Bahir Dar Conference to Promote Investment in Amhara Region
Over 200
business people from Addis Abeba are due to congregate at Bahir Dar,
the seat of the Amhara Regional State, to discuss what kinds of
policy incentives will attract more investment to the region.
Hundreds of invitations from the office of the regional president,
Ayalew Gobeze, were distributed primarily to business owners born in
the regional state.
According to
the region’s Trade and Industry Bureau, a total of 500 businessmen
and women are invited to the daylong consultation to be held on
Monday, July 17, 2006. Close to 270 of the invitees are from the
Amhara state.
According to
sources, the Deputy Prime Minister, Addisu Legesse, is expected to
chair the meeting. He was president of the regional state in the mid
1990s.
Ambachew
Mekonnen, chairman of the Trade and Industry Bureau, told
Fortune that officials of the regional state would like to hear
what is stopping local investors from investing in the region. They
would also like be told how the federal or regional governments
could enhance investments.
“I want to tell
them that the regional government should develop policies that could
make the region very competitive,” said Abebaw Gelaye, one of the
three owners of Star Business Group. “We are all interested in
investing there.”
He is one of
the 230 people invited from the capital, and one of the five people
scheduled to attend from his company. He is keen to see the regional
government ease land provision, develop infrastructure, facilitate
bank financing and in particular, upgrade the Bahir Dar airport to
international standards.
The Bureau’s
Ambachew told Fortune that there is a strong interest among
officials of the regional state to revise the land lease price in
the region.
Football
means many things to many people. Take, for example, Tadesse Aynalem, the new
chairman of the Coffee Football Club fans association.
30-years-old, Tadesse has
had an unconventional career. He is one of four survivors of the 11 people who
founded Tasfa Goh Ethiopia, a group that helped break the AIDS taboo in
Ethiopia 10 years ago. His first wife, the late Mebrat G. Meskel, was also a
founding member.
When trade
representatives of the United States announced that they would concede 97pc of
their duty on exports from poor countries, many delegates from the developing
world were skeptical. Six months later Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in
economics and a professor of Economics at Columbia University, and
.........
To me, the
opposition parties that have decided to join parliament this year
after so much haggling do not sound brilliant when trying to
articulate their agendas in Parliament. Opposition politicians
looked terrific before, during and immediately following the May
2005 elections. Now well-settled in Parliament, they look more
timid, less imaginative and more divided.
Two distinct ideological tendencies were evident during the
recent parliamentary debate that set the Revolutionary Democrats
against what their chief priest, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, called
liberals, whom he accused of displaying confusion and inconsistency.
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 ......
In history books,
bloody revolutions and popular uprisings get all the attention. But
if you look at the past more closely, many epochal democratic
breakthroughs happened after the storm or next to it, when pressured
autocratic regimes made concessions to democracy out of pragmatism
...
A close member of
my family is in town from Sweden for a few weeks and has been
staying at our house. He has been residing in Scandinavia for well
over 30 years, and it is always most entertaining when he comes to
visit. His entire Abesha ......
The new basilica of the Holy Saviour
church built in the vicinity of Bole (referred to as Bole
Medhanialem in the local vernacular) has become the latest addition
to the series of tourist attractions in the metropolis.
The
usual site for churches in this country is a hilltop or at least an
elevated land with a commanding vantage point from where one can see
the surrounding landscape. The Bole area in the southern part of
Addis, however, is disadvantaged in this regard. Nonetheless, the
grandeur of the basilica and its imposing presence compensate well
for that natural shortcoming.
Yes, many people
say putting an incumbent in the same footage with leaders of
opposition, particularly those who are inexperienced, is unjust.
They sure have a point. Seen in light of this, leaders of Ethiopia's
parliamentary opposition should have been accorded the benefit of a
doubt when they were found erring.
In large part,
this is not the case. They may think of themselves as braving a huge
popular protest when they decided to join the club where their
archrival party has an overwhelming power. Particularly in Addis
Abeba, little were they appreciated for what many believed was an
act of betrayal to their colleagues in jail.
