By Kebour Ghenna
The big story that will soon hit the media is how the country will soon go broke.
My guess: with a big bang!
The country was already on the road to ruin long before the advent of AA to 4 Kilo… Former PM Meles abandoned fiscal discipline to let bad debt expand, corruption to spread within METEC and other entities, and allowed deficits to grow. Haile Mariam Dessalegn accentuated the drift. There is some hope that Aby Ahmed – with his batteries of reforms – would revamp the economy and change the course of history. But the new PM seems to get sucked by 1) internal political crises… and 2) slow pace of implementing economic reforms.
Today, one doesn’t need to be a wizard to recognize Ethiopia’s business mood has soured. The Central Bank has lost its way. It can’t really lower the amount of debt of the country, (as a matter of fact debt has gone up much faster than income in the last ten years). It (the CB) can’t increase the real output of firms, generate growth, boost employment, uplift the poor, support the development of small-scale industries and the promotion of domestic manufacturing.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen business volume is dropping, people have stopped buying houses, expansion plans are shelved, and the weakest companies are unable to pay their debts.
And yet, driven by strong public sector investment Ethiopia’s economy is said to remain among the fastest growing economies in the developing world and is expected to grow at high rate in 2019. Hard to believe!
But the trend is increasingly pointing down. The massive debts intended to achieve growth are piling on every day. For a sense of perspective, Ethiopia had less than USD3 bl total debt in 2006. Today, it’s about $30 bl. No exaggeration. That’s an unbelievable increase in under 12 years.
So yes, there is a crisis waiting to happen. But ho!… Reforming or fixing a broken economic system is never easy, particularly when the problem is structural. For the now, now, however, something has to be done to hold together the broken system… like a duct tape, until the leaders start reflecting on transforming the socio-economic-political system of the country (…something to think about).
Put to task business would have voted for the following fixes to keep the economy from going broke.
Establishment of a task force to organize an Ethiopia Investment Conference, to raise at least $15-20 billion to boost the productive investment of the economy over the next five years.
Step up privatization of non strategic companies.
Steer clear of additional debts; you can’t settle debt with more debt.
Support business startups and scaling up.
Introduce land market program, including buying, selling or leasing.
Temper laws that explicitly curtail labor-market flexibility to increase job creation and manufacturing success, while at the same time investing to increase productivity of the labor force.
Scrap excessive regulations that prevent business to grow.
Sustain and expand the remittance growth.
Adopt gradual financial liberalization including interest rate liberalization, increase the penetration of foreign capital into the country’s financial industry in an appropriate way., reduction of reserve requirements, and removal of credit allocation, with adequate regulation and supervision.
Expand mobile payments service to bring the unbanked into the formal economy, and speed up and simplify the process of sending money from urban to rural areas, and even facilitate insurance premium or microfinance loan repayments, thus slashing microcredit costs and therefore interest rates, which are often at least twice or three times the market rate.
Are these reforms going to make Ethiopians richer?
We don’t know. Our guess is that these fixes will give the country some breathing space…or so.
untry some breathing space…or so.

By Kebour Ghenna
Politicians are funny creatures. Let’s take the bunch of Ethiopian politicians we endured for the last two decades. They knew… all of them from top to bottom knew, that their system was breeding corruption and injustice. They knew that the bosses were looting the people, they knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew, they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. I remember the last election, where EPRDF politicians won almost 100% of the seats, people were relieved. Why? Because they felt the beast will be distracted enough to leave them alone. So much so no one saw AA coming.
There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you want to free yourself by killing those who do not speak your language and believe this will have no consequences whatsoever; that you could bring economic growth without sacrifice or even hard work; that you can go forward without knowing which direction you’re heading; that killing the messenger may make you feel liberated but can’t be a solution. It’s all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.
Today people know lots of things are not going well, they also know that those in charge know that the people know that they don’t know what’s going on. They know the old EPRDF sort of died soon after it took power and has been replaced by a system that manages its own oligarchs. The party realized that in time of peace managing people by instituting some kind of discipline was no more possible. People were less and less interested to join parties unless there is cash heading their way. The bosses were getting all the deals and so why not them. And because the old EPRDF failed to allow mass politics to challenge power, it has allowed corruption to carry on without it really being challenged properly.
Easy to say ‘things don’t work’ or ‘what can we change’? For a start we need leaders and citizens that understand why things don’t change after injustice is exposed. It could be, say, that the kind of measure that it would take to repatriate money hidden in the US or Dubai by politicians and their cronies and sort out all this injustice would require a very bold and radical set of proposals. But proposals that are bold and radical are always a challenge to stability.
But stability is what Haile Mariam and his handlers chose and failed. They wanted people to think that their system was going to go on forever knowing well that it wasn’t working. You can’t remain static and still be a winner. Check out AA, the man opted for something more than the repetition we hear every day, he introduced the politics of imagination giving the people a sense that they’re part of something that’s moving onwards, and so far he (AA, the saint)) has captured the imagination of large number of people. That’s what politics is about. It’s exciting and dynamic.
