The rise of the “baksheesh state” in Ethiopia My long time readers by now know that I mint my own words and phrases whenever I find it necessary to convey…
Clare Short has won! Congratulations, Clare! Brava! Last week, Clare Short, Chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), succeeded in bullying the EITI Board members into voting to admit…
Meles Zenawi when he was alive and his apostles today (“Melesistas”) keep playing us in the Diaspora like a cheap fiddle. They make us screech, shriek, scream and shout by…
Alemayehu G. Mariam Ethio-Corruption, Inc. (Unlimited) “The people of Ethiopia are being bled dry. No matter how hard they try to fight their way out of absolute destitution and poverty,…
First, Why is Africa Poor? George Ayittey, the renowned Ghanaian economist and president of the Free Africa Foundation swears that “Africa is poor because she is not free”. Like Ayittey,…
By Alemayehu G. Mariam Author’s Note: On June 16, 2008, I published a special commentary (reproduced below in its original form) explaining the sysetmatic use of disinformation by Meles Zenawi, the dictator in…
There is the economics of Adam Smith, the intellectual father of capitalism. There is Levitt & Dubner’s freakonomics of weird stuff. Then there is the fakeonomics (economics by gimmickry) of Meles…
“There are lies, lies and implausible lies,” to quote Meles Zenawi, the dictator-cum-economic spinmeister of Ethiopia. Last week, Zenawi told a snickering Parliament a story that is the equivalent of…
For the past several months, I have been commenting on the findings of the World Bank’s “Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia”, a 448-page report covering eight sectors (health, education, rural water…