Who in Ethiopia is happy today? The Afars, the Amharas, the Oromos, the Tigrays’. Who? As a matter of fact our history hardly finds moments where people enjoyed happiness, liberty, or even wild abandon. Ours is a history of ethnic violence, nationalities, battle, blood and territory.
Ethiopia in the era of Jawar and Bekele (now in detention) appears to be re-inventing a new religion of ethnicity. In accordance with our culture’s declining intellectual prowess, our new creed in the year 2020 is a very simple faith, with one Oromo-and-Amhara dogma: Oromos are great, Amhara’s are dull. Everything else follows inevitably. For example, Amharas are wrongdoers and must be disciplined, while Oromos are saints and must be pampered.
Last weeks’ destruction in Oromia region is what interests us today.
The rampant destruction directed towards Amharas in few Oromia towns following the murder of Hachalu Hundessa is what jolted Ethiopia in early July. All day the so called ‘Keros’ intimidated and attacked Amharas and non-Oromos causing massive devastation to towns, the like of which has never been seen in Ethiopia’s recent history. As one Shashemene resident supposedly said “All the people could do was pray.” These gangsters were organized, incited, and committed by extreme political party operatives. For reasons that are obscure, the state security forces acted like they were either on the side of or afraid of the destroyers. [Notice, not one top official from the regional or the federal government was terminated, no one resigned, and no one took responsibility for failing to prevent or stop these crimes against humanity … No one!… Yes, some mid level bureaucrats and officials suspected to have ties with the attackers seem to have been arrested. But nothing else!]
We only bring these issues because we hear a lot of words, but we don’t see much happening
For background… killings, looting, or taking of goods by force and causing destruction to businesses owned by Amharas have been increasing in Oromia since the latter years of Hailemariam’s administration. In most, if not all instances these incidents have been tolerated. While this reality left many citizens bone-weary with the shock and frustration that no decisive action is taken, and that political leaders calling for “hate the man or woman who’s not Oromo” persist, the country will remain in danger of lapsing into a state of civil unrest. These extremists always ignore or belittle the enormous success of millions of Oromo people over the generations in enriching economic, political, intellectual, social, and cultural life in Ethiopia. They want their followers to riot, set fires, and attack and even kill innocent people. For what? To grab power and prosper while everyone else struggles, suffers, and dies.
In the wider context of the political transformation of Ethiopia, a more fundamental debate should have taken place following the rise of Prime Minister Abye Ahmed to power. In particular, discussions on inequality, justice, failure of institutions, predation of wealth, should have been contemplated… there was none. Instead, the same old politics continued. The state, this time again, became nothing more than a vehicle for Oromo polity domination.
Today, maintaining political balance and diffusing ethnic tensions is the only way the country can survive. If the Federal government fails to maintain these essential functions, the destruction and mindless mayhem can turn the still controllable risk into uncontrollable. Add to it Covid-19 in a country where poverty, growing inequality and disregard for human life are thriving, and in which legal and economic policies are increasingly designed to create and sustain wealth for the powerful, but not end poverty, any fool can see that we’re all heading for disaster.
Interestingly enough, the past weeks’ destructions provoked the first embryonic unity of citizens in Addis Ababa. Most of the city residents stood firm and prevented an actual fight and the possibility of general damage that could easily have brought havoc to the city. This time over AA residents did not let the thugs take over. Still, plenty of damage has been done to businesses, personal lives, undefended buildings, and the public interest.
I think and I hope, more and more citizens of AA, with increasing understanding and courage, will develop a much greater and more systematic level of organizational control in defending their city from hooligans. Even better, why not organize to seek political representation in kebele or zone-level decision-making conversations about how to best strengthen communities and increase shared economic prosperity? Organized communities act as stewards by building community wealth, empowering community voice, increasing resident participation and enhancing community conditions through neighborhood organizing. More specifically, many such communities galvanize residents and together push for transformative neighborhood changes including security, job creation, housing unit production and small business support.
Dear readers, thuggery never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people. It’s therefore critical for this government to face reality and launch a deeper political, social and economic transformation to restore normalcy, rebuild the unity of Ethiopia and put in place an economy designed to serve the people.
