Are Democracy and the Rule of Law Necessary for Ethiopia

Lately, especially
after EPDRF’s realization of its defeat during the 2005 election and the
rejection of its policies by the people of Ethiopia, some of its representatives
and cadres have began advancing an idea, possibly concocted up at the Prime
Minister’s office, that respecting the rule of law and democracy are not
necessary for Ethiopia. In fact, the concocted propaganda tool that they have
begun using sounds like the myth that Ato Meles has laid out in his so-called
book, which I possess the first version of the blue-print.[1] The
countries that they are trying to mimic are what the World Bank called High Performance Asian Economies, HPAEs. They
are: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and
Thailand. The propaganda arguments presented by representatives of the Zenawi
regime run like this: since these countries achieved their economic miracles
under one-party systems, the EPDRF would like to follow their footsteps in
order to achieve high economic growth and political stability.

 

The
purpose of this short article is to show that there are indeed quite a few
economic policy lessons to be learned from the experiences of Southeast Asian
countries. Second, if the last 18 years that Ethiopia has been under the EPDRF
are any witness, this country is neither in a position to mimic these countries
and bring about measurable economic change, nor is the political and economic
phenomena of Ethiopia comparable to those countries. In the process, I refute
the argument that is being presented by the EPDRF representatives on both
factual and empirical basis. I do so by briefly presenting the economic, social,
and political experiences of the Southeast Asian countries and by comparing and
contrasting them with that of the Ethiopian economic situation and political realities.
I then present a series of conjunctures on why the regime wants us to believe
that democracy is unnecessary for Ethiopia.

 

II.   
A Brief Summary
of Some of the Common Characteristics of the High Performance Asian Economies (HPAEs):

 

A.    Shared Growth.

Sharing
the wealth created through good policies and hard work is one of the remarkable
accomplishments of the HPAEs. What was also remarkable is that the rise in
their income levels was also accompanied by economic equality. These countries
accomplished this remarkable feat with land reform, by expanding educational
opportunities (by making primary and secondary education free), access to public
health care systems, and a significant amount of investment in rural
infrastructure such as clean water systems as well as communication and
transportation systems. These policies were not designed to equalize incomes
but to provide their citizens the tools they needed to raise their own income
levels and to give them hope. In the process, these policies raised the
purchasing power of each individual, which in turn benefited the local business
owners. The rising incomes raised everyone’s hopes thereby encouraging everyone
to work hard

In
contrast, Ethiopia is a vicious cycle of poverty due
to the small landholdings, poor agricultural practices, a lack of potable water
(with only 7% of the rural population having access to clean water, for
example), and deteriorating health and environments. These circumstances have
been made worse by poor governance characterized by repressive minority rule.
Even though Ato Meles likes to talk about how wealthy the peasants have become,
the fact of the matter is that his policies have heavily contributed to their
increased misery. Income inequality in the country has been rising under the
reign of the EPDRF, while at the same time a handful of former guerilla
fighters have become super rich nearly overnight. The corruption scourge (with
a corruption index ranking of 139^th out 179 countries) is so rampant
and so repugnant that it has begun changing the culture of that country.[2]

 

As I will argue later with another write-up, even the highly
nationalistic and educated individuals have come to the sad realization that
they cannot make it in life unless they become part of the corruption scourge.
Such an attitude, driven by bad governance, denies everyone the right to be an
equal participant of the economy. It denies hard working citizens the
opportunity to reap the benefits of their hard work and the stakes that their
country may hold for them. Rampant corruption erodes the hopes of citizens, and
unfortunately, this is what is taking place in Ethiopia. When competent
government bureaucrats realize that they could not serve the people who paid
for their education, they choose to fend for themselves by working in the
private sector or for the NGOs. When this is not possible, they leave their beloved
country and become political refugees in neighboring countries, most of them
facing increasing hardships and terror. When educated people become refugees,
Ethiopia loses in a multiple of ways: being unable to use its young and
educated sons and daughters, and being unable to recoup the costs it incurred
for raising and educating the same people. There are also other social costs
that I would refrain from elaborating to save space. A significant portion of
the refugees make it to the West, countries which enjoy a comparative advantage
in human capital. But their departure from their homeland adds to the problem
of the brain-drain, a loss that poor countries such as Ethiopia cannot afford. In
Ethiopia today, not only we do not have leaders who understand this issue, but
the same “leaders” have exacerbated the situation by threatening the
intellectuals that they would be replaced by Nigerians.

