Travel agency used to promote Ethiopia as a tour de force

WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD:THE HEADQUARTERS of travel company Ethiopian Quadrants in the centre of Addis Ababa buzzes with activity. Inside, staff are organising various tours and land cruisers emblazoned with the company logo are parked outside the door.

Founder Tony Hickey (62) is awaiting a CBS camera crew making a documentary on human evolution. The Irishman has just despatched a party of German tourists who charted a private plane to camp at a remote volcano. A key figure in the country’s tourism industry, he has also been instrumental in the work visit to Lalibela in the highlands for Connect Ethiopia, an Irish business initiative.

“I founded the company in June 2006, but I’d been engaged in other tourism companies,” he explains in his office, sitting under a map of Ethiopia. “At the end of the civil war in 1993 I established a trust tourism company for the party which had just assumed government. During the war, I told them that we needed to restart tourism. I went private after a few years. Now I do all kinds of tours for all kinds of budgets. Most clients are British, American or rich Germans. Birdwatchers post trip reports on the net and many request the same drivers and guides because we have bird experts for serious twitchers. Most of my business is by referral.” Though his father was from Lismore in Waterford and his mother from Limerick, Hickey grew up, one of eight, in London where he did Middle Eastern Studies at the School of African and Oriental Studies.

An accident of fate landed him in Ethiopia. In 1973 aged 24 he bought an old Land Rover and drove to Jeddah en route to Sudan, but couldn’t get a visa, “so I got one for Ethiopia instead and landed in Eritrea”, he says.

For two years he drove tourists around the region and across the border into Kenya. On one of these trips he met his wife, an Ethiopian, who was studying in Nairobi and they left for London for a short time in 1975 to visit Hickey’s dying father. Under the new military dictatorship – the Derg that ousted Emperor Haile Selassie in l974 – travel around Ethiopia for residents had become difficult. The tourist industry, which had flourished up to then, took a dive.

In the 1980s Hickey travelled to Sudan where he met members of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) who were fighting the Derg. “I started to do consultancy work for them in the liberated areas, doing PR explaining the cross-border operations which channelled aid through Sudan to the TPLF’s Relief Society of Tigray,” he says.

When the rebels overthrew the Derg and came to power in 1993, Hickey, fluent in Arabic and Amharic, was chosen to start a travel company.

“Ethiopia is a fantastic place to visit but it has a terrible image issue. At world travel markets, I talk the country up, but aid workers talk it down because they need to keep aid going. And then Live Aid launches the 20th anniversary of the famine. Aid can have its function, but inevitably it is an industry and often interests clash.”

He’s enthusiastic, however, about the Connect Ethiopia initiative in Lalibela run by Irish businessmen in the tourism industry. “The Irish tourism section is very successful and these are people with knowledge to share. The World Bank produces umpteen meetings and umpteen reports, but these [Irish] guys come with straightforward advice about front of house, reception, food etc.

“And a couple of visits to local farms in Lalibela is a school uniform for a year. It’s not aid, it is a common transaction,” he insists.

Hickey lives in the mountains above Addis Ababa with his wife, six dogs “and hyenas passing my door at night”. He plans to come to Ireland this year to visit his last remaining uncle, now 87, who lives in Bray.

Apart from tourism, he sponsors a football team to help disadvantaged youths in Addis and participates in an annual road marathon. Things have got easier in the country in the last few decades, he believes, and more liberalised for investors. “The country is pretty much corruption-free. The government is often criticised, but such criticism, often from countries with flaws in their own democracies, is often misplaced. Ethiopia has had 3,000 years of feudalism, 17 years of Marxist Leninism and now two decades of a democratic system. It takes time – a lot of time – to create a democratic culture and it’s not like turning on a light switch...

“Ethiopia is the fastest growing non-oil economy in Africa and has had double-digit growth in the last six years,” he argues, a supporter of Ethiopia’s latest ambitious – and controversial – project, the building of a big dam on the Sudanese border.

“There is a huge power deficit throughout Africa and our way out of poverty is power. We will be able eventually to export clean power to Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan.”

Deirdre McQuillan’s visit to Ethiopia was assisted by the Simon Cumbers media fund

Tony Hickey

General manager,

Ethiopian Quadrants