If Ethiopia had been stable and peaceful, and if it had resorted to a constitutional amendments, as proposed by groups in 1966 E.C, (i) the shameful and barbaric murder of thousands of our brightest youth, military and distinguished elder statesmen, including that of the world-wide respected Emperor and Prime Minister Aklilu, would have been avoided, (ii) the dismemberment of Ethiopia and its being land-locked would have been avoided, (iii) the current divisive and destructive minority regime and the ever increasing inter-ethnic tension would have been avoided, (iv) the misery, pain and death of millions of Ethiopians that had fled Ethiopia for political and other reasons would have been avoided, (v) the wasted years from 1972 to 2005 would have been avoided, and Ethiopia would have continued to grow at around 6% per year, at least, for 37 years after 1972, and our national per-capita income today would have been no less than 2000 US Dollars, which is the current level of income of lower middle-income countries; ours is about 250 Dollars at this time !
A big price has been paid by the innocent majority of Ethiopians on account of the limitless folly, blind conceit, single-track mindedness, ignorance and short-sightedness of a tiny minority in the former student movement, in the Derg and in today’s TPLF !
After Kiniijit’s meteoric rise and well-deserved fall in 2005, EPRDF decided to avoid a repeat of the shock of defeat it had experienced from Kinijit in May 2005.
To win the simple hearts and minds of our starving and helpless rural folks, EPRDF built thousands of effectively empty clinics and thousands of illiterate schools whose primary objective was the mass production of illiterate youth; it also started 22 universities staffed mainly with fresh graduates with first degrees, with no suitable text-books, and practically no libraries or laboratories. However, family members of the ruling elite avoided all such schools and universities and went to either good private schools in Addis Ababa or to Europe and America.
Those schools were built to deceive the masses by making them feel that they had their own schools and universities in their own districts and sub-districts when those institutions were effectively useless and wasteful . Today, the Ministry of Education is telling us that it is raising the quality of education by calling useless conferences of parents, teachers, administrators and students, thereby wasting still more money on purposeless caps, per diems and wasting the time of busy farmers instead of spending the money on better teachers, improved text-books, stronger laboratories, better food and improved support facilities.
Why wouldn’t government officials send their children to these schools instead of sending them to Addis Ababa’s private schools ? Does this not confirm the existence of an on-going discriminatory policy and deception ? The same sort of corruption holds for clinics, health centers and hospitals all over the country.
To makes matters still worse, government bureaucrats serving on bidding committees resort to corrupt practices as seen in the most recent case of the messy repair effort of Zewditu Hospital at a cost of 18 million Birr (This is enough to build a new hospital without corruption), but it is still unusable since the rain freely leaks into wards, into the kitchen, the pharmacy and into laundry rooms; sewerage and water pipes are rusty, broken and completely out of order.
Even ETV could not interview any of those responsible for this shoddy and worthless repair, perhaps because of the protection they had from senior government officials that might be shareholders of this huge theft of 18 million Birr. The same has also happened in the recent past in Black Lion Hospital, in St. Paul’s Hospital and other hospitals in the city. Matters must be much worse in rural Ethiopia where corrupt EPRDF officials are totally in charge and out of sight? Is the Anti-corruption Commission still alive ? Let us wait and see what it does!
Indeed, one of EPRDF’s principal problems is putting up worthless institutions and appointing corrupt and incompetent TPLF/EPRDF political cadres to head ministries and such other important development agencies and services as EEPCO and the Ethiopian Roads Authority.
EPRDF has also built several roads that have further enriched EPRDF’s party businesses like Sur Construction, but pot-holes and various plants and weeds have invariably taken over almost immediately after completion even in Addis Ababa; hydropower stations went up in Tekeze and Gilgel Gibe with billions of Birr, but poorly conceived, designed and built Tekeze and Gilgel Gibe have failed to function so that sudden blackouts are still common today.
The water supply, even in Addis Ababa, has a dry tap most of the week; ETV rarely says anything that is credible and sensible, and whatever little it does, as in its recent report on Zewditu Hospital, is likely to be covered up by senior officials.
