Salaam salaam from BA! This is the Rorshok Ethiopia Update from the 4th of December twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Ethiopia.

The spread of the Marburg Virus has decreased over the past week, with the number of new cases declining. On Monday the 1st of December, the Ministry of Health said it tested over a hundred and seventy people and found that none were infected. On top of that, no casualties have been reported since Friday the 28th of November.

On Saturday the 29th, the Ari zonal government, which administers Jinka city, in southern Ethiopia, where the virus was first found in the country, banned all transportation services to and from the area for a week. The zonal administration had also temporarily closed schools and other places where a crowd could gather.

Next up, this past week, world-renowned news outlet Al Jazeera released an interview between famous journalist Mehdi Hasan and Getachew Reda, the Prime Minister’s advisor on East African affairs and former senior official at the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (or TPLF).

In the fifty-minute-long interview, Mehdi grilled Getachew because, during the war, he said that PM Abiy was committing a genocide, but then switched sides after the war ended and became his advisor. Getachew also said he doesn’t believe that a war will break out between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the foreseeable future, citing insider intel.

Parts of the interview were dominated by Mehdi citing Getachew’s tweets during the Tigray war, strongly criticizing Abiy and accusing him of genocide and other war crimes.

Meanwhile, The National Dialogue Commission said on Tuesday the 2nd that it will not be able to complete its remaining tasks, including organizing discussions on issues its participants have identified, within the next three months. Recall that the commission was formed to encourage and facilitate dialogue to resolve disagreements and address past injustices. The Parliament had given the commission an additional year to finish up, but time is running out as only three months remain until its deadline.

The deputy commissioner said the commission won’t be able to make it because it didn’t make meaningful progress in the Tigray region due to tensions between the TPLF and the federal government and because some opposition parties have been excluded from the process.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, talked over the phone this week, according to the US State Department. The department said the two discussed regional issues in the Horn of Africa and their shared commitment to regional stability.

Media outlets, however, were quick to point out what was unusually missing from the department’s statement: talks concerning Ethiopia’s internal affairs. Conversations between top government officials of the two countries would usually include talks on Ethiopia’s politics, humanitarian issues and other topics of specific interest to Ethiopia.

Now, let’s spread our wings, as preparations for the construction of what’s expected to be the largest airport in Africa are underway since Ethiopian Airlines revealed its picks for financial, legal and technical consulting this past week. KPMG, a US consulting company, is expected to help with the project’s financial matters, while UK-based law firm Clyde & Co. will handle legal issues. Clyde & Co. had previously represented Ethiopian Airlines in a suit against Boeing for over fifty million US dollars.

The new airport, whose estimated costs have jumped from ten to more than twelve billion US dollars, is expected to serve over sixty million people annually and is scheduled to begin operating by twenty thirty.

More about transportation as The Civil Aviation Authority held an event on Thursday the 27th of November, and revealed the results of a feasibility study on the use of biofuel for aircraft.

Alemu Sime, the Minister of Transport and Logistics, attended the event and gave a speech, saying that the government is planning to require car owners to install emissions meters on all their vehicles that run on fuel. He explained that cars that emit pollutants in volumes above a set amount will be forced off the roads.

He added that it has been a while since the government planned this and gave a grace period to car owners, which he said has run out. He recalled that the government also made policy changes, including banning the import of used internal combustion engine cars.

On another note, the newspaper Reporter revealed on Wednesday the 3rd that the Addis Ababa Revenue Office told the publication that its field officers have begun wearing bodycams this week.

The office collaborated with the Information Network Security Agency and spent over a hundred million birr, which is more than half a million US dollars, to equip its officers with bodycams, which also include location tracking. The office said the use of bodycams will help combat corruption and deal with complaints effectively.

In business news, the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority said on Tuesday the 2nd that it has prepared a policy document to allow foreigners to invest in the country’s capital market. The authority’s head said even though her office hasn’t received any formal requests from foreigners, it believes there will be interest from abroad in the future.

She also said the authority has prepared directives that will address potential complaints from people and institutions seeking compensation for damages from capital market services providers.

Let’s follow up on a story from our previous show. Last week, we reported that Taye Dendea, the former state minister of peace, is in custody and had been charged with three counts of political crimes.

This week, on Tuesday the 2nd, his lawyer told media outlets that he had asked the Federal High Court to release Taye on bail. Prosecutors refused and presented comments on a video in which people praised Taye for exposing the government, saying that it was evidence of Taye’s influence and if released, he could use his sway to call riots and disrupt peace.

The same video, released back in June, is also their main evidence for the new charges. The court picked two dates over the next two weeks, the first to sentence Taye for a crime he was found guilty of and the second, to hear Taye’s defense on the new charges and to decide whether to grant him bail.

More news from the Federal High Court as it gave its verdict on the case of TikToker Jon Daniel and four others who were detained over a year ago after they refused to get off a flight from Addis to Mekelle, the Tigray region’s capital, that was cancelled due to weather conditions. Detainees were also livestreaming the situation on TikTok, which resulted in a computer-crimes charge from prosecutors.

Suspects were in custody for over a year as their case was pending. On Wednesday the 3rd, the court said they were guilty but said they’d served enough time and decided that they should be released.

The construction of a factory that will print passports, IDs and make debit cards is almost done. The factory, which is being built in an industrial park in Addis and is partly owned by the Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is expected to print over five and a half million passports annually.

Media outlets have also reported that it will have the capacity to print twenty-eight million IDs. Ethiopian passports have so far been printed abroad and this has posed security risks as well as service disruptions, issues that the new plant is expected to fix.

It’s not just passport printing that’s going to Ethiopia. A nineteenth-century artifact, a hairpin that belonged to the wife of Emperor Tewodros the second, is going to return too, after years at the Bartolami Fine Art gallery in Rome.

The Royal Ethiopia Trust, a non-profit that Emperor Haile Selassie’s grandson founded to advocate for the return of Ethiopia’s artifacts abroad, negotiated with the gallery to have the hairpin returned. The non-profit also said it is talking to authorities to have the returned hairpin displayed in the National Museum of Ethiopia.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Ciao!