Is Tigray the problem?

As
the ruling coalition in Ethiopia begins to mark 20 years at the helm of
politics in the country, its critics and opponents have united in a renewed last-ditch
effort to try and dislodge it from power by stirring a nationwide protest .

The
proposed final push comes amid the unprecedented success of popular uprisings
in Tunisia and Egypt where authoritarian regimes had successfully been toppled
after dominating for decades the national political scene in their respective
countries.

To
the man in the line of fire, the real threat to EPRDF’s hold on power in
Ethiopia however comes neither from the weakened legal opposition which hasn’t
held a significant public rally since the historic political turbulence in 2005
nor from critics and activists far removed from the domestic political landscape.

The
Ethiopian prime minister seems under no illusion that the most credible threat
to his power comes from a rival regime north of the Ethiopian border rather
than a disgruntled population feeling the heat of the recent price hikes in the
price of petrol and other basic necessities.

Whether
the prime minister is right or not about where the  threat to his power lies will of course
have to be seen in due course.

Meanwhile
the intensifying debate about the real problems in the country seems to be
heading in a rather dangerous direction as Tigray-bashing
continues to eclipse rationale debates in some quarters of the Ethiopian
Diaspora.

Despite
the diversity of colours in political opinion, the cyber world of Ethiopian
political activism is woefully peppered with indiscriminate and unambiguous
news and comments castigating Tigray and Tigreans.

Such
indiscriminate and purposeful targeting probably reached new heights when in May
2009 Ginbot 7 accused the whole of the Tigrean ethnic group of dominating key posts in the
Ethiopian army.

The
carefully worded press release which has since been widely echoed time and time
again in all manners of news and comments on all anti-government websites said
‘a minority ethnic group that comprises no more than 6%
of the total population (80 Million) controls the political, economic, and
social life of 94% of the Ethiopian people.’

The
trouble is such inflammatory and misleading statements shift the focus away
from the real problem onto the less significant point of which ethnic group is
in power as if that were the fundamental flaw of the system.

In
stead of highlighting the perilousness of politics along ethno-linguistic lines , statements such as this and the plethora of other hateful
comments dominating Ethiopian websites in the Diaspora today target one ethnic
group for the flaws of a system designed to favour an organised group of people
in power in the name of a whole population in a part of the country. 

This
focused and single-minded attack also validates widespread myths about how a
particular ethnic group (in this case the Tigrean
ethnic group) is forging way ahead of the rest of the country in infrastructure
development, health care, employment , agricultural production and other
spheres of national life at the expense of the rest. This is of course not
true.

Despite
the anti-Tigray hype , the
reality on the ground depicts a completely different story.

Today
as in the past many hundreds of years , farmers in Tigray subsist on traditional farming methods and are just
as exposed to the vagaries of nature as their compatriots in other parts of the
country.

An
independent research into food insecurity levels in Ethiopia described the
situation in rural Tigray five years ago as extremely
alarming.

The
IFPRI-EDRI research published as recently as 2009 further showed that in 2005 , 10.6 per cent of children born in the region died
before marking their fifth birthdays. The figure at national level is only 2.6
per cent worse.

Urban
poverty is just as grinding in the region with a fast growing population
increasingly finding it hard to make a living in an economy dominated by a
giant business conglomerate with links to the ruling elite rather than the ordinary
Tigreans whose lives have seen little if any change.

Suggesting
otherwise is completely preposterous and self defeating as it is often the same
people who brazenly admit that despite the ruling elite’s Tigrean
roots, for the bulk of the Tigrean population, life
is pretty much the same as everywhere else in the country.

Even
in the fast growing construction sector , the ancient
cities and towns of Tigray including the capital Mekele trail far behind their southern counterparts.

Bahr
Dar , Dire Dawa and Awassa have seen a far greater degree of expansion and modernisation
not to mention ever burgeoning , though administratively less important, Nazret and Debre Zeit .

Pseudo-private
firms under EFFORT have in deed invested in the region creating limited employment
opportunities in the nearby communities. However, the scale and depth of the
benefits to local communities is often sadly exaggerated to prove the
politically-charged accusations of unfair economic advantage to the people of Tigray.

As
Arena-Tigray’s Asseged G.Sellasie –himself a TPLF veteran and a founding member- recently
told the Amharic weekly Awramba Times that EFFORT has not invested in Tigray more than 30 million Birr of its suspected multi
million dollar wealth.

Sure
enough far from being ahead of the rest of the country in economic progress, Tigray remains the deprived province where the no-war-no-peace
existence of at least the last 10 years continues to hamper any real prospects
for the citizenry.

One
evening during a holiday in Summer 2010, I was
strolling down the main road which runs through the centre of the ancient city
of Axum. I popped into a brightly lit roadside convenience store modestly
stacked with every day necessities of all kind.

The
shopkeeper, an intelligent affable man in his early thirties
, was standing idly behind the half glass counter presumably looking out
into the quiet street with the hope of seeing the next customer come through
the door.

After
buying what I had come in for, I spent a good few minutes talking to the
businessman about life as a whole and business in particular.

I
was not surprised by what I had heard. He said since the end of the conflict
with Eritrea , business had particularly got more and
more low-pitched as the stand off with the Shabia
continues to cast its shadows on the movement of goods into the region.

With
businesses forced to look to Sudan and Djibouti for their supply of imported goods , the cost of transportation has continually spiralled
out of control.

The
effect has been greater impoverishment for consumers as they are forced to dig
deeper into their meagre resources to afford even the most basic of
necessities.

In
deed , the miscalculations of TPLF’s Eritrea policy
have been arguably more damning to the local economy in Tigray
than to many other regions in Ethiopia given its relative proximity to the
seacoast.

Yet
living in equally gruesome if not worse conditions has not sparred
the good old people of Tigray from coming under a
barrage of wholesale criticisms and attacks by all those opposed to Meles Zenawi and his cohorts.

They
continue to be vilified for not being at the fore front of the ‘struggle’ to
depose Zenawi whose stay in power is rather  explained by his largely skilful but
occasionally violent measures to weaken and destroy his opponents.

Hence,
the emotive Tigray-bashing misguided debate raging in
certain quarters of the Ethiopian Diaspora needs to change for the better. It
is counterproductive and it only helps entrench tribal prejudices which get in
the way of achieving the common goals of equality and justice.

—
The writer can be reached at [email protected]