Friday, October 3, 2025
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HEALING HEARTS MINDS AND ATTITUDES

“though lives are being lost daily by the pandemic, hearts are growing and acts of kindness are everywhere.”

It appears there is nothing in the world we can talk about these days without the topic being somehow connected to the corona virus. I have been unpacking some of my observations and experiences, logging a range of reactions – good and bad – of this scourge that has spread over the earth in a matter of a few short months. I start with myself. I travel a lot and for decades I have been that curious looking passenger with face covered sanitizing around my seat including table and all ‘touchibles’ upon boarding. I am also the one that opens doors with tissue, wipes down groceries before packing them away, keeps hand sanitizer in my bag and offers fist-bumps or bows with hand over heart, for as long as I can remember. Feel free to judge me – while you wash your hands – please. Now don’t get me wrong, I am a hugger and love to greet kith and kin with genuine warmth but I have worked and lived on the Continent, visited numerous countries and raised 10 healthy children by being conscious of hygiene and healthy eating. So I confess, I am happy everyone is now on board. I am proud that Ethiopia has a ring tone about hand-washing. I am elated that public and private sector leaders from President Sahle Work to Dr. Eleni GebreMedhin are reinforcing what mama taught you growing up – wash your hands!
Inadvertently, has this horrible virus caused us to hit the re-set button on society’s attitude on something as simple as clean hands and proper hygiene, one of the best ways to thwart certain illnesses? This is crucial for Africa, as we have not felt the full brunt of the mysterious virus wreaking havoc on the world. Are we also resetting attitudes on either side of the social spectrum in regards to human relations? Recently, this country known for its hospitality towards foreigners has seen an increase in harassment, assaults and even denial of services to non-Ethiopians, right here in Addis Abeba based on virus instilled fear, suspicion and/or good ole mean spiritedness. On the other hand Ethiopian cordiality has been expressed by some advocating for a group of Italian tourists who reportedly refused to return to Italy based on reports of more illness and deaths than even China to date. I hold a different position, but I won’t judge, instead I washed my hands of the topic leaving it for others to debate…need I say excuse the pun? But seriously do your part and wash your hands.
Finally, though lives are being lost daily by the pandemic, hearts are growing and acts of kindness are everywhere and we need to focus and promote the positive while acknowledging and healing the negative. Scenes of self quarantined balcony singers serenading health workers every evening in Italy and Spain are moving. Free online platforms and tutorials are popping up for the nearly one billion students being homeschooled due to closures. Home based chefs in the USA, are now receiving a host of online options to keep them afloat by Chefthanded, one of the fast growing online solutions, supporting a large industry sequestered at home. And some good Samaritans are even offering free meals and groceries to the most vulnerable. But in what I consider a sweet surprise close to home was when I saw my sister friend, Yvette Noel-Schure’s instagram (IG) post. One of the busiest women in the music and entertainment industry, Yvette took time out of her busy day to talk to small children about the changes in their world due to the virus. Using her calm cool Caribbean aunty voice, she read a book to children, showing them some of the colorful illustrations as she explained culture and the locale of the author in Africa, Ethiopia specifically. According to award winning Jamaican journalist Vinette Pryce for Caribbean Life, the “Grenadian trailblazing publicist Yvette Noel-Schure is now Executive Producer at Tempo Network, the premiere Caribbean broadcast media domain that disseminates noteworthy lifestyles and cultural achievements from and about the region.” Yvette, CEO of Schure Media Group, is also known for accepting Roc Nation’s offer to “re-energize” the career of Jamaican dancehall artist, Buju Banton. All of this and more, the born in the 60’s dynamo cared enough to stop for a moment to help mom’s “run to the kitchen for a sandwich” while she read to the wee ones. It speaks volumes. We are not boasting here, but we are toasting which encourages even more good deeds. At this very daunting time, we all can and should help fill gaps in humanity noting the special role of art, books, music and more. Speaking of books Yvette was reading I LOVE LOCKS, written by me and she is best known as “Keeper of the Bey-Hive” the trusted publicist of Beyonce’. If she can find considerable time for acts of kindness, I challenge us to do the same, it’s healing.

Dr. Desta Meghoo is a Jamaican born
Creative Consultant, Curator and cultural promoter based in Ethiopia since 2005. She also serves as Liaison to the AU for the Ghana based, Diaspora African Forum.

