The
Proverbial Ethiopian Donkey and Similarities and
Contrasts between Donald Trump and Abiy Ahmed
Ghelawdewos
Araia, PhD
January 14, 2021
In
this essay I intend to provide comparative
perspectives of the politics of Donald Trump of
the United States and Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, in
the context of the proverbial Ethiopian donkey and
the current confrontational politics promoted by
the two leaders. First and foremost, however, for
the sake of clarity and relevance to the central
thesis of this essay, and the message I wanted to
convey to readers, I like to introduce the
‘Ethiopian donkey’ especially to non-Ethiopian
subscribers. There are several donkeys in relation
to Ethiopian ancestral maxims; some of them are
iconic and some brute, and one known for being
greedy, self-centered and extremely selfish. The
good and iconic donkeys are best exemplified by
the common ass that is hard working and that is a
true beast of burden, one that was in company of
baby Jesus when he was born at Bethlehem, and it
is this same donkey that Jesus Christ rode for a
triumphal entry into Jerusalem, otherwise known as
Palm Sunday. The
brute donkey is the infamous ass that kicks and
hurt people, bites other animals, and that is
reckless and disobedient for the most part when it
comes to burden; it is the greedy and selfish
donkey, well known in Ethiopian oral tradition,
including proverbs that I am interested in this
article. According to Ethiopian ethos, or more
specifically proverbs, the greedy and selfish
donkey is believed to have said, “Let there be
no grass after I am gone!”
I
now attribute the behavior and psychology of the
proverbial Ethiopian donkey to both Trump and Abiy
Ahmed, because in many ways the two political
personas are very much like the donkey in thought
and in behavior; they are egocentric, pompous,
self-centered, and without doubt selfish because
both of them are interested and obsessed in power
politics and they are determined to maintain it at
the cost of people’s lives; they have no regard
for citizens insofar they are in power, but if
their power status is challenged or shaken, they
will do anything at their disposal to eliminate,
or wipe out and destroy their challengers and
perceived enemies; they jealously guard their
authority (legitimate or not) against potential
impediments and barricades in order to further
exercise their power status and thereby promote
their selfish interests.
However,
regarding the idiosyncratic or distinctive
management of political affairs surrounding their
individual interests, there is an essential
difference between Trump and Abiy. While Trump is
president of a country that can legitimately boast
as the citadel of democracy, Abiy, by contrast, is
the prime minister of a country that is rich in
civilizations of late antiquity and the medieval
period, but a very poor country with no democratic
tradition and institutions at all.
It
is also important to delineate the donkey scenario
in relation to the political cultures of the
United States and Ethiopia so that we can
meaningfully explore the psychology of the two
leaders under discussion. The US is well-known for
its political culture with attendant separation of
powers, a checks and balances system, a robust
constitution, a vibrant and open political debate,
and most importantly a powerful Supreme Court with
independent federal courts across the board in the
country. By contrast, Ethiopia has none of the
above-mentioned elements of political culture; the
country, in fact, egregiously suffers from the
absence of democratic culture.
Therefore,
no matter how Trump resembles the Ethiopian donkey
he could not be defiant through and through or get
away with crime without being scrutinized and
without being impeached for major offences; in
fact, Trump has now become the first and only
American president to be impeached twice. This
could not be the case with Abiy Ahmed; Abiy could
perfectly fit into the proverbial donkey because
there are no democratic institutions in Ethiopia,
let alone American type of checks and balances
that are the envy of the world; and to be sure,
there is no independent court of justice in
Ethiopia that could either restrain Abiy from
doing his self-centered ambitions or charge him
for transgressing the written Ethiopian
constitution.
