Hope for Ethiopia?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ethiopia's economic growth has been hailed as a miracle by some, but it is a country deeply divided along the lines of ethnicity and wealth, and in recent years has been wracked by violence.
New Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has made a public apology to the hundreds who have died and hundreds of thousands displaced, but will his words be enough to bring harmony?
We hear from an Ethiopian medical student who fled to Yemen several months ago for fear of persecution, and ask Dr Awol Allo, a human rights lawyer and émigré from Ethiopia, about the reasons for the conflict, which prompted the government to declare a national state of emergency earlier this year. Ed Butler also visits a Chinese-built shoe factory south of the capital Addis Ababa to hear about pay and working conditions.
Plus, what has been the international business reaction to the unrest? Has it deterred investment? We speak to Arusha Mehta, from clothing firm Goldmark Ltd, William Attwell from Frontier Strategy Group, and Zemenedeh Negatu, the Ethiopian-American chairman of the Fairfax Africa Fund, which invests heavily in the country.
(Picture: A protest against government crackdowns in the Oromo and Amhara regions of Ethiopia. Credit: Gulshan Khan,Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, we're talking Ethiopia, |
| 0:11.5 | an African country seemingly divided between the haves and the have-nots. |
| 0:16.1 | Single Italian group from Northern Ethiopia, the country's economy was controlled by them. And the protest |
| 0:22.5 | is really about restructuring this fundamental anomaly. But others see the country as an economic |
| 0:30.4 | miracle, promising to transform East Africa. There's 85 million Chinese jobs that are looking to |
| 0:37.1 | offload to other countries. |
| 0:38.9 | There's a huge opportunity, and that's what you're going to start seeing in the future years, |
| 0:43.1 | filling up these massive factories. |
| 0:45.0 | That's the kind of vision that's in place. |
| 0:47.1 | What's really going on in Ethiopia? |
| 0:49.4 | Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:04.8 | Oh! from the BBC. The sound of gunfire from Ethiopian soldiers there to protest in the country's central |
| 1:10.8 | highlands earlier this year. We've had to protest in the country's central highlands earlier this year. |
| 1:12.9 | We've had renewed unrest in the country leading to a second state of emergency being declared in February. |
| 1:19.1 | Altogether, over the last two years, anti-government protests have seen the deaths of hundreds of people in Amhara and Aromia, |
| 1:25.9 | the nation's two most populous provinces. |
| 1:28.2 | It's been an intractable and frightening conflict for a part of the region, |
| 1:31.9 | already plagued by violence and regular drought. |
| 1:34.5 | This week, though, there was perhaps a glimmer of hope. |
| 1:37.2 | A new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, |
| 1:39.6 | the first to be appointed from the country's largest ethnic group, |
| 1:42.9 | the Aromo, has made this striking declaration to protest us. |
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