Meles stays. Bigotry leaves

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Paulos Yrgaw
Apr 27, 2006

An old adage has it that, great men talk principles, mediocre men talk ideas and small men talk personalities. Ato Alemu not only rightly fits in to the latter, he is also in contradiction as well. As he seemed to have taken so much pain in scribing the rather lengthy convulsion, by his own admission, he failed to give a stern and thought out effort in laying out his vantage point. A vantage point where the plain is smooth bereft of angles.

If he wanted to play the Devil’s advocate, he should have picked up a child’s play take where the rest of us are spared from abusing our synapsis in a bid to make a sense out of a muddy adobe on a canvas.

The intense alacrity to put the person of Meles on a Freudian Couch for a rigorous psychoanalysis not only misses the diagnosis, it also puts the bespectacled expert with crossed legs in a vexed mood. Simply because, the Freudian Couch only gravitates those who are in a verge of crossing the twilight-zone and Meles is far from it to say the least.

The bespectacled-expert Ato Alemu however, tells the Meles on the Freudian Couch that, you have done remarkably well, in poverty reduction, robust economic performance, brilliant diplomatic endeavours, in the establishment of sound democratic system, equity amongst nations and nationalities but there is something wrong with you. How could there be something wrong with Meles, if he has done remarkably well? Oxymoron, isn’t it?

The annals of history attest that, one does not have to have a "pure blood" line in order to aspire for the highest office on the land. Napoleon Bonaparte (Corsica), Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Argentina), Alberto Fujimori (Japan), Carlos Menem (Syria) to mention but a few are cases in point. The writer brings this up for the sake of an argument when Meles is a full-blown Ethiopian as the rest of us.

Meles’ perceived Achilles’ heel we are told is his non-Ethiopian blood line, as Paris spotted the weakest link of Achilles, the "old guard" what ever the term means as well Ato Alemu tells us that, are turning events into their advantage by shooting at Meles’ Achilles’ heel. Again what the "old guards" are missing is, they are shooting at Meles’ Achilles’ Tendon instead. When the "old guards" indulge on the vagaries of personalities, Meles is shining and standing tall more than ever.

When the old Ethiopian Aristocratic School of Thought emphasized on the amalgamation of "Kawasaki’s DNA fragments" from virtually all the nations and nationalities in the genetic pool of a leader, in the new emerging Ethiopia however, the archaic mode of thought is obsolete. Instead, so long as a leader regardless his/her ethnic background rhymes with the heart beat of the majority of the people, no hypothesis or thesis/antithesis push can nullify his/her aspirations.

Ato Alemu asserts that, in order the "old guard" attain a sound sleep, Meles ought to resign. What Ato Alemu tragically missing is that, the whole point of the metamorphosis the new Ethiopia is going through is to take off from the parochial and rigid mentality of the old self, hence an attempt to appease the "old guard" is to negate the entire vibrant political dynamics where the new Ethiopia is erected as a beacon of hope.

Worse still, the argument goes, Meles should be replaced by a non-Tigrean leader. The prescribed "antidote" we are again told, will potentially be an elixir to Ethiopia’s ailment. As incredibly as absurd the assertion sounds, if we are to utilize a leader’s ethnic background as an index to measure a leader’s competence as a definitive criteria, the long and hard glorious struggle for liberation will be rendered a naught.

The perception on Ato Alemu’s side is however a reflection of a high-tech "Zemene Mesafnt". My understanding is that, his take emanates from the premises that, the shift of power from a certain ethnic group into other ethnic group will rectify the perceived anomaly. Ethiopia’s dynamic political reality however, is about contending political plat-forms and visions based solely on the best interest of the people.

One other crucial intrinsic factor with in Ethiopia’s political fabric is that, the Ethiopian Constitution is designed in such a way that, not a single ethnic group can assume political power with out forging an alliance with other contending nations and nationalities. When bigotry holds Ethiopia as an inertia from striding forward, the irresistible need for triviality from certain quarters adds more into the baggage where Ethiopia is desperately trying to relieve.

Paulos Yrgaw
Ottawa, Canada.
Comments: Asimov107@yahoo.ca

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