The Irrelevance of the Millennium

by Teodros Kiros (Ph.D)

Now that the exuberance of the Millennium is over Addis wakes up to the empty tall buildings which could never hide the reality from ninety-nine percent of the Ethiopian population. Ethiopia remains to be one of the poorest nations in the world. No skyscrapers can fool the vigilant eye from seeing the reality behind the veil of the millennium.

What is it that Ethiopia just celebrated? Celebration must have a cause. What is our cause?  Reasonable people celebrate because they have achieved a dream, realized a goal, and exacted a plan.  Ethiopia has not achieved any of these, since the days of Axum and Lalibela, pillars of classical Ethiopian history.

Moreover, individuals celebrate their birthdays, if they can invite more than person. In contemporary Ethiopia, only one percent of the population can remember when they were born.

A majority of Ethiopians are born without knowing when and they die without knowing why, how and when.  They die like cattle without a name, and without a history- anonymous and nameless; they live no traces of their existence.  

Here we live in an Ethiopia that cannot feed its population and that lives on handouts from the West, and yet we dared to bombard the world with the empty millennium, when millions of Ethiopians were stretching their hands for our refuses as diaspora Ethiopians and local thugs danced away at our ugly hotels.

How dare we display our ostentatious commodities to the eyes of the hungry and the famished on our badly fixed streets in Addis, a city  built to accommodate three hundred thousand Ethiopians and is now infested with  millions of malnourished Ethiopians.

How dare we display our American dollars to the hungry that will never eat chicken until they die?

I ask you Ethiopians, where is your conscience and where is your political intelligence? How dare you stay put when your nation is burning in the crucible of poverty?  How dare you celebrate on the backs of your people�s backs?