This week marked one year since the Ethiopian civil war begun.
What begun as a political
dispute when current prime minster Abiy Ahmed rose to power and sidelined the
once dominant Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) flared into a full blown
civil war and now the imminent fall of Addis Ababa.
This is a tragedy on
many fronts not least of all because these developments will set the
continent’s second most populous nation back politically and economically.
The signs however have been staring us in the face. While rapid economic growth over the last twenty or so years – the size of their economy was doubling every eight years, made it look like Ethiopia was on an irreversible path to development you cannot paper over the realities of poverty and inequitable development...
It is not news that
Ethiopia has not been the best place for journalists to work in recent years
and what triggered the recent uprising is the government’s alleged blockading
of Tigray, preventing much needed relief aid from reaching the northern region
which is being ravaged by drought.
The details are, of
course much messier, but one can guess that Ethiopia’s politics, which is
organised along tribal lines is at the heart of it.
And therein lies the challenge
of running a developing country, at least in our part of the world.
The reality of power
is such that you have to cobble together a power base to propel yourself to
power and once there to maintain you there.
When a leader in our
parts look around the easiest coalitions are family and tribe, not labour, landowners
or industrialists as happens in more developed economies.
All the textbooks will
tell you that the narrowness of such powerbases are a recipe for intolerance
and instability and are not the best base from which to launch a democratic
nation.
And for the while that
it works everybody thinks “this time it will be different”, but you cannot subvert
the laws of society for long before they turn around to bite you.
As Bill Clinton said
when he run for the White House in 1992 “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Any leader worth his
name in the world and more importantly in our neck of the woods, has to have
the economy at the top of his agenda.
He has to make it his ambition to create the class structures that supersede the politics of tribe and ethnicity. They do this by creating the environment for economic growth, making it easy for business to thrive – you ensure safety of property rights, lay down business enabling infrastructure and allow the markets to thrive....
The cold war showed
us, with the collapse of the communist block, that countries are only as credible
as the viability of their private sectors.
The private sector creates
the economic activity that can be taxed. With these taxes government can
provide public goods and most especially education and health services.
Education and health are critical because they are the rungs on the ladder
required to allow for social climbing of even the lowest members of society.
They improve the quality of your human resource.
Education, for one is
a great equaliser, allowing students to criss cross the country, interact with
other tribes and demystify all the myths surrounding our differences. It also
allows them to transcend their ethnicity and causes collaborations that
eventually lead to the creation of classes with wide cutting interests.
There are two reasons why leaders do not
pursue this progressive course; it takes a long time for these transformations
to take root and in the meanwhile they revert to their politics of ethnicity to
hang on to power. But also because it
will very well mean working yourself out of a job as the people become more
empowered and clamour for the share of power. It is inevitable.
But also, for the simple reason that political
expediency does not allow for the selling of long term dreams that you will not
be around to see through.
"A better educated, middle class dominated country is unlikely to revert to brute force to resolve political disagreement. They have too much to lose...
Better that than to encourage tribalism and
fratricidal war as we are witnessing in Ethiopia, which bursts out and undoes
all your good work.
