Lessons from Ethiopia about delayed projects and self-doubting population

A few years ago, I used to frequent Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital to largely attend meetings at the African Union headquarters.

If you kept away for a few months, you would return to a city that you wouldn’t recognize. A new flyover would exist within a few months. You would see people laying down railway lines and find these huge buses providing public transport.

Addis Ababa in the mid 2000s was a construction site that was turning slums into hotels of certain status and other infrastructural projects. They seemed to deliver their projects without much delays. One thing I also noticed about Ethiopians is that they claimed to have the biggest everything.

A cab driver or a university professor would quickly tell you that they had the biggest market in Africa — the Merkato, equivalent of our Owino. They claimed they had the largest number of cows on the continent, biggest airline, largest number of producers of leather products and coffee, biggest army and even the most beautiful women.

Although some of these claims may be true and others could be debatable, Ethiopians have come to believe that they have to do the biggest things. And they go ahead and do them. Just the other day, Ethiopian Airlines launched perhaps the biggest hotel in Africa.

Ethiopian Skylight Hotel in Addis Ababa boasts of 1,024 modern rooms. That is perhaps why they decided to utilize River Nile a lot bit more, they didn’t go around building a 100 Megawatts dam.

They went for 5,150MW. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that was launched a few weeks ago is, true to Ethiopian style, billed as one of the largest infrastructural projects on the continent. And like roads and railway lines in Addis Ababa, the hydroelectricity dam, which cost US$5 billion to build was completed in 14 short years.

It had many challenges such as protests from Egypt over the use of River Nile — like they do whenever anyone else wants to use the Nile waters, funding, technical skills and even bloody wars. But the project never got derailed.

Compare it to the Grand Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo, perhaps the world’s wealthiest country, and you will understand what I am saying. Or just look at some of the countries where it takes a year or more to build a single kilometer of a dual carriage road without interchanges and bridges.

To build the GERD, Ethiopia got most of the funding from local contributions in form of donations, and selling of bonds locally and to Ethiopians in the diaspora among other sources.

They got very little foreign debt to achieve their project which ideally should ensure affordable electricity access to many people in Ethiopia while exporting some to neighboring countries thereby getting much more foreign revenue.

Ethiopia is not some country in America, Europe or Asia. It is actually considered part of East Africa and a mere two hours by air from Entebbe. They face similar challenges like us. Wars, famine, draught and diseases among others.

Like Uganda, they are landlocked and depend a lot on agriculture. In fact, we have just toppled them as the largest coffee exporter on the continent. They still produce more coffee though only that they consume a lot of it domestically.

Since we are so similar and ideally neighbors, what do they have in their DNA that we don’t? How can they run an airline with more than 150 aircraft while we struggle with about six including leased ones? How can they build flyovers in Addis while we take decades to complete ours?

Or build small hydroelectricity dams with defaults while they complete mega ones? There is a need to dream big by technocrats and be intentional about building a culture that leads us to achieve our targets and on time.

We can have as many patriotic lectures as we wish but if people are driving over potholes every day and have them normalized as the way of life, we won’t achieve more ambitious targets like GERD. We will end up with a population that self-doubts itself.

Businesspeople will not dream of creating mega factories or big businesses. Their ambitions will remain importing a few containers from China, driving an old Landcruiser, building a storied house in a slummy area, and another in the village and a few apartments.

An ordinary Ethiopian seeing the country launching GERD or the largest hotel on the continent will dream of something as big.

djjuuko@gmail.com

The writer is a communication and visibility consultant.