Tyrants as Plato observed in his famous Republic are hallucinatory. They shut off their five senses from reality. Their senses, when they are intact mislead them, as Descartes, the modern philosopher may add. They hide behind abstractions. They are melancholic, ruthless, inconsistent and prone to lie. This is the case with our existing leaders.

The blind Prime Minister had the audacity to recently foolishly speculate that the circumstances for the possibility of uprising do not exist in Ethiopia, and this in spite of gruesome facts that,
(1) Ethiopia is ranked at 210th out of a total of 210 countries;
(2) That Ethiopia by any measure is the 2nd poorest nation in the world;
(3) That it is at the bottom of the list of the three weighed indicators of well being; (4) that 64.9% of school children are not enrolled;
(4) In health, child mortality, it stands at 38%;
(5) 85.7% lack electricity;
(6) 54% do not get any cleaning water;
(7) 89.5% do not have any cooking oil;
(8) It has one of the smallest economies in Africa inspite of its population, accounting only for the continent’s 1% National domestic product.
(9) 90% of the nation’s 77 million people live beyond the poverty line (Getachew Begashaw, “Acute Poverty amidst “Double Digit Economic Growth”: Contradiction in Terms, Addis Voice, 2010)

Look how miserable Ethiopian material reality is; look further the decency of our people to put up with this condemned life; one does not have to think hard about what must be done, provided that organizers go to work and start the peaceful uprising, lead by the people and fed by their passions and intelligences which is being squandered in shacks and tin house.

Getachew rightly concludes that,

Indeed, the cycle of poverty in Ethiopia can only be broken by abolishing the ethno-centric dictatorship that is characterized by the absolute monopoly and domination of the economy and politics of the country through ethnic-party-government merger. Therefore, as pronounced in the recently released declaration, for example, “The New York Manifesto”, the focus of all Ethiopians, at home and abroad, should be on changing the current dictatorship of ethno-centric party and government.