When it comes to agricultural development, land has often been taken from poor peasants for flower and other commercial farming for export. On the other hand, Addis Ababa alone has hundreds of thousands of nameless youth who have left their villages all over the country because there is no more land to go round; almost naked and starved children from all over rural Ethiopia continue to migrate en masse into cities in millions to seek menial jobs, and have no addresses and not even a right to be counted in the recent census in 2007, or to vote on May 23, 2010; this is evident in Addis Ababa, and this accounts, at least partially, for the huge census undercounts that Addisu Legesse approved for the north-western provinces of the country and Addis Ababa.
Well-connected sharks lease huge tracts of urban land for housing development for a few thousand Birr but end up selling it for tens of millions of Birr right under the nose of corrupt city government bureaucrats only a few days after receiving the title deeds, and they and their corrupt accomplices continue to get richer while the majority get increasingly poorer ! These are some of the facts associated with the double-digit growth trumpeted by the EPRDF government.
Telecommunications’ service is another area that is regarded as “ the cow that provides milk” by EPRDF, according to a former Minister who was defending the government’s monopoly, but the real reason was to protect EPRDF control of information flow in the country. It is true that fixed phone lines, mobiles phones and internet services have increased significantly since 2005, but the quality of service continues to be shockingly poor, perhaps the poorest in Africa. As a result, the mediocrity of the services is a serious impediment to the healthy development of business and an obstacle to the inflow of foreign capital.
Indeed, there is some economic growth – which is commendable – but the quality of that growth could have been much better and its pace could have been much faster if EPRDF had created a more conducive working environment for thousands of Ethiopian professionals scattered all over the globe and if it had dwelt less on brute loyalty and ethnicity, and more on quality, durability, sustainability and the overall national interest.
WHAT ELSE HAS GONE WRONG ?
There are several other issues of grave national concern that are often missed: an ethnic-driven state structure that continues to breed inter-ethnic animosity, a Constitution that is partisan and rarely respected by its sole authors, lack of respect for ethnic rights by allowing only 7 out of 85 to enjoy such rights at the expense of the remaining 84 by the very same group that went to the bush to fight for their democratic rights, lack of respect for Ethiopian territorial integrity and the annexation and/or transfer of certain rural areas to others in the absence of any historical or traditional justification, the continuously festering ethnic divisions within the Defense Forces, Federal Police and the Civil Service, the absence of a democratic environment which provides a meaningful and legal role for the Ruling Party and the opposition under a democratic Constitution, and the ominous clouds building around the waters of the Nile are all causes for great concern and possible future instability in an increasingly divided Ethiopia. Dictatorial and selfish regimes have always dug their graves in Ethiopia, and that lesson must not be lost to short-sighted TPLF/EPRDF.
The electoral system is also another cause for great worry since Ethiopian politicians have failed to hold free and fair elections in May 2010 after having gone through 3 shamefully fraudulent and costly elections.
Flatters and short-sighted supporters have colluded with ignorant and undemocratic student leaders of the student movement to cause the destruction of the government of His Imperial Majesty; sheer ignorance and incompetence led to the demise of the dirty military junta in 1991. EPRDF’s TPLF-dominated regime cannot have any better luck if it continues to be divisive, corrupt, partisan, undemocratic and short-sighted.
Indeed, the fall of TPLF out of power through violent means is bound to be catastrophic to the flatterers and short-sighted supporters of the divisive one-party regime at home and abroad, and to the entire future of the country. Such a catastrophe can be avoided if we all work together today to save the minority regime from a sudden collapse and help it to evolve to be a partner in ensuring the stability, security, territorial integrity and continued growth of our country !
If EPRDF wants a smooth and peaceful transition to multi-party rule and a peaceful and secure life for all its supporters, family members and for all other Ethiopians, then Meles needs to use the next five years to transform EPRDF into a truly democratic party that is able to lay the foundations for a democratic republic of a united and democratic Ethiopia that is free from ethnic, religious, minority or majority biases.
