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ETHIOPIA
IS TOO BIG TO FAIL
Cyber
Politicians’ Bad Omen & Critique on the
Doomsday Scenario of Ethiopia
Ghelawdewos
Araia, PhD
February 21, 2015
First
and foremost let me make my position crystal clear
why I decided to write this piece. I am not
affiliated to any political organization nor am I
interested to address any party, governing elite,
or government in relation to this essay. I see
myself as an independent scholar who advances a
modicum of advocacy on behalf of Ethiopia, and I
would be more than willing to perform as a
spokesperson for my country.
As
the subtitle of this essay implies, I am
critiquing the recent video clip entitled US
Policy: Ethiopia A Failed State1
that has been circulating among Ethiopians in
the Diaspora.
I am perplexed and flabbergasted by the
contents of the narrative of the video surrounding
a pending disaster for Ethiopia, and while I am
not interested in totally refuting what has been
presented in the video, I am however disappointed
by the egregious negligence and exclusion of the
Ethiopian people, the ultimate force who play a
pivotal role in determining the fate of Ethiopia.
Moreover, the video completely ignores the
greatness of Ethiopia that I will address later in
order to reinforce my thesis of ‘Ethiopia, too
big a nation to fail’.
The
doomsday video clip, written by E. Veracity and
narrated by Thomas B. Miller, does not offer any
new information regarding the reality on the
ground in Ethiopia and it is, by and large, a
rehash of apocalyptic scenario that we have come
across over and over again. I would not mind if
the producers of this video sincerely criticize or
oppose the current government of Ethiopia,
especially if their rationale is substantiated
with verifiable evidence. This would have been a
major contribution for those of us who want to
learn, but what the writer and narrator of the
video have provided us is a cliché of
romanticized and overly simplistic political
analysis of the Ethiopian reality. Adding insult
to injury, the data in the video, including the
many pictures, may have been inputs from
Ethiopians, but the video is the making of
non-Ethiopians who hardly understand the history
and culture of Ethiopians. Ethiopian presenters
are conspicuously absent in the video.
On
top of the above defects, I have come to conclude
that the writer and narrator, in fact, turned
themselves [unwittingly perhaps] into irrational
robots obsessed with “the Tigray Government”
and “the disintegration of Ethiopia”. These
latter two phrases are the general patterns of
political language that are repeated throughout
the video to the point of existential absurdity.
For
the uninitiated, uninformed, and people with low
political acumen, the story narrated in the video
may sound up-to-date and authentic. For people who
have been following Ethiopian politics in some
depth, however, the central thesis of the
narration is abundantly clear that it is in fact
gleaned from various press clippings that have
been around for quite some time. For instance,
five years ago, Dr. Gregory Stanton delivered a
speech to a small Ethiopian audience with same
content and tone that the Documentary has
presented to Ethiopian viewers now. So that
readers can have a balanced grasp of the Veracity,
Miller, and Stanton trio analyses, I hereby
present what I wrote in 2010 in response to
Stanton:
Dr.
Stanton attempted to substantiate his thesis of a
“Tigrayan regime to colonize the best of
Ethiopia” by his argument stated as
“effectively a Tigrayan takeover of the whole
country.” Furthermore, in an omen anticipating
sign, the speaker said, “who do you think is to
pay for all this?” and he answers by saying,
“the Tigrayans”; “I am worried for the
Tigrayans,” says Stanton, “who could become
victims [of genocide]” themselves.
First
and foremost, the speaker’s claims are
spectacularly implausible as to lack of
credibility. Secondly, the Tigrayans are not
colonizers and they are not presiding over
“internal colonization”. The latter concept is
paradigmatically bankrupt and meaningless in any
given historical context.
With
respect to the Gambella massacre, Dr. Stanton has
a point. A massacre took place on December 13,
2003. I am of the opinion that the Gambella
incident must be re-investigated and after a
corpus delicti has been established, the
perpetrators must be brought before justice.
However, to charge all Tigrayans as responsible
for the massacre in Gambella is not only
hopelessly false, but it is also against reason
and history.2
The
same rhetoric has now been unleashed by the
so-called documentary video (henceforth,
‘Documentary’) which, in the same vein of
Stanton’s depiction of the Ethiopian reality,
charges the people of Tigray with crime against
humanity. However, to be fair to the producers and
presenters of the Documentary, they are less
tempted to confuse the people of Tigray with the
Government, although they too also fail to
attribute the class composition of the ruling
party of Ethiopia. Ultimately, thus, they were
unable to make distinction between a seating
government that happen to be predominantly
Tigrayan and the people of Tigray, who
incidentally may not even know what happened in
Gambella and/or Ogaden, let alone be accomplice in
the massacres.
