Throughout most of American history, the idea of socialism has been a hopeless, often vaguely defined dream. So distant were its prospects at midcentury that the best definition Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, editors of the socialist periodical Dissent, could come up with in 1954 was this: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”
That may be changing. Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party, which the political analyst Kevin Phillips once called the “second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” in the world. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among young people.
What explains this irruption? And what do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about “socialism”? Some part of the story is pure accident. Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center stated that in 2016, Mr. Sanders made a strong bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Far from hurting his candidacy, the “socialism” label helped it. Mr. Sanders wasn’t a liberal, a progressive or even a Democrat. He was untainted by all the words and ways of politics as usual. Ironically, the fact that socialism was so long in exile now shields it from the toxic familiarities of American politics.
Another part of the story is less accidental. Corey Robin noted that since the 1970s, American liberals have taken a right turn on the economy. They used to champion workers and unions, high taxes, redistribution, regulation and public services. Now they lionize billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, deregulate wherever possible, steer clear of unions except at election time and at least until recently, fight over how much to cut most people’s taxes.
Liberals, of course, argue that they are merely using market-friendly tools like tax cuts and deregulation to achieve things like equitable growth, expanded health care and social justice which are the same ends they always have pursued. Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine explained that for decades, left-leaning voters have gone along with that answer, even if they didn’t like the results, for lack of an alternative.
Socialism means different things to different people. For some, it conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag. For others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. But neither is the true vision of socialism. What the socialist seeks is freedom.
John Altman, an American analyst argued that of under capitalism, people are forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as synonymous with freedom. But socialists hear “the market” and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn’t cover her child’s appendectomy. According to Kevin Kelly, under capitalism, people are forced to submit to the boss. Terrified of getting on his bad side, people bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse just to get that raise or make sure they don’t get fired.
John Altman further noted that the socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes people poor. It’s that it makes people unfree. When our well-being depends upon their whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.
Listen to today’s socialists, and we will hear less the language of poverty than of power. They invokes the 1 percent and speaks to and for the “working class”, not “working people” or “working families,” homey phrases meant to soften and soothe. The 1 percent and the working class are not economic descriptors. They’re political accusations. They split society in two, declaring one side the illegitimate ruler of the other; one side the taker of the other’s freedom, power and promise.
Kenny Malone, economic analyst of Planet Money stated that like the great transformative presidents, today’s socialist candidates reach beyond the parties to target a malignant social form: for Abraham Lincoln, it was the slavocracy; for Franklin Roosevelt, it was the economic royalists. According to Kenny Malone, the great realigners understood that any transformation of society requires a confrontation not just with the opposition but also with the political economy that underpins both parties. For Lincoln in the 1850s confronting the Whigs and the Democrats, that language was free labor. For leftists in the 2010s, confronting the Republicans and the Democrats, it’s socialism.
To critics in the mainstream and further to the left, that language can seem slippery. With their talk of Medicare for All or increasing the minimum wage, these socialist candidates sound like New Deal or Great Society liberals. There’s not much discussion, yet, of classic socialist tenets like worker control or collective ownership of the means of production.
And of course, there’s overlap between what liberals and socialists call for. But even if liberals come to support single-payer health care, free college, more unions and higher wages, the divide between the two will remain. Danielle Kurtzleben, another economic analyst of Planet Money explained that for liberals, these are policies to alleviate economic misery. For socialists, these are measures of emancipation, liberating men and women from the tyranny of the market and autocracy at work. Back in the 1930s, it was said that liberalism was freedom plus groceries. The socialist, by contrast, believes that making things free makes people free.
According to Danielle Kurtzleben, it’s also important to remember that the traffic between socialism and liberalism has always been wide. The 10-point program of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto” included demands that are now boilerplate: universal public education, abolition of child labor and a progressive income tax. It can take a lot of socialists to get a little liberalism: It was socialists in Europe, after all, who won the right to vote, freedom of speech and parliamentary democracy. Given how timid and tepid American liberalism has become, it’s not surprising that a more arresting term helps get the conversation going. Sometimes nudges need a nudge.
