Another Think-Tank in the Making

A highly regarded official in diplomatic circles, Teferra Shiwal Kidane-kal has a reputation as a self-effacing person, comfortable out of the spotlight. He is one of the three important personalities behind the newly launched Institute for Advanced Research (IAR), an independent think-tank that includes former Minister of Foreign Affairs and now the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to China, Seyoum Mesfin as its chairman of the board of trustees and another old hand in the diplomacy, currently Ethiopia’s permanent representative to the UN, Tekeda Alemu in its management. Teferra, 73, is a relatively little-known figure compared to the two heavyweights who came to the spot, albeit his distinguished career in the media, diplomacy and humanitarian service in the country’s three successive governments. Slowly stepping up to the task, Teferra and his colleagues have a bigger task of transforming the institution into bold, effective and influential centre, in its mission “to contribute to political, economic and societal transformation through the active pursuit and employment of in-depth analyses and research.”
From his earlier years as a journalist at Radio Voice of the Gospel, later at the Amharic service of Deutseche Welle in Cologne, and BBC Africa Service in London in the 1960’s, Teferra has lived and worked extensively in Europe. Through his diplomacy experience as Emperor Haile Selassie’s Second Secretary of Ethiopian Embassy in Germany in the 1970 ’s, his service at the Ethiopian Tourism Commission and as Secretary General of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and Ambassador to Czech, Slovak and Hungary, Tefera has relentlessly pursued his ambitions and has won a reputation as a man who delivers. Upon leaving the Foreign Ministry in March 1993, he has worked as a consultant at Inter Africa Group, which was followed by a string of international consultancy jobs. His most notable work was on refugees and the internally displaced. In 2007, he was nominated by the Ethiopian government for the Secretariat of the Nairobi-based East African Standby Force Coordination Mechanism, an institution designed to facilitate peace keeping and conflict management in the East African Region within the framework of the African Standby Force of the African Union. He has also served as the Chief of Staff of the IGAD Peace Process for South Sudan and senior adviser to the Mediation Team. As person preoccupied with the peace and security issues of the Horn of Africa, Teferra has the following to say: “The challenges of re-reengineering relations with Eritrea and, indeed, with all Ethiopia’s neighbours cannot be underestimated. The ups and downs of Ethiopia’s fortunes may have, albeit temporarily, deprived the country of the required arsenal of qualified diplomatic practitioners, but there is a great hope of revival in the new dawn,” he wrote in his book the New Dawn, Fifty Years in the Life of Veteran Diplomat (2008).
Teferra’s tenure at IAR is going to attract watchful eyes, in what is considered as a noble, laudable and demanding task of bringing change in the Horn of Africa and beyond.