FORTUNE+ VIDEO SPONSORED CONTENTS ADVERTORIALS FORTUNE AUDIO Fortune Careers New TRADE AFRICA New

Fortune Logo

Month: December 2020

Better Solutions for Maternal Health: The $2.9b Answer

Posted on by Web Master

In the next two minutes, one woman will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. She will die from entirely preventable causes during one of the most beautiful moments of human life — giving birth. The good news is that there are some solutions that are inexpensive and effective.

In a world besieged by problems from COVID-19 to climate change, it is hard to pay attention to the many other challenges that still remain. For the vast majority of the world’s population, these are simple problems of survival: not dying from tuberculosis, getting enough food, breaking free of poverty and getting an adequate education.

Vying for scarce resources, these problems often lose out, because they do not get enough media attention, famous spokespeople or viral imagery. The harsh truth is we cannot afford to fix all problems.

That is why we have to ask hard questions: how big is the problem, what is the solution — and crucially, how much will it cost compared to its effects?

The tragedy of pregnant women and their children dying has been on the global health community’s radar for a long time. Twenty years ago, the UN promised to address the issue. But progress to date has not been enough. Yes, maternal deaths declined about a third from 451,000 per year in 2000 to about 295,000 today, but we had committed to more than a two-thirds reduction by 2015. Since then, we have promised to reduce it even further to around 100,000 deaths by 2030.

But commitment without action does not save pregnant women and their children. It takes financing and simple procedures.

Mothers in the hardest-hit developing countries are still 80 times more likely to die than their rich-country counterparts. And their newborns also die — last year 2.4 million children died in their first 28 days on earth. They die because many women either give birth in their own homes, without access to skilled birth attendants or in facilities with limited basic emergency care. The mothers die from infections that abound with low hygiene and high blood pressure that can lead to seizures. Severe bleeding that can happen after childbirth kills 46,000 mothers every year.

Clearly, something needs to be done. Development professionals have put forward many proposals on how to address this global crisis, but trying to fix everything everywhere comes at a cost of over 30 billion dollars a year, and it is unlikely that such funds can be mobilised.

Copenhagen Consensus [the author of this piece is the founder of the think tank], supported by funding from Merck for Mothers, worked with leading maternal health experts to use cost-benefit analysis to find the most cost-effective policies first.

The research focused on the highest-burden 59 countries that account for 91pc of all maternal deaths globally. Using the recognised Lives Saved Tool (LiST) model from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the researchers analysed more than 30 different ways to help and found that while all would have an impact, some would help much more for every dollar spent.

Two interventions stood out as the very best investments for additional resources. These are straight-forward without requiring cutting edge technology, but perhaps that is exactly why they are not well-known, lack celebrity endorsements and lose out on media coverage.

To drive the greatest impact for investments, the world should consider focusing on what is known as Basic Emergency Obstetric & Newborn Care (BEmONC) along with family planning. An estimated 217 million women who want to avoid pregnancy still do not have access to safe and effective family planning methods. Scaling up access to 90pc in the 59 countries would mean that fewer women would become pregnant, avoiding 87,000 mothers dying every year.

Getting more mothers into more facilities while also improving the quality of those facilities could help them and their children survive at a greater rate. In practice, this means ensuring that adequately trained staff are present with the right equipment and medicines to deliver simple and well-known life-saving procedures. These include immediate drying and thermal protection of the newborn, controlled cord traction, skin-to-skin contact of newborns, assisted vaginal delivery along with neonatal resuscitation.

All of this will entail costs. Midwives and nurses have to be educated, recruited and salaried; management expanded; drugs procured; and infrastructure paid for. Moreover, women also have to be incentivised to give birth in facilities. But overall, BEmONC and family planning would cost just 2.9 billion dollars a year — less than a tenth of the 30 billion-plus dollars typically asked for, which would save only a fraction more lives.

It would protect the women we have already promised to save at a very low cost: in total it would safeguard 162,000 mothers every year along with 1.2 million newborns. If we measure the total value of these efforts, each dollar spent would achieve 71 dollars of social benefits, making it one of the best investments in the world.

While a reader goes through this article, at least one more mother will have died. We owe it to her and all the millions whose lives we can save to invest 2.9 billion dollars smartly to bring hundreds of billions of dollars of economic and health benefits to people around the world.

