50 No Holiday: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Image

The International Airport, Addis Ababa

How to get there

Fly straight there. Bole International Airport is located 5 miles (8 kilometers) southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is the larger of the two international airports located in Ethiopia, the second being the Lideta Airport, which is located to the southwest of the capital.

What to see

This is a magnificently modern, gleaming glass and steel structure stuffed full of fashionable boutiques selling the usual airport necessities like silk ties and Belgian chocolates. But they are necessities if you want to attract Western experts! And even as Bob Geldof's “Band Aid” alerted the world to the tragic images of Ethiopian children dying in the parched fields, in Addis Ababa, the restaurants were full of the aid experts and development professionals wining and dining the Ethiopian ruling class. Such people, unlike No Holidaymakers, do not travel rough.

In 2001, an expansion plan was announced for the airport at a cost of $130 million. This involved the construction of a new runway, as well as five taxiways linking the new runway to the existing runway and various practical safety improvements. It also involved the construction of a new steel structure to house the airport terminal, a parking garage, a shopping complex and restaurants. This made up about two-thirds of the total bill of $75 million with a British firm, Fitchner, in charge of the project management and a Kuwaiti company as the contractor.

The new terminal is capable of handling six to seven million passengers each year, although at the moment the airport receives only about one twelfth as many as that. This is comfortably more even than the number of international development experts expected.

Today the ultra-modern glass structure dominates the skyline of the area. The “shining glass structure is an architectural and artistic masterpiece, functional and beautiful at the same time,” according to its owners. On the other hand, the existing terminal, which had served customers very well for years, is now relegated to serving domestic flights.

Useful information

Ethiopia is a country of 72 million people, with a Gross National Product so small that it works out at about 40 cents per person, per day. Not of course that it is distributed equally—there are plenty of rich people in Ethiopia, quite a lot of money for waging wars against its even poorer neighbor, Eritrea—and even a bit for its airport.

Remarkably, ever since the 1980s when Band Aid highlighted the plight of the 60 million or so rural Ethiopians (who make up five out of every six of the population) aid has made up a good third of the country's income. And not all of it goes straight back to the donors in the form of arms deals! Apart from the essential proportion carefully saved in offshore bank accounts for the use of the quintessentially African “socialist” ruling elite and their relatives, there has been cash for a few grand, national projects, like the airport. (Financing for these facilities has come through low interest loans from a variety of donors, the largest being Kuwait and the African Development Bank.)

The authorities hoped that the expansion of the airport would turn Bole into the aviation capital of Africa. The provision of easy international connections is a key element in the ambition of Addis Ababa to become the African hub of a global network. Good air connections are believed to be essential in attracting business to the capital.

Useless information

At the time of Band Aid and the famine, Ethiopia was implausibly, but formally, under a Maoist dictatorship (Mengistu Haile Mariam's), the practical sign of which was that all the land was nationalized and the channeling of all resources into armaments for the conquest of Eritrea was seen as the main national requirement. The Maoism never extended to industrialization strategies, nor to population control and certainly not to any rural initiatives such as basic educational and health care.

Nowadays the country is officially more democratic and not at all Maoist, but funnily enough the government still owns all the land and seems to have a hand (or a family member) in all the major businesses. So the money that is poured into Ethiopia for infrastructure by the donors continues to flow through the government's hands and then (slightly reduced of course) on to the usual benefactors: transnational companies and arms dealers.

The fact that the government owns all the land is, however, the main explanation both for the change of Ethiopia's once fertile lands into semi-arid desert and the collapse of food production in the country.

When Band Aid shut itself down, it had officially raised $144,124,694, or just about the same amount of money as the government wanted for the new airport.

Let's be positive about this

If the Band Aid type donations were politically naive, and inadvertently supported the war on Eritrea, at least many of the projects the money was spent on, being ground level crisis intervention such as emergency feeding and emergency health, were valuable—and certainly would not have been financed otherwise.

And support for the airport comes from Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal, writing about the project for Arab News on July 11, 2004:

When I visited Addis Ababa last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see how nice it was. The city has wide, well paved, tree-lined avenues and comfortable first-class hotels. Although it is a poor city, the people there have done well with the meager resources they have available. An example of this is Addis Ababa Airport where a new terminal has just been completed. The new building is very beautiful and well designed, and cost, I was told, less than $100 million. The new terminal at Karachi airport, Pakistan, which cost about $250 million, gave me the same impression—a lot can be done on a modest budget. These projects contrast sharply with our airport here in Jeddah, which cost more than $4 billion 20 years ago but is badly designed. It will cost another fortune to renovate it.

Image Ethiopian side trip:

The Political Monuments of Addis Ababa

How to get there

But whilst visiting Bole International Airport—why not take a side trip to see some of Ethiopia? The airport is 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the city center and a free shuttle bus runs into the city. It is a very political capital, with much for the No Holidaymaker to see.

What to see

The town itself boasts numerous patriotic statues and memorials of a vaguely political nature. Abune Petros Statue at Arada, marks the spot where the Ethiopian patriarch courageously faced the firing squad in defiance of the fascists, while The Freedom Tower at Arat Kilo, and the Martyr's Statue at Sidist Killo commemorate the victories of Ethiopia against both the genocide committed by the Italians and the political treachery of the British.

Piquantly perhaps, the Menelik Monument, near St. George's cathedral, is intended to recall the battle of Adwa in 1896 where Africa was supposed to have triumphed over colonialism. Not to forget, the Tiglachin Monument, which proudly commemorates the war against Somalia.

Revolutionary parades are held every September in a natural amphitheatre nearby to mark the 1974 communist revolution. Portraits of Marx, Lenin, “Angels,” and Ethiopia's own Comrade Mengistu used to adorn the square, but have now sadly gone.

The infamous Haile Selassie's Grand Palace is located north east of Churchill Avenue at the end of Colsen Street, whilst his second residence, Jubilee Palace, is on Menelik Avenue, just near the Ghion Hotel, celebrated for its Italian style coffee. But Haile Selassie's palaces are simple stuff compared to the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Africa Hall is a magnificent building with huge stained glass windows depicting the suffering of the people of Africa. It is said to be a symbol of African independence and revival, just like the thermal springs to the west of it. Alas, these springs are now diverted to a private bathing complex.

Another, as the Ethiopian tourist board puts it, “major attraction” is the old Imperial Lion Zoo, where the last few Ethiopian lions can be seen waiting out their twilight days.

Useful information

The name “Addis Ababa” means “new flower,” and Addis is a flower that grows very high, at 7,900 feet above sea level in the Entoto Mountains. At 8,000 feet (2,440 meters), Addis Ababa is the third highest capital in the world. Ethiopia used to have no less than six capitals at six different locations, with King Menelik moving between them as available trees and hence fuel wood became exhausted. Addis itself was on the point of being abandoned when fast-growing eucalyptus trees were introduced from Australia.

Addis Ababa strives to be an administrative center not only for Ethiopia but also for the whole of Africa. The headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Africa was established here in 1958 and is the base for the Organization of African Unity's (OAU's) secretariat.

Administration-wise, Ethiopians have their own methods though. For example, very few streets have names in Addis Ababa, and those that do may not be the same as either the ones on the map or the ones people use. “Africa Avenue,” for instance, on the map is popularly known as “Bole Road,” and “Has Biru Avenue” as “Debre Zeit Road.” Likewise, people in Ethiopia use a different calendar from most of the rest of the world, the Julian calendar (which has thirteen months, 12 of 30 days and one of just five!) rather than the more usual Gregorian one, with the Ethiopians running about seven years behind. This means that when it is 2006 in Europe, it is 1999 in Ethiopia.