Q: That means around the beginning of 1969, right?

Yes. After that, around 1971, I returned for a short period to the Foreign Ministry in Addis Abeba where I worked for a while. Then I took a job with the World Bank as Technical Advisor to the Executive Director for Africa and some countries in the Caribbean. Following the 1974 revolution, I was called back to Addis and served at the Foreign Affairs Ministry as Head of Americas Department and then as Head of International Organizations Department.

After that, I was purged out of the diplomatic service for reasons no one knew for sure, but I think the excuse given was my family background and western orientation. Then I was transferred to the then Ministry of Domestic Trade, a ministry which I really didn’t have any idea about, following which I joined the state Ethiopian Household and Office Furniture Enterprise (ETHOFE) as a salesman of television sets, home equipment, used cars and so on.

Q: Was it in your own interest?

No. I was moved out of the Domestic Trade Ministry and put into this state enterprise. So basically I became a  furniture salesman and believe it or not, it was an enjoyable new area of work for me. That gave me a new horizon and field of experience. It sounds funny now, but I enjoyed being a salesman, a super one, in Addis. And then, one fine morning, I was called back into service and was assigned as Deputy Commissioner for the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. This was at the height of the Ethiopian famine.

Q: I’m interested in the period you worked as a salesperson, a super one as you described yourself. Didn’t you, at that time, feel anything bad and consider leaving the country like most people did in those days?

Not really, for two reasons. I will be honest with you. First, the remuneration in state enterprises was better than government salaries. Perks, such as a government vehicle, which most senior government officials didn’t have, were also made available to me. There was less tension because it was almost a private sector kind of job. Nobody from the then ruling party was there to bruise your neck. We just sold furniture. More than that, the fact that it was a new profession for me - I lived all my life as a diplomat and after 11 years in New York I came back to Addis and literally sat in ETHOFE office and sold television sets, knives, forks, and bedding, among other things - was quite fascinating for me.

Q: That particular business related experience; did it have any impact in terms of tempting you to start a business? Do you have one right now?

No. I don’t have a business, neither do I have any inclination to get into business. Basically, I’m a technocrat.  

Q: Let me take you back one month or so before you became Mayor of the Addis Abeba Caretaker Administration and your life prior to that. That is, before you were informed that you had been chosen as Mayor. Had you ever dreamt of becoming a mayor one day?

No, not at all. In fact, if anybody had suggested that to me at a time of peace and tranquility, I would not only have frowned at it, but also run away because the last job I ever wanted was being involved in a city government of any kind. Especially the Addis Abeba municipality, in my days, was famous for its archaic way of doing things, for its bureaucracy and so on. The municipality was known to be a place where files and people got lost. So it had a bad reputation during the emperor’s time and during the Derg regime it was a place where the ‘Red Terror’ was organized. One of the leaders of that campaign was allegedly the then Mayor of Addis Abeba. I say allegedly because I don’t know that for sure. But the popular view was that it was a terrible place to work. But then I was asked to be Mayor right after the 2005 elections. 

Q: I remember the time and the situation after the May 2005 elections during which you came to the municipality office. It was a time of violence, a time when the government machinery in Addis Abeba had totally stopped. The city was in a critical situation in many aspects. There were clashing political views among people and among political parties. Under such conditions, I imagine it was a risky business to get in to. Didn’t it appear  that way to you?

Yes, definitely. The atmosphere was very tense. The opposition and ruling parties were at loggerheads. There was the smell of burning tyres in the streets and demonstrations took place. Very strong emotions were expressed on both sides. But when I was asked, at first I thought that I was going to lead a group of people who would work on calming the situation. Then I realized that what they really wanted was someone who would actually takeover the day-to-day running of the city as a Mayor. The word for mayor in Amharic, Kentiba, as you know, is a magical word here. In the past, it was really giant men who took that job, especially during Menelik’s and Haileselassie’s times. It was a job given to people of high stature and their role was very, very important. So I thought it was a joke; I didn’t even take it seriously when they asked me to be a Mayor.

Q:  Who exactly informed you that you had been chosen to be Mayor?  

Well, first there were a series of discussions and negotiations during which nobody mentioned that I had been chosen to be Mayor. But then emissaries of the Government, whom I had never seen before, came to me and said the city needed someone of my background, someone who was elderly who would be able to lead a new group that - as the parliament has decided to have a caretaker government - would take over the city’s administration.

Q: So you were informed after parliament had made the decision?

Yes. A decision to have an interim, Caretaker Government.

Q: After that decision, the Prime Minster came up with a list of names, including yours, of cabinet members of the City Administration. Did you know the PM was going to mention your name at Parliament?