We cannot pretend as if nothing happened
MAGICAL THINKING
Magical thinking is becoming quite broad and frighteningly popular. When magical thinking pervades a society, widespread disconnect, followed by actively erupting disillusionment, is the inevitable result. By and large, we believe the imports of these make believe phenomenon/magical thinking, in all spheres of socio-economic existence, is essentially due to the strategy of globally entrenched interests. All the major institutions of humanity are systemically geared to numbing the masses. It is not for no reason we affectionately call the ‘human mass’ of each and every society the ‘sheeple’ (sheep + people). Without the project of zombifying the sheeple (sorry for the redundancy) the world’s dominant interests cannot always get away with their ritualized murdering, so to speak!
Here is a benign general definition. ‘Magical thinking is a type of thought process based on questionable cause and effect relationships. This can lead a person to hold false ideas and make poor decisions. In some cases, magical thinking plays some type of positive role that improves creativity or quality of life’. For us, a more nuanced and biting explication of the phrase is preferred, subsequently; ‘Magical Thinking’ is nothing more than a type of thinking fixated almost always on the magical, i.e., on the irredeemably irrational. In other words, it is thinking ‘outside of reality’! If magical thinking is widespread in a society, the possibility of rational thinking usurping power, hence responsibilities, is going to be remote. Such a situation is now prevalent in the majority of human collectives/societies. Why is the world having more and more individuals, people, corporations, states, etc., immersed in magical thinking? Our answer is simple; it is because late modernity is incapable of surviving actually existing reality! See the articles next column, on pages 30.
Let’s use current and somewhat familiar examples to illustrate the point. In Ethiopia, private banks profess to pay a dividend of 50% per annum. Obviously, this is not a prudent business model, by any stretch of imagination. Elsewhere, such Ponzi utterances can easily start a bank run, but not here. It seems there is no room for rational reflection on such critical matters in our country. Be that as it may, it is obvious that banks play significant role in late modernity. Therefore, if banks are getting such basic fundamentals wrong, then one can imagine what kind of blunders other gullible economic actors are liable to make, invariably at the expense of the sheeple’s livelihood. Between our mighty industrialists, who are bravely assailing the formidable manufacturing challenge of bottling God given water in plastics, and the highly depraved tenderpreneurs/rentiers corrupting all state apparatus, the country’s hope of creating a capable modern sector is bound to remain only a pipe dream. But don’t sweat it too much; what we lack in creativity can be amply compensated with our unfailing magical thinking!
Less than half a decade ago, the Ethiopian government was going around boasting that it had managed to raise a couple of billions of USD from the international capital market without a glitch. If memory serves us right, the underwriter/handler was Goldman Sachs. To critical analysts the whole theatrics seemed embarrassingly amateurish, if not out rightly imbecilic. As usual, we opined against such magical thinking, but to no avail. The magical thinking, backing the government’s decision was the unfounded belief in the country’s capacity to service the debt as well as pay the principal without sweat, i.e., without rescheduling or (anticipated) debt forgiveness. With plenty of useful idiots around (from the lenders’ point of view), our voices were drowned swiftly. Nonetheless, we fruitlessly continued to holler; these useless idiots (our sentiment) have no clue as to the real workings of transnational capital, financial, industrial, etc. Highly educated all the way up to complete daftness and subjugation, these cretins/useless idiots and their preaching were accepted as the epitome of erudition. Beware of false Prophets in late modernity, says the Good book!
Trusting the Goldman Sachs of this world, on its own, is an example of unadulterated magical thinking. These so-called investment banks (before they collapsed in 2008 and changed their status to ordinary banks) have proved, time and again, their unreliability the world over. Greece was taken to the cleaners, never to recuperate, on the account of Goldman Sachs’ expensive ‘guidance’. During the last decade Africa was ordered to sing the tune; ‘it is time for Africa’ or in the parlance of the propagandists; ‘Africa Rising’, all on the back of another cyclical commodity boom, which was known to be short lived. Today, we are not singing but crying. Don’t expect our good for nothing elites/leadership (not only political) to self-flagellate for their gross mistakes. If anything, these states and their leaders are now working, yet again, on other unworkable projects (New Green Development, Sustainable, blah, blah.), mostly to collect pittance from the pushers of these initiatives (OECD countries)!
Truth is; when the sheeple starts thinking magically, it tends to feel good.
Achieving all our dreams through sheer desire is what one of the modern day philosophers from Hollywood’s ivory tower is advocating. “I operate from a place of delusion – that’s what the Fame is all about….I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be-and then to fight so hard for it everyday that the lie becomes the truth.” Good Day!
Jubilation as the first phase of GERD filling completed
On Sunday July 19 at exactly 10:00 pm the first phase of the filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) was completed. After that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed congratulated all Ethiopians on the completion of the first phase of the filling of GERD on July 21. The country glows with proud moment where everyone walks with their heads high the following day.
