Ethiopian historiography has long featured a claim to exceptionalism based on the country’s many distinctive features in the African context: a state whose roots go back to antiquity, a literate culture, the only place in Africa where Christianity survived as a native faith and a surplus producing agricultural economy that sustained a sophisticated class stratified society. Not least among these is the unique confrontation with European imperialism in the nineteenth century, following which the legendary Christian state on the northern plateau, also known abroad as Abyssinia, went on to build its own empire in the Horn of Africa, doubling its size and population in the process.
The Ethiopian Empire was created the same time Western imperialism invaded and divided Africa, and for the same reason: the seizure and exploitation of material resources. In Ethiopia’s case the coveted resource was fertile land to relieve the pressure of population on the exhausted land of the northern plateau. Accordingly, most of the best land in the newly conquered territories was confiscated and given to land hungry northerners who flocked there. Land without the labour to work it is useless. This labour was forcibly extracted from the people who lived on the land, turning them into serfs on their own land, trapped in a quasi-feudal system of land tenure.
This proved a fateful development. While Abyssinian society was largely culturally homogeneous, the empire was highly heterogeneous. The massive expropriation of land forged a nexus of class and ethnicity, whose explosive repercussions have marred Ethiopia’s political life to this day.
Ethiopian historiography glosses over what is plausibly the most distinctive feature, the fact that the Ethiopian Empire did not dissolve in the past century when all its contemporaries in Africa did, to allow the subjugated population of the annexed regions to determine their own political future. Instead, Ethiopia’s imperial rulers embarked on a mission of nation-building intended to produce a homogeneous society by eliminating cultural differences among its subject. The chosen template for the envisaged nation was none other than Abyssinian culture, and the chosen method was the assimilation of the rest of the non-Abyssinian population.
This greatly reinforced the destabilizing potential of the class/ethnicity nexus, as was immediately manifested in rising militant resistance of the part of the people threatened with cultural deracination. To overcome it required a highly centralized highly authoritarian system of rule based on force provided by a huge military and security apparatus, the largest at the time in black Africa. The military was employed primarily to suppress internal political opposition, and inevitably it became highly politicized and inclined to intervene in public affairs.
The legacy of the past weighs heavily on the present, manifested in recurrent political crises, three of which I personally witnessed in my professional relationship with this country. All sprung from the same source, all aspired to find solutions to age old problems and all failed. Failure each time led to regression with practices that had failed in the past and were condemned to fail again. While studying and recording this historical process, I sought to fathom the reasons for repeated failure which fall into two categories. Basic was the failure to recognize and address the root causes of social conflict and political instability. Related to it was the resort to technocratic and institutional reforms imposed from the top and were unrelated to the nature of the problem. Will it be different this time?
This will depend on whether the search for solutions focuses on the real causes of the problems, and the measures taken to remove them are the result of innovative, independent thinking related to the realities of Ethiopia’s situation. Moreover, it will depend on whether reform is a top down process, or the result of broad consultation involving all sectors of society. By way of contributing to the search, I will highlight four root causes that need to be confronted if meaningful reform is to be achieved: they are the ownership and control of land, the nationality conflict, the structure of the state, and the design of a future political system.
Land is the country’s most important resource, and the fundamental, perennial cause of conflict throughout Ethiopia’s modern history. Control of it is of vital concern to those who live off agriculture; three quarters of the population. Control of land is also of vital concern to the state, partly as a source of revenue, but mainly as the means of exercising its authority over the rural population. Every regime in the past used a different approach to maintain this control; from the quasi-feudal arrangement of the imperial regime, to the nationalization cum collectivization of the Dergue, retained in a modified form by the EPRDF.