Bersabel Mulat

Name: Bersabel Mulat

Education: Degree in Law

Company name: Hanbell Manufacturing Plc /Orera/

Title: Owner

Founded in: 2017

What it does: Designing leather products

HQ: Addis Ababa

Number of employees: 21

Startup Capital: 50,000 birr

Current capital: 3,000,000 birr

Reasons for starting the business: Interest in the filed

Biggest perk of ownership: Not giving up

Biggest strength: Dedicated to do my job

Biggest challenging: Getting accessories and inputs

Plan: Creating strong and big company

First career: None

Most interested in meeting: Oprah Winfrey

Most admired person: Everyone around me

Stress reducer: Praying

Favorite past time: Watching movies

Favorite book: The power

Favorite destination: Jerusalem

Favorite automobile: Cadillac

Nation braces for the worst

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On Friday, March 13, Minister of Health Lia Tadesse confirmed Ethiopia’s first Coronavirus case, and since then, cases have risen to nine, with the government launching a manhunt for several others who may have come into contact with the patients.
Following the numerous deaths and several cases of infection throughout the world, the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 virus a worldwide pandemic.
Several countries have been forced to close their borders, declaring nationwide lockdowns as a way to combat the deadly virus.
Ethiopia’s economy nose-dived ever since the first victim of corona virus was announced.
The increasing demand of health care expenditures and food items results an increase on the price of daily consumed goods. The fight against the pandemic will have a direct impact on the fiscal space. It will increase the cost of health care provision, in the form of costs for prevention, testing, identification, isolation and care.
According to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, it has formed a national task force to control the situation, “nationally the task force took measures on more than 3000 traders who were inflating price of goods illegally,” and also to help the public the government has prepared handmade sanitizers and distributed it in the capital.
In three days the number of victims has reached four and on Monday March 16, 2020 the government has decided to close schools across the country, including higher education, gatherings and sporting events for two weeks. However, in the next few days people were seen scrambling to get their hands on some sanitizers at public pharmacies.
The virus which started at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, China has shocked the world with its high spread which the World Health Organization (WHO) categorized the virus as a global pandemic.
Countries are closing borders, restricting mobility, instituting strict surveillance measures, establishing and operationalizing quarantines.
As an import dependent and supply constrained economy, one major channel through which the pandemic will be affecting the economy is through affecting imports. As of now, China, the manufacturing hub of the world and the number one import sourcing country for Ethiopia, is stuck. Middle Eastern countries, European Union and North America have also imposed their own flight restrictions. This means that importers could no more travel to make orders, freight forwarders could not effectively facilitate trade and transistors could not do the facilitation as they would normally do. Shipping lines will also be affected by the travel bans and it will take more time for cargo to be transported due to new protocols in terms of certification.
PM Abiy in his last remark stated that through the high spread of the corona internationally, the country’s dependence on imported items is difficult and to import needed items through this can cause delay and additional cost on projects and exporting rate of the country is declining, “the last few month growth rate of the country was good, but it may not continue” the economy remains weak he added.
Inflation has lately been increasing so fast that the annual inflation stands at 21.8%.
Real GDP growth slowed to an estimated 7.4% in 2019 from 7.7% in 2018, caused by social unrest and fiscal consolidation to stabilize the public debt.
In light of this, the COVID-19 pandemic will have multiple channels through which it will impose a burden on the economy.
Service providers are highly affected, in fear of the virus most of market centers and malls closed their doors for the coming couple of weeks. At the end of the week the prime minister has ordered night clubs and bars to be closed. Due to the sharp decline in travel, meetings and summits internationally and also nationally are cancelled, the hotel and tourism sector of the country is affected as anyone who enters the country from now on will be quarantined for 14 days.
Even if much of the negative effects of the virus relies on the weeks ahead and the struggling economy of the country although, it is affecting other aspects of the nation, including the religion and cultural aspects.
In his latest announcement the prime minister said due to the fear of the virus religions and religious activities held by gathering of people should be considered as one of the means of transmitting the virus. “They {religious leaders} should coordinate their acts towards preventing the spread of the virus,” he added.
On March 7, 2020 the government has announced that it has allocated 300 million birr to the fight against the virus. Also other private and public stake holders are also providing their effort to support the government but this seems to be small, compared to the risk related to the pandemic.
As the prime minister stated if the corona situation continues, the coming election may not be held at the planned time, “the board will study and assess the situations to give the right decision,” he said.

