ADDIS ABABA – A few days before fire burned down Ethiopia’s historic Taitu Hotel, a young woman reads out a satire in the company of a live jazz band:
A drop is just water but pierces the rock,
Let’s make noise till the nation wakes up,
Was my advice to you before I now know
That my whole idea is futile and hollow.
When film director and actor Meron Getnet read her satirical poem, it was like a lasting tribute to a country that has time and again failed to shrug off tyranny and rise up to honor.
Gone is Taitu Hotel along with the Jazzamba, where the gifted instrumentalists that kept Meron company used to play.
Taitu Hotel, EPRDF and ARSON
When on Monday the landmark hotel was going up in smoke, fire fighters began work after one hour, when the hotel was largely destroyed.
Witnesses said distance couldn’t be a reason as the fire station was only a five-minute drive away. The fire fighters were haggling how much they should be paid before the raging fire was brought under control and the hotel saved.
But ‘haggling’ was a cover-up. Well-informed sources say it is in the interest of the ruling party to keep destroying historical landmarks like Taitu’s, whose founder was the wife of Emperor Menelik II, a leader Ethiopians credit as the first modernizer of the country. Menelik is also hailed for leading a huge Ethiopian force that crushed Italian colonial invaders at the 1896 Battle of Adwa.
And such credits are what upset the ruling party, which has lived demonizing Emperor Menelik as a divider and conqueror of “nations and nationalities.”
“Taitu Hotel is destroyed as the work of an arsonist, and there is no better arsonist than EPRDF,” one source with close ties to the ruling party told Ethiomedia by phone. How many private businesses have been burned down because the ruling party wants to dominate the market, asked the source.
“If they can’t send you to prion,” he quipped, “they burn you down.”
Without the need for evidence, the foreign media may report Ethiopia as one of the fastest economies in Africa. For the citizens of the country, however, they believe their country is one of the failed states in Africa reeling under a regime that is not only a tyrant but also a merciless arsonist.
Source: Ethiomedia editor@ethiomedia.com