[Popegaf]

> * More than half of Ethiopia's 110 million people have no electric power.

> * Almost all of Ethiopia is under some level of food stress.

Where is a country like Ethiopia getting all the money for such a mega-project?

> * This happened due to Colonial era agreements in which great Britain

Typical, colonial forces left a mess everywhere they went. India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, pretty much all of Africa, my history on South America and Asia are rusty but I bet they right messed up things there too.

What's crazy is how things still are in such disarray so long after they retreated.

[boomboomsubban]

>Where is a country like Ethiopia getting all the money for such a mega-project?

The cost is $4.2 billion according to the article, and Ethiopia's GDP is $272 billion. It's not a mystery to see the project get financing, though I imagine the risk of war warped the deal somewhat.

[CountSessine]

Well that just makes me even more curious. How does a nation of 110 million, 70% of whom don’t even have access to electricity, have a GDP of $272 billion? $2700 GDP per capita would put Ethiopia in the ranks of the middle-income countries.

[boomboomsubban]

I accidentally read the PPP GDP from Wikipedia, the nominal is $93 billion. Bottom 30 for GDP per capita. The point still stands though.

[ilstormcloud]

> Where is a country like Ethiopia getting all the money for such a mega-project?

The major source: For most of the decade, for each bank loan, 27% of it goes to the construction of the dam. And then, most employees have given at least 1 month of their salary to the dam.

[Popegaf]

> And then, most employees have given at least 1 month of their salary to the dam.

Are you talking about taxes?

[vagrantJin]

> What's crazy is how things still are in such disarray so long after they retreated.

I think it's adorable that you think they "retreated".

Perhaps in another forum I can give you a "low-down" on why the African former colonies are an economic mess, why France and England left physically but not politically or economically, and ofcourse why African leaders visit European powers as one of the first things they do after elections. I may also wax on and wax off about China in Africa. Maybe Libya and the crisis there too.

[wetmore]

How about you actually talk about those things, instead of just alluding to them to make the person you're replying to seem small?

[Popegaf]

I think it's quite condescending of you to think I'm some naive, little child who's seen nothing of the world.

Perhaps you should first learn how to be polite and first try to ask questions, before assuming everyone is dumber than you.

[yunohn]

> things still are in such disarray so long after they retreated

What is “so long”? Reading online, I see that Ethiopia was not fully colonized, but Europe/UK were attacking and meddling in its affairs even in the 1930s.

What most of the West doesn’t realize, is that colonization is majorly impactful and leads to disarray for decades, if not centuries. Countries need time to stabilize, after being systematically dismantled and robbed by colonizers.

[mjburgess]

Is this the case?

This seems to take the view that pre-colonisation these countries were modern functioning states; and that it was the coloniser which "destabilised them".

However this seems to be rarely, if ever, the case. Colonised countries were extremely pre-modern compared to coloniser-states, and as far as I'm aware, routinely the purpose of colonisation was to establish such thing as a functioning state -- for the sake of enabling trade and commerce to be conducted reliably.

Here we should also distinguish the activities of a coloniser-state (eg., the UK) vs., eg., that of an individual eg., Leopold.

[cool_dude85]

>routinely the purpose of colonisation was to establish such thing as a functioning state -- for the sake of enabling trade and commerce to be conducted reliably.

That's just a polite way to describe looting a colony.

Consider the situation here, where the British got together with... a British colony... to claim near-exclusive water rights to the Nile. This is important enough almost 100 years later that Egypt is threatening war over it.

[oehtXRwMkIs]

I don't understand how you interpreted the comment you replied to as taking a stance of "they were modern functioning states". The negation of causing disarray is not causing disarray. Relax with the strawmen.

[legutierr]

Our idea of a "modern functioning state" relies on concepts of sovereignty that didn't begin to gain wide purchase in Europe before the Peace of Westphalia—at least 150 years after European colonial efforts had begun.

The colonial project in Europe was concomitant with the development of western concepts of national sovereignty and the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state. In fact, many features of modern governments emerged specifically as mechanisms to implement colonial policies, and the material resources that were used to build up the institutions of many Western states were largely extracted from the colonies. In light of that, it seems strange for you to critique colonized polities for being "pre-modern" prior to colonization when European colonizers were themselves largely pre-modern before colonization efforts began, and themselves modernized—both in material terms, and in terms of the sophistication of their institutions—at the expense of their colonies.

That "the purpose of colonization was to establish such a thing as a functioning state" is only true in a technical sense. The ultimate purpose of colonization was extraction, and in order to implement extractive policies, modern bureaucratic institutions needed to be established, both at home and in the colonies. Many colonizers, when they departed, may have left their colonies with governing institutions that resembled the institutions that the colonizers had created at home—but only in the way that franchisee businesses resemble the businesses of their franchisors. Colonial governments depended entirely on their metropole for essential aspects of governance, and could not serve any meaningful function without tight integration with their home country governments. This even remains true of some post-colonial governments today.

Even if colonial institutions had been established "for the sake of enabling trade and commerce" those institutions would have been insufficient to govern independent states. But the terms "trade and commerce" presume the existence of peer counter-parties who are able to negotiate at an arms length to arrive at arrangements that benefit all parties. Colonial institutions were not at all established for that purpose—they were established for the purpose of resource extraction at the expense of a subjugated population. A governmental orientation towards trade and commerce could have given former colonies at least a starting point on the road towards economic development, but in actuality the governing institutions that former colonies inherited were entirely oriented towards giving the industries of their former colonizers uninterrupted and privileged access to cheap labor and cheap resources.

European colonial governments employed many different tactics to deliberately destabilize colonized polities—destroying, subjugating or co-opting pre-colonial (and post-colonial!) governing institutions; intentionally pitting rival ethnic, class and religious groups against each other; creating borders within the contiguous territory of cohesive ethnic & linguistic groups, while forcing groups with disparate languages and cultures to share the same government [1]; denying indigenous people equal (or, in many cases, any) opportunities for social, economic, and political advancement; suppressing (and often stamping out) indigenous languages, cultures and religions; suppressing independent local industries that might compete with industries in the metropole; and suppressing independent political thought and local political institutions—all of which had the effect of preventing the development of institutions within the colonies that could keep pace with the development of modern institutions in Europe.

The underlying objective of the colonial project itself, however, was perhaps the most destabilizing. The system as a whole was designed and implemented to maximize the flow of economic value out of the colonies and into the metropole. Every institution was optimized for that purpose, and any element of local politics or culture that did not contribute in some way to that effort was discouraged, suppressed, or eliminated, through the (often violent) application of state power.

GP is entirely correct to write that "colonization is majorly impactful and leads to disarray for decades, if not centuries," and that "countries need time to stabilize, after being systematically dismantled and robbed by colonizers."

[krona]

I'm not sure what argument you're making; that it was the fault of the British for not colonising Ethiopia?

[bilbo0s]

I read that as the British left a mess by allocating 70% of Ethiopia's water to Egypt even though the British had no legitimate claim or control over Ethiopia.

Though even if the British had been in control of Ethiopia, I would argue it was still problematic to allocate 70% of their water to Egypt. It was just a fundamentally bad arrangement. So fundamentally bad that I can only assume the British, at the time, had no idea how the Nile actually worked. Maybe the field of hydrology was not quite so well developed, and the Nile was not quite so well studied? I try not to attribute to malice what can reasonably be explained by ineptitude.