse Zewai’s EPRDF committed mass murders and national treason using spy agents and cadres such as Abiy as effective tools? How complicated was it to read their 25 years resume? How hard was it to understand that these tools lack conscience, morality, self-confidence, vision, courage and pride like any other tools?

The gullible Amara elites forgot their brilliant forefathers’ teachings that empty love words come from the mouths of monsters that snatch believers from the hands of God. They failed to follow the teachings of the holy books, which warn people to identify fiends by their past and current deeds, not by their empty words.

Beyond the understandings of the suffering Amaras, some dupe Amara elites are still following the serpent’s swinging tail even at a time the serpent is chasing, stinging and killing the Amara leaders to weaken the strength of Amara and materialize the dream of building the republics of nations and nationalist on the graves of Amaras.

Many fools and HODAM Amara elites are licking the serpent’s tail even at this juncture when the serpent is turning every possible rock to make the Amara people leaderless while allowing his brutal kin to do whatever they want including killing, displacing, incarcerating, and robbing others.

It is unfortunate and sickening to see the gullible Amara elites contributing to the suffering and demise of Amara by committing political tragedy of anticipatory obedience, and by fabricating excuses of blaming the forbidden trees around the serpent instead of the serpent.

It was the serpent, not the forbidden trees, the unholy Adam and Eve cooked as an excuse at the beginning of genesis. Even Adam and Eve who directly blamed the serpent did not escape punishment because they keep cooking excuses and failed to repent their sins. Worse than Adam and Eve, the gullible Amara elites have miserably failed even to identify the serpent that misleads and stings the Amaras. The fools keep cooking excuses and blame the trees where the serpent resides.

The Amara elites should understand that the serpents are causing existential threats to the people of Amara, its beautiful Amaric Language, Scripts and well-designed calendar.

God has given us the brains so that we can predict the future based on past experiences. Our past experiences show that Abiyote Ahmed and his colleagues have been the leaders of EPRDF, a criminal origination that committed ethnic cleaning of Amaras in every corner of the country. For the survival of the well- cultured and God-fearing Amara people, the gullible elites shall repent and stand united against the serpents.  Thank you.

*Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism:  https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2005/6/leszek-kolakowski-the-anatomy-of-totalitarianism

** Timothy Snyder, on Tyranny 2017: page 18

July 2019

The writer can be reached at abatebelai@yahoo.com

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The post In Politics, Being Deceived Is No Excuse! appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

By Kebour Ghenna
October 6, 2019

Yes, what is this election for if it does not answer the relevant and serious political, societal and economic questions of Ethiopia, or help us pursue common interests and aspirations, or make the country easier to govern… What good is it? For people to vote but nothing is really resolved or reconciled

What the 2020 voting will do is nation-deconstruction, not nation-building, national disunity, not national unity, disintegration, not integration. In these conditions, whatever democracy we claim to exercise devolves into a zero-sum competition, one in which the ugliest us-versus-them instincts takes precedence. Ethiopians today view their fellow neighbors not as fellow Ethiopians, but as enemies to be vanquished. The simple truth is that Ethiopia is losing its sense of mission or purpose as a country.

The upcoming election would be different, radically, clearly and manifestly from those of years past. For a start it will be the most consequential in our lifetimes; survival of the country, as we know it today, may depend on it. And yet our discourses are just limited to speculating whether ELECTIONS WILL TAKE PLACE OR NOT! Surely there’s a big storm out there somewhere…No?

The government is creating the illusion that everything will be sorted out with this election and that individuals must give their total support for its success. Yet what kind of success is the government referring to, if any, is not clear.

This is the first time, in our history, that we’ll vote mostly along ethnic divide…. We’ll choose between an ethnic identity and multiculturalism. I take no joy in this assertion. This is not an election about issues, not about innovation and productivity, not about fighting violence, famines, disease, misery, depression, inflation, living in peace, traffic, price of onions…This is not about Egypt, debt, climate change, privatization, or rural financing. This is about ourselves, about our willingness and readiness to live together. Can we… do we… want to live together. WHAT DO WE WANT?

This will be an election where our chronic lack of shared vision as a country will be clearly manifested. Without a shared vision, the tendency is for citizens to devalue one another as they glorify themselves and their ethnic identity, believing that they are the best thing to have happened to their country. Such selfish greed hardly allows for time to think of Ethiopia in real terms as a collective treasure to be valued and protected by its inhabitant.

No surprise there!

The country’s constitution for the past 25 years or so served to accelerate this division, turning the people against one another. This was a constitution specifically designed to divide and split the hell out of us, and to a remarkable extent, it has succeeded in doing just that. Funny enough many still want to keep this constitution with all its faults than fight for another that keeps Ethiopia together.