That will be making history and securing a place alongside the great men and women of Ethiopia, and building the most invincible and durable defenses that a united and democratic modern republic badly needs today to stand up to all threatening challenges to Ethiopian sovereignty, security and national interest.
THE FUTURE TO MAY 2015
The opposition at home and its supporters in the Diaspora had learnt very little from the failed Ethiopian elections in 1995, 2000 and 2005 or from successful elections like that of South Africa in April 1994. As usual, the disorganized opposition came to think about elections in 2009. Hence, in the absence of humans, no angels worked on the preconditions for free and fair elections in May 2010. Under those conditions, it was absurd to go into the elections when there was no level playing field, but the opposition was dumb enough to do it for the 4th time. However, unimpeded by any serious pressure from the opposition, EPRDF had perfected its most valuable trade well before coming to the elections in May 2010.
EPRDF’s preparations served it well: it enacted a revised but still undemocratic electoral law; it enacted a new party registration law which served EPRDF well; it also enacted a repressive media law which had successfully wiped out any traces of the free press; it produced an NGO law to ensure full EPRDF control over all NGO activities; EPRDF’s legal factory wound up with laws on anti-terrorism to harass and control the opposition and produced an election code of conduct that was sheepishly agreed to by the larger and older opposition parties, when its primary goal was to stifle the opposition and wipe out any challenge to any EPRDF-engineered election fraud or election misconduct.
In addition, EPRDF organized a national women’s league, the Addis Ababa women’s league, the national youth league and the Addis Ababa youth league and several similar leagues in all regions, in addition to the national labor union, and the national teachers union which it had earlier organized in its own image.
To cap this all, the mass media, which are paid for from taxes, continued to be under the full control of EPRDF which was generous enough to give only a few minutes of ETV and radio time to the disorganized and mindless opposition which took what was offered and left EPRDF to use the mass media to destroy it.
Even with such huge resources at its disposal, and all the government schools, municipal and corporate halls under its control, EPRDF was still reported to have spent well over 32 million Birr on the elections, in addition to 189,000,000 Birr used by the EPRDF-appointed-managed National Election Board.
The undemocratic electoral system, which has never been understood as such by the entire opposition since 1995, includes the partisan National Election Board nominated and appointed by EPRDF, the undemocratic electoral law which continues to perpetuate a dominant role for illiterate and partisan observers effectively selected by EPRDF to pronounce elections free and fair and allows for extensive fraud during voting, vote counting and reporting, the partisan courts whose EPRDF-loyal justices obey decisions passed to them by EPRDF, the helplessly enslaved public mass media, local governments and police that continue to serve only EPRDF, and the absence of a strong and independent free press. Indeed, it is very sad that even the most highly educated leaders in the opposition have never made any serious study of these partisan components of the undemocratic electoral system which has bedeviled all elections since 1995.
Tragically, even today, the opposition, including today’s MEDREK, does not appear to see the critical role of these prerequisites for free and fair elections though elections in 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 have continued to underscore the futility of going into elections before making them free from the influence of any political party. This false and misleading perception was also recently revealed in Beyene Petros’s interview right after agreement was reached on the evolution of MEDREK to a FRONT; he said that all past failures of the opposition had been because of the absence of strong opposition political parties. That was false !
Ato Bulcha’s OFDM won some 11 seats in 2005 after only a few weeks of existence, but none in 2010 after it had grown much stronger. Kinijit was very strong in 2005, but it lost the elections because its naïve, ignorant but conceited campaign strategists never took the trouble to ensure the existence of the legal and institutional framework required to guarantee free and fair elections; a level playing field for all political parties was not available; If there were a level playing field in 2005, Kinijit would have had a land-slide victory. Kinijit failed primarily because it had failed to prepare a suitable legal and institutional framework to stop EPRDF’s election fraud ! Some old leaders of Kinijit that live abroad have wrongly claimed that only force can dislodge EPRDF, but that is also untrue since the peaceful approach has not been exhausted at all through a united and determined effort by the opposition! Some opposition leaders were too selfish !
