Mekki Elmograbi (mekkicentre.com)
The two articles: “Oakland Institute’s efforts to damage Ethiopia’s development policies”, and “The Cry wolf of the Washington Post”, gave me strong evidences that the campaign against Ethiopia is completely politicized and obviously synchronized with election; this explains for me why it has been launched in this way, and why the reports against Ethiopia are temporarily at the top of the list, to achieve specific goals and then another country will be placed for a reason or other.
I will pick three paragraphs from the two articles but I feel that the two articles should be published in all African media not just in Ethiopia, because as – I said before – the economic renaissance that happening now in Ethiopia is a model for all Africa, therefore, Ethiopia should not be alone in this battle, it is the battle of all African and Third World countries.
The first article presented a background about the change in Ethiopia and the other ugly images that some of western-based organizations and institutes want to promote:
(In the 1980s, Ethiopia, with images of starving Ethiopian children filling the Western media, became a symbol of humanitarian need. Subsequently, this was twisted into a representation of an incompetent African government dependent upon wasteful foreign aid and disinterested in the suffering of its people. These conveniently simplistic journalistic images were never very accurate. Today, they are totally wrong. Ethiopia’s policies over the last decade or more have been specifically based on pro-poor and pro-development strategies, implemented though integrated planning, coordination, management and cooperation of government at federal, regional and local levels, aid agencies and the people. Over 70% of the federal budget is dedicated to pro-poor policies …. Ethiopia is not dependent upon development aid but it has benefited significantly from it in the implementation of its “Agricultural Development Led Industrialization” strategy and in a series of other pro-poor development programs, covering the country)
The article continued to detect the problem in the Western reports: (The central point of the Oakland Institute reports and other similar reports appears to be part of a deliberate political agenda aiming to stop the contributions of the World Bank and other donors to Ethiopia’s pro-poor developmental programs in order to contribute to the overthrow of the government …. The Oakland Institute even says “Our hope is that this report will further pressure the US Congress and State Department to renegotiate the development assistance to Ethiopia.”)
The second article re-placed the politicized human rights campaign against Ethiopia in its real context: (As has been their customary behavior on the eve and in the aftermath of the previous four Ethiopian general elections, some self-proclaimed human right institutions and media outlets from afar and near are barking their hearts out unconstructively against Ethiopia and its democratically elected government as the country is nearing to conduct its fifth national election on May 24, 2015).