16
Letters
FRIDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2020
The tragedy in Ethiopia
needs a political solution
Crisis in the rebellious Tigray region cannot be solved by brute force
Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime min-
ister, says his federal troops will soon
march on Mekelle, capital of the rebel-
lious Tigray region, and that victory is
close. His government presents the
military campaign against the Tigray
People’s Liberation Front, prosecuted
with tanks and air strikes, as a simple
law and order exercise. With hundreds
of reported casualties that description
stretches credulity.
In Mr Abiy’s version of how this plays
out, TPLF leaders will be apprehended
and brought to justice and an interim
regional government imposed — at
which point the country can revert to
“normal”. Unfortunately, normal has
long been highly precarious in spite of
years of strong economic growth that
has held out great promise for the
country of 110m people. It is far from
assured that federal forces can achieve
the promised swift victory. The TPLF
ran Ethiopia for 27 years and is heavily
armed. Even if government troops cap-
ture the leadership, there is no guaran-
tee that other TPLF fighters won’t wage
a protracted guerrilla war or that the
Tigrayan people will acquiesce to a fed-
erally imposed government.
Nor, if Tigray is under some sort of
martial law, is it easy to see how Mr
Abiy can hold the open elections he has
promised. These are now set for June
and are already complicated by the
arrest of prominent opposition leaders
from Oromia and elsewhere. Unless Mr
Abiy can achieve an electoral mandate,
he will not regain the legitimacy he
needs to unite the country or convince
people of his liberal-sounding agenda.
Tigray is just one of the crises he faces.
Since he became prime minister in
2018, Mr Abiy has sought a new federal-
ist arrangement that plays down ethnic-
ity in an environment where identity
has become the principal means of
political mobilisation. That sounds
sensible to western ears. But many
Promise of bitcoin has
proved to be elusive
Cryptocurrency fails to provide investors with stability and protection
Bitcoin promises to be digital gold: safe,
valuable and rare. That could explain
much of the cryptocurrency’s rally
over the past year. Like the yellow-
coloured metal, the price of bitcoin is
supposed to surge as investors take
fright at the possibility of inflation from
central banks printing money or, for
some, the potential collapse of society in
the face of the coronavirus pandemic
and civil disturbance following the US
election. In those circumstances the two
scarce assets are supposed to retain
their value while others’ disappears.
Unfortunately, like gold, bitcoin’s
status as a safe haven is more theoret-
ical than anything else. Rather than
stability it offers investors volatility
and a chance to speculate on the
market’s sentiment towards the cur-
rency. The recent rise in the cryptocur-
rency’s valuation is no different. Inves-
tors looking for a safe place to keep
their wealth should look elsewhere.
The price of bitcoin in terms of the
US dollar hit a three-year high of close
to $18,000 this week, representing a
nearly 250 per cent rise since January.
Bitcoin’s price has spiked before: this
year’s increase in the cryptocurrency’s
price has seen it almost touch levels it
reached in 2017. That peak did not last,
however, and was followed by a deep
crash and calls for tighter regulation.
Bitcoin holders have learnt to live
with the volatility: as recently as March
the cryptocurrency lost half of its value
after investors realised the scale of dis-
ruption that coronavirus would bring
and rushed to sell anything they could
exchange to get hold of then-scarce
dollars. Such swings in bitcoin’s value,
both dramatically up and down in the
space of 12 months, hardly suggest it is
a stable store of value.
Instead of reflecting fears of geopolit-
ical risk or hyperinflation, the recent
rally in the cryptocurrency’s price has
happened alongside other risk assets.
Ethiopians, including people from Oro-
mia, Mr Abiy’s own, regard his vision as
an attempt to restore the type of cen-
tralised authority practised by Emperor
Menelik II, who reigned at the turn of
the 20th century, or the Derg military
junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam, over-
thrown in 1991. Until this fractious con-
stitutional issue is resolved through
national dialogue, ethnicity will con-
tinue to gnaw at Ethiopia’s body politic.
