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By Keffyalew Gebremedhin The Ethiopia Observatory (TEO)
In the Great Donkey Rush, the Daily Maverick opened its major story of September 9, 2016 with the following theme:

“Forget gold, diamonds or rhino horn. The hottest commodity in Africa right now – the most prized ass-et, if you will – is the humble donkey, thanks to a critical donkey shortage in China.”

Dwelling on a different angle of the same theme, two days earlier Quartz Africa highlighted an interesting development – crime popping up across Africa becuse of donkey meat market, as follows:

“No wonder Chinese businesses have shown a growing interest in donkeys from Namibia to Nigeria over the past few years. Earlier this year, Botswana arrested four people involved in a donkey hide smuggling syndicate with operations in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and China. Donkey slaughterhouses have also been opened in Kenya to meet Chinese demand. Last year South Africa was considering beginning a training program for farmers in anticipation of exporting donkeys to China’s Henan province.”

The problem

The largest donkey populations in the world are found in China and India. Unfortunately, China’s love for donkey meat and skin has caused the animal’s diminution. Add to this Vietnam’s 95.2 million population, no mean importers of donkey meats.

Of late, China has been hit hard, The Guardian reports, by shortage of donkey skin gelatin. They say this is a translucent, colorless, brittle (when dry), flavorless food. Gelatin is derived from collagen obtained from various animal/donkey body parts.

For the Chinese, gelatin is both traditional medicine; it is also commonly used, according to some sources, as a gelling agent in food, pharmaceutical drugs, vitamin capsules, photography and cosmetic manufacturing.

I never knew until fairly recently, we too have become the unmasked indirect consumers of donkey parts, i.e., through the medicines China produces.

In recent times, this donkey shortage in China has exerted pressure on Beijing and local governments, market agents persistently demanding government actions to support local donkey breeders and importers from the rest of the world. Especially targeted for this are poor African nations, whose eyes could easily get stuck on the foreign exchange and ignore all other things.

Our tragedy is that, African leaders being unwilling to think on their own or receive advice, this new donkey meat business is likely to affect Africa over the medium-and-long-terms, via consequences of such trade. One problem now is its encouragement of transfrontier donkey smuggling in vast parts of Africa for sale to China, as mentioned above.

Consequently, in response to this deepening donkey meat and skin trade between a number of African and some Asian states, the African donkey population in the last few years has been terribly decimated.

When Ethiopia is added to the list of donkey meat and skin traders, this is likely to have huge adverse implications on African farmers. The region would increasingly lose its beast of burden that for generations has been serving as means of transport for agricultural goods.

In Where have all the donkeys gone? Burkina Faso’s export dilemma, Phys.org clearly highlights the dilemma of poor nations without sufficient resources, or fallback, such as the benefits of science and technology.
Ethiopia’s curious relations with its donkeys

Out of ignorance, Ethiopia’s utilitarian society has done little to improve its donkey breed. Nor has it ever credited its utility. In fact, this little cared for and little respected animal – አህያ – its name has been used to demeaningly insult/describe a fool and the lazy in Ethiopia.

And yet, this has not stopped Ethiopia from being the silent beneficiary of a donkey’s contributions to family productivity. Also, one needs to keep in mind a donkey is source of family security, as a lower category rural asset. As the most uncomplaining ally in stressed health circumstances, however, the donkey has also been useful in transporting pregnant women to health centers to deliver their babies in a number of countries, including northern Ethiopia.

The best and rarest praise for the donkey’s unitility in Ethiopia I have come accross is from a Haramaya University research paper (Zewdie and et.al). They have done donkeys the honor of inserting the praise in the academic records. What that record does is transmit the real sentiments of one Ethiopian rural farmer, who aptly says: “Without a donkey, my wife and I become the donkeys”.

In this article, I am trying to understand the disconcerting news to Ethiopian citizens across the board both at home and abroad of the implications of Ethiopia’s lurch into the donkey meat market with the Asian nations of China and Vietnam. From what I read here and there, Ethiopians appear preoccupied by a revolting sense of the what next of sorts questions for the ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) despotic leaders.

All over the world, the mafia and other inebriates, like those of ours in political power, are seen getting most of what they need – if they are lucky – by their use of bruteness of force. That does not mean this has made them win the people’s trust, respect and loyalty. It is one of the key elements in governance, which has eluded the TPLF in Ethiopia.

Even at this time as the corrupt and dictatorial Abay Tsehaye makes a fool of himself about past TPLF arrogance and tyranny that, according to him, has hit the height of heights, the TPLF is promising itself ‘fist full of dollars’ from the donkey meat business by the forex strapped nation!

The donkey in Ethiopia primarily is a component part of the ‘factors’ contributing to 50-60 percent of nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). There is a creeping concern, informed by living together with the TPLF for such a long time, that the business Ethiopia just started could adversely affect the nation’s agricultural sector – due to the TPLF member’s insatiable appetite and disregard for Ethiopia.
Why should it be different from land grab?

Lurking in the background are three Ethiopian concerns.

Firstly, there is the well-founded fear of the usual ruling TPLF greed, deceptiveness and hubris. If the past has taught Ethiopians any lesson, it is wariness of the TPLF, a concern ingrained in the future China-Ethiopia donkey meat and skin business, driven by the TPLF greed.

We know for a fact that invariably almost all TPLF members suffer from foreign exchange hunger. Amassing vast wealth by any means, as dictator Meles Zenawi has taught them, above every non-Tigrean, is likely to become their goal with a view to enabling them achieve their ethnic overlordship over the rest of the Ethiopian people.

Did Meles not break state banks, such as the public-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), the Construction Bank of Ethiopia that finally went down because of TPLF corruption and finally merged with CBE, and the Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE)? Lawless Meles compelled these state institutions to throw public monies in their vaults on TPLF members and to the TPLF-owned Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT) businesses.

They took the monies with no interest payments, or even not necessarily paying back the loans they took. This is a common knowledge even with the common man in the highlands, lowlands and streets of Ethiopia – likely to be replicated in the dog meat businesses case!

The lesson here for people is that the TPLF have little respect for the law; they are likely to force themselves onto a peasant’s humble manger and seize the donkey of the humble farmer to take it to one of the Chinese donkey slaughterhouses that would soon dot the land. If the TPLF could seize a land belonging to an individual or a community, demolish homes on the heads of residents to seize the urban lands, what law could stop the TPLF members from seizing an ordinary citizen’s donkey?

Consequently, I fear, in a short while Ethiopians may someday wake up when they no longer see donkeys, not only in city streets and towns across Ethiopia, but also across rural areas in this vast country.
Offending Ethiopian sensibilities

The second concern arising from the new TPLF business in donkey meat is the offense to the country’s religious and cultural convictions. The irony is that, this comes at a time when a number of African nations are closing down the donkey meat business under popular pressure.

There is the real danger and possibility of donkey meat from the Chinese-owned Debre Zeit slaughterhouse or elsewhere later creeping up in ordinary Ethiopian meat markets.

For now, the TPLF tells the nation that the Ethiopian Revenues & Customs Authority (ERCA) has already set up an office inside the company’s plant to stop from the source donkey meat from finding its way into the local meat market, according to Addis Fortune. This is no assurance to citizens, especially given the corruptibility of the TPLF officials and agents.

China is a strong nation. But it could not stop the sale of contaminated baby milks, produced in the mainland. The only thing China could do is to allow its citizens to travel and buy the milk Hong Kong residents feed their children. Why should Chinese investors care for Ethiopian beliefs, when they have not cared for their children, or the corrupt TPLF cadres and the security stop wrong meats going to the right consumers?

On this matter, one of the latest TPLF deceits relates to donkey slaughterhouse expansion. We learn from Addis Fortune that TPLF investment spokesperson Fitsum Arega saying the slaughterhouses are limited in number to those registered before 2014. Its rationale of varying degrees of sinfulness is troubling: “We don’t approve of applications for such investments anymore as they are against values and the culture of the society”.

What on Earth has assured the TPLF those that were registered before 2014 are less of a sin and acceptable to societal values? This is a problem with a regime fearful of consulting the people. They could even dare stepping on the faith of citizens, as if a small donkey meat is acceptable to our faith and cultural values!

The fact of the matter is that very soon the TPLF’s EFFORT and individual TPLF members could jump into operations, banks pumping the nation’s resources only to expand donkey killing places all over the country and the chains of meat supplier chains.

The Chinese custom-built Debre Zeit donkey slaughterhouse is expected to kill 200 donkeys a day, bought from local farmers. The Asela slaughterhouse, also owned by Chinese investors, is still under construction. Fitsum Arega does not disclose how many permits they have so far registered and when those donkey meat slaughterhouses open.

In some African nations, moral, health considerations (including the stench from processing, open air drying of the skins) and the negative economic implications have aroused youth anger that subsequently forced the closure of the businesses benefitting corrupt African leaders.
Donkey grab?

The third Ethiopian concern is donkey meat breeding lawlessness.

The TPLF action has so far turned Ethiopia into society of unequals, which Ethiopians very much resent. The robbers using state powers have become richer grabbing someone else’s land, as the rest have gone down on rungs of the poverty ladder.

The more enriching economic conditions are in sight, the more lawless has Ethiopia under the TPLF become – no pretensions about property rights irrespective of what the law says!

Gambella, where the TPLF has built one of its garrisons has left sufficient lessons for all citizens. The Gambella garrison is not and could not protect citizens nor ensure Ethiopia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity from Murle marauders, but ensure the TPLF settler occupation of the region.

Because of TPLF interests, we cannot anticipate what and where the next garrison after Gambella, because of the donkey meat business.

For the record, while the data out of date, Ethiopian regions’ donkey endowment, according to a regional survey by the Ethiopian Central Statistics Agency (CSA, 2007/8), shows Oromia to have the largest donkey population (2.2 mil), followed by Amhara (1.8 mil), Harar (0.8 mil), Tigray (0.5 mil), Benishangul-Gumuz (0.5 mil), SNNPR (0.4 mil) and Dire Dawa (0.14 mil).

In a lawless state such as Ethiopia, I would say, these citizens concerns are all reasonable and legitimate.

This is more jutified by the abundant donkey resources Ethiopia has been endowed with: an estimated 6.2 million donkeys; the share of our country’s donkey resource is 32 percent of Africa’s donkey population and 10 percent of the global estimate.

Another study, appearing on the International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS), 2015, Vol 2, No.6, 13-22, pushes the Ethiopian donkey population estimate to 40 percent of the global donkey figure.

The fear now is that the usually-undisciplined and never law-abiding TPLF, which all of a sudden may have started salivating to scoop foreign exchange exporting dog meats, may consider Ethiopian donkeys its inexhaustible resource – so long as it is the forex collector!

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Esat Radio Wed 05 Apr 2017

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Abdissa Zerai (PhD)

If there is a generation that has for long occupied a central stage in the psyche of the Ethiopian society, it is the generation that has commonly been referred to as ‘Ya Tiwulid’ (or The Generation). As is known, ‘Ya Tiwulid’ is the generation that emerged in the 1960s and played an active role in the student movement and the revolution that brought down the imperial regime in the early 1970s, and one that has since continued to shape the Ethiopian political terrain up until now. Through a plethora of writings, media narratives and rudimentary public discourses, the ‘Ya Tiwulid’s’ uncontested ‘exceptionalism’ has relentlessly been echoed to the point where it has almost assumed a mythical stature in our collective memory. Obviously, the outsized valorization and veneration of the ‘Ya Tiwulid’ has not been without reason. But before delving into that, situating the discussion within the generational theoretical framework is in order.

Extant literature on generations often proceeds from the theoretical contributions of a Hungarian-born sociologist Dr. Karl Mannheim. According to Mannheim’s (1959) classic formulation, the social phenomenon of ‘generations’ represent nothing more than a particular kind of identity of location, embracing related ‘age-groups’ embedded in a historical-social process. In other words, a generation constitutes a cohort of people born within a similar span of time who share a comparable age and life stage and who are shaped by a particular span of time.  Along a similar line, William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991), well reputed scholars on the subject, see a generation as a group of people who share a time and space in history that lends them a collective persona. They further argue that members of a generation share an age location in history, i.e., they encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. To put it differently, members of a generation are shaped in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults and certain common beliefs and behaviors they share. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation would also share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation.

