By Haile-Gebriel Endashaw
Staff reporter
ADDIS ABABA – Leadership of Addis Ababa City Administration has approved budgetary allocation of hundreds of thousands of birr for procurement of new cell phones, sources said. Birr 140,000 has reportedly been earmarked for a new cellphone to be possessed by the City Mayor.
As per the decision made last January 2023, cabinet of the Addis Ababa City Administration ratified the budget of hundreds of thousands of birr for the procurement of the cell phones for members of the top leadership, Ethio-FM 107.8 reported here yesterday. Accordingly, a total amount of Birr 280,000 was allocated for two cellphones of both the City Mayor and the Speaker.
Birr 120,000 will be released for the procurement of cell phones for the Deputy Mayor and every other appointee of the leadership under the title of Deputy Mayor.
Chief administrators of Sub-Cities will also take their share of birr 50,000 each while every Woreda Chairperson grabs birr 40,000 for the purchasing of the cell phone. Other Woreda leadership members are allowed to take 30,000 birr per head.
Ethio-FM 107.8 said that the letter that allows the execution of the directive, which was descended from the City Administration, has been circulated to all line city administrations from top to down.
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If I use today’s currency exchange rate with is around 54 birr to each US dollar, the 280,000 birr amounts to around 5,200 in US dollars just for two phones. That is around $2,600 each. Galaxy z-fold4 costs around $1900 here. I expect secured phone for officials to be more expensive than those intended for civilians use. But these budget seems inflated and deserves further investigation. Hackers are everywhere these days and they are getting more sophisticated and ruthless. I wish cyber security experts among our Diaspora would weigh in on this topic and give us their valuable opinion. In this fiber optic connected world hackers can shut down anyone.
NSA, (all major vendors are required to provide “back-door”, apple, microsoft… & all the rest)
Unless they buy the very best and cheep Chinese cellphones like Huawei where NSA may not privy to…
examples = youtube.com/watch?v=RkQgML6NtfU
The embarrassing part of these (OPEN-thefts) in the ‘Bus” deal, the Condo-deal…is that they are STILL- blaming previous leaderships for LOOTING & ethnics-Bias… only to BATH themselves in all the “SINs” they criticized others about…
A sign of ignorance, & utter-incompetence.
In the 60’s the General called a meeting of the top HS I advisers and started mowing …
In the 74/75 a Colonel lead “Derg” did the same on about 60 of the top ministers of the state…
It will not be a surprise to anyone, if we hear that, someone ( St George on his horse) came along and lined them all up and gave them a final farewell to the 7th heavens-below… to go read the list of their SINs while taking a fire-bath with all the others crooks & unsavoury-characters before them.
Be well.
Sorry for the wrong Link above…
The correct one = youtube.com/watch?v=jlLNMpJSEq8
TY
CORRUPTION CORRUPTION CORRUPTION is the hallmark of a degenerating administration totally unpegged from the community it is supposed to serve (rather it seems to enslave). The problem is incapacity, inferiority complex, dumbness, inefficiency, ignorance, fatness, ethnic racism, …all rolled in one. What a pity?