Tag: corruption

  • Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival: Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki

    Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival: Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki

    Two Towering Figures–Giants and Lilliputians (Part 1) Across the sorrowful and entangled histories of Ethiopia and Eritrea, two figures loom with spectral intensity: Emperor Haile Selassie I and President Isaias Afwerki. Their shadows stretch across generations, ideologies, and geopolitical fault lines—each a master of power, each a paradox incarnate. At the outset of their reigns,

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  • Nepal: A Lesson for the PFDJ and the Youth

    Nepal: A Lesson for the PFDJ and the Youth

    Every era popularizes certain names—mainly names of rulers and prominent people of the time. Since the nineteen-forties and fifties, the name of a famous person that was often repeated in newspapers and radio bulletins has become popular; parents adopt the name for their babies. My aunt, (who is my cousin, but I called her aunt

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  • Eritrean Businesses: Between Loyalists and Others

    Eritrean Businesses: Between Loyalists and Others

    In recent months, the Eritrean government has been carrying out a heightened surveillance on the Eritrean commercial sector, and reports of spies working for the security departments is focused on merchants and traders suspected of transacting in cash, in violation of the government directive that requires them to deal in checks and not in cash. Since

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  • Pirates Of The PFDJ

    Pirates Of The PFDJ

    In 1976, when the Derg announced the change of King Haile Selassie’s birr in Ethiopia, the general public was reluctant to surrender the currency to the bank. People perceived the birr as a currency “guaranteed with gold” though by then the world had long dropped the system of defining the value of currency with gold.

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