The Rare Piece of Good News

Posted on by Web Master

It seems that it is only acceptable to write about doom and gloom these days, about how misery is everywhere. It is hard to admonish anyone for this. After all, this was objectively a bad year.

The big news was a once in a century global pandemic. There have since been close to 80 million cases across the world, which is nearly the entire population of Germany. At this point, about one in every hundred people in the world has caught the virus. It has killed 1.7 million people across the world as well, nearly the entire population of Bahrain, or 0.02pc of everyone on Earth.

In Ethiopia, there have been over 120,000 cases. This is 0.1pc of the population, and this also may not reflect the true extent of the virus due to awareness and testing capacities. There is some consolation in that the reported deaths have been a tiny fraction of this but not small enough to take mildly.

The year also saw devastating forest fires, social unrest, floods and desert locust swarms. In Ethiopia, we also had our first armed conflict since the Ethiopian defence forces engaged with those of Eritrea’s two decades back. It was an unrelenting year.

There was a tiny blessing of good news nonetheless, and it came in the form of the UN’s Human Development Indicators (HDI) report. It is important to ponder it momentarily, because it focuses on data, while most well-being measures in Ethiopia are considered through a thick frame of politics.

No doubt, numbers are not perfect indicators of our conditions. There is more to well-being than what economists and statisticians can count. There are factors such as dignity, feelings of security and political freedom that are also fundamental to understanding whether society is in the best shape it can be.

Still, they are more valuable than guesstimating the physical, material and emotional well-being of society from whoever was in power during the years of review. This is why indicators such as HDI are critical, and that of Ethiopia’s has an inspiring story to tell.

Ethiopia is still a low-income country. But it is in a far better position than it was at the turn of the century. We now can expect to live about 15 years more on average than we did two decades ago; expected years of schooling have more than doubled; national income per capita tripled; maternal mortality rates were more than halved; and the number of internet users is in the double digits and rising.

In all, Ethiopia has improved in HDI from about 0.3 to close to 0.5. This means that fewer people die of diseases and malnutrition; more people are literate and can put food on the table than was the case two decades ago. This is objectively a good thing. This is the ball we should have our eyes on.

It did not occur by some miracle, especially considering how fast the rate of improvement for Ethiopia has been. Take Kenya, which went from 0.5 to just 0.6 in three decades and even regressed during the 1990s. This means that improvement is not written in stone. Globalisation may be helping most countries come out of poverty faster, but it is by no means a guarantor, and the room for failure is wide.

The major roadblock is and will remain the threat of political instability. We continue to be a country that is not at peace with itself. To an extent, this does not make us unique. Few countries in the world are comfortable with their history and do not have internal contradictions. The problem is when we allow our political challenges to consume the developmental progress we are indeed making.

With Desert Locusts, Ethiopia Meets Ancient, Familiar Enemy

Posted on by Web Master

Even during my childhood in the 1970s, desert locusts were known to be fierce enemies, identified by the government and the aid agencies that supported it. It was only below the likes of Malaria as a non-human induced threat to our collective well-being.

Ferociously destroying fresh crops, covering the earth, filling the air and darkening the light of the sun, their power is hard to believe for those who have not seen them. They come in waves, sometimes dispersed over a year, sometimes within a span of a few months; whenever they come, the earth remains as though it had been set on fire.

Dubbed an eating machine, a desert locust can live for up to five months. An adult consumes roughly its own weight in fresh food a day. For such a small species of insect, this seems insignificant. But swarms consist of millions. One tonne of locusts, which is a very modest fraction of an average swarm, will consume in a day as many as what 2,500 people would eat, according to the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

When it comes and settles, and it departs, not a leaf remains upon a tree, not enough to make a difference anyways. The wheat, barley and teffnever have a chance. It is as if they have never been sown there. The farmers are equally helpless. They only have whips and a few tools to make noise to scare the locusts.

This sums up exactly what happened in Ethiopia half a millennium ago, and what was left to us in writing by the Portuguese Francisco Alvarez. He witnessed swarms of desert locusts devastating especially the northern parts of the country. It is his description of the locust eggs that is perhaps most daunting.

“This country was entirely covered with locusts without wings, and they said these were the seed of those which had been there and destroyed the country, and they said that as soon as they had wings they would at once go and seek their country,” he wrote.