Still, today’s socialism is just getting started. It took Lincoln a decade plus a civil war, and the decision of black slaves to defy their masters, rushing to join advancing Union troops to come to the position that free labor meant immediate abolition.
In magazines and on websites, in reading groups and party chapters, socialists are debating the next steps: state ownership of certain industries, worker councils and economic cooperatives, sovereign wealth funds. Once upon a time, such conversations were the subject of academic satire and science fiction. Now they’re getting out the vote and driving campaigns. It’s too soon to tell whether they’ll spill over into Congress, but events have a way of converting barroom chatter into legislative debate.
As Corey Robin noted, socialism is not journalists, intellectuals or politicians armed with a policy agenda. As Marx and Engels understood, this was one of their core insights, what distinguished them from other socialist thinkers, ever ready with their blueprints, it is workers who get us there, who decide what and where “there” is. That, too, is a kind of freedom. Socialist freedom.
The emergence of modern socialists
Bank mergers in Ethiopia: inevitable or avoidable?
Since the government expressed its intention to open the financial market to foreign providers, one of the hotly discussed topics has been the weakness of domestic banks to withstand the ensuing competition from their foreigner counterparties. This narrative is followed by a proposition for their merger towards creating fewer numbers of larger banks. On many occasions National Bank authorities have indicated merger among the existing providers to be desirable, if not inevitable. Is merger the only survival mechanism for Ethiopian banks post opening of the market? Not necessarily for all. While most of the small banks may have difficulty to cope with the changing financial market without merger, especially after entry of foreign players, a few of them can avoid unwanted consolidation.
It is true that Ethiopian banks are small in comparison to some of their African counterparts. According to the 2021 Banker Magazine of the Financial Times, only 2 of the top 25 African banks have a tier-1 capital of less than a billion USD (Banque du Cairo and First Bank of Nigeria). While South Africa and Egypt have each six of these big firms, Nigeria and Morocco respectively claim five and four places. The remaining four are from Kenya (2), Mauritius and Togo. Another report, African Business of 2021 provides a slightly different rank without segregating the tier 1 capital structure. In this later report the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia takes 26th place with a total capital of USD 1.173 Billion and an asset of USD 23.849 Billion. In this ranking which lists 100 biggest African banks Awash Bank is the only private bank from Ethiopia that comes at the 83rd place with a capital of 243 million USD. All the three big Ghanaian banks come after 87th rank, while none is listed from Uganda, Tanzania, DRC or the Sudan-countries that have opened their markets to foreign banks long ago. In a way, this indicates that it is possible to open the banking market even if a country doesn’t have big domestic players.
Nevertheless, by these standards Ethiopian banks are rather small in size. If Ethiopia wants its banks to become competitive, encouraging the emergence of bigger entities is necessary. I don’t mean to suggest that size of capital is the only determinant of success in competition. Technological and human resource development is as important. However, capital base is a key consideration as it enables companies to acquire the other key factors of success. If so, organic growth by raising capital from internal sources will not be fast enough since foreign banks are knocking at the gates. The quicker way is merger of existing firms and the emergence of a handful of big players.
Indeed, bank mergers will be desirable, but not necessarily inevitable. Thus, there should not be any compulsion to force consolidation. If anything consolidation in the sector should be voluntary. Forced bank mergers are said to have occurred in India and Malaysia among others. In India the forced merger applied to the various state owned banks (regional and central state banks). In effect the element of compulsion was not there strictly speaking since the state that adopted the policy of consolidation in the sector was the owner of these banks. These mergers did indeed create giant banks, but it was widely reported that these consolidations did not result in efficiency gain in service quality, cost effectiveness or profitability. In Malaysia, forced mergers between private banks resulted in consolidating 71 institutions into 10 mega banks. However, subsequent studies indicated that only two out of the ten resultant mega banks showed improvement in cost efficiency. From profitability point of view, none of the banks experienced significant difference in profit efficiency level after the merger exercise.