Every regime in the past also had its own approach to foster economic development based on agriculture. Before its collapse, the imperial regime was moving towards a free market system; by contrast the Dergue promoted collectivization, while the EPRDF initially tried to modernize small scale agriculture and, having failed, switched to large scale commercial agriculture based on imported capital and technology. These schemes, along with the funds to implement them, were imported from abroad. They came as packages with the ‘once size fits all’ prescription. Little prior thought was given to their suitability in Ethiopia’s highly varied environment. Crucially, they were forcefully imposed without prior consultation with the peasantry, whose life was repeatedly turned upside down with schemes such as collectivization, villagisation, resettlement, agriculturally led industrialization, and land leasing for plantation farming.
Unsurprisingly, all these schemes failed miserably. Failure was variously attributed to environmental and technical problems, as well as the alleged backwardness and stubbornness of the Ethiopian peasant. The latter points to the cardinal reason for failure; the passive resistance of the peasantry, a weapon honed over centuries of oppression and exploitation, manifested in non-cooperation, delay, sabotage, subversion, undermining and ultimately thwarting the imposed scheme. .
It was not long after I first set foot in Ethiopia in 1965 that I became aware of the land issue. The echoes of the first student demonstration with the slogan Land to the Tiller that had shocked a lethargic imperial regime a few months earlier were still in the air. The students were keenly aware that the quasi feudal land tenure system was a ticking bomb in the foundations of the state. Have the tillers ever got control of the land? Over half a century later, the state still owns and disposes it as the ruling elite see fit.
The most glaring example of this is the ongoing plunder of land in the lowlands. Given the technology of the time and the administrative limitations of the imperial state, the scorched lands on the flanks of the plateau were considered uncultivable and were spared the expropriation that was visited on the southern plateau. That omission is being corrected with a vengeance now. Imported technology and capital are turning the neglected lowlands into the promised land of the country’s future development. Huge tracts of land are declared vacant and offered for exploitation to foreign and domestic capital. The hapless people who live there are displaced without compensation, and crammed into ‘villages’ without any means of earning a livelihood. The ultimate cruelty is the promise of work in the plantations, when the much-claimed advantage of large commercial agriculture is the use of capital-intensive technology.
Are the rural masses ever to have the privilege of participating in making the decisions that affect their lives? Will they attain it through land privatization, the only system talked about currently, which has already made great inroads by stealth under the EPRDF? Is this the only solution imaginable? Is the goal to throw the peasantry to the mercy of the free market, to turn food producing peasants into food consuming urban proletarians and a source of cheap labour, or to help them hold on to the land?
Land is a purely class issue; control over the means of production. Confronted as such, it could transform the political equation by uniting the rural people to protect their common interests. This has not happened because the land issue is invariably perceived though the nationality filter, the issue that divides and neutralizes them.
Nationality is not a problem in itself. It has been made into one. As the Nigerian scholar, Claude Ake, put it, asking an African why he belongs to a tribe is like asking him why he has five fingers. What is more natural? Tribe is the template upon which African society is organized – its economy, society, polity and culture – and has been for ages. It provides a framework for identity and solidarity, as well as economic, social and political organization. Neither colonialism nor independence has provided an alternative. The attempt to supplant the tribe with the nation-state, as Basil Davidson (1992) presciently wrote, proved ‘a curse and a burden for the black man.’
The ‘nation state’ became the idol of the miniscule, westernized, urban elite that inherited state power with independence, and made ‘nationalism’ the new faith imported from the West. The pursuit of ‘nation-state building’ was facilitated by a campaign to cleanse Black Africa from the blight of ‘tribalism’: led by none other than Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. There was a mundane reason however for turning ‘tribalism’ into a cultural evil and a political crime. It was to undermine traditional authority and neutralize political opposition from customary leaders. Africa’s kings, sultans, paramount chiefs, lawmakers, religious leaders, diviners and medicine men were the target of the campaign that proved quite successful. Nevertheless, this hardly affected the currency of tribalism since it became the political capital of the ruling elite and remains the most potent force in political life throughout the subcontinent.
