ESAT News (October 19(2), 2016)
The New York Times says that Ethiopia is in flames and cast doubt on its ability to sustain economic growth in the face of turmoil.
“Ethiopia is now in flames. Hundreds have been killed during protests that have convulsed the country,” the paper said on Tuesday in an article “ ‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa Reeling’ May Be More Fitting Now.
“No place exposes the cracks in the ‘Africa rising’ narrative better than Ethiopia, which had been one of the fastest risers,” the New York Times said in an article on Tuesday.
The paper recalled the government, whose stranglehold on the country is so complete that not a single opposition politician sits in the 547-seat Parliament, recently took the drastic step of imposing a state of emergency.
Many of the Ethiopia’s new engines of growth — sugar factories, textile mills, foreign-owned flower farms — now lie in ashes, burned down in an anti government rage, it said.
At the same time, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, just listed Ethiopia as the fastest growing economy on the continent from 2010 to 2015. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also rapidly sliding toward chaos — again, was second.
“Political turmoil on the one hand, rosy economic prospects on the other. Can both be true?”
“It comes down to how sustained the turmoil is,” said Acha Leke, a senior partner at McKinsey.
In Ethiopia’s case, the unrest appears to be just beginning. Videos show demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians chanting antigovernment slogans, giving a sense of the depth of discontent. The protesters hail from Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, a population of more than 60 million, leading many analysts to predict that this is no passing fad.
As Mr. Leke said, “You can’t eat growth.”
Mr. Chelwa, the Zambian economist, has a different view. The fundamentals of African economies have not changed nearly as much as the “Africa rising” narrative implied, he said, with Africa still relying too heavily on the export of raw materials and not enough on industry.
“In Zambia, we import pencils,” he said.
He also points out that some of the fastest-growing economies, like Ethiopia, Angola and Rwanda, are among the most repressive. These governments can move ahead with big infrastructure projects that help drive growth, but at the same time, they leave out many people, creating dangerous resentments.
In Ethiopia, that resentment seems to be growing by the day.
The trouble started last year when members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, began protesting government land policies. Soon Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group, the Amhara, joined in, and the protests have now hardened into calls to overthrow the government, which is led by a small ethnic minority.
If you track the news coming out of Ethiopia, you would not be a fool to think it is two totally different countries. One day, there is a triumphant picture of a new electric train, with Chinese conductors standing next to shiny carriages. (China remains a huge investor in Ethiopia.) The next, there are grisly images of dead bodies that witnesses said were people gunned down by the police.