In contrast Nigeria’s voluntary merger resulted positively both in terms of operational efficiency and profitability. Nigeria policy was not to force consolidation, in as much as it didn’t select the anchor banks and the targets, and instruct them to converge. This is in marked contrast to Malaysia which seeded the 71 banks into anchors, subsidiaries and targets. Nigeria’s central bank raised the minimum capital to 25 billion Naira only (in today’s rate roughly less than 4 billion ETB), and left the decision to consolidate to the institutions.
The direction Ethiopia’s NBE is taking seems to be similar with Nigeria’s. It has raised the minimum capital for bank formation to 5 billion ETB, and has been constantly stressing the need for consolidation in the sector. For a good number of the existing banks consolidation is unavoidable. A few of them have already surpassed the 5 billion thresholds, and can avoid mergers. Most of these also have huge legal reserves accumulated throughout their profitable years. These reserves can be converted into equity in as far as Ethiopian law allows such an exercise. However this option is a non starter for smaller and newer banks. Therefore, it is only a matter of time for the new entrants and those that could not muster the minimum 5 billion to converge.
However consolidation is easier said than done. Especially, in the Ethiopian financial sector regulatory environment and market practice there appear many barriers to mergers. A few of the challenges can be lack of experience, regulatory challenges, and possible management resistance.
First there is acute dearth of experience of mergers and acquisitions in the corporate culture in Ethiopia. To begin with, in corporate law parlance, the word merger represents three different procedures, i.e., amalgamation, acquisition and takeover: 1) amalgamation-the full combination of two entities to create one new entity; 2) acquisition-the full absorption of one entity by another; and 3) takeover-the acquisition controlling shares by one company in another. The call for consolidation in the financial sector refers to the first two only. Looking at the experience of the market, in Ethiopia amalgamations and acquisitions involving share companies with dispersed ownership are very few and far between. Most capital restructurings hitherto reported as mergers are simply takeovers, and of no useful lesson to what is being contemplated in the banking sector. If anyone thinks that the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia’s acquisition of Construction and Business Bank as an important source of experience, they will soon be disappointed. That was merely a process of a sole owner (the state) merging its two properties. Perhaps the only known experience one can mention is the acquisition of Raya Breweries by BGI a few years ago.
However, merger in the banking sector will not be so easy as the acquisition of Raya by BGI because of the structure of share ownership. Financial institutions are widely held mainly because the NBE requirement limits the maximum holding to just 5%. In fact, NBE’s policies tended to discourage concentration of ownership by placing stringent requirements for influential shareholders having stakes above 2%. However, the dispersion of ownership will come back to haunt the initiative for consolidation. This will prove a regulatory barrier. The fact that both the bidders and the targets are companies with dispersed ownership will make merger transactions complicated in the financial sector. This means diffuse shareholders at both sides should be convinced of the merits of the transaction. The new commercial code clarifies the procedures, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. What is more, some of these institutions mean more than just business because they carry ethnic representations. Imbued in their value is their appeal among their respective ethnic or religious communities. Thus, while mergers should be rational market decisions, mergers between institutions carrying differing ethnic symbolism may appear to be unholy marriages. This will limit the menu both for bidders and targets. In other words, if you are bank A, you can’t bid to acquire bank X, because bank X symbolizes a different ethnic community. This will make merger transactions further complicated. Even if there are a few non-aligned banks; and their choices both as bidder or target will be likewise, limited to the non-aligned groups.
In view of the mechanics of effectuating mergers the selection between amalgamation and acquisition needs careful considerations. Amalgamation is more disruptive and complicated than acquisition. It disrupts the operation of all the entities participating in the transaction, and until the new entity is created with its bosses identified business operation will be slowed if not interrupted. Acquisition will be less disruptive, and more straightforward. It can be cash-for-shares acquisition (the bidder increases its capital and uses the proceeds to pay the shareholders of the target; the target disappears, its shareholders go, and assets of the target become assets of the acquirer). Or such an acquisition can be share-for-share transaction (the bidder exchanges x number of its shares for y number of the target’s shares. The target’s disappears, but its shareholders are allowed to remain shareholders of the acquirer, except those that reject the proposition which will be forced to leave taking cash compensation.)
Thirdly, like in all other countries there will be managerial barrier. Executives at target companies are natural obstacles to mergers. This is especially true in companies with diffuse ownership like in Ethiopian financial institutions giving senior management and the board effectively full control of major decisions. Even if the decision on mergers is theoretically made by the shareholders’ meeting, practically it is only the management/board that can initiate such decisions. Minority shareholders can initiate decisions under the new commercial code, but the management/board can always dissuade the general meeting from taking any decision it doesn’t favor. So much so that, mergers that the management doesn’t like have less likelihood of success. Target management disfavors acquisitions because it means loss of position. In other countries the market for corporate control has long introduced effective remedies for hostile target management such as golden parachutes, golden handshakes, etc. Under such arrangements, target management is paid generation compensation for job losses from the mergers. In fact most senior management employment contracts will have such clauses. It is not clear how many of bank CEOs in Ethiopia contemplated job losses from mergers and included such clauses in their employment contracts. Nevertheless, such clauses can be useful in as much as they can remove one of the potential barriers against consolidation in the financial sector. Post merger integrations are also problematic because each institution will have its own corporate culture.
Way forward
Where does all this leave us? Merger of banks is not necessarily a must for all. Some can avoid mergers. Older banks that have surpassed the minimum capital threshold of 5 billion can withstand the threat of merger. First of all, most of these have accumulated legal reserves which they can easily convert into equity. Second most of these institutions have assets in real-estate, and other investments. Newer ones don’t have that luxury, and must plan for merger.
The NBE should take the initiative and support them in providing guidelines, trainings and coordinate knowledge/experience sharing. In as far as compulsory mergers can’t be effective, guidelines will be more appropriate than directives. Such guidelines should explain procedures, identify issues of valuations and indicate possible methods of solving such issues. If the NBE decides to issue directives, such an instrument should not enforce compulsory mergers. A directive can be issued to clarify as to how merger can take place, how cash-for-share or share-for-share acquisitions can be made, how disruptions can be minimized during such transactions, disclosure and due diligence matters, etc. To ensure the optimum success of the consolidation program, in particular the post consolidation integration issues, there is the need for the NBE to sponsor training programmers’ on post-consolidation integration and corporate culture conflict management. This would assist to mitigate conflicts associated with consolidation, thereby facilitating the sustainability of the merged institutions.
Coordinating experience sharing with foreign counterparts can provide key lessons. Ethiopian financial industry is probably unique because of dispersion of ownership and the presence of ethnic elements in some of the players. May be it is hard to find parallels for such elements in other countries. Yet, the experience of financial institutions in other countries can give us useful lessons. Bank mergers either market driven or policy driven such as that being contemplated in Ethiopia has occurred in many countries. Why not learn from them and avoid the errors they made and capitalize on the positives?
Fekadu Petros is Managing Partner at Fekadu Petros & Partners Law Office
Ethiopia Reads hosts 3rd summit to spark youngster’s intellect through reading
Prepared by Ethiopia Reads(ER), the third annual children’s reading summit was held on September 22-23, 2022 for two days with the theme of ‘Early childhood Development in Reading” at Addis Ababa Sapphire Addis hotel.
Aimed to inform, discuss and reflect on challenges and opportunities on children reading culture, the summit brought together more than 150 education stakeholders from Ethiopia and beyond.
Ethiopia Reads children summit started in 2019 and due to the pandemic and conflict in the country it was interrupted for one year and resumed this year for its third summit collaborating with the Ministry of Education.
Founded in 1998, Ethiopia Reads has been working in building youth and children’s literacy across Ethiopia. Its first library was established in 2003, and since that time ER has built more than 72 libraries spanning every region of the country, shipping more than a quarter million books and serving over 130,000 children per year.
The ER programs are managed by Ethiopians who live and work in Addis Ababa and the regional capital of Hawassa.
In Ethiopia, one of the biggest obstacles to literacy development is lack of reading materials for children in native languages. ER has stepped in with an effort to develop story books for children in several major Ethiopian languages. The organization has also begun collecting a bibliography of children’s literature in Ethiopia, both historical and current.
