Just in time for New Years, the Ethiopian capital is abuzz with the latest punishment from God because we just refuse to get rid of Prime Minister! Oh what a love affair we are having with Meles Zenawi and his many games! We were so caught up in the rapture that is the Commodity Exchange that we neglected to notice that some as yet, unclaimed, unidentified and undiagnosed disease has let loose in Addis!
Now that diseases are running rampant, could locusts and the four horsemen of the apocalypse be far behind? Must everyone conspire to ruin our capitalist dreams?
Actually we have decided it is not God that is punishing us! Obviously it is the Diaspora that has conjured up this unnamed, unclaimed, non-epidemic in an attempt to ruin your new years’ plans. Damn Diaspora!
You see this is the problem with the Third World. Just when you introduce something as shiny and as impressive as a commodity exchange, surely an instrument of First World Arrival Status, here comes some Third World Problem like a monstrous disease to ruin everything. Why is it that Africans can’t have nice things? Gosh! We have been so looking forward to initial public offering shindigs and closing deals once we build our stock market! But now it all seems ruined!
Does this mean we should not count on our year-end bonuses?
What is this disease threatening to cause financial and social chaos in Ethiopia? The officials won’t confirm.
We wonder if it is the same way that whenever someone dies of AIDS in Ethiopia, they kept telling us it was Nefas. So at first we thought, WOW why is this disease call “wind?” Then we thought WOW! What a lot of Pneumonia cases there must be in Ethiopia! Then we discovered that every family, every house, every town and village has several Nefas stories. Although the name was innocuous, the disease was deadly and took out generations in the same family.
Isn’t it amusing how fatal diseases have serene names in Amharic—AIDS is wind and diabetes is sugar. No doubt this latest scourge will be called sparkles or cotton candy. Even our language is in denial about our problems.
Since the whole denying AIDS is an issue and refusing to call a rose a rose was such a rousing success not only in Ethiopia but also in Africa, let’s just repeat the same cycle of denial, cover-ups and diversion one more time! With a thousand people catching this waterborne disease daily, won’t it be a hoot to just sit and watch as panic grips an already crippled population. Who has the champagne to toast because clearly we are not touching the water! Ambo, anyone?
According to almost all sources, the Disease Whose Name No One Dare Speak is cholera. Dagmawi even reports that the Ethiopian government has banned use of the word “cholera.” Can the Prime Minister’s regime get any more surreal? George Orwell couldn’t have dreamed up a better setting for his dystopia.
“Today the Ethiopian Government declared that the word “Cholera” will be stricken from Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromiya and all other languages, including Geez, and Jesus Christ’s language of Aramaic. The word is now illegal and its use will be considered treasonous. Punishment for disobedience is Death.”
Yes, Meles. The big boys over in Europe, China and America will be soooo impressed when you tell them you can’t control the outbreak of diarrhea in your capital. Maybe you can still distract them by pointing at the Commodity Exchange and the Sheraton. “Look! Look! We can have dinner for the price of one family’s monthly or heck yearly salary!”
The outbreak of Cholera (let’s call things what they are; it makes things much simpler!) is telling; a brief search into its origins and its impact reveals it is an issue of poverty. One handy internet source explains the issue as follows:
The disease is transferred from person to person through ingestion of water contaminated with the cholera bacterium, usually from feces or other effluent. The source of the contamination is typically other cholera patients when their untreated diarrhea discharge is allowed to get into waterways or into ground water or drinking water supplies.
We bet you are just over the moon with joy that we spent money building fancy hotels and commodity exchanges! Disease prevention be damned! The way to dig ourselves out of poverty is to create a big ole distraction somewhere else and hope no one looks at the huge pink elephant in the room labeled “Utter Disaster."
Can we put aside the ostentatious “development” plans that the junta has in place for us and instead focus on basic necessities? Access to clean water and sanitation are fundamental human rights issues which the government has been reticent to address. Instead, the concentration is on building playgrounds for rich ex-pats and their friends and finding deluded economists to sell pipe dreams of an Ethiopian version of “Wall Street” to the public. Meanwhile, where is our clean water?
What will be interesting is how these code words for the disease, “Acute Watery Diarrohea,” will play out as the cholera fighting and prevention resources arrive from the various international entities. The United Nations has already dispatched its crew. Will the esteemed and all knowing Prime Minister turn them away, assuring them that all is under control? Move along, now. Nothing to see here. Let’s dispense with the euphemisms. A dictatorship is a dictatorship is a dictatorship. A regime that can’t feed a population, prevent an outbreak and stifles even the mere discussion of diseases is a failed state. Face it, Prime Minister. No one is going to laud you for your governance when a disease whose stench reveals your incompetence and ultimately your disdain for the population.
The current tragicomedy state of Ethiopia is too absurd for words. If it wasn’t the lives of 80 million that Meles was playing with, the Mitmita Girls would be dying with laughter. Where else but in Prime Minister’s version of our Ethiopia would a commodity exchange be discussed quite seriously in the same breathe as “cholera.” We understand quite well that looting and pillaging a nation necessitates a docile and demoralized population. We suppose instead of just letting us watch as he pillages our wealth, he has decided it might be better to also watch us die.
We will leave you with this passage from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera. The protagonist of the novel and the love of his life are trying to figure out how to stay on a ship, surrounded by nothing but their love, blocking out the intrusions of a cruel world which judges their union.
“and speaking hypothetically,” [Florentino Ariza] said, “Would it be possible to make a trip without stopping, without cargo and without coming into any port, without anything?"
The Captain said that it was possible, but only hypothetically. The [ship] had business commitments that Florentino Ariza was more familiar with than he was, it had contracts for cargos, for passengers, mail, and a great deal more, and most of them are unbreakable. The only thing that would allow them to bypass all that was a case of cholera on board. The ship will be quarantined, it will hoist a yellow flag and sail in a state of emergency. Captain Samaritano had needed to do just that on several occasions because of the many cases of cholera along the river, although later the health authorities had obligated the doctors to sign death certificates that called the cases common dysentery. Besides many times in the history of the river the yellow plague flag had been flown in order to evade taxes, or to avoid picking up an undesirable passenger or to elude inopportune inspections.”
We wonder for what purpose and to what ends the Prime Minister will use the yellow flag of cholera in Ethiopia.
Even in this time of cholera, we profess our love for the women and men of Ethiopia who despite the unbelievably bad odds against them continue to live, resist and work towards a day free of cholera and Meles Zenawi.
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