Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Aborted

By Aba Gobena

“I was very skeptical from the very beginning, and that’s why I couldn’t give it the benefit of the doubt, ” said Tona, an Ethiopian Taxi driver in DC.

“In an event of heavy run or flooding, the dam would easily collapse. And communities in the upstream will be devastated, “ said an irrigation technology expert based in Finland.

4 billion USD by TPLF – and 0.5 billion USD by EPRDF and its value network – laundered out of Ethiopia in the last fiscal year alone,” laments Gebru – a senior Financial analyst at Commercial Bank of Ethiopia.

This yields 34.5 billion USD– nearly the same as the aid that Ethiopia received– as the total amount laundered out of Ethiopia since TPLF took hostage the country three decades a go.

On 31 March 2011, a day after the project was made public, a US $4.8 billion contract was awarded without any competitive bidding to Salini Costruttori – which is notorious for participating in a number of opaque deal projects in Ethiopia – and the dam’s foundation stone was laid on 2 April 2011 by then tyrant Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. This mega laundering project – Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam– of which fixed cost alone increased by 1400% is overdue by couple of years. Worth yet, the regime intercepted the mega project unofficially by firing thousands of employees on site.

“ The regime is so tyrant that it doesn’t even care about committing tyranny openly, “ continued Gebru.

” We are obliged to keep quite about the interception of the mega project,” said a construction engineer just fired from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam construction industry complex.

“ A fellow construction worker and a friend of mine from Afar is thrown in to prison for sending a text message that he’s redundant due to the ‘interception of the mega project’,“ continued the construction engineer.

A website reporting the status of the project is reportedly shut down. The division in charge of ‘Systematic repression and information encapsulation’ at the Ethiopian intelligence has just finalized its poor holistic training of state journalists about the need for being reticent with regard.

“Millions of lives have been lost under the TPLF regime, and billions of USD laundered out. Worth yet, we are still counting ,“ continued Tona.

The whereabouts of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has yet got to be known ; one thing is clear that the Ethiopian regime didn’t manage to secure yet another sum for laundering. Not surprisingly, no one will be held accounta