 

B.    
Increased
accumulation of human capital.

Investment
in people, through good educational policies was one of the most important
polices of the HPAEs. They focused on primary and secondary education levels
whose rate of return is much higher than university level (tertiary) education.
By making primary and secondary education free, these countries raised the
literacy rates, thereby laying the foundation for a highly skilled work force
available for both the business and government sectors.

In
contrast, the failed educational policies of the EPDRF have kept the county’s
position in terms of education one of the lowest in Africa. For example,
according to the UNDP and other sources, the net elementary school enrolment
ratio is the lowest in Sub-Sahara Africa at only 35%, the drop-out rate being
among the highest. The literacy rate is 34% for females and 49% for males, which
averages out to be about 41%.  Gross
Tertiary (college level) School Enrollment is around 1%. To add insult to
injury, the last 18 years of EPDRF policies have exacerbated the situation
since the EPDRF has forced intellectuals to leave their country, making
Ethiopia’s brain to continuously bleed and be hugely impaired due to the
effects of the brain-drain.  For example,
I have been told that the number of doctors of Ethiopian origin who work in a
single or two cities in the USA was greater than the numbers of doctors who
work in the entire country of Ethiopia. Logic would tell you that doctors
should be where most of the patients are located- in Ethiopia. Logic would also
indicate to you that teachers should be residing in countries where they are
the most needed, where the student/teacher ratio is one of the highest in the
world – Ethiopia.  One Ethiopian young
mathematician tells me that, by his count and just in the last few years, the
number of college level mathematicians who either have left their Homeland or
decided never to go back home, mainly for fear of persecution is over
fifty.  This explains why the TPLF owned
conglomerates, which were bought at throw away prices during the privatization
process, are known to be operating way below capacity due to the shortages of
human capital.

 

C.    Rapid accumulation of physical capital:

The
governments of HPAEs encouraged their people to raise savings rates which were
used for domestic investment. These policies were accompanied by changes in
demographics, which were accomplished through both low birth and death rates.
Such demographic transitions allowed fewer children below the working age
population while allowing a larger portion of the population to be economically
productive. In addition, their policies enabled them to attract huge sums of
foreign investments.

In
contrast, the rampant inflation rates in Ethiopia, the IMF reporting it to be
40% for the month of June, is not only eroding the purchasing power of savers’
incomes but the real negative interest rates are wiping out their assets on a
daily basis. The negative real rate of returns could only help the ruling party-owned
corporations who are enjoying preferential treatments by the government-controlled
financial institutions.

Regarding
the demographics of the country, because of the absence of a good national
population policy and/or the lack of the provision of more than basic health
services, the country is flooded with high birth rates.  As a result, a significant proportion of the
population is young and unproductive, where children under fifteen years of age
make up nearly 50 percent of the population. Add to this the HIV/AIDS epidemic,
which continues to wipe out a significant portion of the working age population.
In contrast to countries such as Uganda, which made reversals of the HIV/AIDS
infections, thanks to their campaigns for awareness and treatments, the
autocrats of Addis Ababa instead wasted the country’s meager resources in
waging senseless wars with the country’s neighbors, in creating ethnic and
religious conflicts and spending a huge sum of money to suppress dissent.

In
addition, the Ethiopian economy faces environmental degradation due to wind and
soil erosion and the absence of good policies for the country to protect its
resources. Such a neglect of the environment denies the country from developing
its own homegrown physical capital.

D.   
Rapid
growth of manufactured exports.

More than anything else, the HPAEs are known to have promoted manufactured exports.
As everyone knows, the gains from the export of
processed and manufactured goods are far greater than those from exporting
primary commodities mainly because of the higher value added. Manufactured
exports create economies of scale when domestic firms produce to satisfy both
the domestic and the international market demands. Exporting manufactured goods
also allow both the importation and development of new technologies, learning
by doing and international best practices; create incentives for R & Ds,
which in turn have multiplier effects on their economies. Luckily
enough, their policies were also aided by the Cold War, in which Western
countries gave favorable treatments (lower tariff rates, etc.) to the goods and
services exported by the HPAEs. [3]

In contrast, the EPDRF has focused
on an agricultural-based industrialization, if it can be called industrialization
at all. The fact of the  matter is that,
Ethiopia is one of those poor countries which uses primitive ox-driven
cultivation system, that no one in his/her right mind could call it
agro-industrialization. One aspect of agro-industrialization is agro-processing
of food products. When it comes to Ethiopia, such an industrialization has many
constraints, including inconsistent and insufficient supply of raw
material, seasonality of crops, harvest losses due to droughts, lack of
efficient infrastructure such as good roads, nearby efficient ports, poorly
trained personnel, weak and non-existent markets, absence of good managerially
skilled work force, among others.