Although both Mannheim (1927) and Strauss-Howe (1991) acknowledge the role of history and society in their generational theories, they hold different views on the relative importance of the two factors in shaping a generation. While accepting the notion that generations are influenced by those who preceded them, Mannheim (1927) believes that social change occurs at a much slower pace. Hence, he argues that major historical events are what change a society quickly in a much more direct and linear way. As such, Mannheim seems more at home with an old dictum that “people resemble their times more than they resemble their parents” (McCrindle 2007, p. 4).

On the other hand, Strauss-Howe (1991) tend to lean more toward the argument that past generations have the greatest influence on their successor since each new generation responds to the previous generation.

Unlike the views represented by the two groups of scholars noted above, DeChane (2014) believes that both the generation that came first and the major events of the day shape a generation, since a generation is the result of a normal ebb and flow of change created by history and society. It means that a generation emerges and becomes defined by the previous generations and the historical context in which it finds itself. It is, thus, logical to argue that any analysis of a generation that takes into account the two factors in tandem would provide a better and fuller picture of the phenomenon than one that skews toward one of the two factors. In order to better understand the Ya Tiwulid, therefore, it is imperative that we begin with the analysis of the historical and social contexts under which the Ya Tiwulid grew and came of age.

As is well known, the generation represented by the Ya Tiwulid was born and grew up in a backward agrarian society ruled by a feudal monarchy whose authority ostensibly emanated from a ‘divine’ source. Growing up in a society where the feudal aristocracy virtually owned the land and where the masses were condemned to live at the mercy of the aristocracy, this generation witnessed firsthand harrowing exploitations and horrendous abuse of society by the anachronistic autocratic feudal aristocracy.

From the historical front, this was the time that entertained a confluence of significant historical occurrences. Among these was the intensification of the geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle between two world superpowers, the USA and the USSR. This was a phenomenon which was commonly referred to as the Cold War that started in the aftermath of the end of the Second World War and continued in full swing in the 1960s and beyond. This time also saw a decolonization frenzy going on around the colonized world in general and on the African continent in particular. It was a period where the wind of civil rights movement was blowing in tandem with sustained and violent anti-Vietnam war demonstrations held across the United States. The period was also characterized not only by a fervent anti-imperialism sentiment that enveloped the third world and the Soviet camp, but also by a relentless worldwide demand for freedom, equality and national self-determination. Generally speaking, we could say that this was a period of socio-political and ideological ferment of an epic proportion engulfing the entire world.

As a better educated segment of the society, the young, energetic, idealistic, and daring coeval of the Ya Tiwulid threw itself in the ongoing ferment. By appropriating conceptual and theoretical tools from Marxism-Leninism, they explained and articulated the prevailing condition of the Ethiopian society and the unsustainability of maintaining the status quo. Hence, it placed itself at the forefront of setting in motion a radical overhaul of the ancien regime in favor of instituting a new progressive system that would do away with any form of marginalization, oppression and exploitation and thereby direct Ethiopia in the path of modernization and development. In order to realize this goal, members of the generation committed themselves to paying whatever price the struggle might require. Remaining true to their commitment, they played a pivotal role in accelerating the demise of the ancien regime. Unfortunately, however, the euphoria was short lived as the aftermath of the collapse of the monarchy proved more chaotic and unpredictable. This was mainly attributable to the fact that there was a glaring absence of consensus on how to go about shaping the political future of post-Monarchy Ethiopia.

Following the demise of the monarchy, the military junta led by Colonel Mengistu H/Mariam took advantage of the fractured political environment of the time and controlled the lever of power. Soon after, the new dispensation unleashed unspeakable current of terror and bloodshed against and among the disparate political groupings that constituted the ‘Ya Tiwulid’. As a result, thousands perished, thousands more went to prison, a staggering number of the cohort fled the country, and a few remaining vanished into the wilderness and started an armed struggle.

While the Marxist junta was consolidating its power over a traumatized society, those who fled the country would have to settle in their new destinations (largely in Europe and North America); those who went to prison would have to learn to live in the shadow of death; and those who decided to take up arms would have to face the harsh reality of never seeing their loved ones again. Except such shared misfortunes, agony and trauma, however, there was little love lost among the disparate groups that constituted the ‘Ya Tiwulid’.

Regardless of their new destinations, these disparate groups of the generation continued their political struggle both against the Derg and against each other. After a protracted struggle, the TPLF-led-EPRDF overthrew the Derg and took control of the lever of power. It was hoped that the new dispensation would seize the opportunity to put an end to this vicious cycle of fratricide by bringing the disparate groups together to bury their hatchets and charter a new future that everyone would believe in. Unfortunately, however, the new order has not been able to live up to the expectation in terms of bringing about a wider political consensus and bridging the sharp divisions among the disparate groups. In fact, in some respects, the new order has accentuated the polarization to the point where the situation now appears hopelessly irredeemable.

The same time when our problems are getting more intractable, both biology and longevity-induced fatigue appear to be taking their toll on the remaining and residual cohort of the Ya Tiwulid. As a result, the Ya Tiwulid is fading away from the Ethiopian political scene, which it had dominated for close to half a century. According to an online Cambridge English dictionary, to fade away means to slowly disappear, lose importance, or become weaker. Hence, the ‘fading away’ argument here does not necessarily imply that it has started to suddenly disappear into oblivion; rather, it means that its grip on the Ethiopian politics is becoming weaker, and in the next five to ten years, its influence might even be relegated to a thing of the past.

On the other hand, we are observing the emergence of the Millennials on the Ethiopian political scene. Although the term Millennials is often used to refer to those who were born between 1982-2002, I use the term here to refer generally to those who were born toward the end of the Cold War and came of age during the reign of the EPRDF. The impeding waning of the political influence of the Ya Tiwulid and the likely gradual takeover of the Ethiopian politics by the Millennials would force us to raise questions as to what lie ahead. In other words, how will the impeding generational shift shape the Ethiopian political terrain? Will it signal continuity or rupture in the realm of our national politics? What does the future hold for the Ethiopian state in general and the Ethiopian national politics in particular? What are our hopes as well as our fears going forward?

It is understandable that providing definitive answers to these questions would obviously require one to be a prophet rather than a humble political analyst. And the purpose of this piece is not to effect a declaration of prophecy over the future direction of Ethiopian national politics under the auspices of the Millennials; rather, it is an attempt to provide a tentative analysis of potentially plausible political developments with the Millennials in the ‘driver’s seat.’

In order to begin with the analysis, we have to recall our theoretical discussion about generations in which I have indentified two important factors that could explain how a generation might behave once it comes of age. These are the socio-historical contexts under which a generation grows and comes of age. From the historical point of view, the millennials grew up during the time when the liberal capitalist market democracy triumphed over communism following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991, and became the dominant and widely appealing organizing principle for politico-economic development around the world. This means that unlike its predecessor, this generation did not have to contend with the issue of having to pay allegiance to any particular ideological dogma as there was no any measure ideological war. What is more, this is the generation that has found itself in the midst of an unprecedented proliferation of communication technology that transcends temporal and spatial barriers; that breaks monopoly over information; that facilitates interconnectivity and interaction; and that empowers citizens by enabling them to reclaim their agency. This was also the time the phenomenon of globalization has swept the world.

On the sociological side, the Millennials grew up in a society that has been undergoing radical reorientation and restructuring on many fronts. They have witnessed the division of the society on the basis of ethno-linguistic cleavages and the resultant meteoric rise of ethno-linguistic consciousness among the various groups and the uncritical celebration and valorization of ‘nativism.’ They are the product of a society whose access to power and resources has normatively been fought along ethnic fault lines. Theirs is a society that has been characterized by favoritism and nepotism and an unconcealed contempt for meritocracy. It is also a society where the hitherto taken-for-granted and shared grand narratives about national history, national culture, national symbols and the whole notion of Ethiopiawinet have been contested, deconstructed and displaced, and where new ones have been constructed/reconstructed and invented/reinvented. In general, theirs is a society that has been preoccupied with an exercise of self-construction/reconstruction in the form of ‘imagined communities,’ to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase.

If these are some of the major historical and social contexts under which the Milennials grew up and came of age, what might our hopes be and what could our fears be, with such a generation assuming an increasing role in the Ethiopian political space? These are questions whose answers might vary depending on the perspectives of the individuals who might wish to respond to them. In the subsequent section, I will attempt to provide my perspectives with respect to these important questions.

To begin with, it is my hope that the Millennials would categorically reject the conduct of politics on the basis of Manichean worldview, which has bedeviled the Ethiopian body politic for the last half a century. As we know, the word Manichean comes from the word Mani, which is the name of an apostle who lived in Mesopotamia in the 240’s and taught a universal religion based on dualism. One who believes in Manichean dualism looks at things as having two sides that are inherently opposed. For such a person, life is neatly divided between good and evil, light and dark, or love and hate, etc. and nothing in between. It is a polarizing worldview that simplistically reduces the world to a struggle between two inherently opposing forces. The hitherto political behavior of the Ya Tiwulid has been rooted in such a worldview where each political group sees itself as having the monopoly over ‘truth’ and regards others as political ‘heretics’ that ought to be forced to recant their views in favor of the other’s ‘truth’ or be subjected to obliteration. Although it is often said that politics is the art of compromise, ours has often been nothing short of a zero-sum game. As they grew up and came of age during the time when grand ideological war was over on the global stage, I hope that the Millennials would adopt a more accommodating approach in the conduct of democratic politics that is rooted in the principle of compromise and give-and-take.

Since the Millennials came of age in the era of globalization which has been fueled by the proliferation of Internet technology, they have been exposed to divergent viewpoints, cultures, races, identities, symbols, images, and politico-economic arrangements; they have had the opportunities to establish networks and relations with others who live across the globe through either virtual interactions or physical contacts or both, and thereby developing an attitude of tolerance and receptivity toward differences and empathy for others.  Such opportunities for exposure and the resultant change of attitudes toward differences would help the Millennials to have more sense of cosmopolitanism and would enable them to be more prone to cooperation than confrontation and conflict. In this sense, I would hope that the Millennials would be able to stay above the political fray and attempt to work out a mechanism that could amicably resolve the Ethiopian political debacle.

On the other hand, I also see some serious factors that could militate against the hopes I have outlined above and which could potentially be a source of fear. The new Millennials who grew up and came of age under the new political dispensation have had divergent experiences with the new order. As the new federal structure is organized along ethno-linguistic cleavages, ethnic consciousness has dramatically increased among the Millennials. The fact that the struggle for access to power and resources is often carried out along ethnic fault lines has accentuated the tension among the various groups and played an important role in reifying and solidifying ethnic boundaries and thereby created and normalized the us-and-them and the in-group and the out-group mentality. As is known, identity based politics has the proclivity to reinforce groupthink and it does not lend itself well to a cross-fertilization of ideas across ethno-linguistic cleavages. As a result politics has become an art of finding particularistic solutions to particularistic problems instead of becoming an art of finding common solutions to common problems.

There is also a widespread feeling among the Millennials that the new dispensation has created ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ among the various groups that have constituted the Millennials. No doubt that the coming of these disparate groups on the Ethiopian political scene would likely be fraught with increased tension as the ‘losers’ would decide to fight their way to improving their lot and as the ‘winners’ would attempt to maintain their privileged position or to at least try to minimize their losses. More importantly, significant number of the Millennials grew up and were schooled in an environment where they were exposed only to their own native language, leaving them unable to effectively communicate and interact with those from other ethnic groups.

Beyond being an identity marker, language is an important instrument for access to opportunities and power. In order to maximize their access to such opportunities and power, these Millennials would likely engage in a fierce fight among themselves over which language(s) would enjoy official status or over jealously guarding the exclusive dominance of their native language in their respective regions as a means of ensuring monopoly control over their region’s politics, resources and opportunities. The unsustainable rate of population growth coupled with the likelihood of increasing climate change-induced drought, which could in turn cause drought, food and water shortage and overall scarcity of resources, could also be a potential source of conflict among the Millennials.

