From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2008 - 13:56:37 EDT
Saturday, 26th July 2008
**
*Starved of ideas
*ETHIOPIA is back in the news. Millions are starving again. The West will
have to send massive aid to save the millions now facing despair. In the
past famines could seem far away and were only reported after the worst. Now
we live in a global village and can see the suffering on our screens.
Yet Ethiopia and other failed states will have to accept that donors insist
on competence in economic management. The catastrophe is not an accident of
nature. The squalor and folly of the Addis Ababa regime needs to be
corrected. What is the main budget priority for these malignant politicians?
It is expenditure for the war with Eritrea over a few square miles of dry
scrubland.
The people of Ethiopia are humiliated by their leaders every generation.
Merely subsiding corruption is a hopeless strategy. The donor nations must
be generous in their aid of food and medicine but with the duty of humanity
it ought to be demanded that the people be allowed to own property and to
build irrigation systems. This crushed nation needs the rule of law and free
markets as urgently as the sacks of grain.
The West must come to the rescue but the answer is functioning markets, not
repeatedly rewarding the bandit leaderships.
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