Anyone who visits government websites or the government dailies, including the government owned ENA (Ethiopian News Agency) and EPRDF’s WIC, will have your stomach full with news of economic statistics going through the roof. The officials and their media are telling us that we have grown an average of 7% in the past three years. The officials even seem not to settle on the exact figure. The Ambassador in the US says 7%, Bereket Simon just said it is 9% in his interview on Straight Talk Africa, I have heard other officials call say it is 11%. Don’t ask questions about the economic conditions of the baseline year from which this result is calculated or even question if 2005, a turmoil ravaged year, was a normal year for a year of economic boom. You have to thank the government even if the big change in agricultural output is due to God’s help of giving us sufficient rain for a bumper crop over the last few years as opposed to the widespread drought during the baseline year from which the percentages are calculated. As much as EPRDF officials like to brag about giving us an unprecedented economic growth with straight face, they refuse to give us a clue about the magic they hold in their armpits that helped them unleash this “miracle” over the last three years. I am sure they know why.
One of the most shameless economic news reports that pushed the lie envelope too far said that Ethiopia is going to become a middle income country in two decades. The news must have been so sensational that even Reuters reported it without putting some analysis onto it. The Reuters story was however quoted back and told to the Ethiopian people by the government as if Reuters itself is the source of this story. The Woyane officials don’t seem to worry that stretching their claims beyond some limits would make their entire claim including the official statistics a total suspect. We are getting used to empty promises of such an upbeat economy talk before. According to Meles Zenawi we have ended famine as we know it two years ago. We are begging the world to feed our hungry millions as I write this. To add credence to the claim of this skyrocketing economic growth, stories are first fed and made to appear on foreign media only to be presented back to us as if even these foreigners have confirmed the existence of such a growth. I could not understand where these officials have developed the idea that a ferenji witnesses is more credible to convince us against something that we Ethiopians know far much better. I read an interesting observation on the opinion page of Addis Fortune, one of a few non government newspapers not closed in the recent crackdown against free journalism. The article exposes the extent to which the government goes to manipulate the economic news. Here is a long but worth quoting quote from an apparently disgusted observer.
The authorities recently said that with the present rate of economic growth, the country would easily become a middle-income country after two decades. In its news monitoring that was later on broadcast over the official media, the foreign news agencies were reported as saying that Ethiopia will become a middle-income country after a couple of decades.
Worse was the state English daily, The Ethiopian Herald,that has had one of its editorials on economic growth achievement but based on a “testimonial” made by a German news organization. The editorial writers made it appear as if this news organization had conducted its own researches on the Ethiopian economy and reached a conclusion that Ethiopia’s economy is indeed “overheating”.
The truth is, however, Ethiopian authorities gave a series of interviews on the subject to the state media; the foreign media conveyed the message and gave way for the news to come back but in a disguised manner. (http://www.addisfortune.com/opinion.htm)
It is not so difficult to find out why these officials go to such levels of sham techniques to make the economy look good and attribute it to their efforts as the writer of the Fortune’s opinion very easily understood. The EPRDF is trying to drown out the widespread news of political crisis and ongoing human rights abuse in the country and mask the exposed false image that it used to project to the gullible prior to becoming naked since the May 2005 election.
The unusual intensity on “economic growth-talk” is made to serve another purpose too. It seems that EPRDF officialdom thought that the hungry folks of Ethiopia would not care about their basic human rights if they tell them food is on the way. It is a sadistic and cynical game played on our people using their tragic poverty against them. “Folks, stop whining about your mistreatment and your rights and your children being killed or being herded and tortured in concentration camps; food is on the way, and you will all have full tummies in twenty years”, it seems they are saying.
It now appears that every official and EPRDF political cadre is instructed to talk about this “great leap forward”. Even Ambassador Fesha Asgedom, the Charge d’Affaires of the Ethiopian embassy in the US, who complained about not being given ample time to testify about human rights and political issues at the US Congress, has to spend a good amount of time talking up the economy. Bereket Simon who was on VOA’s Straight Talk Africa on April 19, 2006 to debate the eloquent and brutal truth teller, Obang Metho, has to do some digression to tell us about a 9% average economic growth before he apparently chickened out of the debate. He added 2% more on the official statistics. (This amazing creature also told us that the Cancer Center has reported that the May election’s was a “quantum leap” in building democracy. Is there any one who knows if Mr. Carter has given them a different report than the one we all saw?).
The reality in Ethiopia is that there is an undeniable growth in some sectors of the economy. The fact is that what we have is hardly compatible with the rate of population growth and the growth of unemployment among the rapidly growing urban and rural population and for the country to viably plug into the global economy. In the rural areas land fragmentation continues unabated inducing diminished returns in agricultural output and impoverishing the peasantry. Some agricultural productivity is obviously due to widespread use of chemical fertilizers, which in the long term is destroying the soil and the ecology. Some growth is due to bringing a lot of marginal land (land such as extreme slopes which should be left for other land-use) to cultivation. The mass of increase in production is due to God’s merciful rains over the last couple of years. Meles Zenawi and Co. is trying to take the credit that should go to God and the investment in our prayers for the merciful rains. We can go back another double digit backwards if the Gods get angry next year as happened in a number of cases before. Obviously, if you compare output of a drought year with that of a rainy year, there can be any amount of rate of growth. Most Ethiopians who understand basic economics know that the bulk of the growth in agricultural output is not because of EPRDF policies but in spite of it. Virtually every sensible economist agrees that the politically tied land policy is starving the country to death.