Yes, at that point because it was after discussions with my colleagues and I that he mentioned nine names, including mine, of those who would be members of cabinet.

Q: Did the PM discus this with you before that time? Did he talk to you?

Yes, we talked at length. So it was like a call of national duty. I come from a family whose members were called to duty to defend the country and to go on peacekeeping missions in Korea and Congo. So it was a national service, which you cannot resist. That is how I looked at this job. So I said ‘yes’ to the PM, who asked only for one year of my life. I had retired from my job with the Ethiopian government 10 years earlier and from the World Bank 5 years before that. So it was after I had retired twice that this offer came.     

Q: Were you here at that time?

Yes.

Q: Even during the violence?

Yes, as any member of the Diaspora who has come home to have fun, to relax, and to visit relatives, I hadn’t quite decided to remain here. The election was an exciting time and it was one of the finest periods of political development in Ethiopia. I had lived through many elections in America as a student, as UN staff and as World Bank staff. The spirit of the 2005 elections was much, much better than what I had seen even in America, the most democratic country in the world. The campaign was very, very sincere. That really anchored me to Addis Abeba and I had great hope about the progress of democracy in my country. So, although I didn’t vote because I didn’t register as I had just returned, I decided to stay and I lived through it. But I followed every bit of the debate, and I don’t mind saying two politicians that made sense to me were Meles Zenawi (PM) and Lidetu Ayalew. They were very articulate; they knew what they were talking about; there was no confusion in their views.

Q: At that particular moment in the history of Ethiopia and in the aftermath of the 2005 elections, there were at least two big groups: supporters of the government and supporters of the opposition both at home and in Diaspora. It was in that situation you came to municipality office and took a highly controversial post as Mayor, due to the overall political situation. And I’m aware that your personal relationships suffered a serious blow because some of your family members and relatives didn’t like that you took that office. How do you feel about this?

Well one thing I have in common with my family is blood. But our political views have always differed. My late brother, called Dereje, was founder and Secretary General of EDU but I was working with Ethiopian government at that time. Some of my relatives were members of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (WPE). But I was never a member. I never supported the Marxist-Leninist ideology. So even in my family, we had political debates based on our ideologies. So that was quite healthy. I was different in that sense even from my brothers. So for me, if someone believes he is good, he belongs to his country and he has to serve his country because what makes a place good or bad, in the final analysis, is the quality of people in it. That is why I came back in 1975 during the Derg time.

Q: Do you foresee the political climate prior to the 2005 elections happening again in Ethiopia in the near future? 

I hope it will. The calmness and genuineness of the situation brought it out because a democratic spirit was there in every body. The political situation unfolded, then afterwards turned sour to our great disappointment. But that is    not to say we have given up. Still, there is hope of bringing the situation back to a point where people accept the verdict of voters. But at this stage I’m so happy because I think that the transfer of power from me to the newly elected mayor of Addis Abeba, without any exaggeration, must be the first peaceful transfer of power in 3000 years. And this is no mean achievement.

Q:  Is there anything that happened in your time at the municipality that you are particularly proud of?

Yes there are many things. The tense atmosphere in 2006 when we came to office resulted in people losing faith; faith in the government, in the city administration and so on. So restoring that was not an easy job. There was a need to build the confidence of staff. It was going to be a transfer of power from Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to the Coalition For Unity and Democracy (CUD). As the result of that anticipation, people left the city government offices and looked for other jobs. Very important professionals in the municipality left and some of them had already found new jobs. And the party that lost the elections in the city took its men out and assigned them to other jobs elsewhere. Basically, we took over an empty shelf in terms of human power. So rebuilding the staff, and confidence in the staff, was no easy task as well. So these are some of the things that happened. To put it in a nutshell, I’m proud that in such short period of time, we were able to bring calm conditions for people to work in. We have also achieved quite a bit in terms of rebuilding the infrastructures of Addis Abeba. As you know, we have started working on 32 roads in the city. And when I say we it was not only my colleagues and I, but also through the support of government that we achieved all this. After all, it was a Federal Government policy in the pipeline initiated by my predecessor that we were supposed to continue with.

Q: Talking about support from the Federal Government, I heard recently that the ruling party announced its intention to provide your successor with an unprecedented level of support. In fact, EPRDF claimed it would exert its entire resource on Addis Abeba. And you were simply supposed to continue with the works initiated by your predecessor without any mandate to introduce new ones. Compared to the level of support the new administration is expected to enjoy, do you think that not getting such backing from the Federal Government, and the limited mandate you had, hindered you from achieving more?