In the meantime, hostilities must
stop in Tigray. A humanitarian crisis is
under way, with thousands fleeing the
fighting into Sudan. A blockade of the
region and ethnically inspired massa-
cres threaten catastrophe. In one inci-
dent, says Amnesty International, hun-
dreds of non-Tigrayan civilians were
stabbed and hacked to death, though
an internet blackout makes details dif-
ficult to verify. Humanitarian organis-
ations have complained they are being
denied access to Tigray, a situation that
needs to be rectified immediately.
The international community has
been scandalously disengaged. Mr
Abiy may have calculated that this is a
good time to finish the TPLF off while
Washington is distracted. The UN
Security Council, the African Union,
the EU and others need to make it clear
that they will not stand by while Ethio-
pia slides into ruin.
Mr Abiy has rejected calls to negoti-
ate with the TPLF, which he has
labelled a “criminal clique”. The prime
minister, it should be recalled, worked
for the security apparatus while the
TPLF was running the country. To the
extent that there are law-and-order
issues, these should be addressed by
the police and the courts.
Yet, above all, this is a political crisis
for which a political settlement is ulti-
mately the only solution. Both sides
need to step back from the brink.
Whatever the underlying issues, tanks
and bombs will not solve them.
Stocks have similarly done well on
news of potential vaccines while tradi-
tional havens such as US treasuries —
and gold — have seen their value slip.
Perhaps the main factor in bitcoin’s
recent rise, then, is its potential for
more mainstream adoption beyond
hobbyists and speculators. Options on
the digital currency are more fre-
quently being traded on the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange while payments
company PayPal is offering the chance
in the US to buy and sell bitcoin
through its app. This has made it more
feasible as a form of money; bitcoin is
not widely accepted but PayPal is.
Yet there are no fundamentals on
which to base a judgment of bitcoin’s
value. Its current price just reflects
what people are willing to spend on it.
That may be a result of central banks’
easy money policies worldwide; bitcoin
looks appealing because other asset
prices are already so high and returns
so low. But it places it in a category
more like fine art or famous sneakers,
both of which have attained record val-
uations in auctions this year.
Bitcoin may have further to go,
thanks not to its own merits but to a
weakening of the dollar. Analysts fore-
cast the US currency could weaken 20
per cent next year as a working corona-
virus vaccine spurs growth and a
greater appetite for risk among inves-
tors. That would be something to wel-
come — not just for what it represents
but because it would help ease pressure
on emerging market borrowers who
rely on cheap dollar financing.
It may be precisely because the Fed-
eral Reserve has done such a good job
of meeting the world’s need for dollars
that investors feel comfortable taking a
punt on bitcoin and venturing away
from the comparative stability of fiat
currency. If so, cryptocurrency advo-
cates have the central bank to thank for
their recent success.
★ FINANCIAL TIMES
IMF must help Africa to woo private investors
There are many positives for poorer
African nations if your article “G20
nears accord over IMF relief funds”
(Report, November 19) is correct. All
of the sub-Saharan nations I operate in
have been materially impacted by the
pandemic and — as importantly — by
the squeeze on international
investment and business activity that
ordinarily contribute to our economic
and social development.
Cash injections from the IMF will
bolster their balance sheets and debt
relief from the G20 and Paris Club will
help, but facilitating proper investment
that caters for long-term development
is infinitely more valuable.
Metals shortages pose risk
for Britain’s EV ambitions
The UK government’s announcement
(Report, November 16) of a 2030 ban
on petrol and diesel cars is a very
positive move. The problem that the
government and the carmakers must
now address is how they will secure
adequate supply of the metals which
are essential to making the batteries.
In mining, the time lag from proving
a new resource to production of metal
is seldom less than five years. The most
conservative electric vehicle (EV)
adoption rates over the next decade
will require a tripling of global cobalt
production (even with the progression
to nickel-rich cathodes), and for
battery grade nickel and lithium to be
at even higher multiples of present
global supply.