The inevitable consequence of this was the displacement it caused.

“The people were going away from this country, and we found the roads full of men, women, and children, on foot, and some in their arm with their little bundles on their heads, removing to a country where they might find provisions,” Alvarez wrote, describing the misery.

Several decades later, another Portuguese figure visited Ethiopia and correctly identified that for a country so dependent on subsistence agriculture, as most other countries were at the time, the recurrent “plague of locusts” was one of the sources for the poverty of the country.

Tragically, it still is. This year, several of the countries in the East Africa region are being impacted by a desert locust swarm of a size that had not been seen in a quarter of a century. It devestated over a quarter of a million hectares and was likely expected to affect some two million more.

Being an extremely large and remote area, Ethiopia’s lack of access to such areas makes controlling the swarms hard. Limited resources for locust monitoring, poor infrastructure and implementing control operations in which the pesticide must be applied directly onto the locusts are some of the challenges that the FAO points to in fighting the locusts.

Early warning systems are essential for fighting against the infestation. No less important are vehicle-mounted and aerial sprayers as well as advanced chemicals that do not end up harming the crops themselves significantly. This requires leadership, attention to research and constant vigilance.

In the absence of this, we will be reduced to hoping that nature takes care of itself, as it did in 1848 in the face of an invasion of grasshoppers that threatened starvation for the Mormon settlers near the Great Salt Lake in the United States. It was checked only by the appearance of flocks of gulls, which devoured the crickets and saved the crops after all other means had failed. It is known as the Miracle of the Gulls.

Agriculture’s SMEs, the Vital Ingredient to Food Security in East Africa

Posted on by Web Master

Nearly 620 million people were still hungry globally in 2019, according to the recent State of Food Security & Nutrition report, underscoring the immense challenge of achieving the Zero Hunger target by 2030. In Africa, hunger is on the rise in almost all African subregions. The latest data shows that 239 million hungry people are living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The East Africa subregion contributes more than 50pc of the chronically hungry people in Africa even though the region contributes under a quarter of Africa’s population. Compounded impacts of droughts, severe flooding, and desert locust infestations in East Africa have already undermined food security and nutrition. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has further threatened livelihoods in the subregion, which, apart from contributing more than half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s chronic food insecure population, also has nearly 28 million people in acute food shortage.

This situation calls for immediate policy and programmatic responses through recovery and resilience building, to keep food supply chains alive and mitigate COVID-19 impacts across the already fragile food system. Robust small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the agro-food sector are vital in economic recovery and resilience, because they provide income and employment opportunities for millions of people in East Africa.

SMEs add value to raw agricultural material through product transformation and can improve food security in different ways. They can reduce post-harvest losses; by extending the shelf life of food, making it easier to reach urban areas where most of the population resides. They also increase incomes and create employment along the food chain from production to consumption. Agro-processing also improves the safety of foods through establishing appropriate certification and traceability and increasing access to markets. These enterprises handle 80pc of Africa’s food consumption and 96pc of domestic supply chains crucial to farmers.

However, these enterprises mainly operate in the informal sector that has seen them disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and related containment measures. Agro-food SMEs have been among the first respondents in the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic is limiting agro-enterprises from ensuring the consistent supply of food to markets due to enforced closures, labour shortages resulting from illness, and slowdowns in operations caused by physical distancing and lockdowns. Food processing facilities have also been the site of large clusters of COVID-19 cases and subsequent food supply chain disruptions.

Despite their significant contributions, small and medium agro-enterprises (SMAEs) face various challenges. Agro-industrial value added is still small in Africa. SMAEs, like small farmers, have difficulty accessing finance, services and modern inputs to build viable enterprises, constraining their potential role in local food systems. Regulation and policy measures focus mainly on the agricultural sector, trade or broader industrial development, failing to address SMAEs’ specific needs. Funding and investment opportunities for agri-food SMAEs are scarce in Africa due to the perceived risks of the agricultural sector, coupled with the lack of capacity of financial institutions and private investors to correctly assess the potential profitability of business opportunities within agribusiness markets.

Studies indicate that only a few small and medium agro-processing enterprises grow to become profitable, competitive businesses. This is because entrepreneurs in developing countries face challenges including lack of market knowledge, limited access to financing products, business services, appropriate technology and testing facilities and professional networks.