Although the modern communication technology, if utilized properly, has the potential to bring us together, foster mutual understanding, broaden our horizon of thinking, cultivate democratic culture, dispel prejudice and stereotype, manufacture national consensus, and help in creating one politico-economic community, it has also the potential to bring about the opposite outcomes if misused. As a cursory examination of the way it has so far been used by the Ethiopian Millennials, both at home and abroad, would easily indicate, there seems to be less ground for optimism. Notwithstanding tireless and commendable efforts being exerted by some in harnessing the power of the communication technology to a positive end, a significant proportion of the Millennials’ use of the technology tends to be more of encouraging polarization, of sowing division, of inciting hatred, of preaching intolerance, of reifying groupthink, of inflaming rather than informing, and of democratizing incivility. Such unhealthy utilization of a potent and ubiquitous instrument as modern communication technology would likely complicate more the relations among the Millennials going forward.

Weighing between the hopes and the fears associated with the emergence of the Millennials on the Ethiopian political scene and their increasing role in our national politics, therefore, I am afraid that the balance seems to tip more toward the fears than the hopes. Unless situations change in a dramatic fashion, as it stands now, it seems to me that the Millennials are heading more likely toward collision rather than cohesion.

If this scenario makes some sense, what then should we do, if anything, to avoid or at least minimize the possible train wreck? Or is it already too late to attempt to do anything of value to avert the impeding catastrophe? I believe there is still a window of opportunity although it is a narrow window. I argue that the question of whether we would be able to make the best out of this narrow window will largely depend on the willingness of the remnants of the Ya Tiwulid who still wield significant influence on the Ethiopian political landscape (be it in the manner of incumbency, or opposition, politically active at home or abroad) to decide to bury their hatchets and make peace with themselves and among themselves. It depends on whether they will be willing to tame their egos and start seriously thinking about their legacy and take a bold move in order to make the necessary atonements for their hitherto ‘sins’ of omission or commission and show real leadership by coming together to collectively rescue the Millennials from the impeding calamity for the sake of the wellbeing of their beloved country. The failure to do so will likely take our country to the abyss, and no volume of books made available to chronicle the contributions and achievements of the Ya Tiwulid writ large will be able to exonerate it from its culpability when history judges the generation in the years to come. May the good Lord give us all the wisdom to do the right thing!

Sources:

DeChane, Darrin. (2014). How to Explain the Millennial Generation? Understand the Context, Inquiries Journal

Vol. 6, No. 03.

Howe, N. & Strauss, W. (1991). Generations: The history of America’s future, 1584 to 2069. New York, NY:

William Morrow & Company.

Mannheim, Karl. (1927). The problem of generations. In P. Kecskementi (Ed.), Karl Mannheim: Essays (pp. 276-

322). New York, NY: Routledge.

Mannheim, Karl. (1959). Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: London.

McCrindle, M. (2007). Understanding Generation. Y. North Parramatta: Australia Leadership Foundation.

*The author can be reached at the following address: berhanwota@gmail.com

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Lys Anzia for The Huffington Post

JONATHAN ALPEYRIE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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An inland staging post for shipping containers – at Modjo, 40km southeast of Addis Ababa.

The dry port handles an estimated 95% of Ethiopia’s trade but it can only hold 14,500 containers at one time, which is pushing up the cost of doing business in the large east African country.

The work will more than double the area of the port from 62ha to 128ha.

“This helps the country to develop the first ever dry port with international standards,” said Aklile Tessema, engineering head of the Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE), reports Addis Fortune.

Ethiopia is landlocked, and conducts almost all of its external trade through the microstate of Djibouti, using the electrified standard gauge rail line, which opened at the beginning of this year. Modjo is the main receiving point for containers on this railway.

The purpose of the port is to relieve congestion at Djibouti by handling many of the customs and trade procedures that would otherwise be done there.

The World Bank is lending Ethiopia an additional $50m to help it bring these standards and procedures up to international best practice.

“The logistics sector is the backbone for industrial and agricultural growth, the success of which is crucial if Ethiopia is to meet its goals as articulated in the Growth and Transformation Plan,” said Carolyn Turk, the World Bank’s country director for Ethiopia, in a press statement.

The loan is over 38 years with a six-year grace period.

The Steder Group, a Dutch logistics service company, has been commissioned to advise on the design and construction of the expanded dry port, and to draw up its business plan, masterplan and port operations manual.

Steder will also work on two other dry port projects in the pipeline, at Hawassa, about 100km south of Addis Ababa, and Woreta in the northern highlands.

There are seven other smaller ports already in operation, many of them located near one of Ethiopia’s new generation of industrial parks, which are seen by the government as a vehicle for developing the country’s manufacturing base and agricultural processing industries.

Top image: Officials from ESLSE discuss the expansion of Modjo (Government of Ethiopia)

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Kidane Alemayehu, My Journey with the United Nations and Quest for the Horn of Africa’s Unity and Justice for Ethiopia, RoseDog Books, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2017; 353pp. $30.00; ISBN: 978-1-4809-7048-9

Getatchew Haile

Prof-Getachew-Haile

The journey which author Ato Kidane Alemayehu chronicles in his new book takes him through Lesotho, Tanzania, Uganda, United Arab Emirates and the Horn of Africa as a representative of the United Nations, and ultimately to establish an organization dedicated to confronting “Fascist Italy and the Vatican.” His book contributes valuable information to the history of East Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and to the rationale behind Ethiopia’s struggle to win recompense from Italy for crimes committed during the Fascist era.  Ato Kidane describes his varied experiences in beautiful, lucid English, and indeed it is a credit to Ethiopia and its educational system that the United Nations looked to her for qualified people to serve in other African countries.

A Successful Journey for Development

The first country Ato Kidane served was the Kingdom of Lesotho, where he went in 1972 at the request of the UN to serve as Director of Posts, Telecommunications and Civil Aviation.  Once there, Kidane’s central problem was human and financial resources.  Many of the offices, including Posts, Telecommunications and Civil Aviation, were staffed by expatriates.  Since Kidane wanted the national Basotho (pl. of Mosotho) to run their own country, he immediately designed a training program for nationals, including Mothibi as supervisor. The Assistant Director, a South African, was amazed at this plan and asked, “Do you want to train Mothibi? He is no better than a monkey!”  For his part, Ato Kidane was greatly satisfied with the training and performance of the nationals, one of whom, Percy Mangoaela, eventually took over as Director.

“Upon completion of my assignment,” writes Kidane, “I was ready to depart Lesotho for Ethiopia when, however, the Lesotho Government and the UN came up with another idea!” Kidane’s next assignment was Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Works.  The list of Kidane’s achievements in modernizing Lesotho, as testified by the country’s authorities, is impressive. Thanks in great part to his tireless efforts, airports were built, pilots were trained, rural cities and neighboring countries and cities (Maseru, Johannesburg, Swaziland, and Mozambique) were connected by air, and all weather roads were built to connect many cities.   Other highlights include Ato Kidane’s leading a Lesotho delegation to Cape Town, South Africa, to resume water negotiations that led to the building of the huge Katsie Dam and water self-sufficiency for the country, and the fact that under his watch a Lesotho national was assigned to the ichair of the Director of Posts, Telecommunications and Civil Aviation.

In 1979 Ato Kidane moved to Tanzania where he served in the Ministry of Capital Development, representing the United Nations as an expert. “The Ministry’s main purpose was to set the policy and strategy as well as oversee the development of a new capital city at Dodoma, located at the center of the country. The implementation of the capital city’s development was the responsibility of the Capital Development.”  The responsibility included policy and planning, coordination and transfer programs, land use, and administration and finance branches, low-income housing.   In 1981, Kidane was transferred from Tanzania to Kenya, to the headquarters of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, located in Nairobi, where he served for a year as Inter-Regional Consultant at the UN Center for Human settlements (UN Habitat).  Since Nairobi was the center serving many African countries, during this posting Kidane traveled to Uganda, Malawi, Botswana, Swaziland, Nigeria, and The Gambia.   Kampala in particular was a difficult place at that time, as Idi Amin Dada had just been ousted and the city was neither stable nor safe.  Yet, with courage and good luck, Kidane’s mission there was successful.  “The overall strategy was to bring about a speedy recovery of the shattered economy,” he writes.   Kidane’s book reminds us that a lack of human resources, migration from rural to urban areas, population growth, lack of energy sources and easy access to water are problems shared by most African countries.

Off to Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE)

No sooner than he migrated to the United States, Ato Kidane was offered an assignment he could not resist: he was invited to give assistance to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in the United Arab Emirates.  He went to Dubai in 1982 to commence a one-month consultancy service that eventually became a two-year term of service.  During the first month review of the Ministry’s overall policies, plans, and performance, he discovered that the Ministry was facing serious challenges in virtually all aspects.  On the basis of his findings, Kidane presented to the authorities his fitting recommendations to solve the daunting problems the Emirates faced.  After his ideas were thoroughly scrutinized, and were found adequate, he was asked to lead a team to implement his recommendations.  The success that followed is recorded on pages 76-88.

Ato Kidane writes that “Dubai Municipality is a success story by international standards. More than anything else, what Dubai Municipality has clearly demonstrated is the fact that a leadership with the courage and unbound vision, firm principles of accountability and transparency and the wisdom to apply modern systems of management, technology and methodologies would achieve positive results. The Municipality’s ability to formulate sound policies, strategies, systems and action plans have enabled it to transform Dubai from being a mere fishing village less than half a century ago to its present international cosmopolitan center of commerce, tourism and industry competing with urban centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore and other such renown cities.”   It is no surprise that the story of Dubai has the lion’s share of My Journey with the United Nations. The book is also a reminder that the United Nations, including the agencies that facilitated Kidane’s services in the various countries, namely, the UNDP, ITU (International Telecommunications Union), and UN-Habitat deserve appreciation for their contribution to the quest of institutional development in Africa and the Middle East.

If only they have ears to hear

Soon after he retired from the United Nations, Ato Kidane shifted his focus to the countries of the Horn of Africa. He devotes three chapters of his book to them: “Horn of Africa’s History and Challenge” (chapter 6), “Vision for Horn of Africa’s Peace and Development” (chapter 7), and “Red Sea Cooperative Council” (chapter 8).   Despite the well-known and difficult problems of the region —abject poverty, famine, epidemics, and civil wars— Ato Kidane writes that it is his “considered view that there are good prospects for hope in this beleaguered part of Africa.  Such a hope, however, presupposes a more vigorous effort by all internal and external stakeholders, including governments, non-governmental and international organizations as well as academic institutions in the formulation, promotion and achievement of appropriate socio-economic and political development strategies for the benefit of the region and the international community.” (p. 180).

One wonders if the Horn of Africa countries will ever follow through on Ato Kidane’s recommendations.  Unfortunately, these countries have not been endowed with leaders dedicated to its development, and one is reminded of the Amharic proverb, ከሞኝ ገበሬ ደጃፍ ሞፈር ይቈረጣል “One cuts a highly-priced plow-log from the backyard of a fool farmer.”

Eluding Death for a Cause

In March 1981 Ato Kidane and other members from the UN flew from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, in central Tanzania, apparently in a chartered plane, to participate in a meeting to resolve a controversy between the Tanzanian government and the UN Department of Technical Cooperation and Development. Several officials some of whom came from New York attended the meeting. Ato Kidane recollects: “During the meeting, it was decided that I remain in Dodoma for a few more days to follow-up on issues concerning my work with the Ministry of Planning. . . I learned later in the morning that the UN team that had flown from Dodoma had perished because of the plane’s crash due to adverse climatic conditions. . . My time was obviously not up” (p. 53).

No, Ato Kidane’s time was not up. As reported in chapters 9 and 10, he had yet to “Cry for Justice” for the Ethiopian people for the crimes the Fascists committed against them, and to demand an apology from the Vatican, reminding it that this is no more than Christian penance, for its “Complicity with the Fascists.” “If there is any country that can be clearly identified as a nation that has been the victim of huge war crimes and destruction, despite its membership of the League of Nations, but continues to this day to be denied the justice it deserves for over (80) years, it is Ethiopia,” writes Ato Kidane, referring to the crimes the Fascists committed against Ethiopians during their invasion in 1935-41 with the connivance of Vatican leadership. “My concern with the Fascist war crimes in Ethiopia and the Vatican’s complicity”, writes Kidane, “dates back to my younger days when I was told stories by my father about the war he participated in Eastern Ethiopia, the Ogaden” (p. 296)

Kidane started his challenge of the Italian government and the Vatican by writing a letter in 2005 to Pope Benedict XVI. The occasion was the Pope’s visit of a synagogue in Nuremburg, in Germany, and his statement that the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was an unimaginable crime. In his letter Kidane reminded the Pope “about one other issue that has been awaiting justice for a long time and that the Ethiopian people deserved a Vatican apology” (p.269).  Since then he has continued his campaign, establishing an organization, Global Alliance for Justice: The Ethiopian Cause.  The historical facts justifying The Ethiopian Cause are convincingly narrated in this book and in many articles Ato Kidane has authored since he established the organization.  Historians who have seen the documents of the time agree with his positions and are cooperating with his demands for justice, reparations, return of looted properties, and an apology from the Vatican.  The Global Alliance is not demanding more for Ethiopia Italy repaid to Libya, a country against whom Italy’s crimes were considerably less severe.