In order to achieve this, significant
investment must be made into the
mining industry to bring new projects
online. However, without much higher
metals prices, it is unlikely that
sufficient funding will come from the
capital markets.
The UK government should look to
utilise sovereign funds to invest in
mining projects to ensure preferential
access to the supply chain that
supports EV manufacturing
domestically here in the UK.
Brian Menell
Chairman and CEO of TechMet
London W1, UK
Shipping looks for help
to hit net-zero targets
Boris Johnson’s announcement of a
green industrial revolution was
welcomed by the UK shipping sector
(Opinion, November 18). As an island
nation ships play a pivotal role by
moving 95 per cent of all UK goods. But
if we are going to reach our net-zero
target by 2050 we need international
collaboration to reduce emissions
across global shipping.
We call on the government to
support the industry’s plans for a $5bn
international research and
development fund to develop new,
clean fuels.
As the shipping industry commits to
new short-term measures to cut carbon
emissions, we will continue working
with the government and industry
partners, in the build up to next year’s
COP26 climate change conference and
beyond, to ensure the UK becomes a
world leader in green maritime
technology.
Bob Sanguinetti
CEO, UK Chamber of Shipping
London SE1, UK
Covid could
change our
tolerance
of flu deaths
Notebook
by Jemima Kelly
Highly-indebted countries struggling
to attract investment need
international institutions to be more
creative when meeting their
investment objectives.
Africa requires a bespoke approach
which recognises its challenges. China
is wise to this. It is evident everywhere
in Africa that the Chinese are able to
free up finance, deploy capital and
mobilise far faster than their Western
counterparts and do so in a manner
that meets the specific requirements of
the countries themselves.
The assumption is that the Chinese
are doing something extraordinary, in
actual fact they’re simply listening to
West Balkans diplomacy
has echoes of Soviet past
I was saddened to read your article by
Valerie Hopkins and Michael Peel
“Bulgaria dashes N Macedonia hopes
over EU membership” (November 18)
describing how Bulgaria had decided to
veto North Macedonia’s accession to
the EU.
The European future of the Western
Balkans is important for the stability of
Europe. Unfortunately, it seems that
the values and decisions of Bulgaria as
a member state are still influenced by
its Soviet era past.
A dispute about one’s identity and
language in 2020 in our fast and
connected world is absurd.
All people have the right to declare
their identity. The Macedonian
language has been internationally
recognised since 1971 and if Bulgaria
can aggressively dispute the issues of
identity and language of a nation today,
and bully a smaller neighbour, then
imagine how it was in the past after the
Ottomans left the Balkans and what
kind of historic truth Bulgaria wants to
impose on North Macedonia today.
The Balkan region, unfortunately, is
full of leaders that are held back by
their history instead of looking to the
future. Leaders that consciously dream
of countries bigger than their borders,
while endangering the future of
millions of poor and suffering people in
the region.
Nationalism for internal political
reasons has long lasting effects for the
future prosperity of the Balkans’
citizens. This behaviour should be
condemned by the EU and its member
states.
Gorjan Lazarov
Prague, Czech Republic
Every evening for the past fortnight or
so, fireworks have been going off
where I live, in east London. This is
not, despite what the US press might
have you believe, in honour of Joe
Biden’s election victory. It’s because
Brits are very fond of setting off
fireworks at this time of year. Not only
do we have Diwali to observe, but we
also feel a pagan compulsion to
celebrate Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt
to blow up parliament four centuries
ago by setting off small explosions of
our very own.
All these splendid bangs, and the
dangers associated with setting them
off — some 2,000 British people end
up in hospital with firework burns
each year — have got me thinking
about risk and how we tolerate or
even embrace it some moments, and
try to avoid it at all costs at others.
