We deserve our leaders By Dr. Messay Kebede: January 30, 2005

Why is that, time and again, Ethiopians inherit situations that they neither longed for nor anticipated? Worse, the recurring theme of their recent history is the stubborn transmutation of their dreams into nightmares. Thirty years ago, Ethiopian students and educated elite dreamt about socialism and initiated the move to radical changes in Ethiopia. The outcome was the rise of the Derg to power, and especially of Mengistu Haile Mariam to absolute and dictatorial rule. Eritreans dreamt about independence, which, they hoped, would set off the mutation of Eritrea into an African Taiwan. They fought three decades to realize the dream. What they have obtained is the rule of a warmonger and ruthless dictator. Tigreans dreamt of Tigray’s re-promotion to political prominence in a de-Amharized Ethiopia. Today they complain of being under the rule of an agent of Eritrea. Clearly, not only are dreams shattered, but they also assume contrary forms. As a result, all agree in saying: this is not what we wanted!

What causes this reversal of our hopes? Sometimes we blame adverse circumstances or external intervention, but more often than not, we attribute our misfortunes to the betrayal of leaders. Our hopes and what we did to make them real were, we maintain, right and appropriate. Unfortunately, once in power our leaders used them for the wrong causes. Yet so repetitive a reversal challenges betrayal of leaders as a sufficient explanatory factor. The time has come to raise the problem of knowing whether the contents of our dreams are not playing tricks on us.

Consider for one moment the circumstances that led to Mengistu’s rise to power. The general consensus says that he rose to power by eliminating all his rivals because he was ruthless, cruel, vengeful, and unscrupulously shrewd, what we call aradanet in Amharic. He fooled everybody; he took all his rivals by surprise. The problem is that Mengistu rose to power even as everybody knew that he had these ominous traits, not to mention the fact that Ethiopians are suspicious of arada character by culture. To argue that we were fooled is not honest, for Mengistu exhibited the full nature of his personality by getting rid of all his rivals one by one.

The solution to the problem transpires if we say that the Derg, a provisional committee composed of privates, non-commissioned officers, and junior officers, needed the qualities of Mengistu to stay in power. What else but the virtue of cruelty, dissimulation, and ruthless was needed to snatch power from the civilian left in the name of socialism while sapping the emergence of reformism? That is why Atnafu Abate lost the battle for leadership though his contribution to the formation of the Derg was greater than anybody else: he was too blunt, and as such unable to use socialism for the purpose of power conquest. He lacked one major quality: aradanet.

Enough is not said about the encounter of socialism with aradanet. The imported idea of socialism offered the home-grown character of aradent an unprecedented opportunity for political prominence. In the socialist claim to promote the interests of the working masses, aradanet promptly detected the necessary disguise to aspire to dictatorial power. Traditionally, the Ethiopian political system gave power and fame for the one thing that can never be dissimulated, namely, courage in battle. The era of the Derg saw the defeat and elimination of courage by aradanet, following the promotion of socialism to the rank of the ruling ideology of the time by the civilian left.

Let us go further: to build socialism in a society that was barely emerging from decades of imperial autocracy and mystification, where organized forces and openly debated political options were unknown, and where a handful of powerful men amassed wealth through robbery and subjugation, was nothing else than to unleash the detestable sentiments of vengefulness, resentment, and envy. Under these conditions, that is, where the society was not even remotely ready to receive socialism, the latter had to be imposed. But more yet, the awakening of revengefulness and envy invited those individuals prone to secrecy, dissimulation, and terror to political leadership. It springs to mind that the rise of the Derg was exactly responsive to this state of mind: its very formation meant the collapse of the chain of command and the unleashing of revenge against the military hierarchy. The Derg emerged victorious because it played the virtues of secrecy, dissimulation, and terror better than any competing organization. Better still, Mengistu’s character incarnated in the most torrid form what the Derg needed to achieve supremacy.

To the question why Mengistu triumphed over all his opponents, who were more educated and qualified, the answer is thus easy: while the Derg got the leadership it secretly needed to seize absolute power, the country, tormented by anger and revenge, could not but identify with the radical measures of the Derg against the rich and the powerful. The irony is that, after the elimination of the rich and the powerful, revenge and terror turned against the educated, the very ones who had aroused the popular wrath in the name of socialism. What was denied to the rich and powerful was denied to the educated: they too fell prey to the revenge of class struggle, the very one that they had summoned to bury the rich and the powerful. Put otherwise, the formation of the Derg and the rise of Mengistu were nothing but the manner the educated elite was reaping what it had sown.

With Eritreans too, their drive to independence, heavily seasoned with the hatred of Ethiopia and the contempt for Ethiopians, needed nothing less than the ruthless leadership of Isayas Afwerki. His brutality was necessary to sustain the military resistance, just as his spite fitted the vision of Eritrea prospering to the detriment of Ethiopia. What brought him to leadership is, therefore, the meanness of the design of those who fomented the destruction of Ethiopia. Predictably, the hand that was forged to destroy Ethiopia is now turning its meanness against Eritreans.

The story of the TPLF shows a similar reversal. As a driving force, the spur of anger and revenge against Amhara rule forged the TPLF. So bitter were these sentiments that they solidified into an Albanian type of socialism. Worst of all, they talked the TPLF into giving a decisive helping hand to the forces working toward the dismantling of Ethiopia. Once victory was achieved, the unnatural alliance between the TPLF and the EPLF started to show its ugly face. Alas, it was too late: the machine that was forged to defeat Amhara rule by supporting the Eritrean independence had already placed people of little Ethiopian allegiance at its head as a condition of success. In other words, the very acquiescence to the dismantling of Ethiopia by supporting the EPLF had already sullied the leadership of the TPLF.

What is the lesson to be learnt from this chain of reversals? That if we want to have good leadership, we must start dreaming big and noble. To paraphrase Kant, we should dream in such a way that what we dream becomes a universal law, that is, treats everybody the way we want to be treated. Indeed, what we have in store for our enemy and opponents selects our leadership. If we have mean intention toward them, we need and indeed obtain a mean leadership. If generosity, forgiveness, equality, justice, and democracy animate us, we would want the type of leadership able to promote these values. When these values are pursued, cruel, revengeful, and deceitful individuals are no longer needed, and so vegetate in their mediocre life. But if we become mean, we give them the opportunity to come to the rescue of our meanness, thereby raising them to the level of historical actors and heroes.