/Prof. AL Mariam/
Houston, we ain’t got NO problem!
I dreamt the nightmare was finally over. It could have been a vision. I am not sure.
There stood I watching the launch pad excitedly, anxiously, happily.
I can hear the robotic voice at Mission Control starting the countdown sequence.
T-May 29, 1991 (the day the T-TPLF [“Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front”] occupied the Ethiopian capital, a day that shall live in infamy) and holding.
T-25 years and counting, …. T-10 years and holding; T-9 years and counting, T-8… T-2 years and holding.
T- May 29, 2017. All systems Go! Main engine start, solid rocket booster ignition.
Blast (Buzz) off Spaceship T-TPLF!!!
In my dream, I saw the whole T-TPLF crew, kit and caboodle, load up, buckle up and blast off in their spaceship and streak home to their own planet.
I woke up. I pinched myself.
It was no dream. It is all true. It is! It is!
I had dozed off reading The Economist’s report on the “Ethiopian Space Program.”
Say what?!
Indeed, a “space program” by the same guys who are today panhandling the world to feed 20 million of their starving citizens.
No matter. I jumped off the bed and shrieked, “Yippie!!!”
I started signin’ that old hymn (with my personal touch, that is).
Joy to the world (Ethiopia), the T-TPLF is gone.
Let earth (Ethiopia) receive her freedom.
No more T-TPLF torture.
No more T-TPLF sorrow.
No more T-TPLF human rights abuses.
No more T-TPLF corruption….
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.
Joy to the world.
Joy to Ethiopia, the T-TPLF is gone.
La li la li la…
I had to stop singing for a moment and re-read The Economist’s report several times because I thought I was missing something.
The report noted that Ethiopia plans to “launch its own satellite” with a little help from their Chinese friends who “designed it to Ethiopian specifications.” The purported purpose for the satellite is to “monitor crops and the weather”.
No kidding?
But high-resolution, tailored imagery for monitoring crop yields is available for pennies or even free”!
They say Google Earth provides such services for next to free. There are even drones that cost a few thousand dollars and do better than the satellites that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
So why would the T-TPLF buy an expensive USD$300 million plus satellite from the Chinese to monitor crops that do not exist (Ethiopia has been in critical famine situation for the last decade)?
Just to sit on their chaise lounges on the rooftops of the Sheraton or Hilton Hotels sipping cognac and quaffing whiskey while watching fluffy white clouds wafting across the Ethiopian sky on the satellite tracking computer monitor?
Why not use the USD$300 million to buy food for the starving Ethiopians instead of handing it over to the Chinese to buy make-believe satellites or panhandling the world for a billion dollars in food aid?
I couldn’t figure it out. But I could smell a stinkin’ rat in the whole deal.
I said to myself, “Surely, the T-TPLF dudes must know about Nigeria’s $320 million Chinese-built satellites that went kaput not long after they went into orbit. Those Chinese-built satellites just break up like a hunk of tofu once in orbit. Tofu satellites, you might say.
Is it possible the T-TPLF may not have heard of Egypt’s earth-observation satellites which completely failed after a couple of years of operation. I guess they were too busy digging a hole in that Renaissance dam over the Nile as the Egyptian eyes in the sky went blind.
So, I got to thinkin’ and thinkin’ real hard.
I racked my brains to find out what it is that the T-TPLF has hidden up its sleeves. Aha!
Eureka! I got it!
The Chinese-built spaceship(s?) for the T-TPLF has nothing to do with earth observation, crop monitoring or anything like that.
The T-TPLF secretly commissioned the Chinese to build them a spaceship so they can go back home to Planet T-TPLF.
Gee whiz! I shoulda knewed it from the first day I got wind of the “Ethiopian Space Program” back in 2015.
Anyway, I ran into the street dancin’ the electric boogaloo and singin’ my version of that old tune at the top of my lungs, “Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggety dog. No more tears, no more fears, no more smears and no more spears from the T-TPLF.”
It’s time for cheers, beers, sneers and jeers!!!
Celebrate! Pop the champagne and get down. “Get down on it. What you gonna do? When they got your back against the wall…Get down on it.”