In contrast, the current TPLF leadership (the jealous husband) is still in its old position, not offering something better than the one on the table! It lost the idea of politics, that of telling the people a simple, powerful and romantic story of where it wants to take their people and why. These are questions that people do ask themselves. People ask why they can’t they prosper and live freely, but they also have this thing in their heads asking what it’s all about. One of the reasons we have politics is because it gives answers to those sorts of questions.
Capish?!

By Kebour Ghenna
Ethiopia is a country in transition… full of surprises, twists, turns, and claptrap.
Last week’s meeting between ruling and opposition parties was a First. In that it was not about adding to the depressing and usual blame or finger pointing, but about how to improve the forthcoming election process by taking action that’ll work.
The whole show was refreshing; still there was not much to write home about in terms of new ideas that is, except for the oppositions’ comical demand for the PM to help consolidate eighty or so opposition parties into three or four groups…
Imagine Trump being asked by democrats to help them be ruthless on fixing voting!
What’s wrong with these opposition ‘leaders’? We thought they were smarter. And more cunning!
Have they forgotten that politics, at least until recently, is mostly a win-lose, smash-and-grab enterprise.
In the real world, opposition parties assume their role and responsibilities. If all Ethiopia’s opposition can do is to just ask the ruling party’s chief to organize them (and not to let them organize), they might need to consider a career change.
A sensible opposition would have asked the PM to invite and encourage citizens to personally engage by investing both their time and resources – and by mobilizing those around them.
A sensible opposition would have asked the PM to seek electoral reforms that reflect the twin pressures of representation and effectiveness, perhaps changes in formula in the direction of proportional representation to favor broader representation, but higher thresholds to ensure effectiveness, thereby making it more challenging to enter into parliament.
A sensible opposition would have debated on what it takes to better align the political system with the public interest and make progress on the nation’s problems. And, which of the many political reform and innovation ideas floating around would actually alter the trajectory of the system.
The problem is not EPRDF or EDL or CUD or the existence of 80 or so parties per se. The problem is not individual politicians; most who seek and hold public office are genuinely seeking to make a positive contribution. The real problem is the nature of competition in the political space.
If you are a politician… or preparing to be one… or just someone who is interested in how the world works, listen up. In many Western countries, party structures are dissolving, traditional political organizations are disintegrating (France, Italy, US), being swept away by new movements.
Today Elections matter a whole lot less than we think.
There are always some smart people able to manipulate, control, and subvert the government and use its power to get what they want…Money. Power. Status.
There is nothing underhanded about it. Nothing sinister or surprising.
The subversion takes place right out in the open.
That’s why the PM and the opposition parties should go beyond electoral politics and reflect on how to deal with the coming evolving pattern, where traditional political structures are breaking up, liquefying political systems, where people are becoming more important than parties, and positioning seems more relevant than policies. So, we say that unless trust is restored in political parties, unless there is more reflection on the tools that our democracies use, we believe the country will sail in the wrong direction.
Into disgrace … and chaos, that is.
Dear readers, we are moving towards a new era of government, where technological innovations and changes in society’s fabric create new channels to form people’s will and demands. All around the world established systems of government are more and more questioned. Elections, in their current form, are increasingly failing to convert the collective will of the people into governments and policies.
The problem is not Democracy. Voting is the problem. Where is the rational voice of the people in all this? Where do citizens obtain the best possible information, engage with each other and decide collectively upon their future? Where do citizens get a chance to shape the fate of their communities? Not in the voting booth, for sure.
To make a long story short, here in Ethiopia we need institutions that minimize not exaggerate our differences, and lock our representatives into rigid ideological camps. There was recently a rather trendy suggestion to redefine the traditional culture of ‘Opposition” politics, where government confronts opposition parties, by a rather less adversarial culture using the Amharic term “Tefokakari” translated as “Competitor”, not much of a difference there… Perhaps the right culture to adopt would have been ‘Consenciational [?]’ or “Tewaway” or “Tebabari” which many coalition groups in many parts of the world appear to embody: a culture of governing together.
If we’re building a new Ethiopia, if we’re constructing tomorrow’s Ethiopia, our political institutions have to be updated to promote effective deliberation of issues and selfless identification with the national interest. We need to stop reducing democracy to voting, we need to change procedures, we need to avoid political turmoil and instability by rejecting what are now arcane features of western democracy.
The system of delegation to an elected representative may have been necessary in the past – when communication was slow and information was limited – but today technology has completely revolutionized the way citizens interact with each other. Even in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already observed that elections alone were no guarantee of liberty: “The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.”
No one can say with confidence whether the coming election will be any different. But at least the PM has issued a challenge to his fellow political adversaries to come forward with ideas to manage Ethiopia’s diversity!
Feel free to contribute.