Prostitution in Ethiopia: Two Dollars With Or Without A Condom (Video)
By Tecola W. Hagos

[Commentary by Tecola W. Hagos on the presentation (showing) of Two Dollars With Or Without A Condom (video) at Towson University [Towson, Maryland], 23 February 2005]

I. Introduction 
The video titled Two Dollars With Or Without A Condom seems to be a limited study of prostitution and the effect of poverty and political oppression in Addis Ababa. The video was financed by a Swedish charity organization aimed to garner awareness of the plight of young Ethiopian girls living on the streets of Merkato and at times practicing prostitution. It also draws our attention on the devastation of AIDS in the country. In traditional discussions of social responsibilities, it has been pointed out by numerous writers that prostitution would cause the moral corruption of the individual and the deterioration of moral standards of society. By contrast, the modernist view is that �prostitution� involves human rights issues of choice and private acts of adults in the sense of the libertarian idea of least government involvement or interference in the lives of individuals. 

Sexuality in Ethiopia, as in all traditional societies, is a very private matter, not displayed or discussed in public. Despite the poverty and human suffering in Ethiopia, prostitution in Addis Ababa still has a human face. There is minimal crime associated with prostitutes like murder, mutilation, pornography, et cetera in Addis Ababa or in the major urban centers in the rest of Ethiopia. In rural Ethiopia, prostitution was almost non-existent until recently. The overwhelming number of prostitutes in Addis Ababa is a result of unchecked population growth, famine, lopsided land-holding or landownership system, oppressive government structure, and deteriorating social conditions. The problem is very complex, and any attempt to reduce it down to a single cause or two is bound to fail.

II. Sources of Prostitution
Ethiopia is an ancient nation of devout Orthodox Christians and Moslems. Until 1971, Orthodox Christianity was the official state religion of Ethiopia, in a tradition that dates back to AD 350, i.e., the same time period when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire during Constantine. Ethiopia can easily be considered as a model nation for religious tolerance compared to the many Moslem nations in a region known for fanaticism and persecution of Christians and others. Islam has effectively destroyed prostitution from its social structure at great human toll of tremendous oppression of women. By contrast, prostitution is a phenomenon that has progressively eroded the moral content of the Ethiopian society from the time Ethiopia opened itself to modernization and the West from the 1900. The Italian occupation of the country in 1935 for five years introduced the �bar-room,� relatively speaking �cheap-sex,� culture that has now grown to such an extent threatening the very survival of Ethiopia as a nation. 

The severity of poverty in Ethiopia has no comparison elsewhere in the World. I contend that Ethiopia is brought to such condition of dehumanization and poverty by a systematic and concerted effort of the West and Arab Nations by making it difficult for Ethiopia to acquire major development loans and government to government grants and/or loans. It is a shame that the World Bank and the IMF are far more interested in meaningless economic activities in Ethiopia by providing financing for tiny projects and setting up repayment �blackmail� systems that merely helped Ethiopia�s agony to continue. What is needed is massive investment to build infrastructure and energy source that will be the basis of further money-making industries that should satisfy the World Bank and others.

Successive Ethiopian Governments were/are also responsible to the state of affairs of the nation sinking into the present social, political, and economic crises. The current government of Meles Zenawi is responsible for the endless political as well as economic crimes committed against Ethiopians. Some of his crimes deal with the land-holding system, the tax structure, the absence of banking that caters to rural development, the over emphasis on export economy, and the internationalization of a poor country sucking all of its resources into accommodating an international army of public servants and employees have contributed to the rise of prostitution in major cities and towns in Ethiopia. The most recent dangerous consequence of prostitution has been the spread of AIDS throughout Ethiopia resulting in the death or prolonged sickness of millions of victims. With our dismal social infrastructure to handle such crises, orphaned children of parents who died of AIDS were the hardest hit victims, and among those orphans the girls were the most who suffered a doubly whammy of hunger and assault on their person.

Considering the millions of people with AIDS, I some time wonder whether the total banning of prostitution in Moslem nations was a proper price to pay for having a society free of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, or moral corruption. There is no question that Moslem countries have no victims of AIDS to speak of. Would it have been possible to achieve such degree of control of the sexual life of a society in order to keep it from horrendous devastation of AIDS without the oppression of women? 

