February 23, 2007
Road building
You've got to admire Addis Ababa's city planners. When they want to widen a road, they widen a road. Nothing gets in their way, whether its a wall, a garden, or the entire front section of a house.
The main road system past the British Embassy, cutting through Aware and past the Ras Amaba hotel, is going through a major face-lift. And in the space of a fortnight, almost everything about 50 yards either side of the new routes has disappeared in a cloud of dust and rubble.
Shacks and roadside businesses have disappeared. Water pipes have been cut without warning. Entire houses have been sliced in two. I walked past one scene (see pic) where a woman in her dressing gown was looking out of her brand new front door as the diggers moved in.
Apparently, people with some kind of title to their properties get some kind of compensation. (The only people who actually own land in Ethiopia are the state and the church.) But there are lots of buildings in Addis that don't appear on any planner's map.
When something similar happened outside our old house in Bole Medhanialem, some of our neighbours woke up one morning with a huge trench outside their front gates, their cars stranded on their drives. That scheme was to widen the road from Bole airport to the junction at Urael. As far as I can tell, that scheme has had quite an impact on the city. The traffic jams opposite Urael are now only twice as bad as they were before the road was improved.
Posted by aheavens at February 23, 2007 1:11 PM