The T-TPLF is leavin’, they goin’ home. Good riddance! Hallelujah! Free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Celebrate! Yeah-hoo!
Celebrate good times, Ethiopians, come on!
Celebrate good times, Ethiopians, come on!
There’s a party goin’ on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia
So bring your good times, and your laughter too
We gonna celebrate the T-TPLF goin’ home…
I called all my friends. “Hey, y’all. C’mon down. Let’s get down. Get out your drums, your cymbals and your trumpets too.” They are going home! Come on down, let’s sang it.
“Oh when the saints/ Go marching in…/ I want to be in that number/ Oh, when the drums begin to bang…/ Oh, when the stars fall from the sky…/Oh, when the moon turns red with blood…/Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call…/ I want to be in that number/ … Oh, when the fire begins to blaze…/
Whoa! I admit I did get carried away just a bit. The joyous spirit (joie de vivre) of the moment, you know.
Just to be clear, I wouldn’t call the T-TPLF “marching saints” exactly.
But they will be marching (or launching) home “when the fire begins to blaze” in hell. Who the hell wants to be in that number with the Marching (Launching) Saints of Hell?!
I have been talking about life with the aliens from Planet T-TPLF (commonly known among one group of earthlings in Northeast Africa as “Planet Thugistan”).
(I affectionately call Planet T-TPLF the “Land of Living Lies” or Planet Absurd-istan/Denial-istan.)
I write about the Overlords of Planet T-TPLF every week. I have done it longer that anybody cares to remember.
Back in August 2015, I wrote about nine young Ethiopian bloggers jammed in the kangaroo (monkey) kourts of the Overlords of Planet T-TPLF.
Those young bloggers were shuttled 33 times from jail to kourt in 8 months as T-TPLF prosekutors kept getting more and more time to fabricate evidense of the bloggers’ krimes.
That’s how they do justice on Planet T-TPLF.
They arrest someone, jail and torture them and then go out to look for evidense of the krimes the suspects have committed and use that to convict them in their monkey kourts.
By the way, the justice system on Planet T-TPLF is the mirror image of the one they have on the Planet of the Apes.
In January 2016, I wrote about the ambassadors (officially known as “thugplomats”) from Planet T-TPLF. They had fallen on hard times and were panhandling in the streets to keep open their earth stations, which earthlings call “embassies”.
For my readers who are not stargazers or sci-fi buffs, I would like to tell them briefly how they roll on Planet T-TPLF.
On Planet T-TPLF, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Knowledge is ignorance. Cruelty is kindness. Arrogance is courage. Dictatorship is democracy. Ethnic kilils (Bantustans) represent ethnic equality. Talk of ethnic supremacy is a criminal conspiracy. T-TPLF plutocracy is an isocracy (where all people have equal political power). Journalism is a crime. Government wrongs are human rights. Rule of outlaws is the rule of law. Corruption is the lifeblood of the body politics. Injustice is justice. Vice is virtue. Falsehood is truth. Sophistry is reason. Nonsense is logic. Statislies is statistics. Stupidity is sagacity. Absurdity is rationality. Hate is love. Illusion is reality. Brutality is morality.”
I know there are some cynical Ethiopians and others who will say the T-TPLF’s “space program” is another white elephant just like the T-TPLF Renaissance Dam, “the largest dam (over the Nile) in Africa”.
There may be others who will dismiss the T-TPLF “space program” as an extraterrestrial version of the T-TPLF’s bankrupt (light) rail system.
I certainly don’t agree with those doubting Thomases who say the T-TPLF “space program” is just another hype that is no different than the BS T-TPLF promo about building an airport larger than Heathrow (London) and transport 120 million passengers per year.
I ask, “What do the Brits know about space flight anyway?”
They are landlubbers when it comes to space travel. Didn’t they once say, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Obviously, they were talking about their real estate on Planet Earth, not intergalactic travel like the T-TPLF.
I have no doubts the T-TPLF can build an airport at least three times larger than Heathrow, and beat the pants off the Brits in the space race to boot.