This is an election devoid of ideas in dealing with the rise of ethnic hatreds. Prime Minister Abye knows it, his government has yet to define Ethiopia’s national purpose, reflect on whether centralism or decentralism will be the governing political strand of the country, develop a sound architecture of political institutions and rules, agree on the way decisions are made, including consensus with each regional state having a veto power on critical decisions.

We’re in an “Election -or-Die” trap. No politicians seem willing to consider postponing this election, until the country stabilizes.
And when you’re in an Election-or-Die trap, leaders will want to get out of it in the worst possible way. That is, they will choose the worst way forward – ignore the problem, more entertainment, and more feeble and divisive policies. The politics of strife and conflict and the struggle for power will be tactfully relegated to the regions, while the leaders (federal and regional), like master juggler, play quietly the regional or ethnic elites against one another.

So why insist in holding the election next year? Why not sort out the reasons and grievances that brought about the rise of ethnic politics first? Why not find a way to call this generation of Ethiopians to a constitutional convention to shape Ethiopia’s future and to prevent a national unity crisis. Such mega constitutional politics is not something new. The US, Canada, most East European countries, South Africa passed through such mega constitutional upheavals. Surely this requires leadership to set the direction, and I still believe Abye, together with the regional presidents and other leaders, is the one who’s well placed to conduct this reform.

Will such initiative help us build a united, forward looking, progressive Ethiopia?

You decide.

The post Ethiopia:What is this election for? appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Last week, Susan Elizabeth Rice, President Obama’s former National Security Advisor and top confidant was ragging on President Donald Trump as the “destroyer of American democracy from within” as she hawked her book “Tough Love” on a talk show. Rice indignantly protested:

… For the first time I can remember, our democracy is under assault. Our country is in effect under attack. That attack is coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…. You’re thinking this man is not predictable, he’s not stable, he’s not playing with a full deck… And for all of the security threats I saw as national security advisor, I never thought I’d see that…

In June 2019, Susan Rice told a reporter:

They [Trump and his people] don’t care. They don’t seem to care about the integrity of our elections, the integrity of our democracy and what makes us Americans…”

According to Susan Rice, Donald Trump has either made America a banana republic or turned it into Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”, the U.S. of A.

Run! Run for your lives, compatriots! Trump the Barbarian is attacking American democracy from his garrison at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is amusing for me to see Susan E. Rice shedding crocodile tears for American democracy and singing requiem hymns for the death of electoral integrity by the bludgeoning hands of Donald Trump.

Aaah! How quickly we forget!

Susan Rice, you may have forgotten it, but I have not.

There is an old Ethiopian saying, “If he who spears (stabs) forgets, he who is speared (stabbed) does not forget.

Susan Rice speared me in the heart on July 27, 2015 with a villainous laughter and piercing words.

As Susan Rice rises to accuse Donald Trump of democricide in America, I rise to accuse, once again, Susan E. Rice of democricide in Ethiopia.

Susan Rice has no moral authority or standing to accuse President Trump of assault and murder of democracy in America because she herself was an accomplice and aider and abettor in the assault on and murder of democracy in Ethiopia.

I accused Susan E. Rice of democricide in Ethiopia in my July 31, 2015 commentary, “Susan Rice Laughing at Ethiopia’s 2015 Elektion”.

At a press conference during Obama’s trip to Kenya and Ethiopia in July 2015, Susan E. Rice busted out laughing immediately after she stated that the election of the “Prime Minister of Ethiopia [Hailemariam Desalegn]” is “absolutely – 100 percent democratic”. That election took a few weeks before Obama and Rice arrived in Ethiopia for a state visit.

For those who cannot access the video, this was Susan Rice’s response:

Reporter Isaac: Does the President consider the presidents of Kenya and Ethiopia democratically elected Presidents?

Susan Rice: I think the Prime Minister of Ethiopia was just elected with 100 percent of the vote, which I think suggests, as we have stated in our public statements, some concern for the integrity of the electoral process — at least if not in the outcomes then in some of the mechanisms that supported the process, the freedom for the opposition to campaign.

Reporter Isaac: But does he [President Obama] think it was a democratic election?

Susan Rice: Absolutely – 100 percent. [Busts out laughing uncontrollably.]

Human Rights Watch commenting on the 2015 “100 percent election” victory wrote:

According to Ethiopia’s National Electoral Board, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition won 546 parliamentary seats (with the 547th seat still to be announced).

The results shouldn’t be seen as a stamp of approval for Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn’s government – rather they are the inevitable outcome of a political system in which opposition parties face extraordinary challenges and nearly all avenues for citizens to engage in political debate are closed.

The theft of democracy and elections in Ethiopia was masterminded by the late brutal Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, a man Susan Rice described as my “true friend”.

Meles Zenawi was a serial election thief, among other things.

He stole the 2005 Ethiopian election.

The European Union  Election Observation Mission – Ethiopia 2005 in its final report stated, “The  2005 elections fell short of international principles for genuine democratic elections.” That is diplomatic speak for stolen election.