As for the Vatican and Pope Pius XI’s complicity, it has been argued that Benito Mussolini would have put the Catholic Church in great danger if the Pope had opposed him. Even if one accepts this untenable argument, there is no reason why the leadership of the Church cannot now apologize for its role during the war.  Kidane has made it his mission to see that Ethiopia be given the respect it deserves, and it seems he will not rest until he has succeeded. He is not pleading but demanding.

To sum it up, Ato Kidane Alemayehu has written a book that has contributed to the history of East Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and to an understanding of Italy’s crimes against the Ethiopian people by presenting facts and information not known in other sources.  The valuable services Ato Kidane rendered to the countries he consulted are testified to by the grateful authorities of those nations.  As a primary source, then, the book’s only shortcoming is that it has no indices.

41. PS. Your support in the quest of justice for Ethiopia is herewith requested by signing the petition you can find at (globalallianceforethiopia.org) calling on the Vatican to apologize to the Ethiopian people for its complicity with Fascist Italy’s war crimes in Ethiopia during 1935-41.

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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act – Orwell.
Mikael Wossen, PhD.

Introduction

The TPLF’s quarter of a century reign of terror and deceit is unraveling at the seams and teachers are playing their critical part. The popular cries for land, better education, representation, freedom, dignity and democracy are all proving infectious and sounding across the land. Ethiopians from all walks of life are waging both violent and peaceful modes of insurrectionary acts against the supremacist ethnic minority regime of the TPLF. What is in place is a quintessential system of minority domination. Ethnically or racially configured, apartheid is ultimately, a technology of power. It instructs how an organized and well armed minority group can wield absolute power over a fractured disenfranchised majority, as is evident in the mechanism of the TPLF state. Six percent of the Ethiopian population has been dominating and subordinating/exploiting the divided 94% majority in the name of ‘ethnic federalism.’ For the last year, at least, ‘ Down, down with Woyanne’ has been the common battle cry of demonstrators facing down the regime across the nation.

Educators of the so called ‘Amhara regional state’ of Ethiopia have been particularly vociferous and pointed in their critique of the TPLF’s ‘Boerish’ educational policies and scathing towards the regime’s allegations of ‘deep Tehadiso’ in the educational sphere. They dismiss the latter claim as yet another propagandistic ploy designed to placate the rising discontent among the learning populations and teaching staff of the region. Along the way, they also provide a surprisingly coherent appraisal of the educational malaise afflicting the region. This is something that concerns us here and, in our opinion, the global federation of teachers (Educational International) should learn about these practices as well.

As a committed educator and a firm believer in the lifelong benefits of public education, the kind of education system currently in place in the “Amhara” region of Ethiopia is of professional concern to me. Let us start out by saying that the state of education there, raises various questions along the lines recently initiated by Ethiopia’s regionalized/ethnicized teaching body.  A meeting recently held by the region’s university educators from Dessie, Gondar, Debre-Tabor and Debre-Markos frankly condemned the brutal actions of the regime’s security forces and the rampant violation of student’s rights on all of the region’s campuses. They condemned the slave-like treatment of the region’s population. International human rights reports concur with the excessive abuses meted out to the country’s youth, particularly in the Amara and Oromia regions. Ironically too, the TPLF regime is on the human rights council of the UN, and has been ruling by a state of emergency and ‘virtual lawlessness’ ever since October 2016.

Formal public education, in the most general sense, serves as the glue of any social order. It achieves this historic status by transmitting vital knowledge, skills and by promoting social cohesion. The state of the nation’s schools calibrates the wellbeing and stability of the social order. That’s why some educators refer to classrooms as the ‘cells of society.’ Schools function with other institutions of society, like the family, for the purpose of imparting necessary knowledge/skills and gaining what is broadly known as hegemony; the education sector selects candidates for positions high and low in society, and maintains the socio-economic hierarchy. The high achievers are assumed to contribute more to society. In short, the provision of public education is central to how societies either reproduce and/or transform themselves over time.   Leaders like Mandela have acknowledged the revolutionary character of education, when relevantly, contextually and properly instilled. Roosevelt was spot on when he declared that the real safeguard of democracy rests with education.

Expansion of Education

Since the closing decades of the last and the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an unprecedented clamour for democracy and the expansion of public education everywhere, in Ethiopia included. Investing in the development of knowledgeable human capital became all the rage. During the same period, the right to basic education has been recognized as a fundamental human right everywhere. Meanwhile, the provision of basic formal public education has evolved into a motherhood item worldwide. Although standardized education/testing may be of limited benefit to children in rural villages (near 80% of Ethiopian students), it is near heresy to suggest otherwise. This amounts to the unquestioned transnational infusion of Western educational culture. Suffice it to say that the old notion of cultural imperialism is still a valid analytical construct in the educational field.

Of specific interest in this inquiry, hereafter, is the audacious teacher’s report recently (Feb. 2017) released to the media (ESAT) by the Amara teaching body in Ethiopia. The teacher’s five day conference dealt with the dismal state of education in the so called Amhara region or killil of this ethnically divided and troubled country. This gathering itself was an act of courage, observers thought, given the state terror and fear that prevails in this part of the country.

Although you can no longer keep populations totally illiterate these days, you can certainly mis-educate them by various means and literally misdirect generations. There is an unequal education system prevailing in Ethiopia, and the Amara population is not only socially and educationally deprived but also badly mis-educated. This is the verdict of the under-paid and over-policed Amara teachers of Ethiopia. Over 8000 teachers stand behind this leaked report, ostensibly sent to the central committee of ANDM, the quisling Amara party, set up by the TPLF as part of its EPRDF puppetry. Led by Eritreans (Simon Bereket), and other non-Amara (or phony Amaras) individuals, vetted and thoroughly brainwashed by the TPLF puppet-masters to play their ‘federalist’ role. This particular party has no independent agency whatsoever and works against the interest of those it claims to represent. In fact, it does not even stem from the constituency in whose name it transacts. It is, in plain language, an imposter party accountable to the TPLF. The teachers have no faith in this non-representative body that hands them over to virtual slavery conditions by the TPLF.

Cognizant of this repressive political climate, the Amara teaching workforce is concerned about the absence of educational leadership and dangerously declining quality of education in its region. On the whole, the teaching force complains that it is not receiving the resources and support necessary for fulfilling the complex educational mandates and needs of their students. To begin with, and rather sadly, there are far too many hungry students and the politico-economic climate is particularly harsh for the close to 30 million Amaras inhabiting Ethiopia. As torture and repression intensifies, a thickening climate of fear prevails. A great part of the TPLF strategy of maintaining Tigrean supremacy hinges on keeping the Amaras impoverished and destitute. On account of this founding policy of the TPLF, the Amaras now inhabit the poorest region in Ethiopia, which itself is the second poorest nation-state on earth, despite the abundant wealth covering the land.

As feared, ethnic politics has managed to invade the schools and infiltrate the student bodies as well. The teachers emphasize the powerful social effect of inequalities among the nation’s teaching staff, based on ethnicity. The Tigrean teaching staff is the most privileged in the country. For instance, teachers may be sent to seminars, where the Tigrean teachers alone are paid per diem allowances. This has a demoralizing effect on the non-Tigreans and enforces the superior treatment of some teachers over others. Access to government-sponsored scholarships and career-improving trips overseas are also highly secured for Tigreans. Similarly, when foreigners show any interest in helping to reform or somehow ‘aid’ the country’s educational system, they are promptly directed to Tigrai. Here, students are afforded the best equipped and most relevant educational system. The famed Kalamino school in Mekelle is a case in point.  Tigraian language and culture is taught to occupied Amaras in former Begemeder and northern Wollo against their will. Scool instruction in mother tongue is denied these colonized Amaras. The Ashenda culture is recognized by UNESCO as uniquely and exclusively Tigrean, in total disregard of its Wag-Agew roots. In brief, there is a sustained transfer of wealth and knowledge from the rest of Ethiopia to Tigrai.

Ideas and beliefs do indeed shape societies. Since the days of Marx, Durkheim and Weber the social world has changed significantly, as has modern sociological thinking on the subject of schooling and its spread. Reproduction theory with class and status-based analytic approaches have been supplemented by ethnicity and gender conscious approaches to measuring educational opportunities and their expansion. In international sociological comparisons among nations, the levels of education attained by a given population, is considered a major indicator of the socio-economic advancement of that society. As such, knowledge production and dissemination become critical to national success and global competition. This key import of education, challenges us to investigate closely the role it plays in present day Ethiopia. It is our challenge to arrive at a certain understanding of how and why the education systems concerned has taken the present dismal shape in the so called ‘Amhara regional state’. Indeed, why are the teachers in the Amhara killil dissatisfied with their conditions/wages and, in growing measure, conditions of work. The population of the Amhara region of Ethiopia is not only economically exploited, it is also culturally oppressed, socially abused and educationally deprived.  The knowledge and skills imparted in the regionalized and segregated and unequal educational system are not allowing the graduates to compete fairly and equally in the nations higher education institutions, governance and occupational structure.

Theoretical background

In a nutshell, schools are perceived as agencies of social reproduction, where learning relations tend to, more or less, reproduce society as is (Appple). In the wake of the student protest movements of the 1960s, Neo-Marxists began to identify schools as the hegemonic apparatus of the capitalist state, (Althusser) and a vital part in the exercise of power and worldwide cultural domination or “Cultural Imperialism” (Carnoy) under conditions of advanced capitalism.

Particularly since the onset of the post-industrial societies and globalization, the institutional developments of schools are influenced less and less by internal forces than by a common world culture and policy template promoted by the UN and other trans-national institutions (John Meyer et al., 1997). So-called “best practices” and standard scripts are routinely diffused around the contemporary world, and are sweetened by generous funding, further entrenching isomorphism or similarity. Known as World polity theory, this approach is persistently promoted by transnational organizations; emphasizing the growing stateless character of world institutions. It portrays schools as institutions of ‘loose coupling.’  This means that what is learned in schools and the requirements of the indigenous workplace may not necessarily match. The favored analytic approach blends sociology of education with globalization studies  and focuses on the role of education in citizenship formation and schooling as part of a process of globalization, seen as a dimension in the formation and emergence of a broader “world society.”

Thus, schools are seen more and more as legitimating institutions, international instruments of human rights and the modernization-globalization process, rather than merely national skill-producing machineries. They are seen as key to the developmental process. Moreover, local school arrangements no longer depend on broader social institutions to supply their form and function. Hence, this approach emphasizes the growing absence of a strong functional connection between schools and their surrounding communities in the global peripheries. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are there to ensure that by 2015, “children everywhere” are able to complete primary school. Some progress has been realized in this area over the past decade and under the earlier Education For All initiative. This is what the TPLF lauds as its achievement.

Primary education has a high standing among the proponents of the Millennium Development Goals. The TPLF claims that it has expanded educational opportunities to an unprecedented degree. This may be true in the qualitative sense but the quality of the literacy and skill sets of the graduates produced is in serious question by the Amara teachers/educators, among others.  A recent article in Addis Fortune underscored the wretched qualification of graduates from TPLF’s schools and proliferating  ‘universities’.

The core purpose of primary education is that children are able to read and write and as adults can read instructional material.  Near-universal literacy is a necessary – if far from sufficient – condition if a country is to escape extreme poverty. Indeed, few countries escape extreme poverty and achieve decent health outcomes without also achieving high literacy.  Very few countries have achieved a per-capita GDP above $2,500 with adult literacy below 80 per cent. As UNESCO realizes very few countries achieve decent public health outcomes with female literacy below that threshold. Female literacy is therefore central to the child’s education. In many of the so-called “least developed” countries, over 90 per cent of children may enter Grade 1, but half drop out before completing the primary cycle, and in general the quality of education tends to be extremely low.

