Football fans are busy arguing whether the arrival of foreign footballers in the Ethiopian Premier League has improved the nation’s football.
There seem to be more and more foreign players every season. How they parachute in here is as guarded as a national security issue.
Fans are sure to encounter additional foreign players in the second round. Now, however, clubs are starting to kick out foreign players when they underperform. This has included Uganda striker Robert Sentengo, Nigerian Christopher Amos, Chadian Masamo Aselmo and Nigerian duo Emmanuel Fevo and Philip Dawzi. It may be negligible considering it is less than ten players out of 52 foreign players at the start of the season. Very few details are known about how exactly these players are cut from the squad despite having remaining contract periods.
Most experts agree that the players either are entitled to be paid their full salary remaining on their contracts or could appeal to the Ethiopian Football Federation or Caf secretariat. The players would definitely collect their dues thanks to the international law of contract.
It is because of the football fans’ pressure and questioning that clubs opted to kick-out the players that are underperforming. However there is a lot of money involved but the situation regarding foreign players seems opaque. It is unclear why the Federation does not disclose the amount of transfer money since all teams except Saint George, Ethiopia Bunna and Dedebit are financed by tax payer’s money. The bizarre situation starts from there.
Under contract players hard to just throw away
Name: Senait Bezu
Education: BA In management
Company name: Seni juice
Title: Owner
Founded in: 2017
What it does: Juice House
HQ: Addis Ababa
Number of employees: 12
Startup Capital: 350,000 birr
Current capital Growing
Reasons for starting the business: Interest on the business
Biggest perks of Ownership: Makes me passionate
Biggest strength: Sociability
Biggest challenge: Not getting the materials on time
Plan: To develop the habit of healthy eating in the community
First career: Running a family business
Most interested in meeting: Athlete Haile G/Selassie
Most admired person: The one who created me
Stress reducer: Praying
Favorite past-time: Swimming
Favorite book: Papillon by Henri Charrière
Favorite destination: Venice, Italy
Favorite automobile: Audi
Trade war and free trade
A trade war is a situation in which countries try to damage each other’s trade, typically by the imposition of tariffs or quota restrictions. This situation is now looming between the USA and China following threats of the President to increase tariffs on steel and aluminium. According to President Trump, such this war is easy to win. We will see. To begin with here follow some of the news headlines, following the imposition of the tariffs:
“Equities in Europe are expected to open significantly lower on Friday as investors see higher risks of a global trade war.”
“The FTSE 100 is seen down by 66 points at 6,881; the CAC 40 is set to be off by 72 points at 5,082; and the DAX 40 is expected to open lower by 189 points at 11,892; according to IG.”
“Asian equities slumped after Chinese authorities said they could hit 128 U.S. products with tariffs in response to the announcement from President Donald Trump that up to $60 billion worth of Chinese products will face new import taxes.” It seems the war has begun, at least a war of words, hence the fear and the nervousness of the stock markets. It also seems that all consequences of beginning this trade war are not fully overseen yet. Thousands of workers and producers in the USA may in fact lose their jobs or their exports instead and be on the losing side rather than on the winning side. President Trump’s WIN-LOSE strategy may and up in a LOSE-LOSE for all.
The “America first” slogan represents the WIN-LOSE concept very well. A WIN-LOSE person is strong and self-centred. (S)he has the courage to express his or her own convictions but is not very considerate of the opinion of others. Most people have been raised in this mentality from birth, in the family, at school, in sports, at work. Children, students, workers have been and are constantly being compared with others and are encouraged to be nicer, better, stronger than others. As a result, they will be loved and appreciated more than others. At home, a child may feel less loved than a brother or sister. At school a student gets better results than others. At the office workers compete for a promotion. In WIN-LOSE, we think “If I win, you lose.” “I get my way, you don’t get yours.” In this frame of mind, people often use position, power, credentials, possessions or personality to get their way. Many people are deeply inscripted in what Stephen Covey calls the Scarcity Mentality. People with this mentality think that there is only so much out there and if someone else were to get a big piece out of the pie, there is less remaining for the rest. These people have a difficult time, sharing recognition, credit, power or profit, even with those who help making it. We often see this mentality in Ethiopia as well. People have a very hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people, even and sometimes especially, members of their own family or close friends and associates. It is as if something is taken away from them when someone else receives special recognition or is becoming successful. Although they might verbally express happiness for the success of others, deep inside they are jealous and unhappy. They compare themselves with that other person, who they feel is winning and thus they are losing. Such people covet what others have and look forward to the time things will go less well for the other. They are always comparing and competing and spend their energy and resources on possessing things or other people to increase their sense of worth. They surround themselves with people who will not challenge them and who are weaker. They win, others lose. WIN-LOSE is really LOSE-LOSE in the long run.
Things can really be different if we seek mutual benefit instead. If we are able, to think WIN-WIN, agreements and deals are beneficial to all parties. They feel good about it and make it work. Thinking WIN-WIN is being co-operative, not competitive. WIN-WIN is not your way or my way; it is a better way. An essential character trait for Win/Win is the abundance mentality as opposed to the scarcity mentality that we looked at earlier. The abundance mentality is a paradigm that means: there is plenty for everybody.
It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making. Thinking WIN-WIN may result in WIN-WIN agreements between countries, companies and suppliers, employer & employees, any group of people who interact to accomplish something.
With this in mind, it is obvious that the current course taken to deliberately begin an international trade war, is going to result in a head-on collision between the USA and China. All affected will be hurt in the end.