Meles Zenawi, following the 2005 election, jailed “several dozen opposition politicians, journalists, editors and civil society activists. Ethiopian authorities have indicated that several among them are likely to face charges of treason, which carries a potential sentence of death under Ethiopian law.”

In 2010, Susan Rice’s “true friend” claimed to have won 99.6 percent of the seats in the Ethiopian parliament.

The European Union  Election Observation Mission – Ethiopia 2010 in its final report stated “the electoral process fell short of certain international commitments, notably regarding  the transparency  of the process and the lack of a level playing field for all contesting parties.” Again, stolen election.

In 2015, Meles Zenawi’s TPLF party, following Zenawi’s playbook, won 100 percent of the seats in parliament. It was theft of an election in broad daylight.

Susan Rice’s “true friend”, Meles Zenawi, was an enemy of democracy, a notorious and brazen election thief and persecutor and jailer of political opponents who trounced him in a democratic election.

The fact of the matter is that Susan E. Rice is a fake defender of democracy, a dissembler of democracy.

Susan Rice worshiped Africans tyrants and enemies of democracy at the altar of dictatorship.

Susan Rice was BFF (best friends for life) with some of the most brutal African dictators  who not only stole elections but also changed their constitutions to become presidents-for-life. Susan Rice never met a dictator she did not like.

Of course, her favorite dictator was her “true friend” Meles Zenawi who ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist and lug-soled boots for over two decades.

Susan Rice’s eulogy of Meles Zenawi in 2012 could best be described as a canonization for sainthood:

Meles was a friend both to my country and to me personally… He was selfless, tireless and totally dedicated to his work and family… In the toughest times, he retained that twinkle in his eye, his roiling laugh, his ready smile and his wicked sense of humor. True, he never lacked confidence in his judgement. He wasn’t just brilliant, a relentless negotiator, and consumer of knowledge. He was uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and long game. He was tough, unsentimental and sometimes and yielding. He had little patience for fools or as liked to call them idiots. From among many of his admirable qualities was his world class mind. He was consistently reasoned in his judgment and thoughtful in his decisions. He was both a son and father of Ethiopia 43 birth… He is a true friend to me and many…

But Saint Meles Zenawi not only had a wicked sense of humor, he was also a villainous and wicked shapeshifting dictator “who smiled as he murdered and murdered as he smiled”, to paraphrase Shakespeare.

In 2008, Parade Magazine described Zenawi as one of “The World’s Worst Dictators”.

In 2012, The Economist described Zenawi as “The man who tried to make dictatorship acceptable.”

The Atlantic in 2012 described Zenawi as a “modern dictator who cracked down on civil society organizations and journalists”, and whose “rule was marked by a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that excluded several of the country’s major ethnic groups from political and economic life, and that denied humanitarian aid to supposedly disloyal sectors of the country.”

Foreign Policy Magazine described Zenawi as “not your typical one-dimensional African strongman.”

It was Meles Zenawi, the man who killed democracy and untold numbers of innocent Ethiopians that Susan Rice described as “a true friend” and a “friend to me personally”.

Today, Susan Rice has the gall to accuse Donald Trump of mounting an “assault on American democracy” and destroying “the integrity of our elections”.

Is the pot calling the kettle black?

But hypocrisy runs in the bloodstream of the Obama extended political family.

In June 2013, Obama the hypocrite ripped into the late dictator Robert Mugabe who claimed to have won his election in Zimbabwe by 61 percent of the vote:

… So there is an opportunity to move forward — but only if there is an election that is free, and fair, and peaceful, so that Zimbabweans can determine their future without fear of intimidation and retribution.  And after elections, there must be respect for the universal rights upon which democracy depends.

Obama and Rice accused Robert Mugabe of being an election thief when he won by 61 percent of the vote, but it was “absolutely 100 percent democratic” when Meles Zenawi claimed 100 percent electoral victory in Ethiopia.

A hypocrite is as a hypocrite does.

Legend has it that President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza that “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

I guess for Obama and Rice, “Zenawi may be an S.O.B, but he is their S.O.B.”

Despite lofty rhetoric in support of the advancement of democracy and protection of human rights in Africa, Susan Rice and Barack Obama continued to subsidize and coddle African dictatorships that are as bad as or even worse than Mugabe’s.

Obviously, in Susan Rice’s mind “stupid is as stupid does.” Africans have never known democracy; therefore dictatorship is democracy for them. 

Apparently, a democracy that is good for the American goose is not good for the Ethiopian gander.

Fake and sham democracy for Ethiopia and Africa is just fine and dandy, according to Susan Rice.

For America, democracy is a sacrosanct institution to be enshrined and cherished in the Holy of Holies.

It must be defended tooth and nail against a man, to use Susan Rice’s phrase, “who is not playing with a full deck”.

When push comes to shove on American democracy, Susan Rice trumpets atop her moral high horse, “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war!”

