When a Government is Angry with the People

By Samuel Estefanous

When the Going gets so tough

I am ashamed to admit it but I haven’t showered in fifteen days. The dirty laundry I had sent to the other end of the town hasn’t been delivered back as the frequency of an all-out tap water dry spell has hit the whole town at the same time.  No number of Tap Water Initiatives could quell the constant bickering among neighbors for equitable share of the once in a fortnight water ration. The usual warm hugging among us is downgraded to a polite nod from distance. The town is functioning in a hyper active mode all for the wrong reasons. When it comes to true municipal services it might as well be non-existent.  Yet the Mayor is being decorated for driving us mad. She is being touted as the one and only. Naturally she isn’t but as Addis folks are spurning her, it is the government way of expressing its royal displeasure with us. 

Sometimes it slips the leadership that this is a government of Federated States and legally power doesn’t trickle down from Arat kilo but on the contrary it is delegated to it by the Constituent Regional States. What kind of power structure enables the Premier to appoint Addis Mayor as a Surrogate Governor of Gondar and Bishoftu?  These Cities have elected City Councils. Short of that they are under the jurisdiction of the Regional States. Such whimsical dictates that undermine the Constitution and usurp Regional power is a blatant display of absolute power.  

To begin with, the appointment betrayed the hollow structure of the government. Out of 14 million party members only a handful are running the government at all levels- from Bishoftu to Gondar and down to Hawasa. Worse still no one dares take issue with the Premier and Co, even though they know better.  Everybody dreads meeting the fate of others ‘tenfold bigger than him’. They wouldn’t raise a little figure that could possibly compromise the super comfortable lifestyle their blind loyalty has bought them; otherwise we know that among the ranks of PP there are astute scholars as well as Khrushchev like cadre school demagogues with battle hardened practical knowledge. 

Back to Addis…     

A family member being evicted to make space to PP’s dream factory around Casa’incis area is acting like he is the only victim and the ring call music he had subscribed to is so gut- wrenching blue that I dread making any calls.( For a change this week we didn’t have constant power interruption or black outs.) The latest revised public transport tariff coupled with the entire price hike on all public service amenities has made us speechless. For no practical economic reason the lunch canteen has made a revision to the menu. And the government is spreading happiness no one could feel or relate to.   

Not anger but fear is creeping deep into our hearts and the mid-day news anchor quotes the Premier-“get used to it, no earthly power could stop us from carrying the destruction cum construction to the next level.” I will never understand the wisdom of breaking up families to make space for concrete and marbles but what surprises most is the angry tone invariably adopted by the officials. 

Do you know when and why you feel angry? You feel angry when you have trust and hope; when you believe and expect that the wrong would be remedied; I would rather see an angry person than one so scared that he is incapable of words. A scared person has exhausted all his expectations. He has given up hope and he is more like a powder keg that easily catches fire. Thank God, I have chosen to keep my hopes up and keep raging at Imperial Powers. 

The Antics of Neoliberalism

Now that we have gone full throttle Neo-Liberal economy, I think studying the nemesis of the system helps us to better understand what PP has got us into. I don’t buy the Premier’s contention that we have always been a parallel liberal economy and nothing substantial would be changed. I assume he was pissed off at the economists with opposing views when he said that, otherwise, there is no need to introduce a change that maintains the status quo.   

Let us call to mind that EPRDF in general and  Ato Meles in particular were able to rally a Continent wide protest against the Bretton Woods bureaucratic sharks ‘strongly recommending sweeping privatization and free floating Forex’ from the comforts of their offices. I don’t understand why Ato Meles took it so very personally and made it his tenure’s legacy but we would be lying if we kept insisting that we didn’t share his forebodings. I mean he had made a name for himself among third world economists,  scholars and political scientists alike as a vocal voice against the IMF and the World Bank one size fits all advice kits. At least three of the members of the Macro-Economic Team as well as most of the top echelon PPs were hard core developmental state devotees; they need to tell us how they have made the express ride transition from one end of the spectrum to the other extreme.         

With all our aspersions against him and his mentor and boss, I wish Ato Berket were to write a part sequel to his latest book written in 2010 E.C.  I mean he had dedicated a substantial part of his book going on record detailing the battle they had been waging against the Bretton Wood sharks- regularly being advised by Nobel Laureates and ably commanded by Ato Meles. Berket went to great length discussing the dangers of adopting IMF’s ‘recommendations’ while Latin America and African countries are still licking the wounds inflicted on them by the Washington Consensus. Of all the grounds of protest, he had listed, the one that kept me thinking was “you cannot deny poor countries the ownership of their respective Sovereign policies mandated by their people”

(Did you notice?  Out of total desperation and in large measure thanks to PP, we have begun dusting off books hitherto committed to the lowest rungs of our book shelves.) 

I have always heard and read that George Soros had become a billionaire overnight by legally defrauding the Bank of England; and the free floating exchange adopted by the FDRE is already creating this class of overnight millionaires in Ethiopia as well- as recently reported by Mesert Media. What is more in our case as usual the criminal act is networked among bank managers colluding with inner circle politicians and the powerful ‘delalas’.  We have already begun reaping what we have sown. 

By way of signing out…after forcing Ethiopia to subscribe to the free floating currency exchange, today the World Bank released a report lamenting that the Ethiopian Birr, the Nigerian Naira and the South Sudan Pound are fast losing value.

God Bless.     

The writer could be reached at : estefanoussamuel@yahoo.com

 Editor’s note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com

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