If you are obfuscated by these fuzzy numbers, welcome to the red book of “Revolutionary Democracy” in action. At least in the prior godless era of “Democratic Centralism”, we had one top authority jiggling and juggling the statistics to tell us how much we have eaten per day or how much we were better off under the rein of “The Great Leader” and all other exponents would simply echo that “truth”. In Revolutionary Democracy (I’m not trying to be a droll here), every minister appears to have a pocket GDP calculator configured to his ‘elasticity of truth.’ Who ever has said “numbers don’t lie” would have to be court marshaled!

Just as the phrase “Revolutionary Democracy” (the country’s supreme policy of governance – the third volume is reportedly coming out soon) is a forced marriage of two contradictory terms, I’ve come to understand it as a spurious philosophy of contradiction – where you say one thing but do exactly the opposite: you talk like Thomas Jefferson but act like Joseph Stalin; you preach for ethnic liberation but practice ethnic domination; you advocate for a free market economy but turn the economy into a ruling party monopoly; you sell yourself as being anti terrorism but practice it with impunity on your own people; you profess for freedom of speech but lockup everyone who speaks/writes against you and use cold-hearted ethnic militia to quell demonstration; you advocate for the empowerment of farmers but deny them ownership of land; you claim you have not detained anyone but declare the release of tens of thousands of people; etc. The list goes on and on. It’s a philosophy of mendacious governance whose true meaning can only be exhibited from its reprobate actions.

And those beguiling statistics flying around lately (if ever people were to listen to them) mean nothing, for people don’t trust anything that the government is saying unless they see them walking on their kitchen tables and around their neighborhoods. An obsolete political joke in Addis goes like this: people are so sick and tired of the deceptive news on television every night, so many of them were seen carrying their television sets on their backs at the doors of private news publishers to exchange them for news papers. I said, “obsolete” because those publishers are now proscribed by the ruling militia and their editors and owners have been either locked up in jail or have fled the country.

Going back to the gist of this piece, a quick googleing of the internet finds IMF’s September 2005 GDP growth index that begs to differ with the recent puffed up reports of the TPLF regime.

Did you read the title of the index above? It says “Ethiopia’s overall economic growth has trended downward since the early 1990s, with droughts causing big troughs.” The graph clearly shows that every three or four years, the economy was hit badly (with a negative growth) during the last fourteen years because of recurring droughts. As recent as in 2002/3, the economy had registered a high negative growth rate of around 4%. But recent talking up of the economy by TPLF exponents deliberately avoided this year or the years before from their growth statistics, indulging in a kind of pick-and-chose statistics. The most troubling part of the report is where the minister said, “If the trend continues for the next 20 years, Ethiopia would come out of poverty and be among middle-income nations.” What a hutzpah? A projection twenty years down the road based on a three-year fortuitous gain is utterly deceptive. How can one talk about joining the middle-income nations while feeding a sizable portion of its people with emergency aid? It’s not even like the old days that large amount of food aid solicited during drought seasons. It’s public knowledge that millions of our citizens are now being fed with foreign food aid year after year. Every genuine Ethiopian soul would have cried with excitement if this meretricious conjecture were based on facts. It would have lifted our national shame as Ethiopians. But the government is playing politics with our national shame. It appears it is too desperate to deflect the attention of the world from the election legerdemain to resuscitate its doomed image.

The fact of the matter is the fundamentals of our economy remained unchanged. Agricultural production (which sustains over 80% of our populous) is predominantly rain-fed and is, therefore, subject to wide variation from year to year depending on the quality and quantity of annual rains. The IMF chart above elucidates how the wild variability of rainfall during the last decades has subjected the nation to recurring droughts. The omnipotent regime still owns all farm lands in the country. Land holding has diminished to .21 ha per person (and even lower in some southern regions) forcing smallholder farming throughout the country. No significant progress was made to transmute our agricultural production from rain dependency to water harvesting or small-scale irrigation. Good rainfall means good harvest and bad rainfall means bad harvest. Variability in the rainfall results in variability in the growth rate of the economy.

Without changing such fundamental, it would be chimerical to talk about sustainable growth by jiggling and juggling the statistics. This is not to undermine the hard challenge awaiting the nation who ever is in power. Making structural change to an age old problem is a humongous task and not a walk in the park. And the responsibility is not just that of a government but requires the participation of all Ethiopians within the country and in the Diaspora. But it is foolish to conjecture sustainable growth where there is plethora of evidence to the contrary.

All governments take credit of good economic news and make remarks that they later regret. This is a fact of life. But the TPLF regime promulgated (on a major international news paper) that at 7% growth rate it could take the country into a middle income nation in twenty years. This is absurd at best. The regime would have to explain the mystery of this wild projection if it were not to be viewed as a government of Marie Antoinette.