Another, more lethal seasonal risk is
the flu — in a bad year, as many as
25,000 people die from the virus in
England alone. Yet this year, thanks in
large part to lockdowns, flu cases are
way down across the world and are
likely to stay that way.
That’s because the habits we’ve
adopted to limit the spread of
coronavirus — handwashing, mask-
wearing and distancing — are effective
for other respiratory pathogens too.
“The measures we’re taking are
enough to essentially eliminate flu,”
says David Spiegelhalter, chair of the
Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence
Communication at Cambridge
university. A study by the US Centers
for Disease Control has found huge
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the needs of the various countries that
they’re seeking to partner with.
Where capital is set aside for Africa
it is too often not utilised because
criteria are not met. As a result, both
African consumers and Western
investors lose out.
Even if there is no breakthrough on
special drawing rights (SDRs) at this
G20 meeting, I hope the IMF and
World Bank will work towards
adapting their investment criteria to
enable private sector investors like me
to better contribute to long-term,
sustainable development in Africa.
Kwaku Boakye-Adjei
Colmar Berg, Luxembourg
Call for targeted sanctions
against China aggression
It was disturbing to read the letter
“Beijing’s intervention is a crisis Hong
Kong created” (November 18), where
the author appears to be blaming the
hundreds of thousands of
Hongkongers, who have asked for
nothing but the rights and freedoms to
which they are entitled, for their own
oppression.
For months, the citizens of Hong
Kong have been standing up for the
rights legally granted to them under
the UN recognised Sino-British Joint
Declaration. To describe the
participants in this vast movement for
liberty and democracy as “rioters” is a
gross inaccuracy. Peaceful protests
were escalated by a brutal Hong Kong
police force and the issue further
exacerbated by Hong Kong authorities
displaying utter contempt for
democratic norms.
The world cannot and should not
stand by and allow the totalitarian
Chinese Communist party to run
rampant over human rights. Instead,
we must stand together behind the
Hongkongers fighting for their freedom
and push for targeted sanctions against
the true aggressors — the authorities in
Hong Kong and Beijing.
Lord Shinkwin
Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary
Group on Hong Kong
Lord Alton of Liverpool
Vice-Chair
Geraint Davies MP
Vice-Chair
Houses of Parliament, London SW1, UK
PM should let unionist case
be made by Scots Tories
You report that the Conservative party
plans to create a task force of MPs to
devise a strategy for preserving the
union with Scotland (Report,
November 18).
The most constructive decision the
overwhelmingly English Conservative
party could take would be to cut
completely their ties with the party
north of the border in order to enable it
to make a case for the union not just to
fellow Conservatives but also to
supporters of the moribund Scottish
Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
A united unionist party untied from
the incubus of English Toryism would
surely be able to give the Scottish
National party a run for their money in
the forthcoming Scottish
parliamentary elections.
Michael Williams
Letchworth Garden City
Hertfordshire, UK
falls in flu activity both in the
southern hemisphere’s winter and in
the US summer season.
Does that mean, therefore, that we
should be locking down every year to
prevent the excess flu deaths that we
are likely to avoid this winter? Nobody
has suggested that. Yet some might
make a case for continuing with some
of the behavioural changes adopted
for Covid-19.
Influenza spreads similarly, though
not identically, to coronavirus. Flu is
less infectious. The “basic
reproduction number”, or R-zero — a
measure of a disease’s ability to spread
between people when left unchecked
— is estimated at between 1.4 and 1.6
for flu. Covid-19 is thought to be
around 3. Epidemiologists use a
second measure — the “effective
reproduction number”, or R — to
track the number of people who could
be infected by an individual at the
current time. When this falls below
one, the virus gradually dies out. Prof
Spiegelhalter reckons that flu’s R will
stay at “far less than 1” this year. That
will mean “thousands” of flu deaths in
the UK will be avoided.
