Borkena
Toronto – Addis Ababa City Administration has a track record of exaggerated spendings including on renovations. But the new spending discussed at the city’s cabinet meeting this week seems to be unprecedented.
Fana Broadcasting Corporate, State-owned media, on Friday reported that the cabinet has agreed to spend 733 billion birr on 30 projects.
The lists of projects selected on investment are undisclosed. The report, however, indicated that the fund will be supporting about 37 developers.
The projects are said to be a public-private partnership. This is one of the core tenets of neoliberal governments. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has been making repeated claims of “home grown economic models.”
Notably, hundreds of thousands of residents of Addis Ababa were uprooted as the government forcefully implemented a “corridor development project.” Apart from being reduced to being homeless, many were deprived of their livelihoods.
A considerable amount of land the government appropriated by displacing residents who lived in the area for many generations was to be transferred to developers in addition to land needed for “corridor development.”
It seems that the “investors” are now getting financial support from the government in the form of neoliberal economic practice – public private partnership.
The city administration cabinet. not the city council, explained its decision to spend the above mentioned amount of money on PPP projects due to the “economic relevance of the projects” including job creation and from “urban development.”
The projects the city Administration is spending on are riverside and corridor development projects.
The opposition parties have not yet reacted on the funding decision. The spending amounts to well over half of the entire country’s annual budget.
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733 billion birr is quite a sum. That is about 5 billion in US Dollars. I remember a seasoned US journalist once making a comment about the annual budget of the entire old country being less than the annual budget of major cities like Chicago, NY etc. That was way back in the 1970’s.
Now with more and more people moving into the capital from all regions looking for opportunities to make a living and for lack of peace and security, things will be even more and more scarce and prohibitively expensive. Essentials like housing and consumer products are said to be out of reach for a lot of people in major cities especially worse in Addis/Finfine. This is a challenge now and it will even be more of a headache for governments to come. I don’t think any one of these opposition groups including those among our Diaspora has presented us any workable plan that will immediately alleviate this grinding cost of living. They are just busy blaming the other guys. Blame game ain’t gonna cut it. As Rod once loudly asked Jerry. the question is ‘Show me the money’.