The Oromia
Investment Commission is to grant Ethiopia’s flagship company, the
Ethiopian Shipping Lines (ESL), a 238,000sqm plot near the town of
Dukem to build a dry port facility that will also be used by Comozar
(PTY) Ltd, the South African company that won a 25-year concession
to run the Ethio-Djibouti Railway Enterprise.
The management
company plans to increase the railway’s transport capacity to 1.5
million tonnes in five years, importing 46 locomotives and 600
wagons.
In the early
1970s, the train line’s heyday, the company had transported close to
450,000tn a year. Its capacity has deteriorated quite shockingly
since then; it has only five operational locomotives, though another
four are expected to resume service soon, say company sources.
The company wants to have a depot inside Ethiopia that could receive
cargo as fast as possible from the Port of Djibouti, accommodating
between 50,000 to 70,000tn. It presented its request to the Ministry
of Transport and Communications a month ago.
A high level
meeting held on Wednesday, June 14, at the Prime Minister’s office
to discuss procedures and costs that involve goods in transit, fell
short of convincing Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who chaired the
meeting.
Hardly anyone
assembled was prepared to answer the Prime Minister’s question of
why the study being presented suggests a dry port facility should be
established in the outskirt of Addis Abeba and not anywhere else.
Negotiations
between MIDROC Group and Somaliland over the management concession
of the Port of Berbera have collapsed, after authorities in the
self-styled republic rejected the proposal, reliable sources
disclosed.
Talks between
MIDROC and Somaliland officials began two months ago, spurred on by
the Ethiopian government’s October 2005 decision to recognize the
Port of Berbera as an alternative to the Port of Djibouti. The two
parties had signed a memorandum of understanding in November 2005.
Subsequently,
MIDROC experts travelled to the Port, 964Km east of Addis Abeba, to
prepare the terms of agreement. They had submitted a proposal to
Somaliland’s Ministry of Finances.
Neway G. Ab,
chief economic advisor to the Prime Minister, Ahmed Tussa, state
minister of Trade and Industry, and Ambassador Vicki Huddleston,
charge D’Affairs at the U.S. Embassy, pictured at the Sheraton on
Wednesday, June 13. They were attending a lecture by Bob Koopman,
chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, a
federal agency accountable to Congress.
Mr. Koopman
argued that tariff cuts alone are not a miracle when countries
venture into trade liberalisation. It has to be supported by
important domestic policy reforms such as identifying comparative
advantage, efficiency at the customs, productivity and cost
structure.
“It is great to
get tariff cuts from our trading partners,” he told participants,
which included Mekonnen Manyazewal, state minister of Finance and
Economic Development. “But, what determines the bottom line is how
much it costs to ship it out.”
Neway could not
agree less. He said policy big bangs do not necessarily guarantee
economic boosts, judging from experience during the structural
adjustment programme.
Organizers of
the meeting hope that it will herald the beginning of liberalising
the service sector in Ethiopia, which is believed to account for
40pc of the economy.
Compiled by Tamrat G. Giorgis, Fortune Staff
Writer
The National
Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) is preparing to issue a revised directive
that governs the repatriation of revenues made from flower exports.
The first such directive, regulating the foreign exchange
repatriations for the industry, was introduced in 2004. This
directive is believed to be not specifically designed to cater to
the floriculture industry.
Star Business
Group and MIDROC Ethiopia are preparing to enter cement production
in the Dejen area of the Amhara Regional State, 229Km north of Addis
Abeba.
The MIDROC
Ethiopia Dejen Project will have the capacity to produce 300tn of
cement per day on the 6,000sqm plot that it has applied for from the
Regional Investment Office. The lease on the plot would be for 50
years, according to sources at the company.
The Addis Abeba
Caretaker Administration is in the process of shaking up the boards
of seven city agencies and the authorities under them.
The new board
members, including those for the city’s Land Development and
Administration Board, the Housing Development project, the Addis
Abeba Abattoirs Enterprises, the Addis Abeba Saving and Loans
institute, and the Water and Sewerage Authority, will replace board
members that were active during the Provisional City Administration.
The tender that
the Ethiopian Roads Authority (ERA) floated for the annual supply of
31.8 million litres of benzene and diesel, has seen the
disqualification of Yetebaberut Beherawi Petroleum (YBP).
The youngest
oil company in the country failed to present its bid documents in
the time stipulated by the bid documents.
The Ethiopian
Sugar Development Fund is in preparations to give a total of 140.3
million Br to four sugar projects.
The funds are
being divided between the eight billion dollar Tendaho Sugar
Development Project and the three state owned sugar factories, Wonji
Showa, Metahara and Fincha.
The Ministry of
Trade and Industry instructed the Fund, through letter 01105/64, to
finance the projects.
Chinese Design Gives Confusion Square Needed Clarity
Thanks to two
wide overpasses, Confusion Square is slated to become less
confusing.
Last week, the
China Investigations and Design Institute, a Chinese design firm,
sent engineers to Addis Abeba with a plan to clean up the notorious
Gotera interchange, better known as Confusion Square. The design was
done according to a year old agreement between the company and the
Addis Abeba City Roads Authority (AACRA).
To the surprise
of many in the local medical community, the Icon Centre for Special
Surgery, a new plastic surgery clinic, opened its doors to the
public last week at its facilities on Mickey Leland Street. The
clinic is the first of its kind in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian
Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) has chosen the joint bid of
Canadian RFW and the British PB for consultancy in the 60 million
dollar Ethiopia-Djibouti Interconnection Project.
The tender
committee submitted its final choice to Corporation management as
well as to the African Development Bank (ADB), which is financing
over half of the project through loans.