An added reason flu deaths might
be kept low in the UK this winter is
that the government is offering the
influenza vaccine to record numbers
of people. And Covid-19 is taking the
lives of some of those who would have
died of flu. But even so, the decline
would be significant.
So what does this mean for the
future? Up to 650,000 people die from
flu worldwide each year — will this
Friday 20 November 2020
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Small-cap fund managers
require encouragement
Following the letter from Harry
Nimmo on the role of active fund
managers in raising capital (November
17) I would like to highlight what I
believe is the importance of private
investors in this process.
Increasingly, small-cap fund
managers are wary of investing in very
small companies typically with market
capitalisation of less than £200m
following the well publicised demise of
certain funds in recent years.
The lack of liquidity is the main
reason cited for this and now makes
such investments very difficult for
professional fund managers. It is not
worth taking the risk from a career
perspective.
In addition, the obstacles put up by
the investment banks and regulators to
prevent individual investors
participating in IPOs is making the
flotation of the next generation of
public companies more difficult.
Further, removal of pre-exemption
rights by companies during the
Covid-19 crisis has been used as a
smokescreen to prevent individual
shareholders participating this year.
Again undermining the position of the
individual investor.
A diverse, engaged and long-term
shareholder base can only be a healthy
development for public companies and
should be encouraged by all.
Guy Crossland
Overton, Hampshire, UK
Generation Z and parents
who fret over lockdown
I am fed up with adults complaining on
behalf of us millennials (Letters,
November 12).
Throughout the pandemic,
melodramatic overgeneralisations have
become commonplace among the
educated urban elite who claim to “get”
Gen-Z-ers. My parents are culprits of
this, telling me how my generation is
going to suffer a massive collective
mental meltdown.
But I don’t buy it. I am not so
completely shut off from the world as
to suggest that nobody has suffered
mental health problems over
lockdown. I mean, how could I be with
the BBC almost daily doing a piece
about how somebody has had a bad
lockdown. And, of course, this is a
problem that needs to be addressed.
But it’s like we’re being treated as a
single unit, which the older generation
views as emotionally less hardy than
they were. This constant worrying
about us has not just been a feature of
lockdown. Before this, it was
technology — oh, the woes of
technology, hey!
But I implore you to stop worrying
about us. This situation is by no means
ideal, but we will muddle through it,
just as everybody else has.
Bertie Low
Devizes, Wiltshire, UK
Johnson’s plan is counting
on a less boggy landing
I was interested to learn of the prime
minister’s ambition in point six of his
article “Now is the time to plan
Britain’s green recovery” (Opinion,
November 18). Will his zero-emission
plane suffer the fate of other feats — a
landing zone, like Alcock and Brown’s,
in a bog in Ireland?
Gavan Sellers
London NW10, UK
number now seem unacceptable? Or
will we be happy to carry on as before,
given that the death rate for flu is only
around 0.1 per cent, five to 10 times
lower than for Covid-19, and we all die
eventually?
“From a scientific perspective, I
think we have been forced by Covid to
experiment with various non-
pharmaceutical infectious control
measures and we have a sense of how
burdensome various ones are,” says
Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and
evolutionary biologist at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
Extreme, unnatural behavioural
changes such as social distancing may
be hard to maintain. But Prof
Bergstrom thinks that where
protective measures do not disrupt
lives significantly, they may stick. He
points to a comment made by Anthony
Fauci, the US infectious disease expert:
“As a society, just forget about shaking
hands.” My hunch is that, for the most
part, we will return to our old ways.
Adjustments will be a matter of
preference. People who enjoy working
from home will stay put when they get
so much as a sniffle. Those who dislike
shaking hands with strangers will have
a valid excuse to avoid doing so.
But we’ll keep drinking too much,
and driving over the speed limit, and
setting off fireworks. Because after
Covid-19 — if such a time exists —
what we’ll consider the biggest risk
won’t be death but the failure to really
live our lives.
jemima.kelly@ft.com