The idea of incorporating smaller towns presently under the jurisdiction of the Oromia Regional State into the Addis Ababa City Administration is a totally senseless strategy. This is not good neither for the Oromia townships nor Addis itself. For the Oromia townships, incorporation amounts to mass eviction of poor farmers from their land. Once the townships are incorporated, their land will inevitably be transferred to so-called investors who are hungry for land at the moment. Where are the poor farmers going to end up then? In the street? Pushed further afar to the periphery? Why should millions of farmers be condemned to become landless wanderers in their own country to benefit the few, and the privileged ones? For Addis too, bloating beyond its current size will not be healthy. What is necessary at the moment is making Addis more attractive for its residents than making it unsustainably big. The city is suffering from a crippling shortage of public services. Attention should, thus, be focused on reducing these problems than planning for how to expand Addis to an unsustainable size. Plus, by limiting activities around Addis, productive capital resources and human talent could easily be diverted to regional cities that have so far been hemorrhaging capital and human talent to Addis. If there is an investor who is currently unable to get land in and around Addis, he/she has to go to Jimma, Harar, Dessie, Awassa, etc and invest there. Yes, those are in Ethiopia too and they have vast amount of land resources waiting to be developed. I have said this before, the more Addis is allowed, and in this case, encouraged, to develop far ahead of the rest of the country, the more it gets crowded and inhospitable due to an overflow of capital and labor from the relatively poorly developed parts of the country. One way of making Addis attractive and hospitable is to create competing cities in different parts of the country and the current plan goes against that principle. It is a costly and an absurd plan!
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 21:50:16 +0000
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