Down on our knees

Ethiopia’ s poverty never seemed entrenched or hopeless. I saw the potential of the natural and human resources to yield something substantial for the future of a prosperous and dignified Ethiopia. The poverty, hunger, corruption, oppression and lack of infrastructure seemed like the growing pains of young and budding nation, symptoms of a worry child that will come good. I had hope, always had hope, even when I discovered that more beggars and homeless were out on the streets, that the gap between the rich and the poor was widening, I always had hope. How can a country so beautiful and rich in history, culture and resources ever fail to make it at some point? I would defend Ethiopia to people raised on the media-diet of hunger, drought and strife. I would point out the strong religious traditions, the mostly peaceful co-existence of religions, the ancient and rich history, the cultural variety and the unique ethnic identities and languages that come with this. Oh yes, we do have roads and food, oh even the most unique cereal in the world is used to make delicious food which is so rich in nutrients, it even gets really cold at night and when it rains we get the most dramatic thunderstorms- how rustic romantic! Of course at times I would resort to sarcasm when people were totally blinkered, I’d claim I swung from tree to tree on a liane wearing a loin cloth, suckling on a lioness and the cubs were my brothers…

The first inkling that perhaps we weren’t on the road to a better world came through work, when I saw that population growth was threatening to engulf and gobble up any development, when I saw how governments and NGOs alike had a vested interest in keeping Ethiopia poor. The didvide-and-rule tactics did and didn’t have success, they weren’t successful in that there was no Rwanda style ethnic strife as TPLF had hoped to orchestrate, but intolerance and prejudice are growing insidiously like an obscure cancer. The election and its aftermath weren’t such a great shock since Meles & Co didn’t really inspire faith, which strengthened the belief that Ethiopians have to work from within each individual to achieve freedom, democracy and consequently prosperity and well-being. The hope that the west would “do something” was a still-birth as the greater hidden agendas are unclear to ordinary mortals and are dictated by the “War on terror” and related neo-imperialistic aspirations.

But boy have we sunk to a new low! Now we are the mercenaries of the USA, the private henchmen; the EPRDF gets money to send Ethiopians into a war that we have very little to do with. So the question as to why the west support a tyrant like Meles has been answered, we are someone else’s dirt shovelers. We go abroad to do jobs the natives are too fine to do, now were are low enough to do just that even in our own corner of the world. The Mafia boss was burnt 15 years ago in Somalia, so now he sends his dispensable, thuggish, testosterone-crazed jackals to do the dirty job. The dead protesters from June and November ’05 didn’t just die for peace and stability in Ethiopia, oh no, they died for the safety and democracy in the land of the free- what do we on the ground get for it? Nothing, but more oppression, corruption and a slide deeper into the muck and tangly bog of human-induced development impediment. The USA, as short-sighted and yobbish as it always is, doesn’t realise that a bit of “hearts and minds” stuff in Jijiga with schools, libraries and clinics has not won anyone over, least of all the Somalis in that area.

The Ethiopians are starting to resent the terrorist-speziale treatment that they get at the hands of their own government in its effort to please the USA and keep itself in power. Resentment turns into hate, what with more fundamentalist muslim ideologies taking root in Ethiopia on one side and the dehumanising war on terror on the other, the EPRDF and thus the west are breeding more hate-blinded suicide-bombers. They aren’t stalling the spread on fundamentalist terror, they just opened another Kindergarten for it. And this is where I realise that our perceived poverty and economic worthlessness are dragging us back, by enslaving us to the warlords of terror on all sides and stripping us of any hope and dignity to do things our way for ourselves