What happened is I came in for one year. In one year you don’t draw up plans for a 122-year-old city. Even the incumbent government carried out programmes partly drawn by it predecessors because you cannot reinvent the wheel every time there is a change of government.

Q: I don’t mean on basic strategies or policy issues. But once you are in office, you see the actual situation of the city at that particular time and sometimes, you may need to introduce new initiatives that are appropriate to those particular conditions. But you didn’t have that mandate.

Nobody really interfered in the day-to-day activities, or on changes here and there.  We had a free hand; at least I didn’t feel it otherwise. Of course, we were not working in a vacuum. There is a Federal Government; there is a well-organized strong party. But within the framework of the rules and regulations, which laid down in black and white, we did have the latitude to do what was possible in the given short period of time.

Q: So do you believe you enjoyed an appropriate level of support from the Federal Government?

Yes, of course. Support, which is second to none.

Q: Let’s talk about the construction of condominiums. When you took office, there was a plan already running to construct about 30 or 31 thousand of them in a year. But the construction of 21, 000 of the condos was transferred to the following year, yet they were all supposed to be finalized in the first year of your term. Of that 19, 361 were supposed to be finalized in the year in which the constructions were transferred. But still the actual achievement was 6,766 condos, or somewhere there. That is one of the areas in which you have been criticized for under performing. How do you explain this? What were the problems other than the obvious shortage of construction materials?

I think people who criticize the Caretaker Administration for not having done as much in the housing area have to realize that you cannot build houses without cement and other building materials like iron. These materials were in short supply.  We couldn’t get hold of a significant amount of building supplies to do the job. And also, when we took over the City Administration, the small enterprises that were supplying building materials dissipated. They just faded away during the elections and in the turmoil in the aftermath of the electoral process. We even had a big problem getting the asphalt to repair the roads. So our priority was to restart the government machinery.

Q: The budget your administration has allocated for the current fiscal year is 6.5 billion Br. But your administration proposed a 3.9billion Br annual budget for the new administration, which is basically for the next fiscal year. It is expected to do a lot more things, while its budget is nearly half of what yours was.

Well budgets are based on revenue. So we anticipated that raising a lot more money than we ended up with. Thus the budget has to be cut to size. If the record of the city’s revenue does not match your expenditure, what can you do? If you raise more money, then you have the resources. And by the way, Addis Abeba is perhaps the only city in Africa, and one of the very few cities in the world, that finances its capital projects from its own resources. I mean, there is no government subsidy for Addis Abeba. There is no foreign aid that comes to support its budget. So it’s not that we are cutting back from what is appropriate to the new government of the city. The budget we proposed, is in any case, subject to review by the new administration. In general our proposal is based on a realistic projection of revenue.

Q: So you are adhering to the principle that you can only live within the limits of your resources?

Cut your coat according to your cloth. This is really what is happening.

Q: Still speaking of money, I think the amount in the coffers of the City Administration when you took over was about half a billion Birr. How much have you left for the new administration?

You see, statistics don’t lie. Statisticians may try to use them as they want. When you say you had 500 million Br without considering how much more we have to pay, and one of our clients has not been paid, it doesn’t make sense. Yes, we had about 450 million Br. What we are leaving now is about 340 million Br. But these are just bold figures because neither this, nor the past figures, really show how much payments have been made and how much are due to be made; how much work has been done and how much is going to be done. When we came in, the city had stopped almost for a year. So there was no expenditure (in that period). That is the difference between this period and that period.

The city looks like a bombed one, like Berlin after World War II. The traffic is so horrible and jammed because there are lots of detours. That’s because there is massive construction of roads and buildings going on now. That was not the case when we took over

Q: You have already told me the things you are proud of achieving. There is no question that there are a lot of road constructions across the city. But let me take you to the other point of the situation now. There is this suggestion that an unprecedented level of corruption in your time has wrecked Addis Abeba. What is your reaction to that?

Corruption has been there. How it has been reported in the past and now is one thing. That is why it looks much more now than in the past, in my personal view. The other point is that when we look at the people arrested; all of them, not 99 percent, but 100 percent of them had been put behind bars for alleged involvement in corruption before we came to the administration. Thus, if you say there have been more people arrested, then why? Is it because the government is more active and adamant now about stamping out this practice? So this is a false accusation, in my view.

Q: Now that you handed over power to the new administration, what would you be doing afterwards?

I will go back to my favorite retirement, reading, traveling and visiting my friends, families and relatives. Of course, I don’t know how long that will last. I have always been active in helping NGOs; I have organized a symposium on African Humanitarian Action (AHA); I also have consulted for FAO. Except for FAO, I did the others free of charge.