Education for Domestication

Education stems from the Latin term Educere, meaning to’ lead out’ or ‘bring up’ in common parlance. Education can either serve for transformational processes or merely reproductive ones. In the latter sense, it serves to reproduce, perpetuate and crystallize the inequalities entrenched in society. The Amara teachers allege that the regime in power recommends them to habitually pass students from the 1^st to the 4^th grade, regardless of their level of achievements. Teachers are also instructed to let students with less than 50% pass through grade 8. In this way, one of the most essential purposes of any education system, namely to ‘select’ and ‘sort’ among students as to who moves on to the next grade in the process of schooling is denied them. The sorting and selecting role of education, so critical to the integrity of the entire schooling process, is ignored. Mediocrity is encouraged and rewarded. Sadly too, Amharic, the highly evolved dominant language of the country, is not part of the high school leaving certificate. This leads to the loss of academic and cultural standards altogether, and the emphasis is on quantity, or the number of students ‘graduates’ produced, as in a factory. The latter frame of mind lends itself to thinking that you have achieved a gigantic leap in terms of educational development, even if the ‘graduates’ may be close to illiterate and unemployable. Such arbitrary schools at best graduate domestics or the old ‘drawers of water and hewers of wood’ personnel, trained as reserve labor and subordinate staff for the export economy. No wonder, college educated graduates are now good for construction sites or cobblestone jobs.

To start with, the Tigrean political leaders have little incentive to building a good school system for Amaras, their declared enemies. Instead, they’d rather subdue them in incompetence and misrule under ANDM. Besides, political interference, incompetence and corruption have infested the tribalized regional school system. This was inevitable, because the leading slogan of the Ethiopian revolution ‘land to the tiller’ has been perverted by the neoliberal ethos of ‘land to the investor’ dear to the TPLF regime. The teachers think that when it comes to populations outside of Tigai, the TPLF is more interested in material/financial development or ‘development of the forces of production’ (capital accumulation) rather than human or social development per se.

Schools in the Amara region are subordinated to the TPLF’s state-led supremacist ethos and are not quite the vaunted ‘passports’ to the future or to the middle class as envisioned by educators in the past. Sure enough, the Amara youth is largely unemployed/underemployed and lives in permanent servitude. The ingestion of the sedative quat is ubiquitous. Graduation does not guarantee employment. Prospects of unemployment and underemployment lie ahead for this generation of students with limited knowledge of their native language/culture and restricted fluency in their acquired language. Unable to meet the exigencies of the modernizing technical manufacture world, most become the disposable and subordinate staff for the ‘export economy.’ Some fall prey to the human trafficker’s promise of a better life in exile.

More than anything, the TPLF regime uses Amara schools as captive places for political indoctrination. Despite the constitutional claims of separation, the politics of the TPLF treats schools as its ideological laboratories. Pupils are recruited and party publications are sold openly in schools.  Schools tend to be run by boards assembled from party ranks and the superintendent element is selected on the basis of its loyalty to the dominant party line, rather than its competence. This prevails all the way to the university sphere. Once a promising domain of research and learning, the country’s universities are also run by loyal boards chaired by TPLF cadres and are run like cadre schools. Most chairmen are clueless about the history or nuances of policy or sociology of education and act on command by the TPLF party-state. Most of the high educational authorities, including the federal government’s minister of education (MoE) are said to have bought rather than earned their sham higher degrees and fake doctorates.   Like their political masters, the teachers are forced to teach the ideological lies of the regime and are willing to deliver distorted information to their students. The curriculum is arbitrary and infused with the ruling ideology. This is the pinnacle of hubris and disrespect to students.  Books convey the wrong message and ‘alternate facts’ preponderate. Grade 6 and 10 curricula are cited as being complete fabrications, like the fable alleging that the mountain range of Ras Dashen lies in Tigrai and so on.  Most of the teachers in one woreda (Jan Amora) are 10^th grade graduates, and not even qualified teachers. In this way, ignorance is reproduced intergenerationally. The teacher’s pay scale is irregular and unfair as well. A teacher who has served for eight years and a new graduate receive the same pay. At best, about 5% of the teaching staff supports these politicized educational policies. This is considerably less than the 85% routinely claimed by the regime.

The teachers note that Ethiopian federalism is a contentious struggle and competition between nine designated people and nationalities, all militarily/ideologically subordinated to the minority ethnic-based TPLF and waiting for independence and self-determination or secession. As stated repeatedly, it is neither a representative, nor a democratic political system. Nor does economic justice prevail in the existing totalitarian order of ‘internal colonialism,’ where vital raw materials are extracted from the Amara region for manufacture in Tigai. Qualified and under-qualified Tigreans are hired by Mesfin Engineering. The so called National Defense Force serves as a private security guard for the TPLF and employment agency for Tigreans. Most shameful to the teachers are the periods when they have to teach human and civil rights (civics).  When they teach students their rights and duties and inspire them to actively participate in the TPLF’s so called democracy, they also know that the students will be harassed, tortured, imprisoned and possibly shot if they take their lessons in citizenship seriously.

to conclude, this type of ethnically segregated and inferior education systems used to exist in apartheid South Africa and Namibia as well, hence the reference to ‘Boerish’ policies.  Here dozens of educational systems and ministries, one for each tribe, used to exist. There was no common education system for the population of the countries concerned. There were qualitatively different and unequal education systems arrayed by the state, Africans were schooled separately and divided by tribe.  Whites and Africans were schooled separately and segregated by race, with a white student being allocated approximately six times the resources granted to Africans. In Ethiopia too, the teachers allege, there exists a grossly unequal and differentiated education system, with Amaras receiving the least support and resources from the state. Consequently, the inferior education system laid out for the Amaras is providing more indoctrination than knowledge, and instilling a culture of compliance and docility, rather than providing any kind of meaningful skills or aptitudes. Aside from the pitiful low remuneration, the teachers are also objecting to the deeply flawed and dead-end education system currently misleading the Amara children.

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by Megan Rowling | @meganrowling | Thomson Reuters Foundation

By Megan Rowling

BARCELONA, April 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The Green Climate Fund, set up to channel billions of dollars to help poor countries tackle climate change, came under fire on Thursday over its choice of which projects to back, as activists said it was overlooking the needs of the most vulnerable people.

The board, which met for the past three days at the fund’s head office in South Korea, approved $755 million in funding for eight new projects, bringing its total allocation to $2.2 billion since 2015.

But civil society groups were disappointed the board did not support a $100 million proposal to bolster Ethiopians, especially women, against an increasing risk of drought, which is currently affecting more than a fifth of the population.

The refusal by some rich nations to get behind the U.N.-led project reflected disagreement over whether the fund’s cash should be used for activities that might be regarded as overseas development assistance rather than closely focused on helping people adapt to climate change effects.

“The ones who benefit most from adaptation are the most vulnerable, the most marginalised, the poorest – and in my opinion, those are the people who should be at the heart of the Green Climate Fund,” said Karen Orenstein, a climate finance specialist with Friends of the Earth U.S., who was at the board meeting in Songdo.

Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA policy director, said he hoped the Ethiopia decision would not deter other developing nations.

“This is potentially a disincentive for countries to come forward with really ambitious adaptation proposals,” he said.

Environment and development groups said the board appears to favour projects that can be clearly labelled as addressing climate change, such as expanding renewable energy or making infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather.

They were highly critical of the board’s decision to spend $50 million on improving Tajikistan’s hydropower sector, including the rehabilitation of a six-decade-old dam, a proposal from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Last month, around 10 international organisations that work on environmental policy sent a letter to the board urging it not to invest in large-scale dam projects.

They argued hydropower is vulnerable to climate change impacts, especially drought, and dams can have negative impacts on biodiversity as well as uprooting people.

Other projects approved this week include a renewable energy financing programme in Egypt, a climate resilience project in Tanzania, and two water-related proposals in Morocco.

Top Green Climate Fund officials declined interview requests.

In a statement issued after the meeting, board co-chair Ewen McDonald of Australia said the fund needed to show “we can implement the funding we have committed by strengthening our core operations and improving the quality of the project pipeline”.

Very little money has so far been disbursed by the fund, held up by bureaucratic bumps in completing formal agreements with agencies that will carry out projects on the ground.

The fund has pledges of $10.3 billion. But there is a question mark over whether the U.S. government will deliver the remaining $2 billion of its $3 billion promise to the fund, as U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to cut off international funding for climate change programmes.

This week’s board meeting did not discuss the issue, observers said.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling @meganrowling; editing by Alex Whiting. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)

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People wait for food and water in the Warder district in the Somali region of Ethiopia, Jan. 28, 2017. Ethiopia is struggling to counter a new drought in its east that authorities say has left 5.6 million people in need.

Ethiopia has declared an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea, also known as AWD, in the country’s Somali region, where people are already struggling to cope with a persistent drought.

Dr. Akpaka Kalu, the World Health Organization representative to Ethiopia, told VOA on Friday that 16,000 cases of AWD had been recorded in the region since January.

The World Health Organization’s representative to Ethiopia Dr Akpaka Kalu (undated photo courtesy of WHO)

The total number of deaths is uncertain.

Regional President Abdi Mohammed Omar said Friday that 19 children had died of AWD in Dollo zone, an area near the southern border with Somalia. This week, residents of a remote village, Qorile, told VOA’s Somali service that dozens had died and more than 700 had received treatment for the illness.

Omar said some of the treatment centers set up to address the outbreak were making headway.

“We have managed to control the worst effects of the disease by establishing temporary emergency medical posts in remote villages,” he said.

Federal authorities have deployed 500 nurses and 68 doctors to fight the disease, in addition to 700 trained health officers, he told VOA’s Amharic service.

Additionally, the WHO has deployed teams on the ground and set up treatment camps to address the outbreak.

Kalu said a U.N. team regional coordinator, WHO representatives and a few others would go to the Somali region, also known as the Ogaden, on Saturday to assess the situation.

“From WHO, for example, we have nearing 40 people on the ground right now. A team went there today in addition to the team that’s been on the ground for some months now,” he said over the telephone. “So we are there working, supporting them to bring it under control.”

Managing the outbreak

Ethiopian officials insist on describing the outbreak as one of AWD, not cholera, which has similar symptoms.

On Monday, a woman who told VOA Somali that she had lost five relatives to cholera and that hundreds of people were suffering from the disease was reportedly arrested by Ethiopian authorities. She was released Wednesday.

In neighboring Somalia, government officials have reported more than 13,000 cases of cholera and 300 deaths since January. WHO said cholera cases were five times greater than what the country experienced last year.

It is not clear what is causing the outbreak in Ethiopia. But Kalu said the government was assessing the situation to try to determine the cause.

Asked whether it was a cholera outbreak, Kalu said, “Cholera is a laboratory diagnosis. You have to test the stool to confirm the cause of the acute watery diarrhea. The government of Ethiopia has declared it acute watery diarrhea. The [assessment] is going on to confirm the causes of acute watery diarrhea, and government is doing that.”

Projects suspended

The outbreak comes as Ethiopian authorities attempt to deal with a dire regional drought. An estimated 5.6 million Ethiopians are in need of emergency food aid. Another 6 million people face starvation in neighboring Somalia and the breakaway republic of Somaliland.

A woman holds her child as they wait to receive treatment in Kobo health center in Kobo village, one of the drought stricken areas of Oromia region, in Ethiopia, April 28, 2016.

This week Somaliland decided to suspend development projects to focus on drought response and related disease emergency assistance.

Ethiopia and Kenya have partially diverted funds from infrastructure investments to finance drought relief efforts. U.N. humanitarian coordinators have requested close to $1 billion to provide food, water and sanitation assistance in Ethiopia.

The World Food Program announced it needs $268 million to provide food assistance in Ethiopia from now until July.

• Salem Solomon

  Salem Solomon is a journalist and web producer at Voice of America’s Africa Division, where she reports in English, Amharic and Tigrigna. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poynter.org, Reuters and The Tampa Bay Times. Salem researches trends in analytics and digital journalism, and her data-driven work has been featured in VOA’s special projects collection.

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The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?

Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.

For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, but in 1935.

I greeted Gandhi with a military salute and asked him: ‘What are you going to do for Africa now that India is going to be free?’ Marshal Kebby Nigerian soldier

Italian Fascist troops, backed by thousands of Eritrean colonial forces, invaded Ethiopia.