To all the doubting Thomases, I say, “Y’all all wrong. Flat wrong!”
The T-TPLF spaceship, satellite or whatever they call it is the real deal, the real McCoy.
That is why I am now declaring publicly that I am fully supporting the T-TPLF space program one-thousand percent!
That is also why I am calling for a global mobilization of Ethiopians to pay in full and in advance for as many spaceships as quickly as possible to transport every last T-TPLF crew to get back to their home planet.
Therefore, I am calling on all Ethiopians to sell their homes and cars, cash their stocks and bonds, cash out their pensions and social security benefits, take out triple mortgages, liquidate their children’s education funds, max out their credit cards, zero out their saving and checking accounts, beg and panhandle the streets, borrow from their friends and relatives (and if they must, rob, cheat and steal; well, on second thought, may be not) to pay for the T-TPLF “Space Program” so we can evacuate all T-TPLF leaders, family members, friends, supporters, hangers-on, cronies, comrades, hoodlums, crooks, gangsters, partners, buddies, confederates, T-TPLF-wolves-in-sheep -clothing in our midst and the rest out of Ethiopia and deliver them to their home planet!
At least make sure they get into orbital flight on an irreversible trajectory to Planet T-TPLF. They are on their own after that!
So, here is a golden opportunity to clear out Qoshe from Ethiopia once and for all. Why not join in this sacred patriotic effort!?
Hold on a second!
In the interest of full disclosure, I must make it clear that I am also putting out a call for a fund-raiser for a second launch vehicle. A cargo spaceship. Why?
Let’s be fair. The T-TPLF crew will need a freighter spaceship to carry the tons of dollars, Euros and Chinese Renminbis they stole to live like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (more like 4o thousand thieves) once they get home.
It is not fair to let the T-TPLF leave the second poorest country on Planet Earth with empty pockets. Is it?
So, I am asking everyone to conduct garage sales, set up flea and street markets and swap meets, have yard and rummage sales and whatever else they need to do to pay for a “T-TPLF Cargo Spaceship” cash on the barrel head.
I think it would be fair to let the Diaspora Ethiopians do all of the heavy lifting for the cargo spaceship fundraiser.
Therefore, I am asking that all remittances (money they send to families and friends in Ethiopia which according to the T-TPLF was USD$2 billion in 2016) by Diaspora Ethiopians be routed directly to the T-TPLF account at the Bank of China.
I estimate we could buy at least a half dozen Chinese-built spaceships (at about $USD300 million a pop with volume discounts) to load up every last T-TPLF dreg and slag and get them the hell out of Ethiopia to their home planet.
Did someone ask, “What will happen to our families if we give all our money to the T-TPLF space program? How will we take care of the millions of starving Ethiopians? How will we be able to rehabilitate the tens of thousands of torture victims the T-TPLF leaves behind?”
I say these are stupid questions. It is like asking a cancer patient, how s/he can continue to live after s/he is cured of cancer.
Godspeed!
Godspeed T-TPLF!
Join up with your soulmates, the Klingons from Planet Kronos. Y’all have a great time visiting death and destruction on neighboring planets.
Have fun. If we never, ever see you again, it will be too soon!
I know there are some who will say it is not a big deal for the T-TPLF to go back to its home planet.
But I say to everyone, “Going back to Planet Thugustan is one small step for the T-TPLF, but one giant, humongous leap for Ethiopians.”
I know dreams come true.
I have a dream that one day soon the T-TPLF dregs will get into their spaceships and go back to their home Planet.
I have a dream that “one day” is May 29, 2017, a day that shall be treasured and live in fame, honor and adoration in Ethiopia for millennia to come.
There will be tens of millions standing around Mission Control for the countdown screaming at the top of their lungs: T-43 days and counting; …. T-33 days and holding… T-23 days and counting… T-13 days and holding… T- 3 days and counting, T-1 day and counting.
May 29, 2017, T-TPLF Blast (Buzz) off! Bon voyage? Hit the road T-TPLF! Don’t you come back no more, no more, no more no more. Hit the road T-TPLF…
Planet Thugistan or bust!
May the FORCE be with us!