Ethiopia and Climate Change
The Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority (EEPA) is the Federal institution for managing the Environment of Ethiopia. EEPA is responsible in ensuring the realization of the environmental rights, goals, objectives and basic principles enshrined in the Constitution. EEPA is also responsible for coordinating appropriate measures, establishing systems, and for developing programs and mechanisms for the welfare of humans as per the Environment Policy of Ethiopia, in addition to the safety of the environment.
It is mandated to formulate or initiate and coordinate the formulation of strategies, policies, laws and standards as well as procedures and up on approval monitor and enforce their implementation. It is also responsible for the synergistic implementation and follow-up of international and regional environmental agreements.
With all these mandates on its plate, Capital reached out to EEPA head, Getahun Garedew (PhD) for insights on policies, carbon trading and overall participation of Ethiopia on climate change issues amongst other issues ahead of COP27. Excerpts;
Capital: What is your evaluation of the overall climate change policies of the country?
Getahun Garedew: Our climate change policy directly engages different sectors of which the climate resilience green economy strategy remains integral. This strategy engages different sectors such as agriculture, transport, energy and so on. Additionally it helps us to integrate these different sectors together for better results. For example, energy and agriculture goes hand in hand as the agriculture sector needs energy for say irrigation. If energy becomes expensive agriculture becomes expensive too. If our energy is pollutant, our agriculture can be pollutant too. Transportation is also knitted to agriculture as we deliver our production using transport which uses energy; thus there is an evident cycle.
I believe that we have a more comprehensive policy as a nation to which the implementation is also good.
In recent times we have been taking certain measures including the 10 years plan, national green legacy, promoting electric vehicles that can reduce carbon emissions both in adaptation and mitigation of which these efforts are showing good results. The issue may be that we need to adopt a new legal binding law which may compromise all these activities.
It can be said that we have been doing and are still doing practical climate investments. We have our national determinant contribution plan, that is, a climate action plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts. This is based on both conditional and unconditional plans as climate change is a global issue. The so called conditional plan is planed based on the money and conditions westerners promised to pledge to reduce climate change impact as Ethiopia’s role in the global climate change is near to the ground. Again we have the unconditional plan if the promises are not kept we will continue to grow in a good manner that will not have an impact to the environment.
At the same time we are participating in different climate change negotiating groups by considering Ethiopia’s priorities on climate change.
Climate change negotiations are group negotiations, however, more than any of these, we always depend on going with plans which can go with the nation’s capacity, potential and sectors strategy and even our ten-year plan is also done based on this.
Capital: There are comments that indicate the overall participation of Ethiopia on climate change issues in the globe are decreasing. What’s your response to these?
Getahun Garedew: The issue of climate change cannot be dedicated only for one institution especially in a developing country like Ethiopia.
The so called climate change action plan should be planned at different sectors with coordination coming to one organization. So we have to have preparations, changes and activities by considering these. And one part to this is increasing practical level engagements.
We can say that our practical engagement is increasing from time to time. For example planting 25 billion trees annually is huge. This alone can be greater than the total forest count of lots of countries. This is what practical engagement is.
With regards to negotiation it is not that much effective since negotiating alone on a climate change stage can’t be fought alone, so to speak. So, for us strengthening our group engagement remains vital.
For instance a couple of month ago we hosted the Africa Group of Negotiators (AGN) summit and also last week we participated on the African Environmental Protection Ministerial Conference to which we look forward to hosting them next year. We have also chaired Least Developed Countries Negotiators and AGN.
On a wider view, the issue may seem that we are not effective since at the base the action plan is distributed in different sectors and only coordination is dedicated to us, and with that it’s difficult to shine out. May be the other cause can be because this leadership positions usually rotate to other countries, so the impact might not be evident. However, it should be well understood that it is not because we have decreased our engagement but it is because of the way the system is run.
Capital: How is the preparation for Cop27 summit ferrying on?
Getahun Garedew: We are currently on a good stage of extensive preparation. We are not aiming for a personalized summit where only our issues are raised but rather the issues of the whole of Africa.
We are working round the clock to ensure the issues raised are inclusive and not that of the select few countries and we hope to have a platform where visible change will be seen.