Emperor Haile Selassie was forced to flee to the UK, but others, known as Patriots, fought on. Among them was Jagama Kello. Fifteen years old at the time, he left home and raised a guerrilla force that struck at the Italian invaders.

Mein Kampf

Other Africans learnt what Fascism could mean for them. Among them was John Henry Smythe of Sierra Leone. His teacher gave him Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf.

“We read what this man was going to do to the blacks if he gets into power. And he attacked the British and Americans for encouraging the blacks to become doctors and lawyers,” Mr Smythe said.

“It was a book which would put any black man’s back up and it put mine up.”

He volunteered to join the Royal Air Force, becoming a navigator, flying bombers over Germany. Others took a similar view.

Joe Culverwell, who went on to fight for the liberation of Zimbabwe, volunteered the day war was declared in 1939.

“Don’t forget in those days we were very loyal Brits – stupid as that may sound now,” Mr Culverwell says. “We were brainwashed into being little brown Britishers.”

Others were conscripted. They were picked up when they went to visit a local market or on the orders of a local chief.

And many found that once they enlisted they were badly treated. The reality of military life for African soldiers like Nigerian Marshall Kebby was very different from the propaganda.

“As a colonial soldier I had very rough treatment. At that time we hadn’t even a single Nigerian officer, all were British. And many of us revolted against injustice, what I might call man’s inhumanity to man.”

‘Hell’

But once the fighting began there was little time for protest. For men like Mr Culverwell, serving in Somalia, being bombed by the Italians was a terrifying experience.

We, the ex-servicemen, gave this country the freedom it’s enjoying today. Marshall Kebby

“Boy that was hell. We all had foxholes. I never felt so frightened in my life. They were bombing 100 yards away. We daren’t even look up, you see.”

Mr Smythe took part in air-raids over enemy territory.

But on the night of 18 November 1943 his plane was shot down over the German city of Mannheim. He spent 18 months in a prisoner of war camp, where the Germans tried to extract intelligence from him.

“You must use some special instruments to navigate your way here,” his interrogator told Mr Smythe.

“He said: ‘I want you to co-operate to get you out of this place.’ I said: ‘I will give you my name and number’. He started to scream at me; became a real Nazi officer.

“He said: ‘You know they are talking about whether to execute you tomorrow or not. Because you, as a black man, should not involve in white man’s war.’”

Meeting Gandhi

On the other side of the world, Mr Kebby was meeting Indians.

Among them was the leader of India’s independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, who was addressing a crowd of one million people in Madras. Mr Kebby worked his way to the front.

“It was one of the greatest things I did as a soldier. I greeted Gandhi with a military salute and asked him: ‘What are you going to do for Africa now that India is going to be free?’

“He said: ‘India will not do anything for you. But India will give you moral support on condition you fight the British non-violently’.”

By 1945 the war was over, African troops had helped the allied powers defeat Germany, Italy and Japan.

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By Tadias Staff

New York (TADIAS) – General Jagama Kello, who passed away this week at the age of 96, was among the Ethiopian heroes whose unimaginable bravery and resistance helped to defeat the second Italian invasion of Ethiopia during World War II.

His daughter Yetmwork Jagema Kello made the announcement on Facebook Friday noting that her father will be laid to rest at the Kidist Selassie Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo cathedral in Addis Ababa on Sunday.

Jagama Kelo’s remarkable story, which has been shared by various Ethiopian media outlets as well as through national literary works, was also featured in the 2009 BBC documentary entitled Africa’s Forgotten Soldiers highlighting “firsthand account of African troops including the Ethiopian guerrilla forces, known as the Patriots (Arbegnoch).”

“Jagama Kelo, was at that time no more than a young man. He was the son of a wealthy landlord, who owned 900 acres of farms with his uncle, in [Ginchi], not far from Addis Ababa,” writes Journalist Martin Plaut who worked on the documentary. “Jagama had heard tales of his brave ancestors as a boy and hoped to emulate them. When the Italian invasion took place Jagama saw his chance. With his elder brother and uncle, he took to the bush, determined to resist. At first he had no gun – only his elder brother had one. But they ambushed Italian troops and gradually armed themselves. Peasants joined the struggle and by the end of the war they had over 3,000 fighters under their command.”

Jagama remembers the battle at Seyoum Mariam in the outskirts of Addis Ababa as the biggest of his many deadly encounters with Mussolini’s ‘blackshirts,’ as they were called. Jagama told Plaut “they were told by a woman fighter where to find the Italians and in a surprise attack broke through their lines. They killed 72 Italians in the engagement, capturing some 3,000 rifles.”

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Unambiguously Ethiopian has been mentioned as one of the world most ancient place. In whatever geographical size fluctuation, all Ethiopian state lines bounded the source of the biblical Ghion (The Blue Nile) which is a living testimony that spots Ethiopia from genesis to here. Indeed this current African poor country Ethiopia archived the full span of human history which the modern science too is witnessing. Ethiopia is not only known as origin, but also in times of disasters and wars, in hosting backs its grand children who had gone left long ago out of Africa.  The small mountainous Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was simply a melting pot where the entire world came together and formed the current living mosaic society. Most of us may know only the story of the first Islam follower who headed off Meca to Abyssinia (the land of Habesh) and got a safe niche. Before this event too, various people of different religion had already been living in this country. Judaism perhaps was the most ancient religion in Ethiopia even before the Israelis. Yes ‘Judaism’ might be connected to ‘Judah’ the fourth son of Israel (Jacob). The bible however clearly stated people who had been believing in God of the Heaven even before Abraham who was the father of all. Melchizedeck, the king of righteousness and the Eternal Priest has at least been mentioned as a non Israel origin. I am not saying Melchizedeck was Ethiopian as the likely geography where he met Abraham was away from Ethiopia. But just to indicate people who had been believing in Heavenly God before Israeli. The father-in-law of Moses a reportedly Ethiopian too was a priest. The father-in-law (in Egypt) of Josef (Son of Jacob) also was priest. The ancient Greek historian Diodorus of the Sicily mentioned Ethiopians as the first people who believed in Heavenly God. From these we understand that at least  Judaism like religion likely had long been existed in Ethiopia and the region before Israelis. Ofcourse, it was not a surprise the Israilies continued to have connection with Ethiopia and they too escaped to Ethiopia at their time of war and natural disasters. The bête Israelies in Ethiopia are good still living evidences. Christianity landed to Ethiopia in just at the time of the apostils though it took a while until it became state religion in the 4^th century.  Trades and related communications of other people with Ethiopia have been the other historical admixing events to build up more diverse cultured, faith, and genetics background of Ethiopians in particular and the whole Habessha people today in general. That is exactly what the current modern science is witnessing and claiming Ethiopians are just the world harboring the entire genetic breadth of all human races. That is why we say Ethiopia is the  land of the Habesha, the Melting Pot!  Here is the link http://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(12)00271-6.pdf

In this long history, none of the current Ethnic groups were mentioned. No Amhara, no Oromo, no Tigre, none of the current ethnics. Obviously, as part of the society these all had been in Ethiopia until they or others named them with the current names. The outcomes of the genetic analysis in the above link could not differentiate one from the other. Instead it puts all having same genetic background but harboring incredibly diverse genetic origin attesting the aforementioned historical admixture of people in Ethiopia.  Inevitably, cultural, language, communication differences have been realities in Ethiopia as it does in any society. Conflicts can also be nearly inevitable events for various reasons. This has been solid fact almost in all nations. Most of the current nations in the world hosted a gravely devastative conflicts and brutal wars time and again their history. On the other hand, Ethiopia experienced relatively few historical wars within in such long history since ancient times. Instead, as mentioned above it had been a haven for people escaped from wars and various disasters. The ancient Ethiopian rulers seem to be wise and strict with law. That exactly was seen when Ethiopian Christian king hosted the aberrant religion followers (Islam) in those days.  Unfortunately, Ethiopians wisdom and justice went down after power taken off from the Zagwes and then entirely turned into whole mess by local warlords who behaved just like ruthless and hooligans. This created vacuum for people to go apart until the essence of unification came to the mind of Tewodros who himself unfortunately attempted to realize his ambition by blood and iron. Yohanis V continued finally, the Great King Menilik realized with all his extra-ordinary talent.

How Emperor Menilik able to unify Ethiopia?

Being captive, Menilik was raised by Tewodros. Though Tewodros was said to have been such a nasty killer, he never killed those under his arrest. That had been a well established Ethiopian culture that survived even with those all the dark years of the warlords. After all, it appeared that Tewodros raised Menilik in good hands; even finally he gave his daughter to Menilik to be his wife. Menilik was a naturally brilliant and talented person. Tewodros already had realized Menilik would succeed. Although, Tewodros and Menilik share with each other the idea of unification of Ethiopia, they had completely different philosophy. Alike Tewodros, Menilik put war as last option. He also had great sympathy to human sufferings. That exactly was the reason why his people call him ‘Emiye Menilik’ which means ‘Mother Menilik’. They meant he was just like a mother who cares about her children. With his all talents and embracing all people around him, Menilik was ultimately successful in bringing together many of local land lords particularly the Oromos quite friendly. Indeed, Menilik seemingly was inclined in favor of the Oromos. Nearly all his generals and prominent decision makers were Oromos. The Shewa, Gobena was said to have been a friend of Menilik since their childhood. It was not a surprise if Gobena joined Menilik. Gobena certainly was a powerful person in Shewa who even had Challenged Tewodros and Nigus Teklehaymanot of the Gojam. But he did not hesitate to join Menilik. The Boreda Bekere of Wellega was the other partner who joined the Menilik group. Aba Jifar the the Jimma too joined Menilik. These all had understood the intension of Menilik. Menilik had no intension of invasion. His only intension was to bring the long time disintegrated Ethiopian administration into one. Local warlords in the North had no chance than to accept Menilik’s peaceful unification. All those who joined Menilik continued to stay in their power and rule their own people. Yet, Menilik set rule against those who abuse people. His anti slavery rule was the one commonly known. Aba Jifar of the Jimma who had been involved in slave trading was among others who were forced to abandon slave trading. In Menilik’s Empire everybody had the right to live as a human being. That was the great change that librated many who had been in the hands of brutal rulers.  With such talent and humanly move Menilik was successful in bringing together most of Ethiopia in quite short period.

Menilik wars against local lords

Despite the fact that Menilik tried all his best to negotiate with the local lords peacefully, not all could be willing to join him. As a result wars with these local lords were inevitable. Menilik might face some more minor wars but three wars were solemnly. The war with Kao (King) Tona of the Welaita, the war with Emir Abdulai of Adere at Chelenko, and War with Arsi (Anonymous local warier). The war with Emir Abdulai of the Adere (Hareri) lasted only less than a day. The wars with Tona and Arsi took long time and accordingly damages were high. Both Tona and Arsi were finally defeated. Tona was capture a live after he had been wounded. Menilik treated him and Tona recovered. Finally, Menilik convinced Tona about his intention and returned him back to his power to continue to rule the Welaita people.  It was not clear who led the Arsi war from the local side but Menilik was seriously heartbroken with the lost lives and announced an order against his fighters not to abuse the survivors after the war.

Adwa and Menilk

Soon after his successful unification of Ethiopia from the southern side, the Italian invaders were one of his next challenges. The invaders had already footed in current Eretria earlier.  The entire nation he just built was heart fully and courageously responded to his call to fight against the infiltrating invaders. That might be something unbelievable a just united Ethiopians became more united in response to the alien aggressors. No one could stop that unity and it smashed the modernly quipped Italian war at Adawa. Adawa, was more than a victory in a battle. It rather was a game changer that alerted the long time thought of colonialists as if they were super natural and alerted all under colonialist’s repression. Adawa signaled the possibilities of centuries years old impossible! Yet, the Ethiopians under the leadership of Menilik would have succeeded to the invaders doc at Messawa.  More sadly however, the wide range a ravaging famine  in  those days was major challenge. Menilik had to responsibly decide safe his people(fighters)  who were with no remaining food in their hands.  Many may think that Adawa was simply Ethiopians and the Italian invaders war. But the famine was also a natural disaster which was in favor of the invaders. Still there also were ‘Bandas’ serving the invaders. Adawa was realized in all these challenges.