 

The fact of the matter is that, even
though the EPDRF has been talking about agro-based industrialization for the
last 18 years, nearly all of Ethiopia’s export revenues come from the
agricultural (primary product) sector- the agricultural sector constituting
nearly 60% of the country’s exports.  Unfortunately,
not only do the export prices of these primary products tend to fluctuate very
highly, but their relative prices do decline over time as well. It is a
well-known fact that countries that are commodity dependent or exhibit a
narrow export basket, as does Ethiopia, often suffer from export instability
arising from inelastic and unstable global demand. Ethiopia’s major source of
exports, coffee, is still being exported unprocessed. Export diversification is
one way to alleviate these particular constraints.

 

We hear from the government, on a
constant basis, how many dollars the country earned through exports.
Unfortunately, it never wants to show the employment figures created by phantom
exports. Even the much-advertised export of flowers, it only accounts for a
little over $100 million, a small sum for a nation of 82 million people.  The flower business is also causing
tremendous environmental degradation.[4]
The government never reports how much profit the country has gained by selling
the flowers. It never tells us the effects being landlocked on exports, something
that the TPLF and Ato Meles are proud of. 
Thanks to Meles’s ceding the country’s sea outlets, the foreign company
running the Djibouti port, Ethiopia’s only outlet, has Ethiopia by the
balls.  It increases tariffs at will, as it
recently did with a 25% hike. Lately, it has been reported that Ethiopia pays
over $300 million every year to Djibouti for handling of the former’s imports
and exports. By this count, Ethiopia had already paid billions of dollars to
Djibouti and other countries over the last 18 years reign of the EPDRF, and
will pay so dearly for many years to come for handling of its imports and
exports. 

 

5. Targeting
   Specific Industrial Policies and Avoiding Rent-Seeking

 

Even though some of the HPAEs were governed by single
dominant parties, they completely liberalized their economies. This
liberalization of the economic sector was accomplished despite the fact that
these countries were surrounded by communist countries with command economic
systems. While following liberalized economic systems, the policymakers, using
the so-called Deliberation Councils,
avoided rent-seeking behaviors (corruption). The Deliberation Councils were
filled with highly-educated and competent bureaucrats who were purposely
insulated from the political process. The Deliberation Councils were also in
charge of targeting specific and narrow development industries. These
government interventions included targeting very narrow and specific
industries, directing credit, and export promotion. To accomplish their goals,
they used licensing, quotas, tariffs, and export subsidies to restrict imports
and promote exports. Whenever those policies failed to work, the incentives
were withdrawn.

In contrast, the EPDRF cadres decided to follow the Russian
model, misappropriating public funds and giving away formerly government owned
institutions and sectors to the ethnically-owned firms.  In Ethiopia, the EPDRF inserted its cadres,
who happen to be highly paid and unproductive, into these ethnically-owned and
other government institutions. In so doing, the EPDRF has stifled the
productivity of competent bureaucrats. Any targeting of some sector is geared
to benefit the ethnically-owned businesses. There is no press freedom
which would expose the rampant corruption, nepotism and cronyism that has
engulfed the country for too long.

 

6. Stable Macroeconomic Environments:

Macroeconomic
stability is manifested by the absence of high inflation and interest rates and
stable financial institutions, relatively low budget and trade deficits,
minimal rent-seeking behaviors (that is, low corruption), and well-defined
property rights . In the HPAEs, lower inflation rates protected the public’s
savings from being eroded by high inflation rates and raised confidence in the
banking sector. Relatively low interest rates raised the real profits of the
business sector. Low budget and trade deficits minimized the occurrence a
financial crisis and dependence on foreign economic assistance, which do not
come free.