Abiy,
thus, could easily eliminate or systematically
downgrade, put down, or even imprison his
opponents; by contrast, Trump could only fire his
subordinates and he has fired many of them or
forced them to resign. The proverbial donkey could
comfortably adapt in the Ethiopian habitat, but
America could not easily serve as a playground for
such disgruntled and nefarious donkeys;
interestingly but quite surprisingly, however,
Donald Trump came very close to Abiy’s conduct
when he instigated the insurrection on Capitol
Hill in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, and
afterwards, he said the insurrection “was
totally appropriate”; he has no remorse
whatsoever and in the lexicon of political
donkeys, there is no such thing as ‘regret’.
In
order to further explore the behavior and conduct
of the proverbial Ethiopian donkey, it is very
important to thematically list what the donkey
humans (I am not implying here that Trump and Abiy
are donkeys; I am just using the metaphor
attribute) have something in common; hence some
brief repertoire of the psychological makeup of
the two dictators:
·
Egocentric
behavior
·
Dismissing
alternative ideas or counsel
·
Contempt
to ordinary citizens
·
Monopoly
of power
·
Disillusioned
·
Treasonous
On
top of the above definitional attributes to the
political personalities who defied rule of law and
the parameters of their respective constitutions,
it is also crucial to underscore the nature and
characteristics of dictators. Our colleagues in
the academia, namely Seth Davis Norrholm and
Samuel Hunley, authors of The Psychology of
Dictators: Power, Fear, and Anxiety tell
us that dictators “see themselves as ‘very
special people, deserving of admiration and,
consequently, have difficulty emphasizing with the
feelings and needs of others…Not only do
dictators commonly show a ‘pervasive pattern of
grandiosity,’ they also tend to behave with a
vindictiveness often observed in narcissistic
personality disorder’”1
Furthermore,
Norrholm and Hunley argue, “Dictatorial leaders
such as these represent the extreme potential of
the human capacity for evil, and yet, despite
their apparent omnipotence within their individual
spheres of power these individuals also tended to
suffer from excessive anxiety – mostly regarding
paranoid fears of citizen uprising and/or
assassination.”2
Trump
and Abiy are highly narcissistic and vindictive;
Trump has punished his erstwhile opponents by
either firing them from their duties or by verbal
attack in his speeches or in writing via his
twitter that is now banned; by the same token,
Abiy has taken vindictive measures against his own
former party (the EPRDF) officials by firing them
or forcing them out from office, and in some cases
by conducting continuous wars against the Oromo
Liberation Front fighters in Western Ethiopia, or
in its extreme version declaring an all-out war on
Tigray and attacking not only the TPLF but also
civilian areas, although it is a crime to bombard
civilian areas according to Geneva Convention
Protocol of 1977.
In
political science, we understand dictatorship as a
form of government in which one single person or a
small group (oligarchy) controls the reins of
power and dictate the affairs of the entire state
by their whims without any constitutional
limitations, even if there is a written law of the
land. In order to facilitate their governance
thus, these dictators most of the time resort to
suppressing civil liberties, intimidation of
politically active members of society, and mass
propaganda in order to maintain political power.
However, it is easier for Abiy Ahmed to implement
his dictatorial desires because there are no state
institutions to deter him from not violating
municipal and national laws; by contrast, if
Donald Trump wants to resort to illegal actions,
he will be met by formidable institutions that can
effectively deter and/or stop him from converting
his caprice into action; and as a result,
Trump’s lawless and turbulent administration
will end with disgrace, thanks in large measure to
congressional act of impeachment, but also thanks
to his own former cabinet
members who suffered with tongue-biting silence
for a long four years but are speaking out now. In
the case of Abiy, his vagaries and dictatorial
governing style will come to an end only when the
now scattered federalist forces gather momentum
and rise against him, or when there is a mass
upheaval and/or people’s uprising.
One
other thing that I found in common in these two
dictators is their deliberate reversal of policies
and/or projects of their predecessor regimes; for
instance, Trump has effectively undermined Obama
Care and the Dreamer’s potential of becoming
legal residents; Abiy, by the same token,
effectively halted major projects of the EPRDF
like the Djibouti-Hara Gebeya Kombolcha-Mekelle
Railway, not to mention the many institutions that
govern the federal system that have been stalled.