Menilik and Modernizations

After Adawa, Menilik turned his eyes on modernization for lack which he remorse much his country and his people were suffering from numerous natural and artificial disasters. Menilik introduced all technologies on earth of that date to Ethiopia. Count all technologies and modern traditions surviving in so called current Ethiopia, all except internet and plane were his legacies. Internet and planes were not on earth. Plane was just a discovery in 1903. Menilik even was an extra ordinary person to break long time deep rooted ill tradition against technology. The priests from Ethiopian Orthodox church were among his confronters in his pace to prosper Ethiopia.   Menilik did not live that longer to perform all these in a single person lifespan. His lived only 69 years and reined Ethiopia for only 17-18 years in his full leadership and may be then extra 6-7 years unwell.  Menilik, apparently, might be one of the few extra ordinary persons  in last millennium? I am not historian, one may list one or two. I hardly think more.

How Menilik could be that much successful

Luckily, Menilik was joined by many other brilliant, humanly, and determined people.  The Meniliks rein primarily recruited leaders from Oromo people. Including his own wife Tayitu, others like Fitawurary Habtegeorgis Denegde were only to mention few the lead role players in Meniliks rein. All, including local administrators (rases and niguses) were actively participating and had strong bond with the Menilik central leadership despite the fact that the poor system of the date to coordinate. His, administration was a form federal system that the local leaders lead their community but they were monitored by the central administration to not let them abuse the people. Ethiopians in Ethiopia under the rule of Menilik indeed had true citizenship right. The poor had options to appeal to the emperor. ‘deha ayibedl’ was the moto in Menilik’s leadership. As stated above many societies were librated from rampant slavery of the time.   That was little to mention the reason behind why people call the emperor ‘Emiye Menilik’.  Menilike was not only joined by the brilliant elite leaders, but also by his entire people. That enabled him to fetch all those successful stories.

Why weyanes its allies targeted the famous world leader Menilik?

The weyanies and their allies obviously had to target Menilik who truly united all Ethiopians together. Otherwise, the weyanies would have not survived for few months let alone for 26 years here now. The strong bond that Menilik built up among Ethiopians and Ethiopianism has been a problem for those who want to infamously penetrate to Ethiopia.  The weyanies, shabia groups had long before understood the only way they could get chance in Ethiopia was by spoiling the history of Menilik and deceiving others with false stories especially the Oromos who had a very strong tie with Menilik. Weyanies infiltrated into the Ethiopians by large and Oromos in particular with systemic poison that completely detached the current generation especially the Qube oromo generation from their heroic forefathers who were successfully led Ethiopia with Menilik. The waynes don’t want the Oromos to be quoted as a lead role player in the most successful Menilik rein. Obviously, if Oromos realized the successful history of Menilik indeed was the history of their fore fathers, let alone the weyane group that came from far north Dedebit, Tigray, no one would able to rule without the will of Oromos and the surrounding people in Addis which is the center of this community.  It was not that serious but Hailesilasse too attempted to distance the Oromos from being aware of the real history of Menilik, which over  80% the oromos played the role and the reason why Menilik decided to hand over his throne to his Oromo grandson, Iyasu. Menilik had planned to hand over his power to the grandson of his friend Gobena which unfortunately was not successful for a reason. This strong evidence of the bond between the Oromos and Menilik has always been seen as a threat by Ethiopian rulers then after except the derg which reined all through out in mess but with good reputation of the Menilik history. The weyanes were successful in wiping out of Menilik’s true history from the minds of the Qube Oromo generation which is currently maneuvered in ridiculous way by the weyanes. Not only distracted the Menilik history which undeniably  was the history of Oromos leadership, weyanes apparently able to let the Qube minds to think the history of Menilik as if it were history of their enemy. The weyane served the Qube Oromo minds with factious fake versions. Most current Qube generation read the weyane sponsored Tesfay Gebere Ab’s ‘Yeburkawe Zimita’; ‘Yejemila Enat’ and so on. The wayanes were ofcourse accompanied by ethnic Oromo elites who want to live for their own personal interest at the expense of the big Oromos. Let alone an Oromo and/or non who speak Afan Oromo, the Quebe generation can easily be idioticed and surrender to anybody who pretend to be Oromo and tell that Oromos have been repressed and your enemies are neftegna(Amhara). That is what the qube mind want to hear and have been made for. That exactly is a strategy to let Oromos believe that they have been powerless, unintelligent in history and to let them accept their incapability for power what so ever they outnumber. This is the mission of those campaigning against the outshining Oromo dominated Menilik leadership history. The truth, all the successes of Menilik were due to leadership performance of Oromo forefathers!

Thank you!

እግዚአብሔር ማስተዋሉን ይስጠን!

ልዑል እግዚአብሔር ኢትዮጵያንና ሕዝቦቿን ይጠብቅ

ሰርጸ ደስታ

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+2
The Jano band — a rare rock band in Ethiopia — has been playing locally and touring in Europe for the past five years

By AFP

At a hotel in Addis Ababa well-known for hosting jazz greats, thousands of fans lined up on a Saturday night to headbang along with what is still a rarity in Ethiopia’s diverse music scene — a rock band.

Jano, named after a popular item of traditional clothing, has made a name for itself in Africa’s second most populous country, as well as abroad, by blending local styles of music with Western rock and roll.

“We’re trying to make something very, very different,” said Hailu Amerga, one of four vocalists in the eight-piece, mixed ensemble, that also features a drummer, keyboard player, guitarist and bassist.

“Rock, it was really far away from our country, and it’s not our tradition,” he said.

Ethiopian music is generally known for its distinctly non-Western scales and instrumentation, and is a staple of the nightlife in the Ethiopian capital.

At open-air beer gardens, young people dance shoulder-shaking jigs to playlists that alternate between Ethiopian singers and hip-hop hits by west African artists like Sarkodie and Davido.

Perhaps no style of Ethiopian music is better known outside the country than its unique kind of jazz, pioneered by musicians such as Mulatu Astatke and Mahmoud Ahmed, and known worldwide as Ethio-jazz.

The longstanding jazz culture evolved from a brass band movement that was begun by an Armenian band brought to the country by Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last emperor, after he saw it perform in Jerusalem during a visit in the 1920s.

– ‘People are so confused’ –

“When… you give them that traditional jazz, the satisfaction never (finishes),” said Melaku Belay, owner of Fendika, a club where crowds gather for Friday night showcases of traditional music by the dozens of ethnic groups in the country.

Ethiopia’s music scene was not always so free.

During the 14-year communist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, jazz was suppressed and many musicians fled the country.

The Jano band — a rare rock band in Ethiopia — has been playing locally and touring in Europe for the past five years

Though the musical culture has experienced a rebirth in the years since Mengistu’s 1991 ouster, rock music has not developed much of a following in Ethiopia, said Dibekulu Tafesse, another of Jano’s vocalists.

“At first, we were afraid to introduce it,” he said. “Some people are so confused. At the same time, it’s not our culture.”

Jano was assembled in 2011 by Addis Gessesse, a band manager and concert promoter, who has since cut ties with the group.

The band’s sound drifted away from the reggae, jazz and pop that dominate Ethiopia’s music scene as it took on new members.

“When we first came together, we didn’t have the plan to create a rock band. Everybody has their own inspiration,” said Dibekulu.

Bill Laswell, a New York-based bassist and producer who worked on Jano’s first album, Ertale (2012), worried how the genre would go down in Ethiopia.

“I thought the rock thing would be kind of risky with the older audience, but I thought the younger audience would be… ready for what they were doing,” Laswell told AFP in a telephone interview.

When Jano began performing after two years of rehearsals, audiences were sometimes taken aback by their unconventional style.

“Usually in our country, most bands perform standing still,” said Dibekulu.

Not Jano, which prides itself on its energetic stage presence. “People usually think we are high…, but we’re not,” he added.

– ‘Everything is from here’ –

While the guitar riffs in Jano’s songs would not be out of place on an Aerosmith or Guns N’ Roses record, much of the songwriting is distinct to the Horn of Africa.

The vocalists sing in Amharic, Ethiopia’s main language; the keyboardist sometimes emulates the sound of a masinko, a string instrument used in music across the region; and the ululating of the female vocalists is typical of Ethiopia’s traditional music.

“The melodies are from here, the musical arrangements, everything is from here,” singer Haleluya Tekletsadik said.

The rise of Jano comes amid a wave of musical diversification in Ethiopia, said Henock Temesgen, a bassist who has played with several Ethiopian jazz acts.

“A lot of bands are trying to experiment with mixing Ethio music with other elements, like jazz. Jano is just one element of that,” Henock said, adding that before Jano, there was no real rock band in the country.

Jano plans to release a second album in the coming months, and regularly performs abroad, including in the Middle East, US and Europe.

While their shows are popular with the Ethiopian diaspora, Dibekulu said Jano has wider appeal.

“There were Africans, Latinos,” he said, of their last show in New York. “Everybody enjoyed our music.”

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April 7, 2017 (JUBA) –South Sudan President Salva Kiir Friday reiterated his commitment and willingness to work with Ethiopia to deepen their military cooperation, making new contributions to an in-depth development of bilateral relations.

President Kiir said South Sudan regards the relationship with the neighbouring country as one of great importance. Over the past years, the military exchanges between the two countries have resulted in fruitful achievements for both countries.

The bilateral level of cooperation has enabled the countries to conduct high-level exchanges, joint military training and defence consultations.

Kuol Manyang Juuk, the Defence Minister pointed out that strengthening the military cooperation between South Sudan and Ethiopia was vital in safeguarding regional peace and stability, regardless of circumstances.

The minister said South Sudan would stay committed in their efforts to deepen military exchanges and advance military ties with Ethiopia. He addressed the press after accompanying the Ethiopian Chief of Defence, Samora Muhammad Yuni and his delegation to President Kiir.

Flanked by Paul Malong Awan, Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) Chief of General Staff, Minister Juuk said the Ethiopian military and security officials had discussed the memorandum signed between the Ethiopian army and SPLA at the State House in Juba.

Malong said the discussions were on the memorandum signed by the two army chiefs of general staff on the provision of security on the borders between the two countries.

He went on to say that he was appreciative of the role that has been played by his Ethiopian counterpart, supporting SPLA and the people of South Sudan during the days where the Sudanese people struggled for freedom.

(ST)

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On October 9, 2016, the puppet prime minister (PPM) of the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (T-TPLF) Hailemariam announced a “state of emergency” (SoE) in a 20-minute televised statement. The PPM argued “anti-peace elements”, allied with foreign forces, had incited strife and undermined the peace and stability in the country. He claimed “anti-peace elements” had destroyed private and government property and waged economic boycotts. He asserted extreme measures were necessary to deal with an extreme emergency. Curiously, he emphatically assured that the SoE will not violate fundamental human rights. The PPM further promised deep and extensive governance reforms and pledged to re-engage opposition parties and civic society organizations in a broader dialogue “to expand and deepen our democracy.”

Surprisingly, the PPM failed to explain why it was necessary to have a nationwide SoE when the alleged violence by “anti-peace elements” occurred in only the “Oromo” and “Amhara” “kilils” (apartheid style-Bantustans). Did the PPM and his regime fear that the other seven “kilils” were also about to explode in acts of civil resistance to his regime?

The PPM also failed to explain why his regime had resorted to a complete state of emergency which clamped down not only on potential disturbances in two regions but also a complete national shutdown of the press, the internet and all forms of mass communication for the  maximum period of six months permitted under his regime’s “constitution”.

On October 15, 2016, the “Ethiopian Cabinet of Ministers” issued its “State of Emergency Command Post” Decree imposing sweeping prohibitions against “incitement and communication that causes public disturbance and riots, communicating with terrorist groups, unauthorized demonstration and public gatherings, conducting strikes in educational institutions and sports facilities, obstructing vehicles’ movement, disturbing and causing incitement in religious, cultural, and public holidays and acts against tolerance and unity”, among others. Among the “measures to be taken” to enforce the Decree included, “detention without an arrest warrant”, keeping detainees incommunicado, “warrantless searches and seizures and arrests”, among others.

So much for PPM Hailemariam’s emphatic promise of no human rights violations in his televised announcement!

On March 19, 2017, the T-TPLF “defense minister” announced that his regime has lifted three  elements of the SoE: 1) arbitrary stops and searches of suspects, 2) warrantless searches and seizures of homes, and 3) dusk-to-dawn curfew on access to economic installations”. The “defense minister” explained: “These measures were lifted because it is our belief that the ordinary security arrangements are sufficient enough to maintain calm.”

