Naimuzzaman Mukta
On October 23, Abiy Ahmed Ali chided a class of opposition and party leaders at a public gathering in Addis Ababa. His chiding went, “You need whiskey every day and that too Scotch. On the other hand, the people of Ethiopia are not even getting safe drinking water!” The statement highlights one of the biggest problems facing Ethiopia, even the basic demands in life are not being met.
Surprisingly there is not much dissent in the people about that. With a history of being manipulated by politicians repeatedly for political gains, the people have given up taking it to be always sides of the same coin. Even after a Marxist group, which based its political ascent on the rights of farmers and labours, ruled for years, the lives of farmers and labours saw little advancement.
Instead, Ethiopia's former dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, killed thousands of political opponents and ignored a famine which killed one million people. Mengistu came to power in 1974 after his Derg party overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. He soon instigated a purge of political opponents known as the "Red Terror". Suspects were rounded up, some shot, others garrotted. The bodies were thrown on the streets.
The country fell into disorder from which it has never recovered. The World Bank’s 1986 Development Report put Ethiopia’s per-capita gross national product at $110, the world’s lowest. All other economic indicators in Ethiopia also plunged since the revolution. Even a study by Soviet advisers in the Ethiopian planning commission admitted that food production is down to 84% of what it was before the revolution.
It was Mengistu's dismissive response to events in 1984 which arguably caused most deaths. An estimated one million people died in a desperate famine which grabbed the world's attention. News footage, shot by the cameraman Mo Amin, spawned LiveAid and a global fundraising drive. Yet through it all, Mengistu was consumed with preparations for the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the member of Mengistu's central committee responsible for drought relief, claimed in his memoirs that Mengistu referred to the prospect of a serious famine as "petty human problems".
Far more Ethiopians have been killed and forced to flee than during the Italian invasion of the 1930s. During Mengistu’s nearly two-decade reign, tens of thousands of people were killed, tortured or detained and about 700,000 peasants were forcibly resettled in an effort to cut off support for rebels in the north. Finally fed up with the then Marxist military junta, Ethiopians took to the streets pursuing the golden dream of democracy, leading to the fall of communism in 1992.
A change that in itself failed to bring much benefit to the masses. The new government, led by a Tigrayan, the EPRDF chairman Meles Zenawi, claimed that it would democratize Ethiopia through recognition of the country’s ethnic heterogeneity. No longer would Ethiopia be maintained by force; rather, it would be a voluntary federation of its many peoples.
To this end the EPRDF and other political groups, including the OLF, agreed to the creation of a transitional government that would engineer a new constitution and elections, to a national charter that recognized an ethnic division of political power, and to the right of nationalities to secede from Ethiopian—thus paving the way for Eritrea’s legal independence, which was official on May 24, 1993.
But a group of party leaders became rich beyond measure and the money gleaned from corruption was not reinvested in the Ethiopian economy but laundered abroad. A similar comparison can be made with our country. The scenario where a ruling political party’s top tier gleaned of wealth from orphans, took 10% ‘commission’ from every development work during their tenure and invested the money abroad through shell companies.
Maybe the stories of all undeveloped countries are same. In the 70’s, political scientist Samir Amin presented a similar scenario through his Dependency Theory. “Resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.”
It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system". It is similar to those corrupt leaders who share their illegal wealth with handful of followers but the money itself is gleaned back through habituating their followers to gambling and drugs, whose syndicates in turn are controlled by the leaders themselves.
Foreign powers have a history of meddling in the African countries to turn their followers into leaders. The leaders in turn oppress and steal from the people and the illegal wealth made in turn is spent in the economies of the foreign powers themselves. The reason for rambling on about this is because Marxist leaders of Ethiopia had created huge social rifts just to stay in power for a long time and protect their interests.
The state had promised farmers seeds, fertilisers and required insecticides. Promised development of education and employment. And it did happen to an extent but only for some of the beneficial followers of the party. Democracy had also failed to bring this so called freedom. Instead the social divide has grown a number of times. Before it was a party that was powerful, now it is a syndicate of a handful of people. Because now, even the general supporters of the party has fallen behind in the race to glean benefits from the nation’s limited resources.
Many of the supporters, despite their allegiance to the party, had been left behind due to the wrath of local leaders or members of their family. Complaining to the central is also not helping because in their eyes, the powerful leader is more important to the party than that general supporter. As a result, smaller factions were being created in the party itself.
Our and Ethiopia’s experiences have this agonising but surprising similarity. After years of widespread protests against government policies and brutal security force repression, a series of human rights reforms were ushered in after Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in April 2018. The government released thousands of political prisoners from detention, admitted that security forces relied on torture, committed to legal reforms of repressive laws and introduced numerous other reforms.
At 42 Abiy is the youngest leader on the continent but his impact is far greater than his age suggests. When the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition elected him prime minister nine months ago the country, Africa's second largest in terms of population with more than 100 million people, shifted decisively from a long period of autocracy.
He ended a 20-year conflict with neighbouring Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, unfettered the media and appointed women to half the cabinet posts. Parliament also accepted his female nominees for president and head of the supreme court. On top of that, he asked a dissident leader to return from exile in the United States to run the electoral commission. The pace of change has delighted pro-democracy activists and thrown more reactionary elements off balance.
But change has inevitably emphasised the significant challenges still facing Abiy. At a graduation ceremony for medical students in Jimma he appealed to them to "use ideas not weapons" and to follow the example of a nation like Japan, which recovered from World War Two to build a sophisticated economy. The speed at which he has been changing Ethiopia has been unprecedented but should not be a surprise. He laid out his political vision in comments made to the Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement's (SEPDM), a constituent party of the ruling coalition, in October 2017
"We have only one option and that is to be united, not only cooperating and helping each other but uniting in order to live together. The other option is to kill each other," Abiy was quoted as saying. "However, no sane person will opt for this. So, our option should be to trust one another, heal our wounds together and work together to develop our country."
But the African country still has a long-way to go to overcome its past. There has been a significant break down in law and order in parts of Ethiopia amidst escalating ethnic tensions that has resulted in significant numbers of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Across the country, over two million people are currently internally displaced due to conflict, including 1.4 million in the first half of 2018, more than anywhere else globally. There are now over 1,000 IDP locations in all of Ethiopia’s regions.