I found their actions entirely without historical
precedent, more lethal and ominous. Moreover,
their mono-directionality in policy making is also
shared by many other dictators, whose policies are
tainted by psychopathology of dissociation.
Finally,
I just want to add two important ideas coming from
two prominent people, one a philosopher and the
other a religious leader. The philosopher I chose
is Hanna Arendt, who once said, “Our discipline
runs the risk of degenerating into a de-bunking
enterprise, based on ideology than evidence,”
and as it is abundantly clear now, Trump has no
evidence whatsoever to claim that the election was
‘fraudulent’ and/or ‘stolen’; similarly,
Abiy, without giving a chance to national
reconciliation resorted to war against the Oromo
and the Tigray people. As Ethiopia is going down
the drain now, it is apparently obvious that the
‘risk of degeneration’ is taking place in
Ethiopia under Abiy Ahmed, but the US with all its
robust institutions and strong government
apparatuses will overcome its present predicament.
The
religious leader I chose is the 14th
Dalai Lama (the current Dalai Lama), who once in
his interview with Charlie Ross said,
“destroying your neighbor is destroying
yourself” but this profound and instructive
saying of the Dalai Lama would never penetrate
into the minds of dictators, never mind minuscule
dictators that I have discussed in this essay;
both Trump and Abiy could care less about the
destruction of their own people, as very much
demonstrated by the insurrection of Washington DC
incited by Trump and the wars being conducted
against Tigray and the Oromo in Western Ethiopia.
The
destruction of one’s neighbor or own people is
directly related to treason committed by the
dictatorial regimes; Trump has surreptitiously
engaged himself with the Russians during the 2016
election campaigns; Abiy, on the other hand,
openly, not secretly, forged alliance with
Eritrean and Somali forces, not to mention the
United Arab Emirates drones, against the people of
Tigray. These foreign forces reinforced the
Ethiopian Defense Forces and the Amhara militia in
their war on Tigray and because the latter
conducted war against Ethiopians by fielding with
foreign terrorist forces, they could be charged
with treason.
Destruction
is bad; it destroys civilizations, tears apart the
fabric of societies, and above all wipe out entire
populations. Whatever happened in the last two
months in Ethiopia, that is, major war in Tigray,
deadly conflicts in Benishangul Gumuz, Oromia, and
Konso, and skirmishes and instabilities everywhere
in Ethiopia, it will take decades for Ethiopia to
recover; and I like to extend a piece of advice to
Abiy Ahmed in order to restore peace and order to
the great Ethiopian nation-state; he should not
follow the track of the proverbial donkey, and if
he is indeed sincere, he could simply apologize to
the Ethiopian people, and particularly to the
people of Tigray for all the violence, atrocities,
and massacres perpetrated against them and call
rather for national reconciliation and dialogue.
In
order to absolve himself from the proverbial
donkey, thus, Abiy Ahmed should encourage such
humanitarian initiatives like that of the Oromo
Abba Gada, who extended a 4 million Ethiopian Birr
worth relief for Tigray; unlike some chauvinist
elites and flag waving charlatans who view the
people of Tigray as their enemies, the wise and
humane Oromo portray Tigrayans as their own
brothers and sisters; deep down they understand
and acknowledge that Tigrayans paid a huge price,
not only for the self-determination of the Oromo
but also for the formation of the self-governing
regional states for other Ethiopians as well. The
Oromo are dignified Ethiopians and Abiy Ahmed
must preserve and respect his Oromo
heritage and act accordingly to bring about peace
and order in all Ethiopia.
Lastly,
my advice to Abiy Ahmed is not to be indifferent,
an onlooker, and a bystander when the Eritrean
forces destroy and loot the public property of
Tigray, steal the household items of Tigrayan
families, and attack UNESCO heritage site of Debre
Damo monastery. These edifices of worship are not
just Tigrayan; they are Ethiopian and African as
well and as such must be preserved and, if
possible, maintained in their original or existing
states.
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