Stop Sending Aid to Dictators; No Democracy, No Aid!! (William Easterly)

By William Easterly

March 13, 2014

Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. It’s time for a new model

Too much of America’s foreign aid funds what I call authoritarian development. That’s when the international community–experts from the U.N. and other bodies–swoop into third-world countries and offer purely technical assistance to dictatorships like Uganda or Ethiopia on how to solve poverty.Unfortunately, dictators’ sole motivation is to stay in power. So the development experts may get some roads built, but they are not maintained. Experts may sink boreholes for clean water, but the wells break down. Individuals do not have the political rights to protest disastrous public services, so they never improve. Meanwhile, dictators are left with cash and services to prop themselves up–while punishing their enemies.

But there is another model: free development, in which poor individuals, asserting their political and economic rights, motivate government and private actors to solve their problems or to give them the means to solve their own problems.

Ethiopia: Hackers Without Borders

March 11, 2014

by Joshua Kopstein

The New Yorker

Photograph: Raphael Satter/AP

Before Edward Snowden sparked a global debate about government surveillance, it was a fact of life for Tadesse Kersmo. During Ethiopia’s national elections, in 2005, he and his wife campaigned for the country’s pro-democracy party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy, which achieved a sweeping victory in the capital of Addis Ababa. But, when the results were overturned and protests broke out amid allegations of fraud, the ruling party quickly began cracking down on the opposition. Observers from the European Union reported extensive human-rights violations in the months that followed, including nearly two hundred demonstrators killed by security forces and tens of thousands more imprisoned.

Troubled Waters Egypt and Ethiopia are at loggerheads over a plan to dam the Nile River.

Egypt’s musical-chairs government faces enough challenges. So why is a construction project almost 1,800 miles from Cairo provoking fears over Egypt’s national survival?Egypt and Ethiopia are butting heads over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4 billion hydroelectric project that Ethiopia is building on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.

Cairo worries that the megaproject, which began construction in

2011 and is scheduled to be finished by 2017, could choke the downstream flow of the Nile River right at a time when it expects its needs for fresh water to increase. Brandishing a pair of colonial-era treaties, Egypt argues that the Nile’s waters largely belong to it and that it has veto power over dams and other upstream projects.

Ethiopia, for its part, sees a chance to finally take advantage of the world’s

Mining Corruption in Ethiopia: A Reply to Clare Short

March 9, 2014

by Alemayehu G. Mariam*

Open letter or open pandering to corruption?

“As I look around the EITI implementing countries, I do not accept that the situation for civil society in Ethiopia is worse than a great many of them.” That was the didactic pronouncement of Ms. Claire Short, Chair of the  Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in her “Open Letter” to Ali Idrissa, Faith Nwadishi and Jean-Claude Katende who are civil society representatives on the EITI Board and the Outreach and Candidature Committee. Short penned her bizzare  “Open Letter” to announce her resolute conviction that EITI should give Ethiopia the green light because she “passionately believe[s] that the entry bar to candidates should be clearly and simply whether there is

Troubled Waters Egypt and Ethiopia are at loggerheads over a plan to dam the Nile River.

Egypt’s musical-chairs government faces enough challenges. So why is a construction project almost 1,800 miles from Cairo provoking fears over Egypt’s national survival?

Egypt and Ethiopia are butting heads over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4 billion hydroelectric project that Ethiopia is building on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.

OLF still maintained not Functioning Ethiopia but killing Ethiopia

March 4, 2014

Biraanu Gammachu

This piece is mainly devoted to discussions on Functioning Ethiopia from OLF’s (Oromo Liberation Front) perspective, and thereby opinionates what ought to be embraced by stakeholders.

OLF’s presentation of Oromo as non-Ethiopia was completely wrong. Ethiopia is significantly a making of Oromo. De-making Ethiopia amounts to Demaking Oromo. Independent Republic Oromia is therefore not within a substantive Oromo worldview; at best it’s an artistic culture. Functioning Ethiopia which is a warranty for sustainable solidarity and tradable interaction in inter-Oromo and/or intra-Oromo is one missing.

For any realistic [and rational] change Functioning Ethiopia has been a point of gravity unlike for separatist OLF. So subtly it has been advancing its inverse function