The fact of the matter is that for the Janus-faced Susan Rice democracy is a question of moral relativism.

Democratic elections are relative. Election integrity is relative.

For Susan Rice to call President Trump the assassin of American democracy is the height of hypocrisy.

Scripture teaches, “Don’t focus on the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the log in your own eye.”

Sister Susan, I say this to you from the bottom of my heart:

Look hard in the mirror. Everything you said about President Trump, I said about you in July 2015. You might just be talking about yourself when you accused President Trump of democricide in America.

Sister Susan, when you point one finger at President Trump for “assaulting democracy”, remember there are three fingers pointing back to you for your support of dictators all over Africa who murdered democracy in its infancy or made sure it was stillborn.

Sister Susan, when you come out swinging at Donald Trump as a holy roller crusader for American democracy, I laugh at you today just as you laughed at me and  100 million Ethiopians in 2015 after saying an election won 100 percent by one party is “100 percent democratic.”

Sister Susan, when I see you preaching morality, constitutionality and patriotism sanctimoniously to Donald Trump from your holier-than-thou pulpit of hypocrisy, I really pity you.

Sister Susan, shed your crocodile tears over the horrible death of American democracy at the hands of Donald Trump to Americans who do not know you.

I know you.

Ethiopians know who you really are.

When you told them the 2015 election was “100 percent democratic”, you not only disrespected them, you also insulted their intelligence.

Sister Susan, Africans know who you really are.

Might I ask you Sister Susan, did you shed a tear when 800 thousand Rwandans were murdered in 1994?

Did you not say in 1994, as a staffer on the National Security Council, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing in Rwanda, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

Sister Susan, tell me, was the moral choice for you winning an election and losing 800 thousand Rwadans?

Sister Susan, let me assure you that Ethiopians do not suffer fools, idiots and those who insult their intelligence and undermine their heroic efforts to establish democracy for themselves and their posterity.

Ethiopians forgive but they never forget!

Whatever President Trump has committed or omitted in the performance of his presidential duties are now under scrutiny by the U.S. House of Representatives.

As a constitutional lawyer, I have had opportunity to study and teach Congress’ power of impeachment (U.S. Const. art.1, §2, cl.5.2; U.S. Const. art.1, §3, cl.6).

Whether an allegation of “assault on American democracy” by one who “does not play with a full deck” amounts to an impeachable “high crime and misdemeanor” remains to be seen.

Regarding impeachment, President Gerald Ford said it best, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Sister Susan, tough love should begin with tough self-love.

As you dish out your “urgent appeal to the American public to bridge our dangerous domestic divides in order to preserve our democracy” in your book, try a taste of your own medicine which you push on others: Honesty, integrity, sincerity, veracity, probity and a little dash of humanity.

Sister Susan, you could “wet your cheeks with artificial tears of a dying American democracy and frame your face” to sell your book, to paraphrase Shakespeare, but be mindful you are in a tough spot to pontificate or hector Donald Trump or anyone else about democracy.

 

The post Open Letter to Susan Hypocrit E Rice: People Who Live in Glass Houses Should Not Throw Stones appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Remarks by Mr. Obang Metho on Shimelis Abdissa’s speech at the Ireecha Festival

October 7, 2019

In a speech given at the 2019 Ireecha Festival, Mr. Shimelis Abdissa, the Deputy President of Oromia Regional State, who also is the top official of the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP/EPRDF), the political party currently in power in Ethiopia and also the former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, made a number of highly controversial statements that have incited anger and rocketed suspicions to new heights among countless Ethiopians.

Whether it was a mistake or intentional; either way, Deputy President Shimelis Abdissa’s comments raise serious questions that require some explanation. In our present ethnic-dominated, political climate, such comments are loaded with innuendos of what people are now saying is “a takeover turn.” It builds the case of those who are suspicious of the motivation behind the players leading the current reforms. Are they genuine? If this was an unfortunate overstatement by Shimelis, the public needs answers to their questions before it creates a bigger divide between an already divided society.

I also have questions. The language he used was similar to what we have heard over the past 27 years from the TPLF-controlled EPRDF who used the dehumanization and labeling of others to separate, alienate and isolate Ethiopians from working together or standing together. It resulted in erasing an important bond, hat of our shared humanity and common national identity that previously had kept Ethiopia together a proud nation. It served as an attempt to divide and conquer “the people” outside their own “ethnic box.”

I could not ignore it in the past fifteen years of my effort to advocate for the rights and wellbeing of all Ethiopian and to help bring reconciliation, peace and respect to the people of Ethiopia and I cannot ignore it now. In fact, in the past years when this kind of language was used against fellow Ethiopians, including my own ethnic group as well as Oromo, Amhara, Somalian, Muslim and others, I condemned it. This is why it is so shocking to hear this now coming from the president of this region. I thought we were done with the abusive languages of division and dehumanization. So, when I heard him speak to thousands of Ireecha celebrants at Meskel Square in the center of Addis Ababa, I was greatly disturbed to hear him talk about defeating.