Endless war as profitable enterprise

“The collapse of the Libyan state has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of people and weapons destabilizing other countries throughout North Africa.” This statement came from the Soufan Group’s 24 January 2020 Intelligence brief, entitled “Fighting Over Access to Libya’s Energy Supplies”.
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Marine Colonel said that on 10 September 2015, President Barak Obama told him and several others assembled in the White House’s Roosevelt Room that “There’s a bias in Washington, DC toward war,” almost seven years into his presidency. At the time, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and others thought President Obama was thinking particularly of the tragic mistake he made by joining the intervention in Libya in 2011, ostensibly implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. President Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, had been rather outspoken at the time about heavier United States participation in yet another endless war then, and still, transpiring in Syria. President Obama however, was apparently having none of that.
The reason is that the Libya intervention not only lead to the grisly death of Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, and set in motion a brutal and continuing military conquest for the title of “who rules Libya,” invite outside powers from all over the Mediterranean to join the fray, and unleash a destabilising refugee flow across that inner sea, it also put the weaponry from one of the world’s largest arms caches into the hands of such groups as ISIS, al-Qaida, and others. Additionally, many of those formerly Libyan weapons were being used in Syria at that very moment.
Here, it is indeed imperative to to pose one crucial question: Why do presidents make such disastrous decisions like Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and, tomorrow perhaps, Iran? President Dwight Eisenhower answered this question, in large part, in 1961 by saying: “We must never let the weight of this combination – the military-industrial complex – endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”
Lawrence Wilkerson simply stated, today America is not composed of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the Complex that Eisenhower so precisely described is in fact, and in ways not even Eisenhower could have imagined, endangering the liberties and democratic processes of the United States. Lawrence Wilkerson noted that the Complex creates the “bias” that President Obama described. Moreover, today the United States Congress fuels the Complex with 738 billion dollar this year plus an unprecedented slush fund of almost 72 billion dollar more to the extent that the Complex’s writ on war has become inexhaustible, ever-lasting, and, as Eisenhower also said, “is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.”
Stewart Dalton, a noted military analyst argued that with respect to the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” an outcome not only in the long-term attributable to proper education but in the short-to-medium term principally inculcated by a responsible and capable “Fourth Estate,” there is an abysmal failure as well. The Complex for most of its nefarious purposes owns the media that matters, from the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, to its capital city’s modern organ, The Washington Post, to the financial community’s banner paper, The Wall Street Journal. All of these papers for the most part never met a decision for war they didn’t like. Only when the wars become “endless” do some of them find their other voices, and then it’s too late.
Stewart Dalton noted that not to be outdone by print journalism, the mainstream TV cable media features talking heads, some of them paid by members of the Complex or having spent their professional lives inside it, or both, to pontificate on the various wars. Again, they only find their critical voices when the wars become endless, are obviously being lost or stalemated, and are costing too much blood and treasure, and better ratings lie on the side of opposition to them.
United States Marine General Smedley Butler, once confessed to having been “a criminal for capitalism.” An apt description for General Butler’s times in the early days of the 20th century. Today, however, any military professional worth his salt as a citizen as well, like President Eisenhower, would have to admit that they too are criminals for the Complex, a card-carrying member of the capitalist state, to be sure, but one whose sole purpose, outside of maximizing shareholder profits, is facilitating the death of others at the hands of the state.
Here is another question: How else to describe accurately men, and now women, wearing multiple stars ceaselessly going before the people’s representatives in the Congress and asking for more and more taxpayer dollars? And the pure charade of the slush fund, known officially as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund and supposed to be strictly for operations in “Theaters of war”, makes a farce of the military budgeting process. According to General Smedley Butler, most members of Congress should hang their heads in shame at what they have allowed to happen annually with this slush fund.
And Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s words at the Center for Strategic and International Studies very recently, ostensibly spoken to illustrate “new thinking” at the Pentagon with regard to budgeting, suggest no indication of real change in the military’s budget, just a new focus, one that promises not to diminish cash outlays but to increase them. But rightfully so, Mark Esper does indicate where some of the blame lies as he glibly accuses the Congress of adding to already bloated budget requests from the Pentagon: “I’ve been telling the Pentagon now for two and a half years that our budgets aren’t gonna get any better – they are where they are – and so we have to be much better stewards of the taxpayer’s dollar. … And, you know, Congress is fully behind that. But then there’s that moment in time when it hits their backyard, and you have to work your way through that.”
But Defense Secretary Mark Esper continued in a far more telling manner: “We’re at this moment in time. We have a new strategy. …We have a lot of support from Congress. … We have to bridge this gap now between what was Cold War-era systems and the counter-insurgency, low-intensity fight of the last ten years, and make this leap into great power competition with Russia and China – China principally. If the old Cold War brought sometimes record military budgets, we can expect the new cold war with China to outstrip those amounts by orders of magnitude. And who is it that decided that we needed a new cold war anyway?”
To understand this explicitly, we need only examine the futile attempts in the past few years to wrest back the power to make war from the executive branch, the branch that when equipped with the power to make war, as James Madison warned, is most likely to bring tyranny. Madison, the real “pen” in the process of writing the United States Constitution, made certain that it put the war power in the hands of the Congress. Nonetheless, from President Truman to President Trump, almost every United States president has usurped it in one way or another.
The recent attempts by certain members of Congress to use this constitutional power simply to remove America from the brutal war in Yemen, have fallen to the Complex’s awesome power. It matters not that the bombs and missiles of the Complex fall on school buses, hospitals, funeral processions, and other harmless civilian activities in that war-torn country. The dollars pour in to the coffers of the Complex. That is what matters. That is all that matters. There will come a day of reckoning; there always is in the relations of nations. The names of the world’s imperial hegemons are indelibly engraved in the history books. From Rome to Britain, they are recorded there. Nowhere, however, is it recorded that any of them are still with us today. They are all gone into the dustbin of history.