On March 30, 2017, the T-TPLF-owned, -managed and –operated “parliament” (the T-TPLF controls 100 percent of the seats) in Ethiopia authorized  a four-month extension of the current SoE. PPM Hailemariam Desalegn told “parliament” that “82 percent of Ethiopians want a partial or full continuation of the state of emergency.”

It remains a mystery how the PPM derived the “82 percent” figure. He offered no evidence of a national poll to support his claim of  “82 percent” of Ethiopians supporting the idea of  living under a  state of emergency where they can be arrested arbitrarily and held incommunicado and tortured. The “82 percent figure” is manifestly cooked just like the T-TPLF’s economic growth mantra figure of “double-digit for the past decade”.

Suffice it to say that the T-TPLF has jailed “more than 25,000 people suspected of taking part in protests were detained under the state of emergency.” The T-TPLF itself admitted detaining over 11,000 people as of November 12, 2016. The actual figure of current detainees in T-TPLF prisons is likely to approximate 100,000.

Over the past six months, the T-TPLF has tried to project a state of normalcy and firm control in the country under a state of emergency. But T-TPLF leaders know that the SoE has only shoveled dirt over the volcanic ambers of anger, frustration and defiance burning furiously under the surface. A declaration of a state of emergency is not likely to permanently suppress the peaceful struggle of all Ethiopians for freedom, democracy, human rights and majority rule. Such is the “objective condition on the ground” in Ethiopia, to borrow a favorite phrase of the late T-TPLF thugmaster. Despite empty promises of dialogue and outreach, the T-TPLF’s preferred method of conflict resolution has been and remains to be massacres, butchery, carnage and murder.

The popular uprising of 2016 demonstrated that the fear of T-TPLF butchery and brutality has not marooned the Ethiopian people on an island of despair and  submission. But the T-TPLF leaders believe they have capped the volcanic eruption of the people’s anger and frustration permanently by their SoE. That is self-delusion. Volcanoes often remain dormant for decades without giving the slightest signs of an impending eruption. Likewise, oppressed societies may remain dormant for decades without giving the slightest indication of  the pressure and heat buildup of deep, widespread, sweeping and pervasive dissatisfaction, anger, resentment and rage. But societies like volcanoes explode; and when they do, the outcome is just as catastrophic as an erupting volcano.

Who is really in a “state of emergency”?

The proposition that “Ethiopia is under a state of emergency.” is a true statement.

The proposition that “The T-TPLF is in a state of emergency.” is an equally true statement.

Ethiopia has been under a state of emergency since May 28, 1991, the date the T-TPLF rebels marched from the bush on the capital Addis Ababa.

Ethiopians have been under an undeclared, de facto state of emergency police state for the past 25 years. The T-TPLF has imposed its will on the people of Ethiopia through brute force. In 2005, following the election that year, the T-TPLF gave new meaning to savagery and brutality by massacring hundreds of people and jailing over 30 thousand others. Over the past decade, the T-TPLF has operated a police state. When Erin Burnett of CNN visited Ethiopia in July 2012, she described what she saw in stark terms: “We saw what an African police state looked like when I was in Ethiopia last month… At the airport, it took an hour to clear customs – not because of lines, but because of checks and questioning. Officials tried multiple times to take us to government cars so they’d know where we went. They only relented after forcing us to leave hundreds of thousands of dollars of TV gear in the airport…”

Since 2009, the T-TPLF has used its so-called anti-terrorism law (Proclamation No. 652/2009), to impose a de jure (by law) state of emergency. Under that “Proclamation”, the T-TPLF has been able to do exactly what it is doing today under its SoE decree. The only, and only difference, is that the T-TPLF now calls its opponents “anti-peace elements” instead of “terrorists”. Everything else is the same!

Under section 5 of that “Proclamation”, the T-TPLF can arrest any person it classifies as “terrorist” for providing “a skill, expertise or moral support or giving advice” etc. to anyone opposing its rule. The same is true under the current decree.

Section 6 criminalizes as a terrorist act publication of “a statement that is likely to be understood by some or all of the members of the public as a direct or indirect encouragement or incitement to violence” The same is true under the decree.

The “Proclamation” authorizes warrantless searches and seizure of homes and offices, interception and surveillance on the telephone, fax, radio, the internet, electronic, postal and similar communications under section 14.   It further allows any “police officer “to make a sudden search” of any vehicle and pedestrian. Ditto for the decree.

Section 19 of the “Proclamation” authorizes any police officer to “arrest without court warrant any person whom he reasonably suspects of terrorism.” Section (20) allows the court to grant endless continuances and postponements so that the police/prosecutor “for sufficient period to complete the investigation.” Section (23) allows the admission of unverified intelligence reports, hearsay or indirect surveillance evidence including those gathered by “foreign law enforcement bodies” and “confessions of suspects, including coerced confessions. Section (25) authorizes the “House of Peoples’ Representatives” the power to list and de-list an organization as a terrorist organization. Section (37) allows the “Council of Ministers” to issue “regulations necessary for the implementation of this proclamation.

Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto… for the October 5 T-TPLF Decree.

The T-TPLF is the one in a state of emergency

Why would the T-TPLF extend its SoE for another four months if it indeed believed “ordinary security arrangements are sufficient enough to maintain calm”? If such a claim is true, the SoE would have simply terminated. The opposite seems to be true. The T-TPLF extended its SoE because it knows that terminating the SoE will re-stoke the righteous anger and indignation of the people. In fact, the very reason the T-TPLF went for the maximum six-month duration of the SoE was a futile exercise aimed at bottling up the popular resistance from spreading like wild fire. But the fire of resistance is still burning in the hearts, minds and souls of all patriotic Ethiopians who abhor living in an apartheid system.

The T-TPLF has been riding the Ethiopian tiger for over a quarter of a century. The hard truth the T-TPLF learned over the past year is that the day for it to dismount the tiger is at hand. It can try and prolong its ride by a SoE decree and increasing its use of armed violence, but the die is cast: The T-TPLF’s days of riding the Ethiopian tiger is fast coming to an end. When the T-TPLF dismounts, by hook or crook, it will be looking at the sparkling eyes, gleaming teeth and pointy nails of one big hu(a)ngry tiger!” So, the only way the T-TPLF can remain in power from day to day is by running its killing machine 24/7/365.

The T-TPLF today is gripped in a “siege mentality”, a psychological state of emergency. The T-TPLF leaders believe they are completely surrounded by enemies. They feel they are in constant danger from everything and everyone. They are frightened to death by the very people they rule with an iron fist with a trigger finger.

Deep anger and loathing have replaced the people’s fear of the T-TPLF. That is the second hard lesson T-TPLF  leaders have learned.  As Robert Holmes argued, “power dissolves when people lose their fear. You can still kill people who no longer fear you, but you cannot control them. Political power requires obedience, which is fueled by the fear of pain to be inflicted if you refuse to comply with the will of those who control the instruments of violence. That power evaporates when the people lose their fear.”

The immutable truth is that the T-TPLF could try, but will never succeed, to rule by brute force. The T-TPLF leaders should heed a hard political truth: “Regardless of how powerful a dictatorship is, it cannot rule without some degree of genuine cooperation and support of the people.”   Popular support for the T-TPLF in Ethiopia, if it ever existed, vanished long ago. No one but T-TPLF cronies and supporters recognize any legitimacy in T-TPLF rule.

The T-TPLF cannot expect to remain in power indefinitely without accepting the absolute necessity for change, massive and radical change. The time for incremental change at a pace dictated by the T-TPLF is gone. Long gone.

It has been said that “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

It does not matter how many soldiers, guns, tanks and warplanes the T-TPLF has to lord over 100 million people. Unless it is able to adapt to the urgent and emergent circumstances in Ethiopia, it will not survive. It could prolong its rule at most by a few years, but survive and thrive as the masters of Ethiopia forever, it will not.

The T-TPLF is using apartheid South Africa’s strategy to prolong its rule, and is doomed to fail

What the T-TPLF is doing to cling to power and add one more day to its rule is remarkably similar to the strategy pursued by the apartheid white minority regime in South Africa. That regime used declarations of states of emergency to crackdown against opponents and tried to suppress the mass movement demanding majority rule. Just like the T-TPLF’s  “proclamation” and “decree”, the South African apartheid regime decreed states of emergency authorizing police, security and military forces to detain for an indefinite period anyone (any black person) for vague and dubious reasons, without any judicial review or appeals. (For a  comparative analysis of “anti-terrorism” law by apartheid South Africa’s regime and the T-TPLF, see my May 2016 commentary, “The “Law” as State Terrorism in Apartheid Ethiopia”.)

The apartheid parliament in South Africa declared a state of emergency in 1960 during the Sharpeville Massacre and in the wake of  the 1976 student uprising; and in 1986 on the 10^th anniversary of the Soweto uprising. Indeed, the 1986 declaration seems to have inspired the T-TPLF SoE decree. In that emergency declaration, the apartheid regime banned all meetings and public gatherings, imposed curfews, imposed a blanket prohibition on media coverage and authorized mass detentions.

After the apartheid SoE ended in 1986, the unraveling of South Africa accelerated. The minority white regime was doomed. The minority white apartheid rulers came to appreciate the maxim: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Four years later, Mandela was released and a South Africa teetering on the cliff’s edge of a civil war was saved.

The masters of apartheid in South Africa decided to change, just in the nick of time.

I do not believe the masters of apartheid in Ethiopia will wake up from their slumber of arrogance and ignorance and change. They think they can outsmart, outfox, outmaneuver, outgun and outplay 100 million Ethiopians any given day of the week. They believe they can rule forever so long as they maintain a chokehold on the economy, the military, the bureaucracy and the judicial and other institutions in society. The T-TPLF crew would rather go down in blazing glory than change.

I predict the T-TPLF is doomed to suffer the fate prophetically spoken by President John Kennedy.  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

As I ponder the T-TPLF’s SoE, I am reminded of the sublime speech of the Jewish barber (Charlie Chaplin) in the Great Dictator:

… Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world [Ethiopia], millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear [and read] me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!  You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world [Ethiopia], a decent world [Ethiopia] that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world [Ethiopia]! To do away with national barriers [kilils]! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance!

Let us fight for a world [an Ethiopia] of reason, a world [an Ethiopia] where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!  The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through! We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world [Ethiopia]; a kindlier world [Ethiopia], where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow! Into the light of hope, into the future! The glorious future, that belongs to you, to me and to all of us [Ethiopians]. Look up, Look up! [Wake up! Wake up!]

The people of Ethiopia UNITED can never be defeated!!!

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Remembering Lt. General Jagama Kello – SBS Amharic

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Ethiopia park tries to relocate settlers to protect wolves

By MICHAEL ATSBEHA
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SIMIEN MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Ethiopia
Apr 9, 2017,

Thousands of Ethiopian wolves once roamed much of this country’s mountainous north but their number has fallen dramatically as farmers encroach on their habitat and introduce domestic dogs that carry rabies.

Only 120 wolves are estimated to remain in this national park and they are elusive, usually seen shortly after sunrise or just before sunset.

“They are almost at the brink of extinction. So my vision is to increase their number significantly,” said Getachew Assefam, coordinator of the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program.

The movement of people move in search of fertile land in the highlands has put pressure on the park. Across the country less than 500 Ethiopian wolves remain in a few mountain enclaves, the Britain-based Born Free Foundation says.

Efforts are underway to move most of the settlers out of this national park in the hope of saving the remaining wolves. The local community currently uses more than two-thirds of the park’s area for grazing, agriculture and settlement, according to the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority.

The wildlife authority said 38 villages with a total of 3,000 people are living within the park’s boundaries.

Gichi village in the heart of the park had more than 418 households before the resettlement program began three years ago. Now there are none. Now the government is focusing on settlers in other areas.

The relocated settlers “are all now living in a better condition,” said the park’s chief warden, Maru Biadgelegn.

But some farmers said the compensation they received for the move is not enough.

Requests by The Associated Press to gain access to the resettlement area were denied. In a recent meeting, residents rejected the government’s compensation offer to resettle the remaining farmers.

“I believe we can come to an agreement on this in the future,” said one park resident, Zezo Adugna.

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