III. The Sins of Western Reporting
I have very serious misgivings about Western journalists and documentary video or filmmakers of events taking place in non-western communities, as independent reporters or observers. Of course, such generalization does not include a number of dedicated researchers and scholars whose love and admiration for Ethiopia is obvious in their tremendous works. Even on such humanitarian and social problem of prostitution, which is to be found in all of human societies throughout history, we find the heavy-handed treatment of such issues by journalists and documentalists such as those who produced the video under consideration. I want to remove the unnecessary victimization of prostitutes, who are already victims of social injustices, from being further dehumanized and degraded by �the title� of the video under consideration. 

This is a necessary correction of comparative value that should be undertaken in order to establish some common understanding that prostitution no matter where it occurs is a process of victimization of women. I have been aware of the two-sided sword of Western journalists cutting the victims as much as they seem to do with the problem. The degradation of poor people in developing countries, who are already victims of violence and natural disasters, ought to be of great concern to all of us. The sad fact is that even the little leftover humanity or dignity such victims may have retained is either stripped off or bulldozed by sensationalist reporters in their unscrupulous pursuit of fame and fortune. It is far too high a price to pay in order to be informed on the plights and sufferings of our fellow human beings. This video presentation on street-walkers and prostitutes in Addis Ababa is no different in its dimension as those others presentations or records of the misery and failure of African societies and leaders. 

I have to make some factual corrections about prostitution and the implied cheapening of the humanity of �prostitutes� in Addis Ababa (or elsewhere in the world), who were victimized twice over as represented by the makers of the Video under discussion. Let me first state that sexual favor in Ethiopia in general or in Addis Ababa in particular is not cheap; sex is very expensive in Ethiopia. It is far more expensive than it is in the West. For example, compared to the price of sex a street-walker prostitute charges in down town Baltimore or Washington DC, a street-walker prostitute in Addis Ababa charges almost a hundred to hundred fifty times more, even using the 1997 findings of the video makers of the price of sex being �two dollars� ($2.00). If we consider the equivalent purchasing power parity based on the 1997 GNP per Capita of Ethiopia of $ 110 (i.e. with purchasing power parity of $510), to that of the GNP per Capita of the United States of $28,740.00 to $30,000.00 (i.e., with purchasing power parity of similar dollar value), and at similar 2% sex-price rate percentage to per Capita, such sexual favors ought to cost a �John� in the United States approximately one thousand two hundred dollars for an encounter with a lower-end street�walker prostitute. 

A very brief survey of charges by street-walker prostitutes in Washington DC and Baltimore cannot be that different than the average suggested by the Police Guide No. 2 on Street Prostitution (a document put out by the Justice Department), and that sex seems to be extremely cheap costing from twenty to one hundred dollars. In other words, an Ethiopian �John,� with a 1997 per Capita income of $ 110 (i.e. with purchasing power parity of $510), paying two dollars to a street-walker prostitute in Addis Ababa, is shelling out a whopping hundred to hundred fifty times more than a man in the United States, with per Capita income of $28,740.00 to $30,000.00 (i.e., with purchasing power parity of similar dollar value), pays for a night encounter with a lower end street-walker prostitute in Baltimore or Washington DC. The facts of relative dollar/labor value being what I have stated above, I would still insist that even my corrective points are unnecessary because we are involving ourselves by so doing in the objectification of human beings (women). 

Although the United States government is not involved in the production or financing of the Video under discussion, I would like to point out some negative role played by reporters and politicians based in the United States often indulging in self-aggrandizement, knowingly or unknowingly degrading and dehumanizing people from other parts of the world. This monumental self-delusion comes from total memory lapse concerning the humblest of origins of most United States citizens. Emma Lazarus in 1883 aptly describes such humble beginning of Americans in her poem �The New Colossus� as follows:
...."Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 
No one people could look down at another people by ridiculing their way of life, or their poverty. I find such blatantly insulting titles such as the title of the Video under discussion or similar social documentaries and articles, and the display of poor people in their very private moments of suffering splashed in Western media, unacceptable. 

IV. Solutions at Variance 
A. The Impact of Economic Assistance: For some time now, it has become unbearably disconcerting to me and a number of fellow Ethiopians, that the governments of several European nations and the United States might have been practicing racist foreign policy against Ethiopia, from the time such nations started their diplomatic relationship more than a hundred years ago. It is also equally disturbing to think that the United States might have a hand in support of the efforts of hostile Arab governments, including the Government of Egypt, in their sustained effort to destabilize and ultimately destroy Ethiopia. The ongoing effort to strangle Ethiopia by alienating Ethiopia�s Afar Coastal Territories and the Territorial Sea of Ethiopia�s historic outlet to the Red Sea is a clear example of hostility to Ethiopia and its citizens by governments of several European nations and successive Governments of the United States.
If we focus our evaluation on the economic and military assistance provided by the United States to Ethiopia on one hand and to Egypt on the other hand, we will be able to see in graphic detail, the gravity of the problem of unbalanced and probably racist foreign policy at work. The amount of military and economic aid to Ethiopia provided by the United States during a century of relationship in that same period, is quite small compared to the amount of military and economic aid provided to other nations in the area. In particular, the exorbitant amount of aid provided to Egypt and Israel goes beyond mere military strategy interest of the United States in the region. 

