What forced me to write this piece was the effort by Uduak Amimo, a BBC reporter from Addis Ababa, to project Meles Zenawi of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as democrat, progressive and a respected statesman. Why didn’t the reporter try to answer the simplest question as to how could a person who still leads a party to liberate Tigray from the rest of Ethiopia be popularly elected by Ethiopians to lead the country he wants to secede from. For it is by being an elected leader that a person could be considered a democrat, if the reporter believes in this argument.
How could UduaK Amimo sincerely declare Meles as a strong and eloquent African statesmen, I believe after witnessing, how inarticulate and defensive he was in the recent African Economic Summit held recently in Daar Es Salaam, Tanzania? In that Summit, the dictator Meles was just superficially parroting about agricultural policies and institutions, while other African leaders and delegates were giving concrete experiences of how they changed their countries’ food security situations.
How could Uduak Amimo claim Meles as a democrat, when for all practical purposes all western democracies admit that Meles is a dictator but they support him only because of the country’s geopolitical position within the volatile Horn of Africa region, with the hope that he would stabilize the region despite being a dectator.
How is Uduak Amimo going to justify Meles as a democrat, when Meles’ foreign Ministry announced just a few days ago, banning all embassies and international non-governmental organizations from observing the upcoming election and restricting movement of their staff outside of the capital?
I was also wondering why Uduak Amimo identified Ethiopian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) as “opposition groups” while citing about their complaint against the civil society law Meles enacted to stifle political desent.
According to Uduak Amimo, is Mohammar Ghadaffi of Libya, the most respected African statesmen, against whom other African leaders have to be evaluated and rated?
If as Udauk Amimo claimed, Meles has been advising his daughter and other Ethiopians “not to enter into politics for their own health”, why didn’t the reporter ask Meles to leave the office of his premiership, at least on grounds of his own deteriorating health after 19 years of rule, if not for the sake of bowing to the voice of the people?
As to the buildings the BBC reporter saw coming out of Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, that is not a sign of development for Ethiopia or will have little benefit to the multitude of poor Ethiopians, since almost all those buildings are owned by a few corrupt Tigriyan officials, their families and cronies, who are amassing the wealth of the country illegally.
And the road networks the reporter is talking about are the perfect mechanisms for TPLF thugs for embezzlement of public money through the bidding process. Schools, clinics, hospitals, universities, and other infrastructure projects TPLF claims to have expanded are all mechanisms of siphoning donor money in the name of development.
From the style of the writing of the piece reported by Uduak Amimo, it looks like the piece was written by a TPLF cadre, but only was read by the BBC reporter. Given that this report came out just a few days before the 2010 “election”, I am not sure if there was no exchange of fat money between the reporter and the TPLF dictators. That time will tell.
At any rate, Uduak Amimo’s reporting wouldn’t change the substance or the image of TPLF and Meles Zenawi. Meles is one of the world’s brutal dictators by all standards!!!