EEPCo unveiled
its plan to sell electricity to Ethiopia’s neighbour in 2001. The
Corporation expects to make 32 million dollars a year once the
project is operational.
A proposal made
by an engineer to generate electricity by pumping water uphill using
wind turbines and running it back down to power a generator at a
cost of five million euro has been turned down by the Rural
Electrification Fund.
The proposal
was submitted by engineer Admasu Gebre, 80pc shareholder of
alternative energy company, NavCom Energy Plc. Admasu is the
inventor of the Traffic Message Channel (TMC), an onboard computer
marketed in Europe and the US that tells car drivers the weather and
traffic conditions on the road ahead.
In a bizarre
weekend meeting held late last month, the Board of Directors of the
Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) reinstated two of the
three top management members it fired the day before.
It was unusual
for the Board, chaired by Getachew Belay, also former minister of
Revenues and deputy manager of the Endowment Fund for the
Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT), to hold a Sunday meeting to
reverse a decision passed the previous day, where Tesfaye Birru, the
chief executive officer of the company, was dismissed along with two
of his three top managers.
The former
Deputy General Manager of Ethiopian Television (ETV), Assefa Bekele,
who had been idel for the past seven months, has resigned from the
company he served for 21 years.
Assefa, 50,
resigned at the beginning of last week despite the fact that he was
appointed as the new head of the Planning and Programming Division,
according to sources from ETV.
Dairy Processing Plant Launches Study in Collaboration with SNV
An NGO from the
Netherlands, SNV, Mechale and Birqua (MB) Plc, and Adera Abdela, a
consultant, singed an agreement on June 14, 2006 to prepare a dairy
processing study for MB, which is planning to enter the sector.
SNV paid 36,000
Br, 75pc of the costs, for a consultant to prepare the study for MB.
MB will be covering the remaining costs of the study.
C&A Investment
Plc, a private processed foods producer, will offer its packaged
foods to the local market beginning next week.
The company is
planning to manufacture corn products including chips, ugali
(a traditional African flour used to make a thick porridge),
industrial starch and nutrition food.
Bedele Beer,
one of the three state owned producers, has ordered one million new
bottles from Addis Abeba Glass and Bottle Factory. Harar Beer is
expected to follow suit in a month’s time.
Bedele order
will cost the company 1.45 Br per bottle.
Werede Kebede,
general manager of Bedelle Beer, told Fortune that the
company would be using the bottles on both the local and
international markets.
Despite the
proliferation of private higher education for the last seven years
in both regions and the capital, University of Ethiopia Plc has been
liquidated after only three years of existence.
University of
Ethiopia Plc was founded in 2003 with a 2.9 million Birr capital by
20 shareholders among them: Abebe Worke, a well-known lawyer;
Emelallu Worede, president of the Contractors Association, Shimeles
Adugna, former commissioner, Relief and Rehabilitation under the
Derg and Yeshak Kifle, the founder of the CUD.
Private Printing Sector to Receive Technical Support
The
International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank
Group (WB), gave a entrepreneurship workshop to local printing
companies last week and plans to continue giving technical and
financial support in the future.
IFC cooperation
was a response to an invitation made by the Ethiopian Private
Printers Employers Association (EPPEA), a consortium of 37 private
printing companies established in 2005.
Ethiopian roads
can seem downright inhospitable. They are over-crowded, and packed
with hidden dangers. “Blue terrorist” taxis wait till you get near
and then leap out into the road. Not bothering to signal of course.
In a country whose number of car accidents and loss of life is dreadfully larger
than the number of cars on the streets (170,000 and increasing at 10pc a year),
a new element is added in to the whole saga: the use of mobile phones while
driving. The Traffic Department has yet to compile its data linking accidents to
mobile use, but our staff writers, Derese Nigatu, Wudineh Zenebe, Habte
Tadesse and Tagu Zergaw, attempted to shed some light on the extent of the
problem.
The recent AGOA
2006 Forum in Washington, DC was a perfect opportunity to assess progress made
thanks to the landmark program to open African trade to US markets. Sadly, as
long as Sub-Saharan Africa lags so far behind in capacity building, trade
overtures like AGOA can amount to little, writes BT Costantinos, PhD. And
liberalising the global textile market did not help matters either.
The
relationship between the World Bank and the Ethiopian government
reminds me of the very enduring tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
In Cervantes's timeless novel, the would-be knight Don Quixote and
his squire Sancho Panza, pretend to lead a normal life. The former
plays out his crazy ideas and the latter lives with the expectation
that something good might come out of their shared adventures
...
A simple round
trip to Adama (Nazareth), 97Km south east of Addis Abeba, exposes
one to the numerous and horrific accidents that mar the splendid
highways leading to the southern and eastern part of Ethiopia.
It was in this
town where police officers crammed in a Toyota pick-up (plate number
0050) were observed ....
My tall Gojame friend called Thursday afternoon to kindly give me
some information that I needed. He enquired about what I was writing
about, and I ......
I changed the
password to my Internet account one Sunday, but lost the sheet of
paper I had written it on. So, in order to get access to my account,
I of course had to deal....
A lot has been
said about the world football games currently underway inGermany.
Football has in fact become a global subject that is affecting our
lives in varying degrees. Gone are the days when we used to see
football as a genuine competition between teams and countries in
terms of physical, psychological, technical as well as tactical
excellence.
The accidental
chief of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), Abi Sanu, is in an
intricate situation. He is leading a financial giant of East Africa
with an army of staff that has mixed reaction to his controversial
appointment: his contemporaries resent him so much they still could
not come to terms how someone just hired few years ago parachuted to
such position.