He said, :“This is where the Oromo people broken. This is where the humiliation began. This is where his conscious is broken. This is where Tufa Muna and other fighters of that time broken by the Neftegna system. Today we have broken and rooted out who broken us. Oromo honored in its humiliation place. You won Oromo”!

He also stated that the Oromo had been denied the opportunity to celebrate the Ireecha Festival for the last 150 years. It is true that Ethiopia has a mixed history like most of the countries in the world; some of which we can be proud of and some that we are not. Opinions also may vary from group to group about what is good and bad; however, the speech was disheartening and many Ethiopians are now reacting to it. His labeling did not make the break from our flawed past, but seemed to repeat some aspects of it once again. It was not something we would have expected from the president of one of the largest, most populous regions of the country and the party that is in charge of leading Ethiopia. Mr. Shimelis’s speech is not only opposite to the Medemer Philosophy but it erased the Medemer Philosophy that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his Oromo Democratic Party (ODP) uses as a fundamental concept to convince and unity the people of Ethiopia.

What we all, Ethiopians need to “Break and Root Out” is not an ethnic group or religious group or any other group but they are multiple, namely: tyranny, persecution, injustice, ethnic hatred and violence, human rights abuses, false imprisonments, denial of freedoms of expression, assembly or movement, the lack of free and fair elections, a weak rule of law, insecurity, and inequality of opportunity, poverty, health care, lack of education, housing, road, infrastructure and sustainable development. Most of all, it is ethnic-based politics and ethnic federalism that is most likely to tear Ethiopia apart if it is not handled swiftly and wisely, with justice and wisdom.

When this current change of Team Lemma or Oro-Amhara began in May 2018, I came out right away and embraced it. I supported the prime minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed; not because of his ethnicity or political party, but because he articulated  a vision for a country where the best interests of the people—not a region or a group—would be made the priority, giving us hope for a country where we can all live together and be valued as citizens. This is what I stand for and is what will bring peace among us, regardless of differences.

These are ways to measure genuine victory but we are not there yet. We may have won some battles as result of the Team Lemma or Oro-Amhara coalition, but we the people are still far away from the total victory. To gain that Common Good Victory for all, we have to reclaim our individual dignity and respect the dignity of others— for no one will be free until all are free. This means restoring the value of each of us— putting humanity over ethnicity or any other differences. These are the foundational principles for any healthy, harmonious and prosperous society.

This Ireecha celebration could have been used as an umbrella to bring everyone together for peace building. It could have been utilized to reconcile Ethiopian people who for many years have been intentionally divided by their ethnicities and any other differences as a means to maintain power over them by few elites.

One of the biggest mistakes done at this Ireecha celebration was the glaring absence of any Ethiopian flag, even the current flag of the EPRDF. Instead, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) political flag was there and the security officials did not take it away. In Ethiopian society, flags have been repeatedly used as strong identity symbols of alliance or rebellion of opposing groups. The missing Ethiopian national flag during the Ireecha Festival was a strong statement that was all the more shocking after the historical Ethiopian flag was outlawed during the annual religious holiday in the Ethiopian Orthodox Churches commemoration of the discover of the True Cross just over a week ago.

The EPRDF flag with the star in the middle was allowed. Some among the Orthodox defied the restrictions. It resulted in the arrest of some 55 people who carried or displayed the historic flag of green, yellow and red that many Ethiopians regard as highly symbolic of the sacrifice of those who fought for the country in the past.

These are the kinds of loaded sensitive issues that can become major mistakes, with serious consequences, for any country that is truly seeking peace. It can be especially dangerous in a country like Ethiopia where ethno-nationalism and conflict is on the rise. Look at our unhealthy obsession with ethnicity, starting with the Preamble of the Ethiopian Constitution that addresses the people of the country as “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples”. Add to that ethnic federalism, ethnic-based political parties, regional states, banks, ID cards with ethnicity, sports clubs and so on—all geared to an ethnic group. We should be cautious.

As someone who cares a great deal about the welfare of all Ethiopian regardless of ethnicity, I hope this kind of mistake will not be done again; or if it was intentional, that the whole agenda behind this be re-evaluated in a transparent manner. It is very dangerous and a threat to the existence of all of us. The concern for the basic rights of our citizens should not be greater simply because someone comes from a preferred group or region.

I call on all Ethiopians to abandon the politics of ethnic hatred, isolation, deception and pretension. It is time to embrace the politics of ideas and principles that advance justice, rights and equality for all. It is too early to celebrate a true victory! Let us hold off our celebrations until we see meaningful reforms, especially constitutional and institutional reform, restorative justice and genuine reconciliation provide a foundation for a healthier, righteous, more caring, and more peaceful society. 

