Lalibela, Ethiopia Luca Attanasio
It was 1984. In the aftermath of the terrible news report by the BBC on the effects of famine in Ethiopia, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure quickly brought together the top bands of the time and recorded the famous song Do They Know it’s Christmas.
They raised a lot of money and international awareness of the enormous tragedy. But by then, the number of deaths had already exceeded one million and Ethiopia was in a limbo of despair and abandonment made worse by a harsh dictatorship and recurrent famine. Emigration was one of the few hopes for its 40 million inhabitants.
Thirty two years later, Ethiopia, free from the tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam and from the conflict with neighbouring Eritrea (although there are still sources of tension on the border), has embarked on the path of development and is now an incredibly different country.
With a population of 95 million, Ethiopia has broken every record for economic growth. According to the World Bank, Ethiopia is first among African nations in terms of economic growth and among the top five worldwide. For the past 10 years, its GDP has been growing steadily by 10-11%, enrolment in primary schools is now approaching 100%, while the number of universities has risen to 34.
Behind such rapid and fruitful development is the so-called Agricultural Development Led Industrialisation strategy which the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who died at the age of 57 in 2012, strongly supported. The current prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, has maintained perfect project continuity, focusing on the 10 million citizens employed in land cultivation and cattle farms.
“The first great goal we reached,” explains Gebreab Barnabas, the former Minister of Health for Tigray, a key player in the war that ousted the dictator Mengistu and his Derg in 1991 – “is food self-sufficiency. If we continue like this, in a very short time we’ll even be able to achieve the goal of food security.” Meanwhile, the country does not depend on other countries and, in spite of the famine that hit the country last spring and which was worse than that of the mid-80s, nobody is starving.
Market
Ethiopia’s free market style still has a large statist footprint. The supply of light, electricity, water, and mobile and fixed telephone lines, for example, is centralised. There are no international banks and the only resources they continually focus on are their own.
“People are the money – the politician from Tigray says, glowing – we don’t need more money. We also adopted a green strategy that allows us, on the one hand, to be almost completely free from the need for oil and, on the other hand, to depend substantially on airdrop power which we produce ourselves and export to Djibouti, Kenya, and Sudan. Up to 20 years ago, we only had 3% of forest coverage, now we have 15%.”
Yet in the rural areas, the signs of such rapid development are yet to be seen. People still fight to survive, struggle to achieve an adequate standard of life quality and health assistance, little children go to school but mind the animals until late at night.
“Many people still leave here for Europe, because life is still very hard,” said Sr Maria Luisa Caruso, head of the community of Sisters of Jeanne-Antide in Shire, in the extreme north on the border with Eritrea.
They have been here since 2003, when they were called by the Bishop of Adigrat to ensure the first presence of a Catholic congregation in the area. Now four of them run a primary school packed with children (with an average of 60-65 students per class), promoting educational and professional activities for girls, as well as strategies to support women’s rights.
Service
Most importantly of all, they manage a free health centre [unlike the national health service, ed.] which, thanks to the efforts of 28 health care workers, cares for 40,000 people a year. “There’s a hospital near here,” says Sr Constance, the manager, “but the poor come to us because they don’t have to pay for the bed and medication. We do all we can to guarantee this for everybody. Until now they have managed very well.”
“But now we are facing a historic challenge,” echoed Sr Maria Luisa, “the opening of a maternal and child department.”
Ethiopia is making a huge effort to attain the millennium goal of zero maternal and infant mortality. The city of Shire, aware of the excellent level of healthcare that the Health Centre has achieved in recent years, has asked the sisters to expand it and to devote their efforts to births.
“To continue to carry out our activities, we are, in a way, forced by the government to include a mother and child unit at our centre. But it is with great pleasure that we respond more effectively to the needs of these people and take the side of women and children.”
Shire has the feel of a border town. Located about 50 miles from Eritrea, this town seems to remind visitors of the drama in the neighboring country. In this area, there are four refugee camps housing more than 110,000 Eritreans.
They have fled from the hell created by Eritrea’s paranoid president and prime minister Isaias Afwerki, who has been in power since 1993. Eritrea’s 6.38 million inhabitants live in constant fear and around 3,000 people are leaving the country every month.
“They killed members of my family who refused to do their military service [which can last over 30 years and subjects men and women to all kinds of violence],” a refugee at the Shimbelba camp whispers to me, wishing to remain anonymous, “so I decided to run away; there was no future for me.”
The future instead seems to belong to Ethiopia. Although a significant portion of its population is still illiterate, civil rights, by the admission of the politicians interviewed, are struggling to gain full acceptance, and even though democratic institutions are still showing their youth, the country has burst onto the African scene like a lion.
Ethiopia now aims to play a role as a true leader and peacemaker over a large area. There are 23 refugee camps within its border sheltering over 650,000 refugees, mainly from Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia. When Obama came here in July 2015, after having demanded greater openness towards the rights of opposition groups he had nothing but high praise for this country.
Obama also praised Ethiopia’s troops as they had played a key role in weakening the Al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab group in Somalia, and added: “We do not need to send our own marines in to do the fighting: The Ethiopians are tough fighters.”
They may still not know it’s Christmas, certainly they know it’s resurrection time.