According to the estimate of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the population of Ethiopia is going to be over 145 million people by year 2025, i.e., in mere twenty years from now. The way our political and economic life is unfolding at this moment indicates that we are heading towards a disaster. Unless we start building a number of dams on the Blue Nile and on our other great rivers, and start extensive irrigated farming, how are we going to feed that many people in a mere twenty years hence when we could not feed half that number now at this time? Moreover, Egypt and Sudan are not going to continue exploiting the waters of the Blue Nile at the cost of the lives of millions of Ethiopians under such taxing circumstances. It is ironic that Egypt, the receiver of the bounty of Ethiopia�s Blue Nile, had not suffered from famine while at the same period millions of Ethiopians starved to death. The United States and the other Western nations seem to be oblivious of the type of problem awaiting them because of their miscalculation and stupid foreign policy as I shall show below. How are they going to deal with hundreds of millions of starving and dying Ethiopians, Egyptians, Sudanese et cetera in twenty years time? 

If we take into consideration the amount of money poured into Egypt form the Treasury of the United States, for example, compared to the amount of money the United States had grudgingly provided Ethiopia up to 1991, one cannot help feeling disgusted. �Aid is central to Washington�s relations with Cairo. The US has provided Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told, Egypt has received over $50 billion in US largesse since 1975.� [See Charles Levinson, �$50 billion Later, Taking Stock of US Aid to Egypt,� The Christian Science Monitor, 12 April 2004, World - Middle East.] During the same period, the United States provided military and economic aid to Ethiopia of about two billion dollars, which was barely four percent (4%) of the aid received by Egypt. Nevertheless, over eighty percent (80%) of that amount never left the United States because it was ploughed back into the economy of the United States through purchases of expensive goods and services. Maybe some two hundred million dollars of that money was used to benefit Ethiopians directly. It is most unfortunate that the leadership of the United States government had embraced such destructive and unbalanced and possibly racist foreign policy in that part of the world and specially against Ethiopia for decades. 

Imagine what Ethiopia would have done with 50 billion dollar assistance. We could have built a dozen huge dams (putting in mind the cost to build Awash Dam was about fifty million dollars and the benefit to the area beyond any economic scale of success) and scores of smaller ones for irrigation and energy source. We could have built the highway and rail systems that we desperately needed. We could have upgraded and built several new schools and colleges. There is no doubt in my mind that the development of Ethiopia�s agriculture and industry would have benefited the United States and the nations of the region a lot more than what we find at this moment with all that aid having been poured into Egypt. Had it been the case that Ethiopia had at its disposal fifty billion dollars, we would not be talking or writing about prostitution here. Rather, our effort would have been directed on the task of advanced science or maybe even indulge in cosmology.
 
B. Ethiopia, �the Water Tower of Africa�: Ethiopia, by far, has greater potential for the development of huge agricultural industry, extensive dairy farming, and cheap hydro-electrical energy than any African country. Compared to Egypt or Sudan, Ethiopia�s river basins, rural farm land, and diverse ecosystem is a marvel. Especially the building of high dams in the Blue Nile gorge, where there is very little vaporization rate compared to the vaporization rate for dams in either Egypt or Sudan, is the most logical and cost effective site for building dams than anywhere else in either Egypt or Sudan. The benefit of such undertaking would ensure that no one will be starving in that part of the world for hundreds of years. It is their shortsighted foreign policy, possibly a racist one, which hindered Western nations, including the United States, from seriously considering the development of the Blue Nile gorge of Ethiopia as a cistern of precious life-giving water and source of cheap hydro-power electricity (energy) for the region. 