Governments and development actors have been making efforts to alleviate some of these challenges through facilitating grants, preferential loans, partial credit guarantees, targeted fiscal relief and other similar measures. The Food & Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) [where the author of this article is a policy economist] works with governments, producer organisations, private sector actors and financial institutions to increase investment in agribusiness. It builds the capacities of agricultural ministries and other relevant ministries to effectively engage with private sector partners on the inclusion of farmers and SMAEs, investment promotion and increased efficiency.

Moving forward, COVID-19 control strategies must enhance workplace safety measures, such as excluding sick workers, erecting physical barriers, requiring face protection, and enhancing sanitation to prevent virus transmission. Providing training and applying these principles in all food processing environments will reduce the transmission and limit the spread of other pathogens, thereby keeping workers healthy and the food supply safe.

Threats such as COVID-19 offer an opportunity to re-think agro-food business models and put in place systemic changes, focusing on resilience systems that leave no one behind.

For short-term recovery, it would be valuable to measure impacts of the pandemic with a food security lens to inform policy decisions and investments on the SMAE sector. It is necessary to support local and regional food markets including input supply, production and logistics. Another step is designing programmes to improve production efficiency and resilience in agro-food systems by promoting innovations and digital solutions. Putting in place mechanisms to leverage different sources of finance and technical assistance is invaluable; for example, targeted credit, challenge funds, impact financing, guarantees etc.

On the longer term, governments and development actors should continue promoting intra-regional trade in agro-food products. Targeted economic stimuli to support enhanced recovery and resilience in agro-food systems and multi-sectoral approaches for recovery and development are also essential.

Recognising the invaluable contribution of SMAEs to agricultural development, there is a need to scale-up innovative approaches to inclusive finance and investment models that support women and youth agro-preneurs. Development actors should work alongside governments, financial institutions and local partners to address both supply-side and demand-side constraints to inclusive financing. Testing and scaling up agricultural finance products and inclusive agribusiness models developed by financial institutions and value chains actors, as well as scaling up mobile banking and ICT use to leverage finance for all actors along agricultural value chains, are key interventions.

To sustainably support SMAEs, promoting financial literacy among producer organisations and improving coordination among public and private stakeholders in implementing common agribusiness investment promotion strategies at national and regional levels are advantageous. Setting up agribusiness entrepreneurship centres can improve the competitiveness and growth of agro-processing enterprises by advancing innovation in products, processes and business models.

Supporting SMAEs is crucial toward achieving food security and sustainable agricultural development in East Africa.

Can Poor Countries Avoid a Vaccine Bidding War?

Posted on by Web Master

The world has received the best possible gift for the coming year. The development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in such a short time is something close to a medical miracle and portends an end to the crisis that dominated 2020.

But the pace at which we will end the pandemic depends on three factors. The first is the extent of continued compliance with recommended safety measures such as wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds and washing hands. The second factor is our ability to overcome the many logistical and distributional challenges of administering vaccines globally. And the third is access to vaccines for poorer countries. The pandemic will not be over until the Novel Coronavirus has been vanquished everywhere.

Some efforts are already underway to achieve this. For example, COVAX, a coalition of 172 countries (not including the United States), is seeking “to guarantee rapid, fair and equitable access” to vaccines “for people in all countries.”

Co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), it has already made arrangements with nine pharmaceutical developers to procure vaccines once they have been approved. Thus far, the European Union and individual EU member states have contributed the most to the effort – 850 million euros to date – followed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other major donors.

COVAX is seeking to raise five billion dollars by the end of 2021 so that it can procure two billion doses. But even with a vaccine requiring only one dose (the current approved vaccines require two), two billion would not be enough to cover the developing world’s population. And while there is hope that producers in countries such as India can manufacture vaccines less expensively, the global supply will still fall far short of demand.

In addition to COVAX, there are also efforts to provide financing for poor countries directly. The World Bank, for example, has committed 160 billion dollars to its client countries, and many other donors and philanthropic foundations have contributed in a similar fashion. Moreover, under the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s joint Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), 73 poor countries have been offered the opportunity to postpone debt service payments until June 2021. As of early December, 45 countries had signed up for the programme, with most of them freeing up funds equivalent to between 0.1pc to 2pc of GDP.