Many took it to the social media to announce their excitement. “Beautiful view, It is really great, This is historic achievement, congratulations Ethiopia,” tweets by the name Idris M. Sanusi from Nigeria. “Ethiopia has the right to use Nile waters because 86% of waters originates from Ethiopia. Nile dam in Ethiopia is my dam! Its my dam! Ethiopia deserves a fair share!” wrote another by the name Belay.
Some weeks back Prime Minister Abiy had justified the start of filling the Renaissance Dam due to the heavy rainfall season. Capital also wrote the start of the filling of the GERD two weeks back saying that it started on July 8.
The idea of a massive hydroelectric project on the upper Nile River, in the Ethiopian highlands, has been a dream since the days of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until 2011 that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam got underway in earnest-and ever since, relations with the downstream countries Sudan and Egypt have been fraught. For Ethiopia, whose citizens bankrolled the USD4 billion+ project, the dam is not just a way to provide electricity to a power-starved corner of the continent but has become a point of national pride and emblematic of the country’s ambitions as a regional power.
The massive dam, Africa’s biggest, has become a flash point of geopolitical tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia. However During the last 12 days of the filling resident in Cairo told Capital that they have not seen any significant change on the Nile in Cairo. “I have been living here for many years, and I always cross the Nile to commute to work, and in those days I have not seen anything unusual in the Nile,” said one resident of Cairo who asked anonymity.
Ethiopia made it clear that it would continue the dam project despite lingering disagreements with other Nile-dependent countries, and in fact it began filling the massive reservoir behind the dam this month, taking advantage of Ethiopia’s rainy season. Egyptians fear Ethiopia will fill the dam over a period of just a few years, which could choke off water supplies that Egypt needs downstream, especially for agriculture. The Ethiopian government says the pace of filling shouldn’t affect Egypt’s allotment of water, and it further maintains that Egypt has used more Nile water than it’s entitled to for decades.
Thermometer guns in the country gravely incorrect
Thermometer guns has become an iconic image of the coronavirus outbreak in the world and in Ethiopia: a masked official aiming what appears to be a small white pistol at a traveler’s forehead. In our case apart from the officials at airports, security guards at every hospital, office, business center, bus station, mall and hotel will hold the gun to your head to screen people for fevers so as to prevent the spread.
The device is equipped with an infrared sensor that can quickly measure surface temperature without making any contact with a person’s skin. In recent years, it has become an important tool for countries scrambling to contain viral outbreaks. It was widely used to try to slow the spread of SARS and to curb the Ebola outbreak.
Thermometer guns are said to be unreliable outside carefully controlled health care settings, according to medical officials and experts on infrared devices.
According to Tigistu Adamu (MD), an advisor at the Ministry of Health, the devices need series calibration to be reliable. “The devices cannot be precise in certain environments or when someone has taken medication to suppress fever,” Tigistu said.
“Once the thermometers start to show inaccurate information the device need to be calibrated otherwise it will continue providing false information.”
Since the devices are distributed all over the country it is difficult for the ministry to control all, as Tigistu said.
The thermometers determine temperature by measuring the heat emanating from the surface of a person’s body. Often, however, those wielding the tools don’t hold them close enough to the subject’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings, or hold them too close and get a high reading.
“My temperature was often below 35 degrees Celsius when these temperature guns screen my temperature wherever I go, be it a hospital or a restaurant. This is a joke,” one person said after Capital approached him while he was arguing with security guards at a bank when they told him that the gun reads his temperature as 33 degree Celsius. Moreover Capital’s reporter tried to see readings around the city and those who use the device.
“We are told that if the gun measures above 37.5 degree Celsius we have to report that person to authorities, but no one told us what the lowest number can be. We will let inside anyone who is below 37.5 degree Celsius. We mostly get a measurement of 33 degree Celsius to 34.5 degree Celsius,” one security guard at a restaurant told Capital.
It is now common to see erroneous information of temperature guns generating unusually low temperature readings as the person is dying of hypothermia or sometimes high temperature. Typically between 36.1 and 37.2 degree Celsius is considered as the normal temperature for a human being.
Hypothermia is a medical emergency that occurs when your body loses heat faster than it can produce heat, causing a dangerously low body temperature. Normal body temperature is around 37 degree Celsius. Hypothermia occurs as your body temperature falls below 35 degree Celsius.