In
contrast, as I showed elsewhere, Ethiopia is facing rampant inflation, huge
budget and trade deficits and high corruption. The lack of well-defined
property rights has allowed the EPDRF owned conglomerates to grab any property
they can find. As I argued elsewhere, by not making land privately owned, the
EPDRF has not only denied the peasants to raise capital using their land as
their collateral for potential loans, but the policy also has been used to
scare the peasants and to force them to be real slaves of the ruling party. It
seems that the same policy has created a perfect situation for the EPDRF to
give Ethiopian land to foreigners at will, for the same policy effectively has
made the EPDRF to be the owner of all the land of Ethiopia.

 

Admittedly, SOME
of those leaders of the HPAEs have done something no one desires and they
already have admitted their mistakes and shortcomings. They are no friends of
tyranny, at least not anymore, especially the most abominable one such as the
one that is being practiced in Ethiopia. For example, the former president of
South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung blamed the 1997/98 financial crisis on “authoritarian
leaders who placed economic development ahead of democracy.”[5]
The autocrats in Addis may invoke the Chinese economic growth as their model to
imitate. Again, the Chinese economic, political and cultural situations are
quite different from those in Ethiopia. Even though one could be hesitant to
call the Chinese economic growth as an economic development, China was able to
garner such a sustained growth by allowing economic freedom, the protection of
property rights and a functioning market system. None of these realities exists
in Ethiopia.

 

Be that as it
may, a good leader is not one which longs for and looks up to the misdeeds and shortcomings of previous
leaders. Such a desire to continue tyranny is distasteful and not one that
healthy leaders could contemplate about and impose them on their own people.
God: what kind of curse have you brought to that country and poor people?! 

 

Now that I have briefly presented the
experiences of the HPAEs, I would like to conclude this part by presenting the
following parable, which, in my view, sums up the point I have tried to make:

 

During the 1988 American vice-presidential debate which took place between
the late Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen and the Republican vice-presidential
candidate Senator Dan Quayle, and after the then senator Quayle was asked what
kind of qualifications he had to be president in the event that the president
was to die or be assassinated as it happened to John F. Kennedy, and after Mr.
Quayle answered in the affirmative, Mr. Bentsen said: “Senator, I served with
Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator,
you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

 

We echo the late Senator Bentsen and say to the
tyrannical leader in Addis: Ato Meles, we and the rest of the world know how
those countries achieved those enviable goals. We know how nationalistic the
leaders of the Southeast Asian countries were (are). The world knows that they
did not instigate ethnic strife. They did not commit treasonous acts by ceasing
the territories of their respective countries. We know how their party members
cared about the people in their entire respective countries. There was no
rampant corruption as it exists in Ethiopia… We know Southeast Asia…. We know
the leaders of the HPAEs. Ethnocentric autocrats in Addis, you’re not like the
leaders of the HPAEs, not even close. The long 18 years of EPDRF’s misrule
reveals that, it is no Southeast Asian political parties which GOVERNED the
HPAEs.  Neither the world nor the
Ethiopian people would be fooled. Nor would they be intimidated.

 

My
readers, if you are convinced by the facts and logic as well as the contrasts
that I presented above, let’s follow the late Senator Lloyd Bentsen and chant
together: “we know …., you’re no….!” Well done, and thank you!

 

III. SOME CONJECTURES:

 

So, these being the facts, why do the leaders of the EPDRF concocted
such a ridiculous suggestion and comparison? Comparing the experiences of the
HPAEs and that of Ethiopia is comparing apples and oranges, really. Therefore,
one cannot escape the thought that Ato Meles and his group concocted such a
propaganda tool in order to use it for their political consumption, and possibly
out of desperation.[6] Here are
SOME conjectures. It may be that:

 

1.     
The pressure from the public is mounting against the
EPDRF, and as a result, the EPDRF is confused, to the point of becoming
schizophrenic. On the one hand, Meles has been lying to his foreign backers and
the donor countries that democracy prevailed in Ethiopia. On the other hand, it
has been difficult for the EPDRF to hide the facts:  that it has ruled Ethiopia with brute force.
It knows that the world now knows it has robbed the peoples’ votes on daylight.
By telling the world that it wants to follow the HPAEs, Meles is effectively
admitting to the world that he is an authoritarian. Such contradictory
statements and admitting to rule Ethiopia with brute force is an act of
desperation.

