2009/1/23
(Ethiopian calendar)
2016/10/3
(European calendar)
[Note:
An Amharic version of this post will appear sometime!]
In
a nutshell, the EPRDF's deal or social contract with the Ethiopian
population over the past 15 years or so has been as follows: I will
give you development and growth. In exchange, you will not challenge
my political power and you will ignore the fact that my membership
will have certain economic and other privileges that the rest of you
will not have.
This
is what a 'developmental state' led by a 'vanguard party' basically
is. The classic example is China. We all know that the Chinese
people, in aggregate, have prospering for years. People have been
getting richer, there's more education, better health care, better
infrastructure, etc. Again, this is in aggregate – large sections
of the population have suffered for this and continue to suffer, but
let's set that aside for the moment. As far as Ethiopians are
concerned, when they see China, they see prosperity.
Now,
the only political party in China – the Communist Party – has no
political competition, which means there is little accountability.
Party members can enrich themselves through corruption and other
means and the population can do nothing about it because it cannot
get rid of the party – that's part of the deal. Now, if this
corruption threatens economic development and therefore threatens
the Communist Party's deal with the people, which would then lead to
revolt and overthrow of the party, then there's a crackdown on
corruption. So as we all have seen, every so often, the party
campaigns against corruption, arrests a few thousand party members
and cronies, and then when it all dies down forgets about it for a
while. Corruption goes up again.
Now,
why isn't this working in Ethiopia? Development is taking place,
economic growth is pretty good, the big projects such as the Nile Dam
are still going strong. So why the unrest? Why the revolt?
The
answer is ethnic federalism. You see, in China, there is more or less
only one ethnicity. The population resents the privileges of the
members of the Communist Party. People resent that party members are
rich, have preferential treatment in everything, including the legal
system, jobs, contracts, etc. However, the resentment is what we
might call class resentment. The upper class is the Communist Party
and the lower class the rest of the population. The upper class makes
sure the lower class does quite well – not as well as the upper
class but well enough to keep politically quiet.
In
Ethiopia not only do we have many ethnicities, but ethnicity is part
of the government! The vanguard party EPRDF is composed of ethnic
parties, and the most powerful party as everyone knows and perceives
is the TPLF. Just as in China, the population resents the privileges
of the members of the EPRDF and their relatives and cronies. But this
resentment is much greater and politically dangerous than in China
because the resentment is not just class resentment, but ethnic
resentment, and ethnic resentment is extremely dangerous.
As
I have written before, people are far more tolerant of oppression by
their own ethnic group or no ethnic group than by another ethnic
group, or by what they perceive to be another ethnic group. When it
comes to political oppression, ethnic feelings are strong. This is
why the combination of developmental state and ethnic federalism is not working in
Ethiopia.
By
the way, this understanding of ethnicity as a strong political force
is precisely the basis of of ethnic federalism! We need ethnic
federalism, ethnic group rights above all else, etc., because
ethnicity is the basis our polity, is what Meles and the EPRDF said
when creating the constitution. If we do not give ethnicity this
primacy, then there will be an ethnic revolt, they said. What irony
then, that the ethnic division they laid in place for this reason is
precisely that which is is proving their downfall.
Now,
how can the EPRDF get out of this quagmire. The band
aid solution is to try and severely clamp down on corruption,
which it has tried to do repeatedly. But how can the EPRDF do that given
the nature of the vanguard party / developmental state model, since
party privilege and corruption is an unavoidable consequence of it? The other option is to do something about ethnic federalism. Of
course the EPRDF can't touch the constitution, but as we have heard
there is a proposal within the party to change it from a multi-ethnic
front to a single non-ethnic party, thereby reducing the ethnic
glare, so to speak, from the population. But this will alienate the
EPRDF's more fervent ethnic nationalists, but at the same time it
won't attract civic nationalists. This might have been a good option
20 years ago, but now it's too little too late.
In
a later article, I will discuss what I think is a better
solution for the EPRDF.
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