By TesfaNews,
Recently we have been witnessing two self-contradictory statements that describe Ethiopia’s economic growth. One calls Ethiopia as one of the world’s fastest growing economies and the other as a country with more than half of its young workers out of a job.
Both statements cannot be true at the same time as it obviously defies both principles of economics as well as common sense.
According to a report by Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi, it’s not that difficult to tell which statement is pretentious.
Abject poverty and sky rocketed cost of living coupled with a dangerously deteriorating political, religious and ethnic instability in the country push people in to total desperation and hopelessness.
According to her report, such situations are prompting most people to use desperate and sometimes dangerous measures to find better opportunities elsewhere, including paying to be smuggled into other countries.
For a country that brags itself enjoying a double digit economic growth for almost a decade, the fact that half of its youth have no job at all tells the wind-bagging nature of the regime.
It was not a surprise then when The Economist once describe the Ethiopian government as one of “the most economically illiterate in the modern world.”
In a country of 80 million out of which 12 million survives on an emergency relief assistance; with more than 50% urban youth unemployment rate and the lowest youth literacy rate in Africa; ungoverned rate of corruption; over 25 billion dollar in capital flight; mounting military spending financed on borrowed money coupled with almost half of Ethiopia’s export revenues earmarked to meet debt-servicing obligations, the only double-digit growth Ethiopians witnessing so far is the amount and number of off shore bank accounts of their tribal leaders.