Let us then pass this kind of blessing to future generations of Ethiopians as well as to those beyond our borders. The choice is ours! Let us, strive to make it become the “Genuine turn of all the people not only few” for all the citizens of the country.

May God bless Ethiopia and long live Ethiopia!

The post A MISTAKE OR INTENTIONAL? EITHER WAY, OROMO REGIONAL PRESIDENT’S STATEMENTS RAISE SERIOUS QUESTIONS appeared first on Satenaw: Ethiopian News/Breaking News: Your right to know!.

Failing to support the movement will have far-reaching consequences for the people in the ‘free world’, more so for the people under authoritarian regimes throughout the globe that emulate the regime.

Teshome Debalke

October 10, 2019

The glamorization of the People Republic Communist Party of China (CPC) that operate behind fortified concrete wall and firewalls being reduced to ashes by the Umbrella Democratic Movement in the semi-autonomous territory of Hong Kong will have far-reaching implications across the globe if the free world failed to draw a line sooner than later.

What started as protest against the introduction of extradition legislation to legalize the Communist party abductions of Hong Kong residences to mainland four months ago triggered whole lots more demands simmering for a long time beyond the due process of law of the accused the Beijing regime violets every day with impunity on its citizens in the mainland.

Failing to address the protest demands, CCP appointed CEO of the territory came up with another trickery of banning face masks for CCP’s surveillance state to identify protestors in preparation to abduct them in the middle of the night while  labeling them as “violent terrorists’ for its kangaroo courts to convict and sentence them to join hundreds of thousands of their compatriots locked up in the vast numbers of detention camps scattered throughout China. But once again, Hong Kong Protests: Bid to suspend Failed – leaving the authorities with not much option to fulfill CCP’s wishes.

What the Government of China Spokesperson said about the protestors alone reviles; the regime empty noise is to justify its security forces that encircled HK inevitable mass-atrocities awaiting to subdue protestors it labeled violent terrorists.

But, the irony the Umbrella Revolution came a year after article of March 2018 by Zheping Huang titled “Xi Jinping says China’s authoritarian system can be a model for the world  and, four months before the 70^th anniversary of the foundation of the People Republic of Communist China is historic and, a lesson to the world; no matter how long authoritarian regimes’ imagination go wild to make something out of absolutely nothing to be legitimate without the consent of the people they rule, they can’t indefinitely hide behind concrete walls nor firewalls.

After all deep down, the Communist regime of China is an empty vessel held together by elaborate surveillance, propaganda, and security apparatus that locked up millions and terrorize billions of its citizens hidden from the world awaiting to implode on its own weight with the slightest democratic challenge coming its way.

The 1989  student-led movement in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent mass-killings of protesters and the abduction of unimaginable numbers of dissidents that followed ever since erased from Chinese’s history and the cyber search to blindfold the world from understanding the reality of indicates; the ruling regime is biting on the ignorance of the world to stay alive.

Furthermore, the ongoing detention of millions of Uighurs in western China out of sight of the world view reminiscent of reeducation camps that followed Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution with millions of innocent casualties is a reminder; the Communist Party of China will to do harm with impunity in  one of the two largest and diverse nations in the world with population of over a billion people under its thumb is beyond comprehension.

The latest leaked video where hundreds of blindfolded and bound men in Western China is a reminder of the vast reported concentration camps across China hidden from the world view. It illustrates the Beijing regime that subdued over billion people behind walls of silence for the last seven decades is fragile enough to be frightened with basic demands for rights, freedom of expression and transparency coming its way in Hong Kong. Therefore, unlike the world is led to believe the surveillance regime won’t have a chance in an open society with freedom of expression and the Free Press.

The Washington Post Op-Ed of  Nov 2018 titled “This paradox explain why China has not failed so far” by Nathan Gardels illuminate some of the myth about CCP’s successes led by elaborate global propaganda and surveillance of its citizens silenced behind the wall and beyond. 

But, the most incriminatory inditement of CCP came from non-other than an CCP insider Guo Wengui. The exiled Chinese billionaire to the US spilling his guts in the free world he cannot do at home further reveals the rot within the communist party and what it has in store for the world.

What was fascinating, Wengui connecting the dots of how the financial hub of Asia – the territory of Hong Kong is the conduit for high-ranking CCP leaders’ corruption and money laundering scheme with far-reaching implication on nations of the free world, more so nations under authoritarian regimes that emulate CCP.

In that regard, 60 Minute Exclusive Documentary that exposes Premier Xi Jinping’s cousin connections with Crown Casino – a money laundering for Asian organize crime syndicates in Australia with close connection with CCP’s leaders.  How Premier Xi Jinping of China cousin Ming Chai ended up to be an Australian citizen living high bankrolling millions of dollars out of the sight of the same regime that put the entire population of China under strict surveillance speaks volumes how free societies are played as fools by CCP global propaganda.

