BY TEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICHAEL
It might be a good idea to conceive of human development as an initial production of knowledge and skills and the application of these to the production of useful and valuable goods and services. Of course, this is a highly reductionist statement of the challenge which is actually huge and extremely complex.
The production of knowledge and skills itself must be broadly categorized into primary, secondary, tertiary and post-tertiary stages and should meet international quality standards to be effective in its objectives.
It is this quality education and training which is produced in a rationally organized manner, that should be applied largely in an inter –disciplinary manner, to the production of useful and valuable goods and service, which are themselves produced by tens of thousands of production units organized under numerous sectors and subsectors.
The production of knowledge and skills in Ethiopia
The acquisition and production of deep knowledge and expert skills require a great deal of human effort and this cannot be expected to be elicited unless properly incentivized. Both teachers and students after graduation have not been anywhere near proper incentivization.
Teachers are mostly hovering around the poverty line at current prices and graduating students largely swell the ranks of the so-called educated unemployed. It would be futile to expect educational excellence in a situation like this.
As a result, outcomes have been significantly negative. Undeserved political power and connections thereto have been the major sources of money, wealth and influence.
This has meant extremely poor leadership from the very top to the lowest rungs of responsibility. Such a political and administrative system has been perpetuated over decades by sheer military force and now seems to be too deeply entrenched to change without a great deal of sacrifice.
It is almost a matter of common sense that no transformational progress can be attained without deep knowledge in math, logic, philosophy; civil, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineering; in information and communication technology, computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, geography, ecology, geology, physics, business, accounting, technology, etc.
It is such knowledge and skills, largely in combination, that translate into the production of food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, water, electricity and health care.
The performance of selected sectors and subsectors in Ethiopia: A general assessment
Food Production
Despite a good climate and a relative abundance of natural resources, Ethiopia has not been self–sufficient in food to this day. Ethiopia still imports wheat, cooking oil, baby formula, fruit juice and all sorts of processed food products. Food prices have persistently risen on the back of population growth and production shortfalls due to reduced rainfall, locust invasions and local conflicts.
Clothing and shoes
Cotton and leather production has dwindled and as a result imports of clothing items and shoes, particularly from China, have increased dramatically. How a once thriving sector has declined so drastically is a highly depressing economic story.
Housing
For a country with a long and rich history of building construction from the obelisks of Axum to the Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, the debilitating and chronic shortage of residential housing particularly in Addis Ababa can only be assumed to be a failure of leadership and management. Of the major components and inputs of building construction, the most significant constraint appears to be land which has been wrongly and artificially made perhaps the most important source of wealth and income in Ethiopia.
Instead of distributing land on the basis of a national (country–wide) land use plan for various purposes on private, communal, government and leasehold legal ownership and lease principles, the government is constitutionally empowered to dispense with and dispose of it as it arbitrarily deems fit.
As there is no practical democratic accountability in Ethiopia, what the government has actually been tempted to do is use this constitutional right and power to make land an indispensable instrument of political and economic patronage.
So, no enduring solution can be found to the chronic housing shortage in Ethiopia without doing something about the perennial land question.
Electricity
With all the blah blah about the water tower of Africa and the immense hydropower potential, Ethiopia’s generated electricity, which obviously is a pillar of industrialization, is only about a tenth of that of Egypt (4,300 MW against 45,000 MW).
Actually, talking about hydropower electricity for industrialization in Ethiopia is almost a pipedream in Addis Ababa where installed diesel generators necessitated by intermittent electricity supply have become veritable noise pollutants! Add to that the appalling billing system of EEPCO which charged me an incredibly outrageous monthly utility due of nearly 16,000 Birr!
I said: “There’s no way I can pay you anywhere near that sum. Just go ahead and cut my line!” They have not dared to do it so far, because I guess they are now getting the worst press they have been exposed to in their 70–year existence!
Transport
Here, we can arguably take Addis Ababa as a good example in relation to public transport. Basically, the major components of the transport service are roads, rail-tracks, air routes, sea routes and waterways, vehicles, trains, airplanes, boats, and ships and the required personnel. In Addis Ababa, some 640,000 car owners and users have no vehicle problem. Their problems are traffic jams and energy shortages.
A private car which can carry 4 people in addition to the driver may only transport one person, i.e. the driver. Be that as it may, the transport problem for the rest of the public is the shortage of commercial transport vehicles in terms of taxis, midi-buses, mini buses, buses, trams (light trains), etc.
The shortage may be real or apparent. During rush hours, the shortage is real because you see queues of passengers (fares) waiting for taxis and buses. On the other hand, during non–rush hours, the queues may well be those of transport vehicles.
However, the adequacy of the public transport system is assessed on the basis of its capacity to cope with rush–hour demand, and that has been extremely deficient. One possible solution may be flexible tariff rates, one set being higher rates for rush-hours and another lower rates for non rush-hours.
Information and communication technology
One cannot be too keen on getting everything digitized in a backward economy such as that of Ethiopia where overt and covert unemployment is extremely high, but basic digital technologies such as mobile telephones, mobile banking, internet connections, etc. are quite useful and necessary.
And from this point of view, we cannot complain too much about Ethio-telecom, but recent revelations, particularly about its rather high internal and external indebtedness will have to be addressed. Internet connectivity is fast becoming indispensable and to this effect the on–going lying down of the 4G infrastructure needs to be speeded up.
Health Care
Health care services at private hospitals and clinics are almost completely out of reach of the vast majority of the Ethiopian people and resort to traditional medicine and holy water therapy has become mandatory. Recent additional government efforts to alleviate the problem through partially subsidized health care service are commendable but woefully in adequate in many ways.
Foreign exchange
The foreign exchange – earning capacity of Ethiopia is a summary indicator of its economic development in the sense that it represents its ability to trade and transact with the rest of the world on equal terms. But, unfortunately, this is where the country and its political and economic leadership over the last thirty years has failed miserably.
Merchandise exports have stagnated at about 3 bln USD, financing no more than 15 percent of its merchandise imports. The scarcity of foreign exchange is the number–one impediment to sustainable economic development.
For a political and economic leadership that has received 100 billion USD in foreign aid; has incurred a total outstanding public debt of 2 trillion Birr and has had an average annual budget of 300 bln Birr over the last thirty years, the sectoral and therefore the overall economic performance has been abysmally low. The Ethiopian economy is not under-resourced; it is under managed because of the low production of knowledge and skills.
The Ethiopian Herald March 9/2021