It is therefore encouraging to learn that the leaders of 44 African countries have signed a deal to create one of the world’s largest free trade blocs. The agreement was signed at a summit in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
It is hoped the deal will come into force within six months, and increase prosperity for 1.2 billion Africans. Some more work needs to be done as all member nation will have to sign the deal before it can come into effect. It will be the result though of thinking WIN-WIN by African leaders. The African Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) would remove barriers to trade, like tariffs and import quotas, allowing the free flow of goods and services between its members. In theory that should boost commerce, growth and employment. African Union commission head Moussa Faki Mahamat called it a “glorious challenge… which calls for the courage to believe, the courage to dare… the courage to achieve”.
Ton Haverkort
Asia And The Evolution Of International Trade
The world economic history well recorded the beautiful story of how Asian countries shaped the international trade more than a millennium ago. Stewart Gordon revisited this phenomenon in his 2008 published book entitled “When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors and Monks Who Created the ‘Riches of the East”.
Stewart Gordon stated that the Asian world in 500-1500 CE, was a place of great empires and large capital cities. In Southeast Asia were the kingdoms of “Srivajaya, Pagan, Angkor, Champa and Dai Viet”. China went through dynastic changes but was strongly linked to the rest of Asia. India had empires as well such as the “Kushans, the sultanates and the Mughals based at Delhi, as well as the “Cholas and Vijayanagara” in the south. The Middle East had the “Abbasid Caliphate”. Central Asia had “Genghis Khan’s empire”, the largest the world has ever known, and it had the empire of “Timur”. The populations of these realms were, in many cases, larger than the whole of Western Europe.
According to Stewart Gordon, Asia was a vast world of contrast, from deserts to mountains, from monsoon rain forest to dry plains. It held a bewildering variety of cultures and languages, many local religions and varieties of Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism that spread across wide regions. But it was its networks that made the great Asian world unique. Bureaucrats, scholars, slaves, ideas, religions and plants moved along its intersecting routes. Family ties stretched across thousands of miles. Traders found markets for products ranging from heavy recycled bronze to the most diaphanous silks.
Asian empires tended to promote linkages and connections to other kingdoms in several ways. Often their own territories crossed “natural” ecological boundaries and brought together regions and societies in unexpected ways. The Kushans, the Afghans and the Mughals established empires that successfully ruled both sides of the formidable Himalayas. The South Indian Chola kingdom built a navy and conquered the islands of Sri Lanka, Java, and Sumatra, politically tying together India and Southeast Asia. Genghis Khan ruled both the steppe and large areas of agricultural China.
Stewart Gordon in his book stated that administrative continuities generally promoted trade between ecologically different regions in which the trade in horses from the steppe to the plains of India, in rice from south to north China, in steel from Damascus to Afghanistan. The big states also produced widely used currencies, such as Chinese cash and silver “Dirhams”, and established standards for normalising local weights and measures.
They also frequently organized postal systems for reliable communication. One could send a letter from Mangalore, India and have it arrive in Cairo, Egypt in slightly over a month. A letter of introduction went from the far Western border of India to Delhi and back in less than two months. Although the big capital cities such as Delhi, Beijing, and Baghdad, were impressive and often many times the size of any European city of the time, the importance of medium-sized cities cannot be overemphasised.
According to Stewart Gordon, these empires, by and large, rose by the expansion of power of a regional family based in a medium-sized city their regional capital. When empires fell, they generally devolved into regional successor states. The regional capitals usually not only survived, but also they thrived. Medium-sized cities thus remained long-term sources of demand, learning, and patronage, and in addition, they produced the bureaucrats necessary to run an empire.
Stewart Gordon noted that cities, large and small, needed basic food, fabric, fuel and building materials. The elite of these cities attracted the more sophisticated trade goods of the Asian world. The Chinese urban elite generated an almost insatiable demand for ivory, both African and Southeast Asian, which found its way into religious statues, pens, fans, boxes and the decoration of furniture. Their demand for the most aromatic incense in the world was filled by incense logs and bushes from Southeast Asia and India. The demand for elegant clothes and beautiful colors in population centers of the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia pushed discovery of and trade in new plant dyes.
According to Stewart Gordon, the urban centers were also places of specialized manufacture that created trade opportunities and employment for these skills. Cities produced books, artwork, fine fabrics, sophisticated musical instruments, jewelry and scientific instruments, all of which were in demand throughout the Asian world. Syria developed steelmaking to such a high art and in such quantity that traders brought its products to all parts of the Asian world. Damascus blades were just as ubiquitous in Indonesia as they were in Central Asia. China produced prodigious quantities of ceramics that were traded across the Asian world, from the Philippines and Japan to the west coast of Africa.
As Stewart Gordon well explained, trade mattered. The volume and variety of trade affected much of the population of the great Asian world. Tropical spices and medicines moved north to the plains of India, west into the Middle East and east into China. These medicinal plants were not “discovered” by doctors in cities, much less by the traders who brought them. These spices and medicines were first discovered by the forest dwellers who experimented with their local profusion of plants.
Trade served the spread of the universalising religions. Ritual objects and books of both Buddhism and Islam came from specialized centers and moved along both water routes and caravan routes to Tibet, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China. Trade in the great Asian world included the exotic, the prosaic and everything in between. At one extreme, a giraffe was somehow transported from Africa to the imperial court of China.
At the other extreme, fish paste produced on the coast of Thailand and ordinary Chinese iron cooking pots were regular, profitable items traded to the islands of Southeast Asia. Rice, the most prosaic of foods in India, China and Southeast Asia, became a high-status food across the steppe world. Every ship and every caravan carried a range of goods from the precious to the mundane.
