What happened next is by now familiar to all who have any interest in the affairs of Ethiopia. Most have since come to the realization that the assessments were too optimistic and the celebration premature. It seems that there is still much to be done before we can be assured that those in authority buy into the notion that the governed have the right to determine the conditions of their governance. The political leadership has much to learn about the intricacies of representative government, institutionalized checks and balances of democratic political power and accountability of state actors.

Some of this was expected. What I find most disheartening is the apparent lack of assimilation by these state actors of even the most fundamental of Locke’s rights, most specially their lack of respect for every citizen’s right to life. Respect for human life is an attribute of all civilized societies, including non-democratic ones. Yet the Ethiopian authorities seem to exhibit a serious lack of sensitivity to this most basic of all human rights. Also worrisome is the fact that few among the opposition, the media or the general public have raised the kind of ououta that needs to be raised if we are to ever hope to inch forward towards our ultimate goal of a democratic order.

We are approaching the second month of the massacre of the innocent whose only crime was to erroneously believe the government’s declaration of a constitutional order at hand. The government has not even thought of any investigation into the circumstances which led to the spilling of innocent blood. The opposition and the media are singularly focused on the count and recount of the vote and have not considered the massacred worthy of their precious attention. I fear, however, all will be lost unless we reverse the course of our history by placing this sad event at the top of our present national agenda.

Our recent history is full of incidents such as the one which transpired on June 8. Too often the nation forgets such incidents as soon as the dead are buried. It is as though we believe that people do not matter once they die. In so doing, we make it that much easier for those who seek to rule over us without our consent to continue in their murderous ways and leave our fate entirely at the mercy of their bloody conscience. If we don’t make sure that justice is done in this case, if we do not insist on a full and open public investigation of the incident, then we are guaranteeing that there would be more political killings in our future. If we do not determine the complete chain of command for the shoot to kill order, if we sweep this under the rug once again as we have done so many times in the past, then we will have learned nothing. The victims’ lives would have been lost in vain. The victims would have been road kill littering the passage of our political history. But if we insist that justice be done, then their blood would water the seeds of liberty.

We need leadership to help our nation break away from this cycle. We need leadership that insists that those who were responsible for the massacre be brought to justice. We need a leader who insists that nothing matters more than human life. We need a leader who understands that our country could be transformed by this election only if the final settlement of this drawn out process includes a clearly defined mechanism for finding those responsible for this terrible episode of our history and for holding them accountable. We need a leader who would proclaim that the killing of citizens who only want to be heard is never acceptable. Not even as a means of securing political peace. We need a leader who will raise high the banner that a government has no better purpose or higher objective than to protect the inalienable right to life of every citizen.