Simegnew Bekele


Simegnew Bekele Aynalem was an Ethiopian civil engineer who served as chief project manager of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project as well as three other similar dam projects in Ethiopia. He was considered the "public face" of the dam project.

Biography

Simegnew was born in 1964 in the small town of Maksegnit located in Begmeder Province. He completed a course at the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation technical training center in 1986. He taught at the institution for a while after graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering from Addis Ababa University in 1997. He served as deputy project manager for the Gilgel Gibe I and the project manager for the Gilgel Gibe II dams. In 2011 he was designated project manager for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, since the start of its construction in 2011. In 2015 the Tigrai Online e-magazine named him as its person of the year.

Death

On the morning of 26 July 2018, Simegnew was found shot dead in his Toyota Land Cruiser on Addis Ababa Meskel Square by a civilian passing through the car. Speaking at a press conference, Ethiopian Federal Police Commissioner Zeinu Jemal said that he had been found with a Colt gun in his right hand and a bullet wound behind his right ear, however foul play has been suspected. Simegnew had been scheduled to give a press conference on the progress of the dam later that day, following comments by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that construction could take up to ten more years, far more than previous projections. He was the public face of the dam being built near the country's western border with Sudan that, when completed, would be Africa's largest.
Simegnew's death is the second of a high-profile company official at around that time. In May, gunmen ambushed and killed Deep Kamara, the country manager for Nigeria's Dangote Cement, alongside two others in the Oromia region outside Addis Ababa. Simegnew's death sparked protests in Addis Ababa, with marchers demanding justice for what they assumed was his assassination. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Meskel Square and along Menelik II Avenue to witness his funeral procession on 29 July. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed reacted to the news, saying he was "saddened and utterly shocked" by the engineer's death. On 7 September, police examination reports suggested that Simegnew committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot.