You might probably have read my paper on the 2005
Ethiopian election (Aiga and Ethiopiafirst) which demonstrates how we try to
advance balanced views at the international level. I am back here with my usual
commentary on the Kenyan election and its analogy with the Ethiopian experience. Quite
frankly, I do not have a habit of going public every time an issue
is discussed. But, as usual most of the debate on this Kenya-Ethiopia analogy
is very much politicized and used to attack EPRDF. I am therefore writing to
try to bring different perspectives. Perhaps I shouldn’t also hide my
frustration that many commentators have found it easy to over politicize the
current Kenyan tragedy. It is tragic
because, other than the 1982 military coup attempt, Kenya was always seen as
one of the most stable countries in Africa.
At least Kenyan MPs have entered parliament,
instead of boycotting the political process and further adding heat to the
already boiling political frustration. Another difference with the Ethiopian
experiences is that, historically, Kenyans have more democracy experience with
broad political representation. When I was in Kenya in 1992, this
representation was evident in the slow trickling-down effects of development
benefits in different regions of the country including universities and
physical infrastructure. The third different with Ethiopia is that Kenyan
politicians remain obsessed with amassing wealth, while the tiny Asian minority
controls most of the commerce in the country.
Kenyan MPs are among the most highly paid politicians in the world,
earning US $84,000 a year. According to the BBC report of December 14,
2006, these MPs “agreed to raise
[President Kibaki’s) basic pay and allowances from $26,000 a month to more than
$44,000” (this will be approximately 350,000 Birr a month, perhaps four, five,
six or 10 (?) times more than Meles Zanawi’s annual salary). Anyway, the President declined the offer.
But, a year later, the same MPs would decide to raise their own annual bonus by
$10,000 (in addition to their $84,000 annual salary). Hence, on July 31, 2007,
the BBC also reported, “four organisers
of the Nairobi protest march [against this pay raise] were arrested and may be
charged with incitement to violence.” I could not find the source, but I
remember a news item talking about a coalition of former and current
politicians trying to discourage the Kenyan government’s anti-corruption work. Consider all this plus the rapidly growing
socially and economically destitute urban population in Nairobi and other
regional cities and you will better understand why Kenyan youth are batting with the
police. What has therefore been frustrating about media reports of the
Kenyan political crisis is that (as was also the case in Ethiopia in 2005),
when frustrated and violent young people went out on the street, they became
portrayed as “opposition supporters”,
implying that opposition leaders have probably orchestrated everything. The
incumbent government would then find it easy to blame the opposition for
creating all the chaos. Another frustration has been that communal conflicts
(neighbourhood conflicts) are generalized and narrated as ethnic conflicts -
this is also one of the issues that has been taken up by Diaspora Ethiopian
commentators. For example, the trouble started in urban slums of Mombassa,
Nairobi or Kisumu and it still goes on in these areas. Why is this narrated as
an all out conflict between the Kikuyus and other ethnic groups? There are no reported problems of conflicts
in Kenyan rural hinterlands.
Recognizing similarities between Kenya and Ethiopia
and learning from the lessons is very useful. Appreciating the differences is
also important. There is no question that we all have our own grievances against
EPRDF including accountability for political prisoners and participation. In spite of this,, Ethiopia has
well-disciplined and hard working politicians. The revolutionary democrats have
taken good care of the masses, as much as they can. Decades ago, the news on
Ethiopia was about famine. Today there are positive stories which are also
helping to reshape African image often tainted by failure. A year ago, many
people perhaps agreed that Africa would not be able to achieve the millennium
development goals. Today the same people can be optimistic. Jeffrey Sachs may
even be drafting a paper on his idea of “big-push” approach to development with
Ethiopia as a case study. Give us a
break, please, Meles Zenawi is being treated almost like an Emperor wherever he
goes across Ethiopia. We care less about what he did to Seye Abraha, Tamerat
Layne or his all other comrades. Politics is a dirty game and he should know
how to play it. And I am sure that some of his decisions (such as imprisoning
Seye and Tamerat) must have affected him personally. For us, we look at broader
macro issues (economic growth, access to education, health, micro credit,
water, infrastructure development, etc) and we think that EPRDF is doing a good
job. Provide us with a party better than EPRDF and we will consider endorsing
it.
The challenge for EPRDF is rather to achieve a
political consensus by adapting positive attitudes towards opposition parties.
I persist to argue that the lack of support for opposition parties is a major
constraint for democratization process in Ethiopia. The proposed legislation
(whose status I know little about) prevents external support to opposition
parties, which will be ridiculous and counter productive unless they are
provided with access to government financial support. If EPRDF continues to “milk” resources from its rich companies,
then opposition parities have every right to “milk” cash from the rich
Diaspora.
Turning to broader issues, there has been a lot of
debate about why countries in democratic transition are more prone to political
crises than the ones which remain under authoritarian rule. A half-century ago,
a renowned scholar Samuel Huntington had warned that it would be futile to
attempt to promote rapid democratization without sufficient state capacity to
accommodate popular demands (resulting from high political expectations). It
now appears unfortunate that Huntington had been unfairly criticized, and even
denounced, for speaking against rapid democratization. In fact, there is now an agreement that
politics in developing countries is complex. Social and cultural values define
relations of power; in other words (for example), since people trust one
another and their community leaders, they also trust their political leaders
(hence, taking political rhetoric for granted). In comparison, for example,
Westerners often ridicule politicians as professional liars and they will also
tell you that they go to the polls to elect honest liars (at least they are
honest!). Secondly, as mentioned above,
economically disparate people get angry when politicians fail to deliver
promises, such as creating jobs. They get more disparate and frustrated when
they see the concentration of wealth in the hands of elites. An
unhappy society gives birth to groups that agitate political violence. Third,
political parties are week. Politicians have no skills and experiences required
to develop public policy agendas. For example, we do not remember any policy
debate during the 2005 Ethiopian election. EPRDF wanted to remind us again and
again that it was better than the Derge. Opposition parties remained
preoccupied with exaggerating and exploiting EPRDF’s weaknesses. Nobody talked
about societal vision – what the Ethiopian society looks like, say, in 20 years
and what a competing party can do to make it happen.
Surely, developing societies suffer from Western,
institutionalized, political stereotype.
There is a deep perception that African or developing country
governments in general are dictators, so that every grievance against them can
be accepted. This may be one of the
reasons that Westerners often sympathize with the causes of opposition
parties. Another, the most important,
reason is that it is impossible to promote political pluralism without
opposition politics. But, how often are
political elites of developing countries aware that opposition politics means
providing an alternative to the status quo by demonstrating the capacity to
articulate better policies and societal vision? More important, are they aware
that electoral processes are never perfect? Consider this BBC report last week
(Jan. 6) on the Georgian election:
Snap presidential election in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia was
democratic and the outcome should be respected, foreign observers say. But opposition groups
allege the vote was rigged and have staged protests.
Will election outcomes such as those in Georgia
(where the opposition refused to accept poll results) or in Ethiopia and Kenya
(where the elections resulted in disaster) create backlashes for the
democratization process, one of the backlashes being that international
agencies and Western governments would simply be reluctant to push for more
serious political reform agendas? After
all, who would want to contribute to elections that result in the destruction
of property and death of innocent people?
Perhaps the so called Third World historical studies
should have paid more attention to the behaviour of individual politicians,
instead of focusing on institutional issues such as state structuring,
colonialism, one-man rule, core-periphery relations, etc. For example, why are educated people
intolerant and dictatorial? One explanation – in fact, it is a conventional
wisdom - is that Third World elites have internalized Western values that are
incompatible with the social and cultural values of their own societies. But, the same elites have no difficulty of
adopting western life styles or using western systems to plan modern economies
or to train police forces western style in order to build repressive security
apparatus. Why should it then be
difficult for them to apply the same values in political management? Above all, studies after studies have also
shown that African societies have democratic traditions (the Oromo Gada system is
an example), despite their shortcomings such as the exclusion of women in
decision-making processes. My friends,
it is all about greed and selfishness, so that all has nothing to do with the
incompatibility between Western democracy and country systems. Compare EPRDF’s revolutionary democrats with
previous elites. The previous elites appropriated the national wealth and used
the wealth to take care of themselves and their extended families and friends.
The result was that how well you did in the Ethiopian society depended on where
you lived: Addis Ababa and Asmara (where resources must flow to appease the
separatist ambition of Eritrean elites). Under EPRDF, ethnic political elites
all over the country come to Addis Ababa and sit around the table to share
national revenues. They have developed equitable division formulas so that no
body cheats, no body takes more than his/her share. These elites transfer the money to their home regions which is
used to construct educational institutions, condos, roads, health centres, etc.
All this is to say that democracy really works. The issue of ethnicity in
Ethiopian politics including the definition of regional state boundaries along
ethnic lines is likely to remain controversial. Yet, instead of getting
consumed with political demagoguery and character assassination of EPRDF
leaders, we can do better by encouraging and leading civic and fruitful debates
focused on assessing the effectiveness and impact of the current federal
constitution with respect to promoting national unity, equitable share of
national resources and political participation, and by rectifying what has not
worked or by proposing a brand new federal political system.
To conclude, there are challenges for a transition
from authoritarian to democratic forms of governance. I have come across one or
two writes in our own community pointing to the limits of Western style of
democracy. Indeed, many have made the same argument. The challenge is to search
for democratization strategies compatible with country situations. China can
perhaps be an example. In 1989, China crushed a student movement that attempted
to organize a mass protest to topple the communist state. Worldwide
condemnations would do little to prevent Chinese leaders from pursuing their
own model of transition to a market economy. They did this by effectively
managing opportunities, that is, by providing Chinese citizens with equal
accesses to opportunities and by encouraging those who succeeded to accumulate
wealth. This would unleash a national energy of entrepreneurial innovation.
Today the rapidly growing rich Chinese middle class has little or no grievances
against the communist state. In contrast, the Russians let everything loose at
once (dismantled the centrally planned economy). Well-connected people, known
as oligarchies, would intercept economic opportunities. The masses were left to
fend for themselves. Russia still
remains in a deep economic mess. There
are certain challenges in Chinese society such as lack of labour laws to protect
workers’ rights and independent judiciary, but overall, Chinese communist
leaders have successfully managed the transition to market economy, enabling
China to emerge as a global economic and military power. Ethiopia and other
African countries have a lot to learn from China.
Getachew Mequanent
January 2008