Q: Earlier on, you told me that all your life; you lived as a diplomat and an international civil servant. Now you say you will go back to your favorite life style, one of them being travelling around the world. In the two years of your time as a mayor, you have travelled more than any other mayor of Addis Abeba has traveled in its 122-year history. Does it have anything to do with your past?

Maybe so because all of us are products of our past and our environment. But it is also the job. Addis Abeba is not just an Ethiopian city. It is the seat of the African Union. For example, my last trip was to Mozambique, because the African Development Bank invited me to speak on urban problems. And believe it or not, Addis Abeba is looked at as a model city in that effort, not with what has been achieved but the programme that it has instituted and the vigour with which it (the programme) is pursued. Another thing is that now, the world has changed from the era of super powers to an era of defused centres of power. Diplomacy is no more just a game played by states and governments. There is cities diplomacy going on. I will give you an example. One of the Mayors’ Conferences I attended was in Istanbul, organized by the Turkish government, obviously.  At that conference, one of the moving spirits, the most active mayors, was the mayor of Athens. In spite of the political differences and clashes between the governments of Turkey and Greece.  The mayor of Athens was active in supporting the programs of Istanbul and he was a great articulator of this idea. It was an eye opener for me. Would that happen between Asmara and Addis Abeba, and the like? I wish. In spite of some political differences, cities can work together. So city diplomacy is an emerging area of diplomatic activity. Its not that I went to more conferences; there are more mayors’ conferences. City people (officials) are trying to find out areas where they can cooperate. I’m a strong believer in that. In fact one of my advice to my successor was to develop a stronger policy on city relations because Addis Abeba now has sister city relations with a dozen cities around the world.

Q: Will you accept it if any request to take up a government office comes to you?

It depends. If they ask me to be the mayor of Addis Abeba, I would turn it down; I won’t accept it because I’m too tired to do the job.

Q: Is it only if it is to be a mayor of Addis Abeba?

I probably would accept it if it is to be a mayor of Dire Dawa. But you cannot be a mayor unless you are elected.

Q: Are there any favourite offices in the government you would be ok with if you were called in?

There are lots of things someone with energy and experience can do in this country. The universities are crying for experienced people. I don’t mind teaching courses here and there. I don’t mind working for NGOs. I don’t need to be paid because I happen to have enough in pensions from both the Ethiopian government and the World Bank.

Q: You were called for one year and it was extended to another one. How did you feel at that time?

I had hoped it would stop there, because I thought, at that time, the job I was recruited for had already be done. I also thought it would have been better for the city to be ruled, from that time on, by an elected officer.

Q: How did you feel when you just handed over the mayoral key to the new mayor?

I felt very relieved because it is not an easy job. It is not a job I was prepared for, both mentally and physically, as it came when I’m close to my 70s. It is not a job for somebody of my age because it is highly demanding. And Ethiopia is still in the feudal traditions. People want to go to the Mayor, to the Prime Minister for every little complaint.

Q: What are the things you regret in those two years of your stay at the municipality office?

Not actually regret. But I wish I had been able to organize the office in the way I wanted to because for anyone to do a good job, he or she has to be in a position to select the right people that one thinks would be appropriate for the kind of responsibility they bear. But I was not in a position to do that because it was only for one year.

Q: Does that include the cabinet members?

Yes, it includes everybody.

Q: How about the impact on your personal relations, like the family and relatives issues I raised earlier. Do you regret that?

No I don’t regret that because, like I told you, I’m a pragmatic and practical person. I’m not a dreamer. And for me even, politics is the art of the possible; it is not something by which you live your dreams or your fate. It is a means by which you do what is possible in a given time. So I’m a kind of person who would not reject anybody or any idea. I ask how far should I go on the spectrum of our differences, where should I meet you? If I can make you take more than 90 percent of my views, I would be very happy. If I can sell 75 percent of my views, I will still be happy. So I want to meet my opponents and detractors somewhere. I don’t want to throw them away in to the sea. I want to work with them. The art of compromise is what I believe in, in every aspect of my life. I don’t always expect to win and I don’t think it is healthy to win every battle because then you don’t change. You change when you see the merits in your opposition and take part of that. That is how growth comes.

Q: How do you think Addis Abebans will remember you?

I don’t know how people will remember me, but I know how I would like to be remembered. That is as a compassionate, caring man; as a man who tried his best in spite of his shortcomings. I never claimed to be a gift to Addis and its jobs that had to be done. But once I took the job, I tried my very best and I think that is what is expected from all of us, the rest is for God to complete. So I want people to say, “Well, he did not finish our condominiums, but at least he tried his best.”