China Communist Party’s menace means many things for the imagination of ruling elites around the world.  For the willfully ignorant ruling political and corporate elites of western democracies, the romance with CCP is nothing more than their nostalgia to their long-lost absolute power over their citizens or the unlimited appetite of the human race to amass profit by eroding constitutional rules, laws, and regulation that restrained their power and privilege.

But, when it comes to the ruling elites of autocratic regimes around the world, CCP is god sent that vindicate them from violation of rights, atrocities and corruption against their citizens with impunity in pretexts of stability and development as well as the conventional economists’ wisdom that dictates — nations at the developmental stage require  elaborate surveillance state, unchallenged propaganda and draconian laws only authoritarian regimes can deliver CCP style.

That is how the China Communist Party successfully employed a combination of two European invention — unchecked crony Capitalism and Marxism that cater for the human greed  and lust for power and privilege and spread it like wildfire for willing ruling elites around the world where the Former Communist Party of the Soviet Union failed.

The irony is, what the people of China have to do with 70-years old Marxism ideology imported from Europe to China for CCP to claim it is uniquely indigenous governance for people with over 5000 years-old complex histories speaks louder; the ruling communist elites’ appetite to enslave their own citizens by any excuse they can master is what kept the populations under totalitarian rule for far too long.

China Central Television Network (CCTV), the one-and-only propaganda arm of CCP backed by massive surveillance and security apparatus illiterates what the communist regime portray itself to the world firewalling every conceivable information imaginable that would have shown; it is rotten to its core.

When that wasn’t enough, the Beijing based China Global Television Network (CGTN) that started in 2009 spreading CCP’s ambition to promote a one-party authoritarian rule, surveillance and developmental state is a better alternative for the world than the democratic rule with six foreign language programs was not by accident.

In the words of Azeem Ibrahim on FT Argument piece titled China Has No Room for Dissenting Friends; he wrote;

“Well, the problem is that Beijing, in effect, building gang. China’s sphere of influence is not going to be just a group of pals. It will be an in-group organized around currying favor with gang leader, but, crucially for everyone else, also the performance of hostility towards the out-group as a display of loyalty to the gang and the leader. China is cultivating an us verses “them” attitude in the foreign outlook of their clients, and the West is the “them.”

Take for instant CGTN Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya launched in January of 2012 broadcasting on DStv — the one-and-only Direct Broadcasting Satellite entertainment service for Sub-Saharan African based in South Africa and owned by MultiChoice, a subsidiary of MultiChoice Group. For unsuspecting, its coverage sounds a normal Media endeavor.  But the reality, it is a propaganda venture of how good China is doing in Africa with the endorsement of African leaders for mutual benefit around Africa and in the global stage by “cultivating us versus “them” — Communism 2.0.?

Closed societies, in general, have one thing in common — elaborate surveillance, propaganda network and security apparatus to alter reality and subdue their populations into subjects.  But, the big elephant in the world stage remains the overrated regime of China; not for its respect on human rights, freedom of expression and private property nor transparency of governance but for its economic growth and development exploiting its own citizens behind the wall-of-silence unheard of since the Cold War ended.

Unfortunately, CCP’s altered reality is celebrated even among high-profile western politicians and businessmen that embrace it and entertain to implement it in their own nations, thanks to China Global Television Network.

Take the Australian Broadcasting Service’s report, China’s Empty Cities CCP’s propaganda arm China Central Television Network (CCTV)  nor China Global Television Network (CGTN) won’t let the world to see. The white elephant projects are as the result of high-ranking party officials use of state-owned banks to pocket the proceeds upfront common with many corrupt authoritarian regimes around the world that emulate the same model.

Though the global propaganda and profit value of the projects are immense for the party functionaries behind the wall of silence, the  implication for global economy more so for Less Developed Countries (LDC) is huge; not only to empower authoritarian regimes to sustain their unmandated power and privilege over their citizens in partnership with CCP but, it reinvented Central Command Economy as a Weapon-of-Mass Distraction across the globe for decades to come at expenses of free enterprises. As a result, CCP’s exercise of futility to silence its critics globally across the political, social and economic sphere indicates, Xi Jinping regime is warming up to do irreversible damage to the economy of ‘free societies’ his Marxists predecessors failed to do.

Regardless, as desperate as authoritarian regimes around the world are to go back-and-forth between western capitals and Beijing to sustain their unmandated rule, it is becoming abundantly clear why China Communist Party became their natural ally that fulfill the desire to stay in power indefinitely and the corruption that come with it.  What is not clear is why of Western Democracies’ ruling political elites choose to ‘look the other way’ except to fulfil multinational corporations’ profit to be gained by remaining silent. 

