The Addis Ababa City Administration has not prepared lands for homes and a planned compensation fee for the people who will be relocated by the 29 billion birr Beautifying Sheger Project.
The administration has listed both kebele and private houses that will be demolished for the project but it has not given any direction so far to the respective sub city as to how much money will be paid for the houses and which condos, kebele houses and lands are ready for the people that will be relocated.
According to a source from the Administration finding houses for the relocated people may take a year.
The project which will touch the nearby river houses of Yeka, Gullele, Arada, Kirkos, Nifas Silk and Akakki sub cities should give a house or land to the relocated people.
In the current working procedure those who have a private house will get at least a minimum of 643,000 birr for compensation and land to build the house.
Those who live in kebele or housing agency houses will get a condo if they can afford to pay the 20 percent down payment or can choose to rent kebele or condo houses.
A source said “things are not going as we expected. The government plans to start the project by next year but no real evacuation process has begun nor has demolishing the houses that are in the radius of the project. We don’t know the prepared land or homes for these people.”
The sources added that the administration has not yet decided the floor compensation rate price for the planned to be demolished private houses.
“It is still unknown how much money will be paid to those who have their houses demolished,” a source said.
The Beautifying Sheger Project is a three-year initiative of the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The project will run along the rivers of Addis Ababa, developing green spaces starting from Entoto to Akaki.
Of the total 56 km that the project covers, the Chinese government has pledged to develop 12kms.
The main aim of the project is to elevate the city to a site of urban tourism leveraging on rehabilitation of the aforementioned water bodies. To enhance the well-being of city dwellers by putting river flooding in check and creating public spaces, parks, bicycle paths and walkways along the river banks. It also strives to enable the aspiration of a green economy by expanding green spaces and creating related services economies.
To get money for the project PM Abiy Ahmed, hosted a dinner program last May in the National Palace in which one plate was served for 5 million birr. Over 257 businesses and notable persons participated.
Those pending relocation await compensation info
Celebrating 10th year anniversary
Oromia International Bank (OIB), which has become one of the top four financial institutions, has celebrated its 10th anniversary at a ceremony held at Hilton Hotel.
The bank took about two years to get through the formation process, but then they became extraordinarily successful. Abi Sano, President of OIB, said that the bank passed several challenges to reach today’s success.
He attributed hard work to their results. The bank is now equal to major banks in many standards.
The bank’s asset that was 1.1 billion birr in 2010 has reached 30.3 billion birr in May 2019, while the paid up capital now climbed to 2.3 billion birr, one of the largest.
At the celebration a representative said that total deposits stood at 24.8 billion birr in May 2019 that was 821 million in 2010. In 2010 OIB registered a profit before tax of 22 million birr, however this figure dramatically increased to 938 million birr at the end of the past financial year.
Currently OIB has close to 5,200 employees and over 260 branches, which is high compared with some old banks. Since its formation the bank has been led by Abi, who also served at the state owned giant Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) as the youngest president in the history of the bank.
OIB is also the first private bank to start interest free banking in the country. Abi said that his bank is the leader in generation and operation of the interest free banking sector in the country.
NEOLIBERAL PRIVATIZATION
Neoliberalism as imposed on the peripheries is more than a mere economic scheme facilitating inequitable integration to the world economic order. Neoliberalism is an ideology that fosters, directly/indirectly very destructive and unsustainable projects on a world scale. The continuous destruction of the planetary ecosystem is not a major consideration to this archaic dogma. There are various definitions of neoliberalism. See the articles next column, on page 42. To us, it is a system of global accumulation that desires to create a world of extremely few owners/managers (not more than few thousands) at the top of the pyramid and plenty of serfs or wage slaves down below. To this end, the system employs plenty of tools, including millions of functionaries, learned or otherwise, to support its lopsided globalization!
Here are interesting figures that might startle many a reader. There are about 190 people who manage with significant ownership, a global wealth of over 40 trillion USD. For comparison, the current global GDP is about eighty trillion USD in nominal terms. Corporations that number less than 100 conduct over half of global trade. Less than 1000 corporations account for over sixty percent of global industrial outputs! In the finance sector, the concentration is even more ominous. This extremely lopsided global economic reality is the result of the neoliberalism of the past forty years! The primary mission of neoliberalism is not efficiency as claimed, but the concentration of wealth in the hands of extremely few global operators. These entrenched interests also run, directly or indirectly, the global political show!
Most importantly, in less than half a century, neoliberalism has managed to destroy a good portion of the world’s natural habitats and its non-renewable resources. Neoliberalism’s economic doctrines are based on the flawed assumptions of infinite growth on a finite planet and a phony money system that favors, by and large, only the gullibly loyal and the criminally connected. During the last forty years, the system leveraged the following policy tools (implemented all over) to cement its grip on humanity and the planet; privatization, liberalization, deregulation and austerity. Today we will only look at the privatization scheme, which is one of the corner stones of the system. Privatization is a scheme that is determined to diminish collective ownership to allow private capital to take charge of management as well as ownership of large-scale state operations. The ideology of private capital doesn’t give much consideration to the interests/desires of the large majority of the world’s population or the natural environment!
Privatization, it is said, will always bring efficiency to the economic system. Results are not all that convincing. Kenyan Airways is now pleading for outright nationalization, by none other than the government of Kenya. As a private venture it is having difficulty securing finances to procure new aircrafts. So much for our dream of privatized airlines, privatized power, privatized water, privatized banks, etc. Many countries are reconsidering the whole privatization projects. Tanzania re-nationalized its water supply management in its entirety. A number of states are reconsidering many of the sectors that were once privatized. The privatization in Britain is even more bewildering, to say the least. What drives privatization? The notion of efficiency, it seems, was used mostly as a Trojan horse for mere grabbing by transnational capital. The real driving force was to find profitable investments to park the glut of capital, which is literally rotting in the core countries. Moreover, as the monetary system is based on phony/fictitious money, securing an investment somewhere and soon, before the whole farce comes tumbling down, became imperative to transnational capital. At the end of the day, the scheme of privatization is to anchor the lopsided globalization of late modernity!
Despite the overwhelming support by dominant interests and their lap/barking dogs, the neoliberal policies of the past forty years are under intense interrogation by the majority of global inhabitants. Only yesterday, one of the leaders of the ascending powers in the world system declared: ‘neoliberalism is obsolete’ (Vladimir Putin). The UK Labor party promises to re-nationalize many of the infrastructures that were privatized under previous regimes, including the major banks! These entities became more inefficient and expensive under private corporations. In addition, just like the case of Kenya Airways, many of them ended up requiring the continuous injection of capital from the state, in one form or another, defeating the very logic of privatization. During the financial crisis, almost all the banks in the west had to be bailed out with taxpayers’ money. Today, the banks are back at it again, engaged in their usual criminal manipulation (CDO=collateralized debt obligations, etc.). Here are some wise words from someone who insists on having ‘skin in the game’. Vacuous intellectuals please listen. “Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in theoretical studies.” Nassim Taleb. Good Day!
