Ethiopian Premier League tenth week fixtures biggest showdown takes place today in Hawassa featuring a derby match between hosts Sidama Bunna and visitors Ethiopia Bunna.
In its best ever season start Ethiopia Bunna faces a fierce away adversary mortally wounded Sidama Bunna back from season’s first defeat at the hands of Mekele.
Sidama is among the strong sides’ this current season but highly dependable on the lone goal machine Addis Gedey who scored seven of the club’s nine goals and its defense is very weak, conceding eight goals. Coach Zeray Mulu has done a good job building a side out of average players with an amazing winning spirit. Sidama sits third with 13 points from seven matches.
On the other hand the visitors Ethiopia Bunna are in strong form coming from three successive victories. Five foreign players including the two up front, the guests’ scored eight goals while conceding three thus a balanced team leading the league season with 18 points from eight matches. Although four of the eight goals are from a spot kick courtesy of Abubaker Nesru, Bunna’s mid field is by far more well-organized than the hosts.
An win means high moral boosting results for the visitors whereas Sidama is expected to turn the situation in to inspiring the players back into a strong title contention. Considering the fact on the ground the difference of having local or foreign coaches is significant neither in the result nor in the art of the football.
Famous for having the biggest and noisiest travelling fans and better squad members, Ethiopia Bunna appears the favorite to return home with all three points. But a goal less draw is the most likely result for these days away wins are very rare and precious. The other big match over the weekend is the showdown between relegation threatened Shere Sehul against visitors Debub Police. The hosts are 14th in the table with five points from eight matches while the visitors are 15th with four points from nine outings.
Ethiopia Bunna travels to fierce rival Sidama Bunna
Dedebit’s walk out bad precedent for EFF
Dedebit walked out of Ethiopian knock-out quarter final stage on grounds of financial insecurity. Ethiopian Football federation is oblivious of handling such bizarre situations so they chose to keep quiet about the new developments. What if others follow suit?
EFF should have readymade regulations to address such unforeseen situations in order to make sure clubs are obliged to stay in championships once registered at the start of the season. The major step to be taken facing such incidents involves checking out clubs’ financial statements at the time of registration. EFF’s unpreparedness to do that has brought about bizarre situations which demoralizes other clubs.
Dedebit’s walkout gave Ethiopia Bunna a place in the quarter final without kicking a ball while others like Fasil achieved that fate after an away 1-0 victory over Welwalo-Adigrat in mid-week. The Gondor based Emperors face the winner of hosts Adama against visitors Bahirdar in a date not yet disclosed to the participating teams.
Dedebit’s sudden walkout will be a bad precedent to Ethiopian Football governing body EFF, incapable of organizing two championships among just sixteen clubs in a country that boasts 13 months of sunshine. Failure of handling such situations could leave EFF a toothless Lion with no power on its subjects. What if any one of the 16 teams walkout in the middle of the league season?
Fixes to help the economy survive
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.
Politics might come back
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?!
