When a biblical famine torched Ethiopia in 1984, the BBC had to say this: "When stark images of millions of people starving to death in Ethiopia were seen on TV…Britain was shocked…and pop star Bob Geldof, then lead singer with the band the Boomtown Rats, decided he could not sit back and just watch the suffering. He launched Band Aid, and the song, released on 7 December, was the fastest-selling single ever and raised £8m - rather than the £70,000 Geldof had expected.

From American philanthropists to Japanese school children, the world rallied to save Ethiopia during our worst times. Charities mushroomed overnight in the country and began the long fight against overcoming hunger. Since the epochal 1984 famine, however, Ethiopia has been exposed to severe episodes of drought and famine. There was famine in 1994/95 and in 2000. To date, an estimated 14 million Ethiopians are faced with the threats of famine again.

Despite the cataclysmic nature of the famine, however, the famine victims have almost failed to win the downpour of sympathy that drenched 1984 Ethiopia. Almost two decades later, the word 'famine' has been used too many times that it has almost become a cliché. In other words, the word 'famine' has lost its meaning, and hence 'donor fatigue.' Are we a failed state? What causes famine?

Scholars have spent years in probing the causes of famines. Almost all of them agree famines prevail in societies that are the victims of dictatorial regimes. One such scholar who has studied famine for years and attached it as the gift of tyrants to their people is Economics Nobel-Prize winner Amartya Sen.

Writes Prof. Sen:

"One remarkable fact in the terrible history of famine is no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form government and a relatively free press. They have occurred in ancient kingdom and in contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribal communities and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies governed by imperialists and in newly independent countries run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But famines have never afflicted any country that is independent, holds regular elections, has opposition parties and permits newspapers to question the wisdom of government policies." But again, the tyrants use various ways of fooling the public - such as propagating through their media that the famine wrecking havoc on Ethiopia was an unavoidable natural phenomenon, failure of seasonal rains, that is as ancient as the history of Ethiopia itself. Such media statements indirectly force the public to accept that famine was not a man-made affair but part of a natural cycle as inevitable as life and death. Still so-called neutral or foreign 'researchers' or 'commentators' come into the play to exonerate the Meles tyranny from any blame, and justify that famine was the adverse consequences of international financial bodies such as the IMF or the World Bank that forced Ethiopia to implement misguided economic policies.

But it is far from the truth. There are practically desert nations in the Sahel or somewhere else that see no rain for years and yet are not in the shameful national tragedy that we are forced to exhibit every year. We can't blame a kind outside world. We have to blame ourselves for failing the world because we could not identify the root-cause of our unwanted guest - famine - and uproot the root-cause once and for all.

(Note: Ethiopia is strictly under one-man rule. Referring to the one-man tyranny as a TPLF/EPRDF or - even worse - as a Woyane regime, is not only politically incorrect but also crediting the tyrant with the legitimacy of a non-existing collective leadership. To confuse the outside world, he is a free-market-oriented to the West, a socialist to the East, and a müezzin to the Middle East. Back at home, he is single-handedly destroying from universities to banks to city councils, and throwing them at the feet of his hirelings. It is a one-man dictatorship as there is no any other EPRDF or any TPLF official who can challenge the tyrant and survive the day. TPLF - the leadership that slaved for 27 years as Eritrea's Trojan horse with Meles seated high on the saddle - died last year during what is called a "split" - another misnomer - as there is no 'split' if one surges high wielding absolute powers, and the other goes to the grave, crushed, and caughing up its last political life.)

But again reiterates Prof Sen: "There has never been a famine in a democratic country because leaders of those nations are spurred into action by politics and a free media. In undemocratic countries, the rules are unaffected by famine "and there is no one to hold them accountable, even when millions die."

Like Sen, another American media and communications scholar, Leo Bogart, rules out external factors as causes to famine. He asserts that if people are free in every sense of the word, free to own their land, their lives, their destiny, there is no hunger. It is only when tyrants grip the lives of working people that famine rises up like a hungry predator, and spreads doom across human settlements.

Yes who will hold the tyrants, those who are responsible for sowing the seeds of famine, and sending millions of citizens to their deaths for lack of food?

There was famine during the Emperor. It was a stifling aristocratic rule, and came to an end through the 1974 national uprising. There was famine under the Derg. It was a killing military dictatorship. It was overthrown in 1991, and succeeded by TPLF, which was too naive, and was torn to pieces by the absolute powers of Meles Zenawi last year. Ethiopia cannot live traumatized as a "stench in the nostrils of humanity."

We have no choice but to restore our honor in the community of nations. That honor would be achieved only when Ethiopians and the friends of Ethiopia around the world realize that TYRANNY has decalred war of famine and poverty on a nation of 65 million people. The key to the problem lies when Ethiopians rise up as one person, use every available means to publicize that their plight was mainly man-made, and the need for forces of democracy and other international organizations such as the United Nations to ask themselves what they can do to stem the destruction of nations under the inhuman grip of African tyrants.

Blaming the failure of a seasonal rain would not bring a lasting solution. It is only when the world is willing to take the continued human suffering of Ethiopians who once again are caught between the hammer and anvil under the most wicked tyrannical clique ever ruled Ethiopia.

It is time for Ethiopians around the world to take to the streets in their respective communities, and echoe that their country was capable of feeding itself several times than the current population, but was chained from doing so due to a clique that has committed crimes no less than any criminal dictator denounced by the West. It is time to tell those powers who have the means to impact policy changes in Ethiopia to open their eyes to the national tragedy that has destroyed the lives of once proud and independent people into the shame of dying of hunger in an era of Western excesses and affluence. But above all, the key lies in the hands of Ethiopians, who, to save their country, must act like Bob Geldoff, one man "who could not sit back, and watch the suffering."