While universal access to the vaccine is essential to overcome the pandemic, it is not clear that allocating more money to poor countries for vaccine purchases will actually enable them to obtain more doses, given the anticipated supply issues. Approved producers are already straining against capacity limits, and while there may be favourable surprises, increased demand (and thus the price at which the vaccine may be purchased) is unlikely to stimulate significantly higher production.

Moreover, many of the current contracts commit producers to sell at cost, with the quantities already specified. After those stocks are depleted, additional financing to countries pursuing unilateral purchases would likely result in a bidding war, thereby driving up the price and offsetting the gains to overall welfare.

To be sure, the companies that undertook the risk of pursuing a safe and effective vaccine deserve to be compensated for their efforts. As productive capacity increases, market forces should be allowed to provide incentives for innovation, development, and the creation of additional production facilities. But given the extent of demand for vaccines in 2021 is likely to exceed supply, further incentives for additional production cannot be expected to improve the supply-demand balance within the year.

And that is hardly the only concern. If some poor countries are sufficiently creditworthy, they may borrow more to finance vaccine purchases at the same time that the price for vaccines rises, leaving them with more debt but not a greater supply of vaccines than they otherwise might have procured.

Meanwhile, other poor countries that were already highly indebted are confronting debt-servicing difficulties that they would have faced even under normal economic circumstances. And some of those receiving DSSI support may simply use the freed-up funds to finance debt servicing commitments rather than to purchase vaccines. To the extent that other creditors – such as private banks and major bilateral official lenders like China – get paid today, there will be fewer funds available later on for debt restructuring undertaken in conjunction with macroeconomic reforms.

These circumstances could result in there being fewer vaccines delivered to poor countries and greater rewards to creditors who received debt-service payments at the expense of those who offered DSSI forbearance. And in still other cases, the newly available funds might be directed toward other areas of government deficit spending instead of to vaccine purchases.

Given all of these complications, the best way to help poor countries obtain more doses is to reach an international agreement, presumably through COVAX and the WHO, to coordinate the allocation of available vaccines. The US is expected to rejoin the WHO after President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. Once that happens, a multilateral push to allocate vaccines efficiently to poor countries will have a high chance of success and should be pursued in earnest.

Don’t Take It Out on the Sack

Posted on by Web Master

At some point in our lives, most of us have gotten angry, lost our cool and have taken it out on someone who probably did not deserve it. This is misdirected or misplaced anger, and it usually afflicts people who are under a lot of stress. Last week, I was the target of one person under a similar condition.

It was when I was taking a walk with a friend, giggling excitedly on the road. We were caught up in a conversation when my friend mindlessly flung a piece of a gum wrapper. It was meant to be for the trash. It instead landed on a turquoise Toyota sedan.

Suddenly, we heard a horn honking and someone screaming. The owner of the car came out of nowhere, ready to start a fight.

“How dare you throw trash on my car? That’s disrespectful. Who do you think you are?” he screamed.

My friend confusedly explained how she meant to put the piece of paper in the trash but how she had missed. She offered to pick it up and throw it in the trash.

“I saw you laughing at me as well,” he continued. “Were you making fun of me? “He was in full-blown argument mode.

We decided to try again and explain our position. Chiming in, I went on about how we were caught up in a conversation and did not realise where the small piece of wrapping paper would land. I tried to assure him that we did not mean harm.

“You see, we haven’t seen each other in a long time and had to do a lot of catching up,” I said in the smoothest tone I could muster. He responded: “I am sick of people like you who think they can do whatever they want and step on people’s shoes,” he responded.

That triggered me. He was blowing the whole thing out of proportion. I replied that he should not make a big deal out of it. There and then, the guy lost it. We were each turning the emotional dial on one another. It was about to escalate.

Fortunately, a parking attendant who witnessed everything stepped in and explained how it was not deliberate. He somehow managed to calm down the guy. Finally, the man drove away in a fit of rage, giving us a menacing look.

“Don’t mind him,” the mediator said. “He was angry even when he stepped out of the car. I overheard him talking on the phone, and he sounded pissed.”

He was arguing with someone about how he was wronged by a person he trusted.

That seemed to explain our bizarre confrontation. It reminded us about the displacement theory course we took in a psychology class. It is a defence mechanism where a person takes out their anger on a less threatening individual instead of the actual person who made them angry.