Of course there will be different side events on different issues such as water, and we are ready for that too, since as a country we are not afraid of any issues if they arise. However, we believe we will not be dragged to this issue. That’s why we are engaging with different groups which have similar intentions.
Climate change is a multilateral negotiation not bilateral of course there will be bilateral negotiations on mitigation, adaptation and finance too.
The other thing is that we hope the stage will not be political driven, rather scientifically driven and our preparations stem from this.
Additionally, the issues are about implementation. There are lots of promises, and enough paper or legal preparations. So what we want in Africa COP is for the implementation of promises, to be the ‘Action COP’. No more pledges and other round of negotiations or promises. The negotiation should be on implementation.
Capital: How will the participation look like?
Getahun Garedew: There will be three levels of participants. The first one will be the head of state of governments, followed by a ministerial participation to which there is a committee established under the Prime Minister’s Office. Last but certainly not least, is the technical level engagement which will continue through our office, EEPA.
For us, we are now engaging on about 18 issues that can benefit our country based on our human resource and we are doing so by engaging different Ethiopian professionals.
And in the near future, we will see which ministry will be engaged on the ministerial level and which leader will participate as head of the state.
Capital: What is the current status of Ethiopia’s carbon trading?
Getahun Garedew: We cannot tell the exact stage of the process, since the carbon market is still on process.
We have been using the clean development mechanism when selling the Humbo Carbon.
Currently, there are three modalities, based on the Paris agreement article 6, that is, bilateral, market mechanism and non-market mechanism.
Here the main issue is that we have been processing using the old mechanism of the clean development mechanism (CDM). When the Paris agreement came, we were about to receive our payment so our negotiation here is to make CDM part of article 6, to finish our projects which we started using CDM to be completed by article 6 as transition.
We are working with countries which have similar intention and so far things are looking good and we expect good results.
Capital: How is the implementation of both the unconditional and conditional NDC plans of Ethiopia going?
Getahun Garedew: Unconditional plans are almost achieving more than 100 percent, and each sector is contributing their role. In just ten years, the Ethiopian government has spent more than 500 billion birr for climate change related issues.
However the conditional plans have been lagging behind since the promises set have not been backed on the ground. The pledges were in overall 100 billion USD, but have not hit the ground maybe because of other focuses such as the pandemic and the Russia- Ukraine war. For us however, we should focus on adaptation as opposed to mitigation as it is more beneficial in the long run. We are pushing for at least half of the pledge to go towards and we believe the groups will have a strong negotiating capacity to achieve this on the Cop27.
Capital: Recently, the Alliance For Food Sovereignty In Africa (AFSA) held its summit on Africa’s ‘ROADMAP TO ADAPTATION THROUGH AGROECOLOGY’, to which you participated. How did you find the session?
Getahun Garedew: The main goal of the summit was the conceptualization of food security which signals that even though you have huge per capita income that does not necessarily translate to being self-sufficient in food.
Of course a good citation of issues can be seen by the challenges faced in the pandemic lockdown and the ripple effect in the well established countries following the Russia- Ukraine war, which led to huge food crisis.
So we cannot be sure on food security just because we have a huge economy since there are both human made and natural crises that can challenge countries’ food self sufficiency.
Beyond that as an Africa continent, there is also the dependency factor from the West, to which viable means of becoming self sufficient was looked into at the summit.
The meeting also focused on expanding agriculture and farming using agroecology, which goes hand in hand with nature and the environment. It was noted that as Africans we ought to expand agriculture /farming based on agroecology, which can protect the environment bring forth better production down the road.
Usually on agriculture productivity, one of the main negative impacts of commercialization is that in our context only planting the same grain on farmlands can make the farm land lose its productivity and fertility.
For instance, in the horticulture sector most of the flower producing lands cannot be used for other plants so it is difficult to turn it to other production due to chemicals used in the production which changes its nature. So the summit was gearing towards more of an agroecology approach as opposed the regular commercial approach.
Capital: Is there anything you want to add?
Getahun Garedew: I want to emphasize that we will continue to strengthen our engagements, and our diplomats are also working a lot in promoting Ethiopia’s practices so that climate change issues cannot be given to one organization.