The recent National Basketball Association of America bowing for the Communist Party of China for a statement made by the Huston Rockets’ manager in solidarity with the Umbrella Democratic Movement of Hong Kong to be free from the regime in Beijing is the tip of the iceberg what CCP has done to silence its citizens and export it to do the same in western institutions and corporations.

Ironically, in the words of the 35^th President of the US JFK, “the greatest revolution in history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free” sums up the erosion constitutions that govern western political elites to the point they couldn’t tell the difference between freedom compromised in the People House (Congress) verses freedom that will never see the day in National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

Whether to blame it on political and corporate elites’ corrupting influence or mainstream media elites’ willful ignorance of the Constitution from push back, CCP will remain free to export its surveillance state and propaganda networks to silence the free world’s ruling elites as we watch self-sensor on to silence  when Hong Kong residence cry for help to contain the Communist Party of China from depriving them to participate to choose who governs them .

That, as every American President in recent memory like to say; ‘My fellow Americans’… is CCP’s surveillance state and the command economy is increasingly daring to come after the people in the free world?  As Abraham Lincoln said; “those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

It is about time the free world deprives freedom for CCP members and their emissaries that deny freedom to their own citizens in the mainland as well as in the territory of Hong Kong and beyond.  Failing to do so sooner than later is an expensive proposition the people of the free world can’t afford and live to regret.

After all, freedom was NOT supposed to be a commodity that can be bought-and-sold in the open or closed markets at the whim of the political elites.

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By Teshome M. Borago

After mass protests – mostly in Oromia and Amhara region – forced the previous Ethiopian Prime Minister to resign in 2018, nobody imagined that his replacement would make drastic reforms inside Ethiopia and the region. However, incoming Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed did just that and now he has won one of the most prestigious awards in the world: the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet despite his historic efforts, most of his accomplishments remain incomplete and his leadership challenged.

Weeks after Dr. Abiy was selected for premiership – mainly by the Oromo and Amhara ruling party members of the EPRDF – he released hundreds of opposition prisoners and began dialogue with arch rival Eritrea. 20 years after the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war began, Abiy brokered a peace deal with dictator Isaias Afewerki and officially reopened relations with Asmara. Meanwhile, he gave alive branch to previously outlawed opposition groups Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), Patriotic Ginbot 7 (PG7) and Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).

Using his “Medemer” philosophy and advocating for Ethiopiawinet (Ethiopian unity), Dr. Abiy quickly became the most popular leader – a Messianic figure – nationwide. Still he kept pushing for more change: advocating privatization of state companies and giving key institutional high-level positions to either qualified professionals or experienced opposition politicians, like Judge Birtukan Mideksa to lead the influential National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE). He turned former torture chambers into an open museum and tourist sites. His administration arrested even former ruling party officials for corruption.

However, every one of Abiy’s reforms have either been challenged or stalled. Despite the media and diplomatic fanfare, even the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia has been closed back and trade deals suspended. All that remains is good will between the two leaders in Addis Ababa and Asmara; but Abiy still needs to convince regional stakeholders like the Tigray state and local border communities. And while his role in South Sudan is exaggerated; even peace there is not a done deal yet.

Most of all, the shortcomings and fragility of his domestic reforms inside Ethiopia will eventually define his legacy; though they are the most overlooked ones ignored by the international media. As a charismatic leader of both Oromo and Amhara ancestry, with Muslim upbringing and Christian faith; Dr. Abiy was embraced by the majority of Ethiopians, as if he was their close family member. But when his government gave unrestrained freedom to all nativist ethnic political movements, various corners of Ethiopia quickly became uncontrollable with ethnic conflict; leading to around 2 million citizens internally displaced nationwide, particularly inside Oromia province and around its disputed boundaries. Since then, Abiy has been walking the fine-dangerous-line between empowering separatist ethnic movements and promoting Ethiopian unity. In this effort, his ODP ruling party seems to swing back-and-forth aimlessly: one day forming alliance with Oromo tribalist groups and another day promising to liberalize his party away from an ethnic affiliation. Therefore, Abiy has been losing public trust in Ethiopia due to conflict between his moderate rhetoric personally and the hyperbole organizational moves of his political party. How long he can hold on to his popular mandate by staying in the middle while Ethiopia continues to divide was the main question of his political career until this week; when the Nobel Peace Prize injected a much needed boost. Therefore, for all who wish peace and co-existence inside Ethiopia; even for his nervous political rivals, this award should be a reason to celebrate.

Abiy will likely interpret this Nobel recognition as a boost to his mandate while most Ethiopians will likely view the award as a stimulus for hope toward lasting change; similar to Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize awarded before much of his utopian domestic and foreign policies actually materialized. Despite some good and mixed results domestically, Obama never lived up to the high expectations of his Nobel award, but his failure was never an existential threat to the survival of the United States; unlike the case in Ethiopia. So Ethiopians will pray that Abiy will perform much better post-Nobel as the stakes of his failure are monumental in Ethiopia and the region.

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