Like most situations in life, there is an Amharic saying for it: Ayit bebela, dawa temeta. It means to take out once anger on the sack a mouse was in because the mouse that was responsible for eating the food could not be caught.

Displacement theory is at work in most offices that deal with a large mass of people. Secretaries and security guards due to the nature of their jobs happen to easily get angry and take out their anger on the next person that walks in. It is not just these professions though. Most of us, when we have a fight with our spouses or get angry over something that happened in our homes, treat people recklessly with repressed anger and indifference.

Perhaps, nothing beats drivers in this regard.

“When you are behind the wheel, you are in control. That is a reward by itself,” a psychology teacher once said.

Then when we are forced to slow down or stop, we are losing control and, therefore, our reward, the teacher explained. That by itself creates frustration and anger. That is why we see most drivers getting angry at their counterparts in other cars when they try to pass them or get in their way. This partly explains road rage, which is very common, especially at peak hours where there is traffic congestion.

Displacing anger on a secondary target rather than the actual person might seem like a harmless thing we do in our day to day lives. However, when this becomes the typical coping mechanism and a way of dealing with anger, then it causes harm. It produces an unhealthy habit that could lead to abusive behaviour.

We have to observe, reflect on our response, and channel our anger and negative emotions properly. This means finding a healthier way of dealing with our anger using alternatives such as writing and exercising.

Half Truths Create Poor Environment for Dialogue

Posted on by Web Master

Politicians and members of society are angrier than ever. They are mad, because they trumpet a particular outlook, built on a certain narrative that they have constructed themselves on stories that they want to believe.

“Truth is the most valuable thing in the world but oftentimes is hidden by a bodyguard of lies,” Winston Churchill once said.

Truth is probably the most violated concept in our country. Society considers everything it wants to accept as absolute. The negative result of this is that it leads to the disregard of reason and the norms and values that society needs to function.

It is a disease that afflicts deep in the marrow, even breaking families apart.

A tragedy was visited upon a couple that have been married for over 30 years and whom I came to know recently. In a reflection of our politics and societal dysfunction, the wife recently left her husband and father of five children. It was because they were from different ethnic groups, and she could no longer accept her husband’s political outlook.

The children caught up in the middle have to choose, not just parents, but ethnic identity and a political outlook to boot.

This anecdote is a terrible reminder of the crisis we have reached as a society. We are unable to bridge the ever-widening gap of societal division and dysfunction that is getting worse by the day.

It is no wonder then that such division, which is ripping apart families, is also creating conflict. It is chilling and distressing to hear the endless loss of lives and destruction that is leading many to flee their country. It is heart-breaking to find that Ethiopia’s name is again being raised for violence, displacement and injustice.

This problem arises from our failure to understand where our disagreements occur and how we can reach a consensus.

How could we when we believe facts selectively?

Constructive debates can only occur in an environment where facts have a place. Emotions are terrible substitutes for facts. The consequence is segments of society who talk past one another.

If any progress is to be made in Ethiopia amid the shifting sands of political and social change, it is imperative that the country understand where any meaningful dialogue can begin. Too much is at stake and too many lives will continue to be lost if the nation is unable to agree even on the starting point.

This is not to imply that a political and social moral consensus can be reached solely by discussions. But overlapping and divergent narratives lead to chaos. At the very least, through constant dialogue a semblance of stability could be achieved.

Knowledge, upon which social and political structures are erected, is based on truth, morality and technique, according to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. Truth is key, from which morality and technique flow. Today in Ethiopia, assumptions reign supreme, morality is mocked, and truth is relative.

Fortunately, all is not lost. There are individuals who continue to call for the moral re-awakening of society and the establishment of truth.

Still, the question remains: how do we arrive at the fact on which narratives hang and by which politics and society must be organised?

At the least, it starts from having leaders who understand the essence of leadership, which is to serve and protect the public and the national interest. It requires having public servants committed to the rule of law.

Society’s future also lies in having an independent justice system that is trusted and free of political interference, a system that protects the poor and the weak against the powerful and upholds democratic and political rights – one that checks the executive.

Such corrections in our political culture and system will create an environment where narratives that come from institutions can be trusted. It also allows discussions to take place. It will not solve all our problems, but it will help steer us away from violence.

On the Nolanite Tradition of Time, Reality: Taken Too Far

Posted on by Web Master

After months of waiting following its release in the West, Tenet has finally hit theatres here in Ethiopia, showing in malls in at least two locations, at Century Mall and Biresh CinePlus.

It is one of the most anticipated movies of the year, even before it was clear that a pandemic would force most movie release dates to be pushed to 2021. Much of this enthusiasm arose as a result of the man behind the camera, Christopher Nolan. He has what amounts to cult status in geek culture and has gained a reputation as a serious and sophisticated filmmaker with the mainstream audience.

His new movie, at least in its description, appears to confirm his status. Shot on 70 mm film – a rarity in the film industry, which has mostly moved to digital – it is a visually stunning movie. Its plot synopsis is even more interesting. It is an action movie about a spy on a mission to save the world from a Russian crime boss working with syndicates in the future that give him technology capable of inverting the flow of time.

Under a director with a greater sense of humour – say, Robert Zemeckis or even James Cameron – this would have been a genuinely entertaining movie. But not Nolan – he is too severe for his own good. He has to make a time travel movie without plot holes or details that can present questions. He has to make it a scientific paper on reverse entropy, but one that also has the inconvenience of telling a human story. A dilemma!

The film starts with The Protagonist (John David Washington) on a mission that ends with him swallowing cyanide to avoid torture after he gets captured. Lucky for him, that was not cyanide, and his decision to consume it is a test of his loyalty. It gets him a job at Tenet.

Nolan was inspired by the Sator Square, an ancient word square with “Tenet” in the centre. It reads the same backwards and forwards, just like the driving technology behind the movie’s plot. The top-secret organisation is on a mission to stop World War III. Someone in the future is “sending back” objects capable of travelling in reverse time – more accurately, in reverse entropy. It allows objects to go from disorder (say, spilt water) to order (water back in its container).

The folks in the future want to destroy the past using this technology, and they are trying to do it with the help of a present-day Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh). The Protagonist teams up with a non-Tenet contact to avert the impending catastrophe.

The film’s plot demands excellent action scenes. Nolan delivers. The only thing more exciting than watching explosions, car crashes and gunfights is seeing them in reverse. Even better is watching action sequences in reverse and forward time combine. It must have been a headache to shoot and edit, but it is delightful to watch.

The ambition of trying to tell such a movie is also impressive. It speaks to Nolan’s status within Hollywood and the pop culture creed he currently has that he was able to get studios to cough up 200 million dollars for a movie that probably only a handful of people would fully understand on the first watch. It was a major gamble which, compounded by COVID-19, inevitably did not pan out.

Partly, this has to do with the fact that the film fails to tell a fully rounded story and develop its character. Nolan dispenses with nearly all types of character backstories. The protagonist does not even get a name; he is just called The Protagonist. Robert Pattinson’s supporting character is just known as Neil. None of them has a character arc or for that matter a character.

The antagonist is better developed, but Nolan wastes Branagh’s acting chops by writing him as such a cliché Russian villain that he ends up coming off as a caricature.

But it is probably the whole idea for the plot that takes away from the film. It is impossible to understand in one sitting, at least for the rest of us mortals. Nolan peppers the movie with obscene amounts of expositions, desperate to make it legible for audiences. It does not work. What’s more, it crowded out any opportunity to develop characters or expound on a theme.

In a way, Tenet is the spiritual sequel to Memento and Inception, other movies where complex time flows are explored, and reality is called into question. Memento remains Nolan’s masterpiece, an exploration of memory and how we willingly distort it. Inception is not a great movie, but it is a very entertaining one, with Nolan taking audiences in a wild ride into dreams. There was an element of storytelling with both movies with the filmmaker’s usual penchant for narrating in a complex but ultimately captivating way.

Tenet was going too far. It was too much physics and very little character development and storytelling. Nolan takes himself way too seriously, at the expense of having a sense of humour or being modest.

Another Beautification

Posted on by Web Master

Beautification and green projects continue in the city, especially along the sites that have been identified as prime locations for leisure. One of these is this hilly space near Sheraton Addis, where day workers can be found laying concrete and affixing handrails. It is also getting a letter sculpture reading “Ethiopia”.

Almost Man

Posted on by Web Master

Along Africa Avenue near Flamingo Restaurant is a figure dressed in yellow, wielding a paint brush, standing atop a paint store. It can easily be confused for a person. But it is a mannequin being used by the store as a way of drawing attention.