Of course, it is humor. Humor spices up even the sullen life of a prisoner. Ethiopian political prisoners - those detainees who spend years without knowing what their charges are - endure their ordeal by sharing jokes which radiate rays of hope through the dark alleys of state dungeons. The more optimism in the mind, the brighter is the future.

The struggle is between optimism (forces of freedom) and pessimism (forces of tyranny). The latter would like us to lose hope, and surrender ourselves to their wishes that we - the protesting governed - be disobedient, soulless, disenfranchised, and die out a slow, agonizing death.

Tyrants quietly rejoice in the advent of widespread calamities like famine, epidemics and war because the disasters cover up misguided government policies on the one hand, and attract an astronomical sum of donor money that would oil the rickety old bureaucratic machinery, on the other.

The malaria epidemic is a case in point. Malaria has been in Ethiopia for ages but it has never reached the current alarming stage of threatening the lives of 14 million people. Why?

Repeated calls by Ethiopian and expatriate experts to fight the threat of malaria at earlier stages fell on deaf ears of the regime, which once again saw waving the "threat of malaria" to donors as a means of securing fund to the insatiable appetite of a corrupt regime.

The recent conflict between the regime and Medicines sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) over how to go about controlling and saving the lives of millions of people shows nothing but how the regime has failed to defend public health in the country. The volunteering doctors are no profit-chasing corrupt officials but health activists in the service of humanity. They jump into high-risk areas of health hazards to rescue human lives. They erect tents to nurse patients abandoned to death by their own government.The mere presence of MSN volunteers comfort those caught up in the throes of death. In other words MSF personnel are frontline soldiers who fight the pandemics head-on. Whatever MSF prescribes as a remedy, it has, at least in the mind of those who don't want to die, chosen preference over government advisors who dispatch policies from the comfort of their metropolitan office complexes.

The regime mercilessly attacked MSF not because MSF-proposed drugs were risky to public health but because the regime saw MSF as a rival in the "malaria business."

Once the regime made sure the business is firmly under its monopoly, it went on warning the philanthropic world that Ethiopia was burdened with insurmountable challenges, and foreign intervention - in the form of money, of course - was crucial to saving the country.

Are you familiar with this comment? Who said: "There is nothing shameful like to be always hungry, and more shameful to be a beggar!" Yes, you got it! It is Meles Zenawi, the tongue-twisting premier of our unfortunate country, telling a Western journalist this week in Addis Ababa.

But Meles would rather kill the nation than step down, by lending his ears to Ethiopian experts such as Dessalegn Rahmatto, an authority on land tenure who for years has protested against the regime - asserting that Ethiopia was capable of feeding herself several times if only it had broken the chains of tyranny that have tied it to the stake. We Ethiopians are not alone in lamenting our plight. The foreign observers also wonder at our endless ordeal. Says BBC's Michael Buerke, the journalist who covered the 'biblical famine' of the 1984, and is, 20 years later, wondering why the famine is still there:

Though the above remarks were made by a Belgian woman scholar, it has been told by Ethiopian scholars time and again. We traveled to Belgium only to lend international credibility that the demands Ethiopian scholars have been making are not only endemic to Ethiopians. They are internationally-shared scholarly convictions that would only spark the fury of tyrants, or their latest title - "elected dictators."

We at Ethiomedia would feel dishonest to our cause and people if we fail to respectfully register our fundamental difference with our esteemed contributor, Dr. Teodros Kiros, who, in his "Declaring War against Poverty in Ethiopia," laid down his "development plan," and sarcastically asked us (readers) to submit his proposal to the "PM" (PM - his own wording).

The article, which in a way sounds like a feather-weight email message one hits everyday to a friend, also appears like a counter rejection to an earlier commentary by Dr. Tseggai Mebrahtu (see Ben's website). No shred of respect would have lost from the reputed name of Dr. Teodros had he respectfully agreed to disagree, or take the scholarly step forward, by picking up a lesson or two, and walk the extra mile to freedom along with Tseggai, for that matter, along with most distinguished Ethiopian scholars and Ethiopian opposition party activists - who at this trying moment - are staunchly fighting to save their people from the grips of a mercenary rule. But to go vengeful and order us to "Submit the proposal to the PM" - like we have a responsive and responsible PM - is adding insult to injury. Who is the PM by the way? The new PM who entered office yesterday? Or the PM who has been in office since 1991, has ignored years of appeals for better governance, and even brutally crushed peaceful student protests, and has made a name for himself as the chief guardian of Eritrean interests over the ruins of Ethiopia?

The PM whose troops slaughtered over hundreds of our Anuak people, and yet had the audacity to blame OLF and Islamic groups for the genocide, or the PM who made a mockery of Ethiopian sovereignty by declaring the war with Eritrea was never about a "God forsaken Badme" but about the respect of 'international law?'

We are at a loss to whom rational leader Teodros is referring that we submit his "Marshall plan" on poverty? We live in a country where a free press journalists' association is shut down by government order because, laughably, it did not do its internal auditing. It has been said to the point of boredom that no democracy would flourish without Press Freedom. Why did the regime detain, jail and torture journalists over the years, and has finally placed its cadre - Bereket Simon - as the gate-keeper of the sole media in the country?

At a time when tiny nations like Lebanon - even troubled Palestine - bubble up with over 37 TV stations, here we have a country condemned by masked Eritrean agents to none - of course none - as the existing TV and Radio are controlled by the same regime in power. (Do I hear someone saying there is a privately-owned TV station in Addis? Yeah, tyrants would be happy if you sign broadcasting permits for the strict purpose of entertainment and commercial ads. Commercial TVs are the companions of tyrants because they assist the regime in deadening the public mind from raising crucial socio-political issues, and seeking change for the better.)

Is it lost from the mind of Dr. Teodros Kiros how Ethiopia is kept in the dark in the Age of Information and the Internet? The regime is critically aware that in a nation where illiteracy stands at about 75 percent, radio is the most powerful tool to reach millions, and deluge it with incessant EPRDF propaganda. In other words, Ethiopia is a country under the rule of a single party because opposition parties have no media outlet to air alternative views to inform and drive the people into political action for the better. So the future battle between the Meles camp and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF) would be the battle to share the air waves, and reach millions of information-deprived Ethiopians. That is why the regime decreed a draconian press law, and nubbed the fledgling press in the bud. It is a pre-emptive strike to the right of the Ethiopian people to own broadcasting or print services - for whatever purpose!

And do we Ethiopians have to disdain our history so as to score victory over poverty? Teodros' invitation to Ethiopians to break clean with our history (whether it is the history of independence or resistance, famine, war or glory), is tantamount to joining the chorus of Meles whose occupation consists of vilifying our history, our flag, our emperors, our Lalibelas, our Axums, our Gondars, our Harars, our Souf Oumars, and even our mothers whom he derided recently as "those who don white costumes to cover their tattered rugs from under."

Such remarks constitute the corner stone of the philosophy of Meles Zenawi, a philosophy too crude and silly even a puzzled George Bernard Shaw, who was in less sad situation, had to wrap up his bafflement this way: