An open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair
By Ethiopians
Posted to the web July 3, 2004

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An Open Letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair
June 10, 2004
The Rt. Honourable Tony Blair
Prime Minister of Great Britain
10 Downing Street
London, England

Re: The Commission for Africa

Dear Sir:

We, the undersigned, would like to present our compliments to you and Sir Bob Geldof for the convening of
The Commission for Africa. We commend you for the plan to draw special attention in 2005 to the plight of
Africa and to garner increased support for the G8 Africa Action Plan and the New Partnership for African
Development (NEPAD). We applaud as well your decision to invite the international community to get
involved in the debate.

Ethiopians are extremely appreciative of Sir Bob’s tireless efforts on behalf of the downtrodden. We also fully
share his sentiment that “this Commission should arrive at a holistic response to the totality of the African
misery.” Please forgive the inescapable scepticism that, given the time frame and the composition of the
Commission, this new initiative will be a crowning success in paving the way for the attainment of the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). We are nonetheless grateful for the planned elevation of Africa in the
global trade and aid agenda.

AID TO AFRICA MUST BE CONSISTENTLY PRO-POOR

OECD data show that some US$500 billion (in 2000 dollars) of official loans and grants was extended to Africa
south of the Sahara in the past half century. The region has also been a site of donor-designed and donormanaged
experiments that reflected changing geopolitical interests and development fashions: big projects,
structural adjustment, sector programs, and, now, budgetary grants. In the political arena, projects related to
good governance, demobilization of combatants, and training of new security forces have been funded. A
veritable army of domestic and foreign NGOs as well as the thousands of itinerant expatriates siphon off over a
quarter of the US$14 billion annual aid flows—a sum equivalent to the annual remittances from the African
Diaspora.

Yet, Africa continues to suffer perennial terms of trade shocks, weather-related shocks, political shocks, and
horrendous pandemics. Growth has been episodic and fragile—easier to initiate than to sustain. Real per capita
income has tragically declined or stagnated since 1970 for all but a handful of countries. Although the global
governance system remains largely rigged, Africa has not been able to take full advantage of even the trade
concessions it had received. It has instead become a net exporter of both skill and capital. Its leaders continue
to misuse the continent’s own scarce resources and, when they can get away with it, aid funds. All these point to
a troubling erosion of the capacity as well as the legitimacy of the African state.
The recent decline in aid flows and the growing realization that aid has not been effective when channelled in
insufficient amounts or in bad policy environments have triggered insistent calls by pro-poor groups for greater
mutual accountability. Some have gone so far to advocate donor disengagement, save relief aid, in order to allow
Africans themselves to sort of their political future. The inter-governmental paradigm of patrimonial aid clearly
needs revamping, if not outright reinventing.

Notable international commissions (Pearson, Brandt, and Meltzer) and grandiose regional initiatives (African
Union and NEPAD) notwithstanding, the root of Africa’s economic debacle remains well below the radar. The
voices of the African poor—despite the recent lip service of the international financial institutions—have yet to
be heard especially by the taxpayers of the donor countries.

Reasonable people have come to recognize that African development is hampered primarily by political failure, at
the domestic as well as international level, to tailor the application of sound economic principles to the unusual circumstances that prevail in Africa. This failure has less to do with incompetence than with the narrowness with which self-interest
is defined by donor countries as well as by African leaderships including many of those waiting in the wings to
replace them. Ultimately, it reflects the powerlessness of Africans to influence events that affect their lives so
profoundly. Those without boots cannot, after all, lift themselves up with their own bootstraps.

Mr. Prime Minister,

As you know, Africa has been a pawn of Western competition for global hegemony for well over a century. As
the Cold War ended, Africans had high expectations that democracy and development would be very prominent
in the global agenda. Sadly, these hopes are rapidly giving way to despondency and a crisis of confidence in
international law. An apparently new scramble for Africa is giving rise to unholy alliances between myopic big
powers and the usual assortment of murderous despots. Foreign aid has ironically boosted the economic prize
that comes with successfully shooting one’s way into the presidential palace. The logic of feeding the greedy to
reach the needy is perpetuating a cycle of violence and political fragility in Africa.
It bears noting here that the AU and NEPAD are clearly inspired by foreign models. They embody unacceptably
low representation of African civil society. And the fact that their success is premised on heavy external financing
belies the lack of a strategic vision for African self-reliance. To make matters worse, duly “elected” African
dictators who pay more attention to their paymasters in Brussels and Washington, D.C., are audacious enough to
present themselves to the international community as reincarnated reformers. The complicity of donors in this
morbid political dance never ceases to astound us. As the Ethiopian saying aptly puts it, “those who feign sleep
will not heed wake-up calls.”