2.     
As one of my other friends pointed out, knowing that
the leaders of the EPDRF will not stay in power (quite possibly not even in
Ethiopia) for too long, they must have decided to concoct an idea, no matter
how ridiculous it may sound, in order to buy time for their exit. Knowing that
there are other graceful ways of exit, following this route is an act of
desperation.

3.     
 The regime is
facing a crisis, both political and economic. On the political side, the regime
knows that the Ethiopian people have rejected its ethnocentric policies and authoritarianism.
It faces dissatisfaction and cynicism on every policy it follows, mainly
because of the corruption scourge and the selfish nature of the EPDRF and its
cadres. The 2005 election revealed to the EPDRF that, if allowed, the people of
Ethiopia can cast their votes peacefully, no matter how much they were
intimidated, arrested, or killed. Given the opportunity, the people of Ethiopia
showed to the EPDRF autocrats and the rest of the world that they could show
their dissatisfaction by peacefully marching in the streets of Addis Ababa, in
millions, and come out and vote those they did not like out of r office.
Humiliated by the outcome, the EPDRF leaders do not want to repeat the same
“mistake” by going through a similar election process and talking about
democracy. Therefore, they are laying the ground to do away completely with any
semblance of democracy. It must be due this same humiliation that the EPDRF has
received why its cadres have now begun terrorizing the general populace-
threatening or firing those workers who voted for the opposition parties.  

4.     
Ato Meles wants to engage the cadres with such a frivolous
issue, in order to keep them busy and confused. 
For those of us who know the tricks Meles has played and how he played
them in the past, a similar concoction has been adopted right after the debacle
of the senseless war with Eritrea. When members of his own party, some of them
founders of the TPLF rejected his ceding of the prize to win the silly war and
the country’s sovereignty, he concocted the idea of fighting corruption. Well,
we all know what happened to the level of corruption in the country after Meles’s
concoction: It skyrocketed since then! Unfortunately, he succeeded:  He threw in his opponents in jail and purged
the rest of them from the party. He succeeded in his deception by deflecting
the public’s attention away from himself. He managed to put the docile members
of his party, and especially the ones who are the most selfish, who are
summarily called in Amharic as the HODAMs, in his column. He might have done it
out of desperation even then, but he succeeded and he thinks he would succeed again. 

5.     
Ato Meles probably concocted this idea of ruling Ethiopians
by hook or crook, and in the process, placate the EPDRF cadres, especially
those who have stakes at the EPDRF controlled conglomerates. On the one hand,
he is terrified by the news of the tariff hike that Djibouti recently announced.
He is also terrified by the fact that his cadres would turn against him for
making the country land-locked to begin with. Having a sea access is very
essential to these corrupt conglomerates and the rest of the business sector in
which the EPDRF is involved in, which according to some people, its involvement
in the Ethiopian economy is so deep that it even includes small retail trade
such as exporting of Ethiopian traditional bread, the injera. The fear adds to
the schizophrenic nature of the EPDRF leadership thereby making them to be
desperate and concoct ridiculous ideas to be used for propaganda purposes. Some
even speculate that, the same desperation may be behind why Ato Meles gave away
huge tracts of Ethiopian land to the president of Djibouti. They further argue
that Meles decided to implement his plan to give away Ethiopian land to the
Sudan so that the EPDRF owned conglomerates would have access to the Port of
Sudan. If what they claim is to be true, the same desperation must have spread
to the entire ruling clique and forced some of them to be schizophrenic. They
ask, what else could explain this bizarre behavior of betrayal of a country,
making her be land-locked, giving away the prizes that comes with a winning of
a war, lying to the people that the so-called Ethio-Eritrean Commission has
ruled in favor Ethiopia while the fact is to the contrary, and now the giving
away a big chunk of the country’s territory to a neighboring country?  In any case, the giving away of the countries
territory and fertile lands is another manifestation of
desperation to stay in power, even if it is a blatant betrayal of trust.[7]

 

6.     
Knowing that it has lost the backing of the general
public, the EPDRF concocted this idea in order to send a terrorizing message to
both the opposition parties and the general public by sending the message that,
whether they like it or not, the EPDRF is here to rule them for many years to
come. In reality, it is a desperate move taken by a desperate party.