The fact that there is growth in some sectors of the economy should not also come as a surprise to anybody nor should it be considered as anything associated with innovative government policy. After all, Ethiopia has broken off from a fully government controlled and war ravaged command economy. Any level of liberalization is definitely bound to create growth and we know there is some liberalization in non agricultural sectors. Aid is flowing. Were we supposed not to see any positive change in the economy after 22 billion dollars of foreign aid? Were we not supposed to see some growth after almost half a billion dollars of remittance from the Ethiopian Diaspora every year? What idiot government in Africa cannot bring about some positive changes on its economy if it is the largest recipient of foreign aid in sub Sahara Africa?
How many fools do they think they are fooling when they tell us that 2005 is such a fantastic economic growth year when most of us exactly know that the year was mostly marred by widespread political turmoil and uncertainty resulting in slowed down trade, investment and tourism and production in industries? Do they think we cannot measure inflation by the amount of quadruple and quintuple rise in the prices of basic necessities such as the price of sugar, soap and teff? Come-on!
Every economist in Ethiopia including regime officials know very well that the number of the absolute poor has more than doubled since the EPRDF took power despite positive growth rates. We now have a country where a large proportion of the population is under perennial food aid and over 40 million people on income of less than a dollar a day.
Now the question is if the economy is growing with such a speed as we are told by our Woyanes, why is it that the people don’t see their downward spiraling life mitigated some how? Where is the beef?
It must also be borne in mind that in Ethiopia we are also concerned about economic justice – justice from plunder, corrupt government practices and illegal profiteering through political party investment that is prohibited by law but the TPLF/EPRDF officials break at will with impunity. There is an obscene disparity in accumulation of wealth where regime officials and their associates are getting richer every day while the mass of the poor are getting dying like flies because of poverty. Can we, for example, ask why we have the following key economic measures skewed so heavily to Tigrai without being accused of attempted genocide?
Government Disbursement of Economic Support and Subsidy to the Major Ethnic States
The charts (right) from the government’s own data at the Central Statistical Authority (CSA: 2001) as compiled by Marie-Anne Valvor (a ferenji by the way) and published in March, 2006. One may add to this the various investment projects owned by the TPLF operating outside of Tigrai. The statistics for the Oromia region, where the government’s support is more than twice less than that of Tigrai, is particularly disturbing as Oromia region is the part of Ethiopia that supplies most of the country’s revenue. I can’t understand how anyone in good faith can tell me that this is a better system of governance than anyone we have before as relates to the rights of ethnic groups (nationalities) in Ethiopia. I am sure there are a lot of sensible Tigreans who would be ashamed of this kind of shameless discrimination by people who shed crocodile tears about ethnic inequality. I am not sure how the OPDO people and the rest of the surrogates kill their own family members under this insulting practice and sleep at night. It is a shame that these people keep telling us with a straight face that they have delivered democracy and equality between ethnic groups.
The TPLF/EPRDF officials should therefore stop telling one side of the story while hiding the other. Growth is not development and more importantly it is about whether it is sustainable. The kind of growth we see in Ethiopia today is not sustainable. As an agrarian country dependent heavily on nature, there is no predicting the future. There are more millionaires in Ethiopia today and a mass of poorer people than when the TPLF started out.
The solution to Ethiopia’s poverty is not to build a house of cards and try to make it look good. Fake statistics, fake democracy, fake constitution, now a fake CUD and ethnic political organizations led by semi-morons, fake ethnic equality and street smart lying mouths could not move us anywhere. It is like shuffling the decks on the Titanic and making them look orderly and beautiful. It is not too late to make a paradigm shift and think and come up with workable ideas. It is not too late to make corrections and amends. Release the CUD leaders who came up with some of the brightest ideas to solve our problems. Some of them are world class economists and Engineers, social scientists who know the problem and the solution more than anybody else. The Oromo Liberation Front and Oromo intellectuals and elite cannot continue to be marginalized in favor of some headless individuals who kill their children and slave for the TPLF help their family’s resources looted. We may even have to think in terms of building a prosperous Horn of Africa with interdependent and complementary economies. We should stop trying to make permanent enmity between Eritrea and Ethiopia. None of us are going to be towed away from the region. The solution is democracy where we all participate and Ethiopia depends on her children than on foreign handouts. The Ethiopian Diaspora which the TPLF loves to hate would be willing to raise funds for building collages and universities, hospitals, dams, irrigation canals, any number of them every year than support dissident politics. We only want a country where human dignity is respected and the law serves the people instead of selfish few. The Diaspora is not the enemy. We hate nobody but we love Ethiopia more. It makes one very angry to have a perpetually poor country just because of bad governance and because of selfish people in power who worry more for their lives than the welfare of the millions. Is that a crime, an attempted genocide and treason?