It is no wonder, then, that the voices of African civil society are no longer willing to accept at face value that the
authors of the current quagmire can be expected to devise a people-oriented vision. This scepticism, for
example, finds confirmation in the representation of Africa in the Commission itself. For one thing, the
Commission is not broadly representative of the fundamental interests in African society. Conspicuously absent
are representatives of civil society, opposition parties and chambers of commerce from Africa. For another,
even those who are on the Commission are decidedly uninspiring. One such member is the head of the U.N.
Economic Commission for Africa, a sterile bureaucracy that has miserably failed to provide the much-needed
intellectual leadership in charting out an Africa-centred development strategy. Another member is Ato Meles
Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, whose record is exemplar only with respect to what the Commission for
Africa purportedly seeks to rectify.

As Sir W. Arthur Lewis, a member of the Pearson Commission rightly put it, “The case for foreign aid is
basically moral: the obligation of the rich to help the poor.” When provided under the right circumstances, such
aid alleviates poverty directly and enables the poor to mobilize their own resources. By limiting its mandate to
the inter-governmental realm, we are afraid that the Commission may have inadvertently sent the wrong signal
that the African poor will continue to be treated as pitiable subjects rather than as key stakeholders worthy of
being masters of their own destiny.

The United Kingdom is not a big bilateral donor to Africa. However, it is our sincere belief that your
government can provide the visionary leadership in the G8 and the EU that is sorely needed for raising the size
as well as effectiveness of development assistance. What ordinary Africans say they want are so basic that the
endless academic debates on Africa’s needs are patently farcical. The villagers’ wish list typically includes: peace,
food security, universal primary education, protection from easily eliminable diseases and devastating pandemics

(such as HIV, malaria and TB), freedom of mobility within one’s country, security of ownership over one’s hard
earned assets, and, yes, bicycles and plastic buckets. Are these really too much to ask for?
It is our belief that foreign aid has done some good in Africa, albeit in providing palliatives in the social sector. It
certainly can do even more to spur African productivity by pushing politicians to get the basics right. As the
Economist (January 17, 2004) rightly puts it, the predatory African political class must be compelled by citizens
and donors to “govern well, spend money on schools rather than soldiers, allow space for peaceful dissent, and
avoid inflaming ethnic grievances.”

It is our fervent wish that the Commission for Africa will seriously search for effective ways of converting
donors into judicious development partners and political allies of the African poor. We, therefore, urge the
Commission to go beyond issuing yet another glossy report on the lofty MDGs to formulate realistic programmes
for achieving them. In the spirit of more aid for basic needs and trade, we hope that the Commission will
explore effective trade, investment and migration regimes that meet Africa’s glaring needs. With respect to aid,
we trust that it would explore novel approaches towards a stable and adequate funding of aid (including your
initiative for an International Financing Facility, and creative taxes on humanity’s common resources),
establishing a sensible division of labour among aid agencies, linking the allocation of pooled aid to a pro-poor
and well-prioritised development agenda, investing in research on tropical agriculture and diseases, channelling a
good deal of the money to credible local NGOs, and devising a mechanism by which the beneficiaries can bring
to bear their invaluable local knowledge on result-oriented aid programmes.

ETHIOPIA IS A CASE IN POINT

As the twentieth anniversary of Live Aid approaches, Ethiopia stands as a cautionary tale of wasted potentials
and wrecked hopes. Ethiopia has the sad fortune of emerging out of the stranglehold of a socialist dictatorship
only to fall in the hands of ethno-Marxist insurgent movements. While Eastern Europe received Western
support to complete its transition to a market economy and a democratic order, Ethiopians saw the United States
and Europe providing short-sighted support to the new regime. The regime, even as a transitional government,
orchestrated the break-up of the country in a manner that left Ethiopia landlocked; recklessly led the country to a
costly war with Eritrea; instituted a pernicious political system based on the atavistic and polarizing ideology of
tribalism; and built up a one-party system that has corrupted both the state and the fledgling market economy
through party-owned companies. Never in Ethiopia’s history, even during the dark days of the Derg, has the
country’s sovereignty been trampled upon.

Despite the hollow and tiresome donor rhetoric of no-democracy-no-aid, the regime has received a billion USD
annually, mostly from the EU and the World Bank. None of the promised democratic reforms have, of course,
materialized except in name. The mandated consultations with respect to the poverty reduction papers have
been utterly perfunctory. The two national elections, held in 1995 and 2000, were rigged. As the 2005 elections
approach, draconian press laws have been proposed. Opposition political parties, trade unions and civic groups
have been targeted for renewed harassment. As the 2004 Report of Amnesty International puts it, the Ethiopian
Government routinely uses “malicious prosecution, arbitrary arrest and excessive force against demonstrators as
tools of political repression.”

To stem the potential political threat from chronically unemployed school leavers, the police (trained with U.K.
money, we might add) have recently been handed a Vagrancy Law which is being used to imprison innocent
school leavers. Reminiscent of the red terror of the Derg regime, parents in Addis Ababa today go from police
station to police station looking for bits of information regarding the whereabouts of their disappeared children.
In the economic sphere, the urban and rural lands that were nationalized by the previous regime continue to be
state owned. Small farmers, who enjoy neither tenure security nor food security, are being threatened by the
regime’s cadres with eviction and jail for voting against government candidates or for failing to service loans for
fertilizer and seeds even after being hit by successive drought and collapsing markets.

The adversarial relationship between the government and the private sector, including the growing diaspora, has
made Ethiopia distinctly unattractive for private investment, much less for the repatriation of the substantial
capital flight or remittances. The regime, as with much other African leadership, has instead polished up its skills
for soliciting more aid by cynically parading the starving, or engaging in reform mongering in tune with the latest
international rhetoric of good governance.

Dissatisfaction with the misrule of Ato Meles’s government is currently taking several disturbing forms. The
ruling party seems to be in an early phase of implosion. A number of insurgencies, ranging from the jihadist to
the secessionist, are rearing their ugly heads. Students at the much-neglected universities are presently on strike
demanding academic freedom. The European Parliament has been calling in vain for impartial inquiries into
serious and credible allegations of massacres and genocide in a number of districts. The long-suffering citizenry,
whose political consciousness has been raised by decades of mass education and rising literacy, are fast
triumphing over the life of quiet desperation by being receptive to opposition parties that embrace its causes.
There is nothing that Ato Meles dreads more than a repeat of 1999-2001 which saw the suspension of significant
aid in response to the reckless Ethio-Eritrean war. Since then, the reform program has stalled just as it entered
its most critical stage. Due to the combination of a fading bounce-back effect from post-war recovery, policy
uncertainty and plummeting coffee prices, the economy’s growth rate has since remained unacceptably low. The
country clearly lacks a viable internal growth engine.

Needless to say, Ato Meles Zenawi is an ethnic entrepreneur, not a statesman. His government has predictably
rebuffed all offers of negotiation by the opposition, apparently counting on continued external support. As a
result, Ethiopia is backsliding instead of deepening the democratization process. Lending respectability to such
failed leaders, much less rewarding them with additional and less restrictive aid, would only perpetuate the aid
trap in which Ethiopia finds herself.

PARTNERSHIP IS ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT GOVERNMENTS

Freedom from tyranny and material want is a universal human ideal. It is also a product of collective struggles by
courageous people within and across national boundaries. We believe that a genuine people-to-people
partnership is essential for nurturing durable local institutions of accountability in Ethiopia. This is indeed a
multi-generational project. Aid programs aimed at long-term development will have to be reinvented to provide
unstinting donor support for fledgling civic and professional organizations as durable agents of Ethiopian
development and democratization.
There is much more that the West can do to save one of the oldest states in the world from failing. A window of
opportunity has now opened for well-meaning donors to exercise their enormous leverage by devising an “exit
strategy” for autocrats, and helping to engineer a peaceful transition to a legitimate and pro-development
government.

Mr. Prime Minister,

As far as Ethiopia is concerned, the bold vision that may emerge out of the Commission’s deliberations should
endorse the cultivation of free and competitive economic and political systems in the country. That would mean
pressing harder with the call by the Department for International Development (DfID) for restoring full
ownership of land to smallholders. In this regard, we are heartened by the announcement at the current G8
Summit: “What we are trying to do this year [2004] is to break the cycle of the famine in the Horn of Africa,
including Ethiopia, where there are 5 million people who are really on the edge of starvation at any point in time.
We’re working with the Ethiopian government on a comprehensive agricultural reform program, including land
reform.” The widely reported mismanagement of the large resettlement project—a major component of the
government’s Food Security Program—however, does not inspire much confidence in its capability to meet
these ambitious targets.

We also strongly urge the Commission to call for disinvestment with respect to the numerous party-owned
companies, for regional equity in the allocation of aid, and for the replacement of ethnic-based federalism by an
inclusive form of political devolution. Just as importantly, it is imperative to vigorously insist on free and fair
elections involving the full participation of all political parties. Since the 2005 Ethiopian national elections
coincide with the final report of the Commission, Ethiopia provides a great test case for the new vision.
As to the future, we can assure you, Mr. Prime Minister, that Ethiopia has the natural and human resources to be
a dynamic and prosperous nation. Its resilient people are asking only for a helping hand of genuine friendship as
they struggle to extricate themselves from the twin grips of abject poverty and a corrupt regime that, even after
thirteen years at the helm of the state, unrepentantly calls itself a liberation front.
Wishing you and the Commission success in this noble endeavour.

Respectfully,