 

7.     
Create an excuse for those foreign powers and
supporters that their governments were behind the rulers of the same Southeast
Asian governments and they ought to do the same for the EPDRF. Second, the
EPDRF is trying to suggest to them that, if a one-party system was good for
those countries mentioned above, it has to be good for Ethiopia as well. Some
of those foreign governments and/or their unsuspecting representatives probably
like such an excuse. Such blackmailing, however, would not last.

 

In addition to their contempt for the
people they rule, the EPDRF leaders have, in a stealth manner, instigated
ethnic and religious conflicts – the latter a phenomena rarely seen in Ethiopia
prior to their rule.  It is quite
possible for them to try to do it on a massive scale, especially when the going
becomes a little too hard. Fortunately, those who were pushed for an
ethnic-based strife had come to their senses, and in most cases, the spirit of
Ethiopianism has triumphed over sectarianism and disintegration. As a disciple
of Isayas Afewerqi, Meles undermined the unity of Ethiopia for nearly two
decades. Fortunately, so far, people have refused to go along with his plans
and instigations. Such refusals had frustrated the leaders of the EPDRF. That
may be why they have become as desperate as to concoct such a myth.

 

8.     
By comparing the incomparable situations that Ethiopia
is in with those of Southeast Asia, the TPLF (EPDRF) is trying to fool the
general public and the unsuspecting cadres that Ethiopia is in par with those
countries and placate them in the process –by feeding them with empty words, as
the Prime minister has been doing it to the peasants – telling the world that
they have gotten richer under his rule, while in fact they are starving. At the
same time, by advancing such issues, Meles is trying to scare the west that
Ethiopia would ally itself with such undemocratic countries such as China and
Russia if they fail to accept the status quo ante. I happen to believe that the
days of such deceptive tactics are about to be over.

 

9.     
Meles has come to the realization that the days for him
to play the game as an ally of the west and one who stands against Islamic
terrorism is about to be over. It could be that Meles is terrified with the
fact that it is his government which has instigated religious-based conflicts.
He may be terrified that the West would come to realize that Islamic
fundamentalism has not roots in Ethiopia. As you all know, the EPDRF has tried
to foment not only ethnic conflicts, but also religious ones. Their calculation
is that, once such religious hostilities begin, Meles would attempt to convince
the Western world that terrorism indeed exists in Ethiopia. Perhaps, the EPDRF
leadership has come to the realization that they cannot dupe the world for so
long and they would be denied of the financial assistance that they have been
generously getting. Perhaps, the same autocrats are now terrified that the West
would know that even his invasion of Somalia has nothing to do with Islamic
terrorism. Instead, it has more to do with Meles’s jailing of protesters,
journalists, human rights workers and opposition leaders, to satisfy his
insatiable appetite for hard currency using false pretexts- which ultimately
will be used to buy weapons, which in turn could be used against the people they
rule. Meles is terrified that he himself is an agent of terror for his
brutality and oppression helps breed terrorism.

 

IV. The Evidence is In: Democracy has Triumphed
over Tyranny

Many researchers have come to
conclude that authoritarianism helps economic development is a myth.  If anything, there is only a spurious
correlation between autocracy and growth. Good governance begets development,
not the other way round. Empirical evidence shows that democracies enjoy higher
economic development compared to non-free ones. Most importantly, evidence
shows that those countries which adopted democratic principles have
outperformed those which followed the path of tyranny on a range of development
indicators, such as life expectancy at birth, access to clean water and air,
literacy rates, and infant mortality rates. They did this in part by doing away
with special interest groups and rampant corruption. The citizens of democracies
stayed within their own countries, to raise their children within their
homeland, to be with their own loved ones, instead of becoming “super maids” as
Ethiopians have become. By allowing their citizens to be part of the
decision-making process, leaders who respected the rule of law have enabled their
citizens to have their own stakes, thereby motivating them to work hard.
Democratic countries were (are) able to enjoy peace, which has been a scarce
commodity for Ethiopians for decades.  As
the 1998 Economics Nobel Prize Winner points out to all of us, hunger and
starvation do not take place in countries which adopted democratic principles.
In the age of globalization, good governance and democracy is the precondition
for economic development. So, the evidence is in: democracy and the respect of
the rule of law bring more prosperity to a country than authoritarianism. In
fact, research shows that both the well-being and the survival of poor
countries depend on people controlling their own destiny more than others. In
fact, both empirical evidence and logic indicate that resource-scarce countries
need better governance and policies than those endowed with relatively abundant
resources.