There can be no other explanation for the lopsided and highly questionable amount of assistance provided to nations other than Ethiopia except racism of the worst kind. Ethiopia is located on the other side of the Red Sea facing Saudi Arabia, a very important strategic position to keep an eye on the flow of traffic in the Red Sea coming and going through the Red Sea to all parts of the World. Moreover, Ethiopia is an equally ancient civilization as Egypt, with similar population size. Ethiopia is a country with Christianity as its official religion with a minority of Moslem population until very recently. Ethiopia had been the target of Moslem attacks starting in the Fourteenth Century by the Ottoman Turks all the way to the Nineteenth Century with repeated attack by Egypt and Sudan. Actually, the hostility toward Ethiopia dates back to the time of the Pharaohs once those civilizations realized that Ethiopia was the mother of the waters of the Nile and that they were dependent on the good grace of the Ethiopians in letting the Nile to flow unhindered. However, what distinguishes Ethiopia is that its civilization and high culture was an indigenous magnificence of mastery of all kinds of World�s and often mankind�s �firsts,� such as the domestication of wheat and barely, the breeding of domestic animals, concept of the divine and the spiritual hereafter, and it being the beginning and birth place of humankind and humanity. 

I am not in any way endorsing the politically loaded schemes of the World Bank system run by a former Wall-Street bond trader whose perception of �development� is narrow and cursory. No one who was a banker, bond trader, money manager et cetera should lead a development Bank of that size with impact of such magnitude. The future presidents of such a world development bank ought to be recruited from social scientists such as sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists et cetera and not some Wall Street currency manipulators and stock market gamblers. One need not go far to see the devastation of �structural adjustment� and the so called fiscal discipline imposed as a condition on borrowing nations around the world. All such insensitive bulldozing activities of the World Bank cum IMF remind me of Abraham Maslow�s poignant remark that every problem looks like a nail to a man whose only tool is a hammer. 
There is enough blame to spread around the world for the condition developing nations are pushed into. For example, the Arab nations of the area should have used a fraction of the trillions of dollars they have invested in Europe and the United States, in such life saving projects of building dams and energy source for the benefit of the people of the region who are their partners in more ways than can be counted. The Arabs in turn would have made as much money as they earned from passive investment in communities in the West, communities that despise and abuse them. If dictatorial systems of governments and repressive social systems persist as they do now in such nations, before long violent revolutions would create havoc in the region. 

No one will benefit from such occurrence, and least of all the rulers of Arab nations. 
It is unbelievable that the very �water tower of Africa� i.e., Ethiopia, with thirteen major river basins and a number of deep lakes, could be experiencing water shortage and persistent hunger and famine. On the other hand, neighboring nations such as Egypt and Sudan, with less than an inch of rainfall yearly and with no contribution to the waters of the Nile, are engaged in damming and having their desert bloom with massive farms and great agricultural industry using the waters of Ethiopian rivers. Here is a graphic example of the inequity and injustice of the United States and European Nations pouring hundred of billions of dollars while Ethiopia is thrown crumbs. Whose water are we talking about here? Yes, we all know water is a natural resource, you may say a gift from God, so is oil or gold et cetera. The world must, acknowledge the fact that water is a commodity just like other natural resource which can be quantified with market value. Ethiopia must evaluate its rights as the originating and source country to its river waters and charge a yearly fee from Egypt and Sudan for the use of its river waters. [We suggest that people visit and read the masterly writings of Daniel Kendie, PhD, and Yosef Yacob, PhD on the Blue Nile posted in www.tecolahagos.com website.] 

Conclusion
I hold that the growing number of prostitutes in Ethiopia is due to several reasons such as our ill-conceived attempt of �modernization,� the violence of our successive oppressive governments, our lack of focused development programs, the sabotage by governments of other nations, and the relentless pullback of some of our antiquated social relationships. We had a well-developed social structure that allowed us to survive for thousands of years due to its great moral content, but we failed to use such advantage as the basis of our modernization effort. Instead, we adopted the surface characteristics of style of dress, metropolis, conspicuous consumption et cetera without internalizing the building pillars of Western civilizations such as education, democratic governance, human rights et cetera. Because we were simply in love with the convenience of modern life, we tried very hard to adopt its superfluous aspects first. As a result of such effort, incongruity and misplaced priorities are all around us, and thus we suffer greatly. 

If such is our reality, why then hold responsible the European nations and the United States for our inadequacy and mistakes? I believe that we all are �our brothers� keepers,� and I believe also that with great power and great wealth comes great responsibility to the world and to all human beings. Other than the moral reasons of responsibility indicated, there are also a number of utilitarian and pragmatic reasons for the involvement of powerful nations in the political and economic lives of weak and poor nations. There is no denying that we are all interdependent on each other at different levels and to varying depths, nevertheless, in meaningful manner in all instances. Thus, my criticism of the Governments of the United States or those of the European nations is meant to express an acute yearning for their close, friendly and meaningful relationship and involvement in the social, political, and economic life of Ethiopia.//

Tecola W. Hagos, 
February 23, 2005