Ethiopia’s economic change fruit of good policies

The Addis Ababa light rail which officially begun its services in September. PHOTO | ANADOLU AGENCY 

By CANUTE WASWA

In Summary

• The World Bank forecasts that Ethiopia will be the world’s fastest-growing country in the four years to 2019, at 9.6 per cent a year.

Today I have had two reasons to brush up on my Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia.

The first one is because my wife and I are still on our 10th anniversary travels. We flew Ethiopian
Airlines (which cost us 65 per cent of the price Kenya Airways was offering us) and it cost us nothing to break the journey in Addis Ababa. But the second reason is because Ethiopia was named as the World’s Best Tourism Destination for 2015.

We are now having two weeks of exploring Ethiopia’s outstanding natural beauty, dramatic landscapes and ancient culture.
Ethiopia has undergone an amazing transformation in my lifetime.

In 1974, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a military uprising called the Derg – which means committee. The Derg was formed by a group of disenchanted military officials who set out to eliminate widespread government corruption.

This conflict culminated in a civil war called the Red Terror that lasted from 1977 to 1978. Estimates are unclear but it is claimed that up to a half a million people were killed during the conflict.

It was a regime so brutal it charged mothers of students shot dead for the cost of the bullets. Land and almost every business was nationalised. Then there was a famine of Biblical proportions that afflicted millions in 1984.

Today, Ethiopia runs sub-Saharan Africa’s first light rail system, the Addis Metro. The green trams operate on the city’s East-West route, while those coloured blue are now shuttling between north and south, daily from 6am to 10pm.

Even the tickets are colour-coded, depending on the distance to be travelled and the price. Fares range up to the equivalent of Sh50, which reflects heavy government subsidies.

The rail tramcars rely on power supplied mainly from overhead wires, with plans to have a dedicated grid, including four substations, to supply 160MW of power.

The World Bank forecasts that Ethiopia will be the world’s fastest-growing country in the four years to 2019, at 9.6 per cent a year.

The country has built 35 universities for 500,000 students and aims to build the world’s biggest hydropower dam, with a $5 billion (Sh500bn) price tag, which the country believes it can afford.

Landlocked, the nation of coffee growers wants to reach middle-income status by 2025.

I see lots of correlations between what Ethiopia is doing and what Kenya is trying to do with mega infrastructure projects like the Thika Superhighway and Standard Gauge Railway.

I only have one concern. True development is not about economic growth; it is about the constant improvement of the wellbeing of people, inclusivity through productive investment, the creation of decent jobs and the fair distribution of benefits without discrimination.

It is a lesson that was brought home by the Arab Spring.

Despite a good growth track record, the Tunisian economy had not generated sufficient jobs to employ the growing and better educated labour force, observed a World Bank document prepared on December 17, 2010.

On that same day, 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, frustrated by the lack of a decent job and constant harassment, denial of the right to work and extortion by government agents, set himself alight sparking off the Arab Spring that engulfed North Africa and parts of the Middle East.

Inclusion and participation are essential to development. The Arab spring was not only about lack of jobs; it was also about the imbalances in wages in places where economic growth was high.

An effective development policy must promote human rights and include sustainable, equitable and inclusive growth, as the economic, social and human dimensions of development all fit together.

The Ethiopia government won its last election with 100 per cent votes. So far, I’m not hearing much criticism from Ethiopians. They acknowledge their present and past without much complaints.

Maybe I’m just being a Kenyan.

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. waswa@outdoorsafrica.co.ke