 

For
those of you who do not know Meles and the EPDRF, it may be quite puzzling to
both hear and see why “leaders” of  a
political party that has been in power for 18 years continue to behave like mad
dogs against their own people. One would expect such leaders, who have amassed
enormous wealth, a good portion of it at the expense of the poor peasants, to
be humbled by the Grace of God who allowed them to be in such a position, while
at the same time, the people they rule are homeless and starving. One would
expect the so-called “leaders” to work hard to deliver what their subjects
yearn dearly, which is the respect of the rule of law and democracy. Instead of
being proud of satisfying the demands of the people, Meles and his gang opted
to frighten and terrorize them, in a crude and repugnant manner at that.
Instead of being confident for delivering the goods and services that their
subjects so desperately needed, they seem to tell the world that the peasants
are rich and not starving. Instead of lifting up the moral and spirits of the
people, they continue to intimidate them, putting them in concentration camps
in drones, just because they exercised their rights and voted their conscience.
Instead of being proud by protecting the territorial integrity of the country,
which is one of the cardinal obligations of a government, they chose to
willingly give away portions of the country’s territory to its traditional
enemies. Instead of taking advantage of the modern telecommunication technology
created elsewhere and try to catch up with the rapidly advancing world, they
chose to suppress its usage and even use it to suppress the people they have
ruled for too long.   Such an act is not
something to be proud of, unless the so-called leaders are so paranoid to the
extent that they even fear their own shadows knowing the crimes they have
committed against the poor people of Ethiopia.

 

V.   
WE HAVE NEWS FOR
THE AUTOCRATS:

 

There
is news for such paranoid, angry, prejudiced and desperate “leaders”- bad news
for them, good news for everyone else: with the demise of communism, respecting
the rule of law and freedom has triumphed over dictatorship. People refuse to
be intimidated. They will continue demanding for the respect of the rule of
law, freedom, human rights, and democracy. Despotic leader leave their victims
with no choice. Despotic leader leave their victims with no choice. Even though
they suppress the independent media with their new draconian press law, even
though they intimidate opposition party leaders by arresting them with familiar
tramped-up charges, even though you have made the existence and function of
opposition parties practically useless, we will not rest until we gain our
freedoms. We know such ridiculous propaganda and intimidation is an act of
desperation. We know the world has changed and we will go along with the rest
of the world that respects and practices democracy. Just like those people who
have found their freedom, who have found the path of democracy, who found ways
to discard authoritarianism, the Ethiopian people will find ours and do the
same. We know, sooner or later, the entire world will be with them. We say,
“No” to tyranny, intimidation, ethnocentric policies; “No”  to nepotism; “No”  to government instigated ethnic and religious
strife; “No” to mass arrests and state terror. “Yes” to checks and balances, to
the respect of the rule of law, to accountability, to equality, and to freedom!

 

So,
bad boys, what are you going to do when those freedom loving people stand in
unison and try to liberate themselves from your yolk of tyranny? Bad boys, what
are you going to do when Ethiopians come after you, demanding their freedom? Bad
boys, what are you going to do once the people begin chronicling how you
expropriated the peoples’ resources by selling the previously government owned
corporations to yourselves? Bad boys…., Bad boys, what are you going to do when
…?

 

The
writer can be reached at [email protected]

 

 

REFERENCES (in brief)

 

“Exposing a 50-Year-Old Myth” http://www.opensocietypolicycenter.org/pub/doc_52/Chapter%20one-The%20Democracy%20Advantage.pdf

 

Gerber, James, 2002. International Economics, Addison
Wesley, Boston, MA.

 

World Bank, 1993. The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth
and Public Policy, Oxford University press, New York, NY.

 

Harvey, James Jr.
July 2007. “Time Under Authoritarian Rule and Economic Growth” CORI Working Paper No. 2007-02, to be
found at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1010748.

 

CIA World Fact Book, to be found at: :https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/et.html

 

MULAT DEMEKE, FANTU GUTA, TADELE FEREDE

(Professors in the Department of Economics, Addis Ababa
University):  “Growth, Employment,
Poverty and Policies in Ethiopia: An empirical investigation”, Discussion
Paper 12, 2003. To be found at: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/poverty/download/disc12.pdf