It
is unfortunate that the Anuaks had to sustain such
kind of massacre, and as indicated above, I
suggested that the Government brings the
perpetrators before justice, but apart from the
incarceration of 37 people suspected in being
involved in the massacre and the Government’s
official apology to the Anuak in 2004, I have not
heard of any criminal conviction of the people who
instigated the massacre. The Government should
have taken the necessary and appropriate action by
way of prosecuting the criminals. It seems to me,
the TPLF/EPRDF has a major defect in maintaining
an eerie silence vis-à-vis major events that
drastically affects the people. Examples are
abound, but suffice to mention some: The pending
crisis and looming war between Ethiopia and
Eritrea was not fully explained to the Ethiopian
people until the Eritrean People’s Liberation
Front (EPLF, now PFDJ) fully controlled Badme and
moved on and occupied Zalambessa and virtually
dismantled the entire town; the etiology of Meles
Zenawi’s illness and subsequent death; and the
absence of follow up news from EBC on the $25
million dollar worth helicopter that was hijacked
and ended up on Eritrean soil. This kind of
muzzled behavior definitely gives rise to
conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies by
disgruntled cyber politicians.
In
spite of the documentary’s charges of “a
single ethnic group” leading Ethiopia “toward
disintegration”, I maintain that the current
regime in power is not entirely Tigrayan, and it
is for the following reasons:
1.
There is no doubt that the TPLF is the
dominant party in the EPRDF, but unless we
completely abandon class analysis and the
sociological methodology of stratification in the
critical examination of the nature and
characteristics of the political system in
Ethiopia, we can still observe the cohesiveness of
a political group (or groups) united by a common
interest and ideological conviction. This
methodology is universally applicable for all
hitherto societies and also for prevailing
contemporary political systems. The EPRDF cannot
be viewed outside this conceptual framework.
2.
When I was at Addis Ababa University, my
colleagues and I had perceived the Haile Selassie
Government as an Amhara Government and by
extension, the Amhara as the dominant nationality.
While there is some truth in this perception, as I
have argued in my previous writings, we were wrong
in viewing the Emperor’s regime as Amhara and
also viewing the latter as the sole beneficiaries;
we were, in fact, myopic that we were unable to
see the abject poverty of the Amhara, who were
indeed downtrodden peasants in northern Shewa,
Wollo, Gonder, and Gojjam. Same logic applies to
the present Government and the Tigrayan people.
In fact, the top echelon of the EPRDF,
including the various ministries and the huge
bureaucracy are staffed by people from various
ethnic groups, and it is this cohesive class that
must be viewed as the privileged class in the
power nexus, not the people of Tigray.
One
other point of argument that is repeated over and
over again by the opposition is that minority
groups should not govern over majority groups.
This “logic” rather flies in thin air as a
false syllogism because it depends on a fulcrum of
demographics that has been diminished to numbers
only or to what I like to call ‘census
politics’. If we follow this haphazard argument,
we can end up concluding, ‘the Tigrayans are a
minority and they should not govern Ethiopia, and
since the Oromo are the majority, they should run
the country’. Lord, have mercy!
How
about if a clique from the so-called majority
seizes state power, vows to represent its majority
constituency but gradually alienates itself from
them and from other ethnic groups, and tramples
over justice, trashes development programs, and
stifles economic growth? Should we not look for
equality, justice, freedom, and development,
rather than mere numbers in the composition of the
ruling elite? There is no doubt that equal
representation in government is preferable, but
subjective wishes and objective realities don’t
always correspond. The fact that we have political
classes and political arrangements has to do with
history’s verdict, which is essentially
independent of our will.
And it is for this apparent reason that the
Anglo-Saxons are still dominant in the United
States, a much more democratic country in the
world.
Unfortunately
however, the census politics is clamored to the
point of meaninglessness in the so-called
Documentary, and the pitfalls of the latter has
now permeated other non-Ethiopian groups like
Dekebat Ertra, who also seem to lavish in in the
idea of minority Tigrayan vs. majority Amhara/Oromo.
Based on the Documentary, this Eritrean group has
produced an opinionated editorial (in Tigrigna)
entitled “What is the United States Policy
toward Ethiopia at this Moment?”3
Both the Documentary and the Dekebat wrongly
conjectured that the failed Ethiopian state or a
state heading toward failure has to do with
cynical US policy of supporting “the Tigrayan
regime”.
Quite
the contrary, based on the data and information I
have there is no US white paper to date that
directly or indirectly contributes to the failure
of Ethiopia. If at all, the US wants a strong
Ethiopia because it is only through Ethiopia that
American foreign policy in the Horn of Africa and
in the rest of the Continent can smoothly be
implemented. And it is not without reason that the
US, time again, portrayed Ethiopia as its best
ally in the war against terrorism, however elusive
and confused the concept and definition of
terrorism is. A stable Ethiopia is in the best
interest of the United States, and the White House
and the Department of State are cognizant of this
hard fact.