The foundations for democracy were securely laid in South Africa in 1994 as a result of a selfless joint effort made by all political parties of all political orientations to prepare an acceptable transitional constitution, a democratic electoral law, an independent electoral commission under all-party control, an electoral court at the level of the supreme court with full authority over the police, a public mass media which was securely established as independent of all political parties, and institutional structures for effective implementation under an all-party control. This was a group determined to see the birth of a united and democratic South Africa.
Mandela told the press during the faltering negotiations with the Apartheid Regime that he was ready to crawl on his knees to bring the recalcitrant Chief Buthelezi to the negotiations which took well over two years; he finally succeeded. The various negotiations and the final one at Kempton Park were completed about January 1994; the elections in April 1994 came to be one of the most democratic ever held on the globe. However, our naive political leaders are too proud to even talk to each other, let alone crawl on their knees for the sake of Ethiopia and its innocent majority, and that is what we have badly lacked all along since the 1990s– an unswerving commitment to Ethiopia and to all its people!
South Africans, under the strong influence and leadership of Mandela and the visionary support of President De Clerk, demonstrated that democracy does not have to be a process; it was achievable at one stroke by making adequate and meticulous preparations, which took some two years in South Africa, to ensure those admirably free and fair elections in April 1994.
The national problems listed above can be, and should be, addressed urgently in Ethiopia by all opposition political parties together today to ensure that we have a stable and democratic homeland for all our citizens and to make sure that our country can stand up to any local and foreign challenges of the 21st century !
Meles has the capacity and authority to make history before his planned departure in 2015. Poor statistics and flattery that cover up the fundamental problems of the day are a disservice to Tigray, to TPLF, to PRDF and to the rest of Ethiopia which still continues to be ruled by an openly separatist and divisive Tigray Liberation Front even after 20 years of TPLF rule.
The fraudulent elections of 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 were unforgivable. The expansions in education, health services, telecommunications, urban public housing and rural electrification are largely incompatible with existing national capacity and resources; they need better supervision and corruption-free control. Some of these current developments, especially those in education, are highly regrettable since they will result in an irreversible damage to the current generation and to our continued national welfare and security.
If Meles corrects these problems between now and 2015 while continuing to maintain a meaningful GDP growth rate, which is very possible if he picks more competent and less corrupt development ministers, updates and modernizes the constitution to unite and serve all Ethiopians equitably, restructures the states into some 30 efficiently-run provinces that are more equal and effectively manageable by present-day managerial skills, continues to work as hard as he has in the past, but for the national good, and settles the problem with Eritrea to avoid a land-locked Ethiopia by restoring its natural access to the Red Sea, most Ethiopians and myself would vote for Meles’s party in May 2015.
The political uncertainties that have influenced the content of the current Constitution and the actions of TPLF/EPRDF in the 1990s are no more. Meles can achieve these changes easily if he chooses to use the up-coming EPRDF-led parliaments at all levels. A well-organized and more committed opposition can assist Meles in expediting the process of change; Kinijit had forced EPRDF to change significantly after the elections of 2005; with another strong opposition and concerted effort by all, further structural, political and economic changes can surely be achieved between now and 2015. The Diaspora can also play a vital support role if it quits its old, divisive, destructive and EPRDF-like methods which contributed to the demise of Kinijit in 2007 and divisions within the opposition.
It is unwise to expect our national problems to be solved for us by the West or the East; we have to solve them ourselves, and that can be done if, like Mandela, we put a united and democratic Ethiopia and all its people well above selfish, short-sighted and partisan goals.
Ethiopians all over the country are ready to do away with the diabolical ethnic and religious divide constructed by EPRDF over the last 20 years, and they have shown that determination to the whole world in May 2005, but they have been badly betrayed by the political elite. If Meles, the opposition and the Diaspora succeed to work together to solve these urgent but and chronic political problems, Ethiopia may, once again, regain its historic role as a leader in Africa.
