Ethiopia, which recently granted voting rights to citizens living abroad, has a long way to go before it can organize overseas polling for its roughly 2-million-strong expatriate community, an Ethiopian official said Wednesday.
“They are legally entitled to cast votes from where they are,” Addisu Gebre-Egziabher, deputy chairperman of Ethiopia’s National Electoral Board (NEBE), said.
He said parliament had tasked the NEBE with conducting research and presenting proposals on the best means of organizing overseas balloting.
“Over the last two decades, we were preoccupied with building institutional capacity to run free and fair elections at home,” Addisu said.
“We must do thorough research and learn from global experience about conducting complex parliamentary elections abroad,” he added.
He could not, however, provide a date for when Ethiopians abroad would be able to participate in national elections, describing the prospect as a “long process.”
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Around 2 million Ethiopian nationals live in North America, the Middle East, Australia and Africa, according to Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry.
The World Bank, meanwhile, puts total remittances sent home by expatriate Ethiopians at some $3.2 billion each year.
The National Bank of Ethiopia, for its part, says expatriates send home some $1.75 billion worth of remittances each year.
Solomon Tessema, a lecturer at Addis Ababa University, said Ethiopian expatriates were highly politicized and had a tradition of speaking critically of the government.
Chane Kebede, head of the Ethiopian Democratic Party, agrees.
“The Ethiopian diaspora is highly involved in the country’s politics,” Chane told Anadolu Agency. “A significant section of the diaspora is the main source of financing for the opposition.”
He added that, while expatriates do not participate in elections, they provide financial support to Ethiopia’s opposition, and sometimes elect leaders of certain opposition parties.
“So they vote without actually voting,” Chane said.
He went on to note that the former head of the Andinet Party, Gizachew Shiferaw, had resigned because Ethiopian expatriates had demanded a new party chief.
“This shows the clear influence of the Ethiopian diaspora,” Chane asserted.
Source: http://news.videonews.us/
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