Is Ato Meles’s confidence about the economy warranted, or a permanent election ploy?
The prime minister exudes optimism about the Ethiopian economy, although reality and many citizens and foreign observers do not agree with his assessment. As far as citizens are concerned, in the past government pledges and statistics have promised them the sky and the moon, even when inflation has been in double-digits for over two years now, food prices are skyrocketing and the danger of drought has been imminent and crushing. For fact check, look around to see what the common person is confronted with on a daily basis. Ato Meles is now claiming that, at its worst, the economy would grow in 2008/09 by 9.2 percent, if not 10.2 percent. The question why economic growth numbers are barely impacted by the huge number of adverse factors the country keeps on experiencing, especially in the last eighteen months, is becoming a miracle of epic proportions. Ominously, poverty alleviation is no longer government priority, the evidence of which is its rampant increase in both rural and urban are
