Calendar 
My Wish on Ethiopian New Year
as if the abject poverty that drives Ethiopians into desperate voyages etc,are not enough
(UGANDA) – In July a firebrand activist named Hanna Metasebia posted on Facebook in Amharic translated roughly as follows.
Today, it’s New Year in Ethiopia. And the Julian calendar that Ethiopia follows reads September 1, 2005 whereas it’s the 11th of September 2012 in accordance with the Gregorian calendar that the majority of the world follows.
Indeed, in whichever September, the Ethiopian tyrant is no longer anywhere.
Yet, his departure is no cause for celebration. As if the brutality he inflicted on Ethiopians; as if the discord he sowed among Ethiopians; as if the abject poverty that drives Ethiopians into desperate voyages etc, are not enough, the system the deceased authored culminated with the humiliating servile mass behavior that no independent society shows to mourn a bloody dictator.
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“My wish, therefore
On the Ethiopian New Year
Is to see my compatriots
Free from the real dictator
Which is our own fear
Perennially nourished
By irrational reverence for power.
Also wish for my people
To gain mental liberty
To cherish values
Such as human dignity
While rejecting a system
That “thrives” on servility.
An Ethiopian social and political commentator exiled in Uganda
Kiflu Hussain is an attorney based in Uganda. He says his passion for writing came from reading, and that it’s inevitable that the more one reads, the more one develops the urge to write. Kiflu has published articles in Ethiopia on the English Reporter, then a weekly newspaper along with a few Amharic articles on the defunct Addis Zena. It was after he and his family found refuge in Uganda, that he began contributing writings to the local papers and various websites such as Daily Monitor, Uganda Record, The New Vision, Ethioquestnews, Garowe Online, WardheerNews etc.
The reason for this is clear. Ethiopia, despite being a seat of the African Union had never produced a regime that allows even the minimum space for dialogue that other people in Africa enjoy so naturally. So Kiflu’s ending up as a refugee in Uganda is a blessing in disguise for it accorded him with the opportunity to write. He says at the same time he learned, unfortunately, that his refugee status would be what showed how deep the hypocrisy of the “international community” goes.
You can write to Kiflu at this address: E-mail;kiflukam@yahoo.com