Moreover,
for those of us who teach African studies and
closely follow African current events, the failed
states in Africa are countries like Somalia,
Guinea Bissau, Democratic Republic of the Congo;
and as of recent, Libya and the Central African
Republic have been added to the failed states
lexicon. Compared to these countries, Ethiopia is
by far stable, and far from being a failed state,
the country has now attracted hundreds of
investors from all over the world, and unless
there is a hidden US agenda that I need to be
enlightened with, to the best of my knowledge
American, European, and Asian companies would not
venture unto Ethiopia if the country is indeed
heading toward instability and disintegration.
The
last actors that joined the chorus of Ethiopian
disunity and/or disintegration engendered by
“the Tigray regime” are ESAT or Ethiopian
Satellite TV4 and Isaias Afewerki. Two
ESAT journalists have interviewed the Eritrean
President and the entire Question and Answer
session ended up with ‘Ethiopia and Woyane’,
and incredibly nothing about Eritrea.
One
of the questions posed by ESAT to Ato Isaias was
in regards to his views on Ethiopia, and his
answer was, “We can’t talk about Ethiopia, but
we can talk about Woyane.” This is not
surprising at all because, following the Ethiopian
and Eritrean war in 1998-2000, the covenant
between the EPLF and TPLF had been torn apart
irreparably. While the damage of the relations
between the two forces could be understood in the
context of the war and its consequence, the
Eritrean obsession and preoccupation with the TPLF
(or Woyane as they want to address it) is
difficult to fathom.
However
we analyze and interpret the Ethiopian-Eritrean
relations, I observe two paradoxes in this
incredibly complex political conundrum: 1) The
friend-turned-foe TPLF in the eyes of the EPLF,
and 2) the unholy alliance of ESAT and the EPLF (PFDJ)
With
respect to the first paradox, it is an established
fact that the TPLF and EPLF were allies (or
God-cousins), although intermittently their
relationship was tainted by oddities, and at times
even with irreconcilable differences. Both
Ethiopian and Eritrean forces who struggled
against the Derg military government know too well
that they supported each other and collaborated on
many venues of the major battlefields, and some
(not necessarily all) acknowledge that the TPLF
fighters, in fact, contributed immensely to the
liberation of Eritrea. Hundreds, if not thousands
of them have died in Eritrea, but neither the TPLF
nor the EPLF have spoken about this. Here comes
another eerie silence (or rigidity) of the TPLF.
In
regards to the second paradox, I observe the old
cliché of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my
friend’ when I witness ESAT gravitating toward
Asmara and allying itself with Ato Isaias, not
knowing perhaps that its own supporters still view
Eritrea as a lost Ethiopian territory and also not
cognizant that it is on the wrong side of history.
It is not the alliance per se that I am
criticizing, for organizations from time to time
can forge alliances, divorce, and go separate
ways, a phenomenon that very much characterized
the Horn of Africa politics. In fact, I know it
first hand when the EPLF was an incipient
liberation front and also during its heyday of its
struggle seeking alliances with various Ethiopian
organizations, not to mention its support to these
organizations. I personally have supported its
political program and even translated (abridged
form) its first manifesto (Our Objectives and Us
or Nehnan
Elamanan) fromTigrigna into Amharic when I was
at Haile Selassie University. After Badme and its
aftermath, however, things have changed
dramatically and history was turned upside down,
and so were my views.
It
is when history is turned upside down that ESAT
sought alliance with the EPLF, and the Ethiopian
people would counterintuitively reject ESAT
without even bothering to figure out its rationale
for the alliance. Moreover, although ESAT has
followers and listeners, its operations from
Eritrea would repel Ethiopians because they would
associate Asmara with the war that destroyed
thousands of people and villages and the latter
nightmare is still fresh in their minds. ESAT’s
paradox in its newly found romance, however, is
going to be an unforeseen bonus to the EPRDF, and
that by itself is a paradox within a paradox.
Despite
the wrong political move made by the Ethiopian
Satellite TV groupings, however, I like to extend
one credit to the ESAT journalists for forwarding
one interesting question to President Isaias. That
question was, “If you think that Woyane was to
divide up Ethiopia and create discord among the
Ethiopian people, why did you then support
them?” Ato Isaias, of course, did not fully
answer the question, and because he is good at
manipulation he made references to the old
alliances as strategic agenda of the EPLF, which
incidentally happen to be true.
Had
the ESAT journalists gone further and reinforced
the above question by saying, “How about the
Addis Ababa Charter that was called upon by the
TPLF/EPRDF, in which you were present, and even
endorsed the spirit of the conference and the
agenda of the TPLF?” That would have been a
difficult question to answer.
Let
me now substantiate my thesis of ‘Ethiopia is
too big to fail’. Twenty three years ago, a lot
of Ethiopians were concerned about the possible
disunity of the Ethiopian people (I prefer the
word ‘people’ instead of ‘peoples’) after
the Regional States were formed based on language
and ethnicity. I too was worried because I thought
the harmony of Ethiopians established since
antiquity would be destroyed and create havoc to
the social fabric of Ethiopians. I had that
concern despite my support of the
self-determination of nationalities, but I am now
at ease because the disunity, let alone
disintegration, of Ethiopia did not occur.
However, I still uphold that Article 39 of the
Ethiopian Constitution, which guarantees secession
to the various nationalities, must be amended or
altogether removed from the Constitution.
What
the Documentary video script writer and narrator,
Stanton, and some Ethiopian opposition groupings
failed to underscore is the role of the Ethiopian
people in the making of Ethiopian history and the
unique state formation that was preserved for
thousands of years. They failed to incorporate
into their theses the long history of state
formation accompanied by formidable kingdoms.
All
civilizations of antiquity, including that of
Egypt (Kemet) and Nubia and the classical
civilizations of Kush (an offshoot of Nubia) and
Ethiopia (all Nile valley civilizations) sprung
from a solid foundation of sedentary agriculture,
and the first farmers in all these civilizations
actually created stable centralized systems and
metropolises in which urban material culture
thrived. They also governed their respective
societies by constitutions and juris prudence and
successfully resolved major conflicts, and it is
for this reason that the ancient Egyptians and
Ethiopians have effectively repulsed several
occupation forces. In the strict sense, these
kinds of societies are not susceptible to sudden
destructions. On the other hand, societies that
haven’t had the fortunes of centralized state
systems like Somalia and South Sudan are
vulnerable because kinship, as opposed to strong
states, rule over their respective societies, and
it is not surprising that we have witnessed
conflicts between the Nuer and the Dinka in South
Sudan. In Somalia, the conflict was much worse
because the country sunk to the level of
internecine skirmishes of sub-clans such as the
Hawye. This again is not surprising because the
Somalis and the Southern Sudanese didn’t have
centralized state systems until the European
colonizers came and ruled them under a new but
superficial nation-sate that was installed, and
when they went back they left behind fragile state
systems.
That
is why countries like Ethiopia with legacy of
strong states don’t easily crumble or succumb to
disintegration. Even the worst political upheaval
like the Era of Princes or Zemene
Mesafint (1769-1855) did not completely
dismember Ethiopia. During this time, Ethiopia
(proper Abyssina) was divided into several spheres
of influences of the Princes, but the latter
respected and retained the ex officio role of the
king, who was viewed in the eyes of Ethiopians as
the symbol of unity. It is for this reason that
the sovereign lords let the king enjoy a secondary
role in governorship and this way they secured the
continuation of the Ethiopian state.
The
above historical fact is completely ignored by the
critics, the opposition forces, and the
Documentary producers and editors. Their analyses
also lack methodological rigor and political
economy evaluation of Ethiopia, and as a result
they come up with fantastic ideas, mystified
diagnoses, and wrong prescriptions.
If
the script writer and narrator of the Documentary
and the opposition groupings distract themselves
for a moment from “the Tigray Government”
fixation and attempt to grasp the wide-ranging
attributes of the Ethiopian society, they would be
able to have a second glance to their claims and
conjectures and see that Ethiopia is indeed too
big to fail.
However, their thesis of “Ethiopia must
democratize” is acceptable to me, and although I
have dedicated many chapters to this issue in my
most recent book, I will nonetheless address it in
a separate forthcoming article for the consumption
of readers.
Finally,
I am not going to say “never”, but given the
long history of Ethiopia and some of the
reinforcing paradigms mentioned above, Ethiopia is
too big a nation to fail and it will prevail
despite political turbulence that may threaten its
very existence.
Notes:
1.
http://acadforum.com/ethiopianvideo/2015/02/03/U-S-policy-Ethiopia-a-failed-state-documnetary
2.
Ghelawdewos Araia, “The Fate of Ethiopia
Must be Decided by Ethiopians: A Commentary on
Gregory Stanton’s Speech,” November 15, 2010 www.africanidea.org/commentary_IDEA.html
3.
http://www.tesfanews.net/u-s-policy-ethiopia-a-failing-state
the Tigrigna viewpoint was posted on February 8
4.
http://www.ashamaddis.com/v/esat-interview-isaias-afwerki-president-of-the-state-of-eritrea-feb-2015
All Rights Reserved. Copyright © Institute of Development and Education
for Africa (IDEA), 2015. Dr. Ghelawdewos Araia can
be contacted for educational and constructive
feedback via dr.garaia@africanidea.org
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