The politicization of nationality in Ethiopia was sown by the imperial regime, and was greatly reinforced subsequently by the attempt to impose a national identity on the many nations that live within the country’s borders. The attempt failed but not before it contributed to the collapse of the imperial and military regimes. By the end of this tumultuous period, every self-respecting nationality in Ethiopia had its own ‘national liberation front.’
The EPRDF which emerged from this crucible was itself a coalition of ‘national liberation fronts.’ It moved boldly to resolve the problem by rehabilitating nationality, abandoning the quest for a homogeneous Ethiopian national identity, and restructuring the state in order to unravel the class/nationality knot. It chose federalism as the model for reform. This was nothing new. Federalism has a long history in the Horn, where it has been the persistent political demand of subordinate and oppressed groups in every state of the region. It appeared first in the 1950s in the form of the Eritrea-Ethiopia link, and subsequently in Kenya, Sudan, Somalia as well as Ethiopia.
Has federalism served the purpose? In fact, it has failed everywhere, and was followed by the longest wars in Africa fought in the Horn, and the breakaway of Eritrea from Ethiopia and South Sudan from Sudan. Federalism failed because it was used as a political ploy to manipulate and deflect opposition, and nowhere did it provide a share of state power to those who demanded it. The EPRDF delegated administrative responsibility to the regional states, without even the illusion of decision-making power. The center’s exclusive control of power over the regions remained intact. This lopsided relationship made a mockery of the very essence of federalism.
Nor did the EPRDF reform improve the position of traditional authority in the least, since the regional states were administered by the regime’s political agents. Traditional leaders were labeled ‘feudal’ and shunned. Advisory councils of chiefs were formed in pastoralist areas, but they were perceived as a bribe for those who were appointed to them and were ignored both by the administration and the people.
The EPRDF brand of federalism is a perfect example of what has been called ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1999); the pursuit of modernity through uniformity, standardization, regimentation, monitoring and policing of citizens. Since federalism presumably is intended to accommodate diversity, the ‘once size fits all’ dogma, typical of how the state ‘sees things’, turns the concept into an oxymoron. In the early 1990s, the constitutions of the regional states were drafted by the centre. They were identical and were distributed to the regions with one line at the top left blank followed by the instruction to ‘fill in’ the name of the regional state.
The EPRDF’s crude manipulation of federalism satisfied no one. Worse yet, it fuelled tribal clashes in various parts of the country, which now a graver threat to the state’s survival than ever before. How can this be averted? Worryingly, the debate at present remains focused on where the balance of center–periphery power should rest, with diametrically opposing views firmly held. The need for federalism to reflect and integrate diversity, the very reason for its existence, is not on the agenda. Yet it is imperative to ask why Ethiopia’s immensely rich and colorful patrimony should be sacrificed on the altar of modernism. Why should every part of the federation have an identical profile sterilized to cleanse it of ‘tribalism’? Why should customary rules, familiar and preferable to the people, not be used along with national law? Why traditional authority systems – Gaada in Oromia, the Sultanate of Aussa in Afar, the Anyawa kings in Gambela, the clan chiefs in Somali, and many other institutions that command popular respect cannot be integrated meaningfully in local government.
The design of the political system is the mother of all issues: it incorporates all the rest, and will decide how they will be addressed. A reformed political system is part of regime change; however, the present crisis has not produced definitive change yet. This offers a rare opportunity to reflect and debate and hopefully agree on how to shake off the legacy of the past and move forward to cross the political frontier (Markakis 2011). Failure to grasp this opportunity will have dire consequences.
Every crisis in the past produced a new leader – Menelik, Haile Selassie, Mengistu, Meles – a messiah upon whose hopes for liberating reform were focused. Each of them forged a rigidly authoritarian personalized regime based on force, betraying all hopes. The current crisis has produced an aspiring messiah also. Does that suggest Ethiopia is ungovernable otherwise?
Of course not, people say. Elections have been scheduled for 2020 and will bring democracy. Even though they have a lamentable history in Africa, elections still inspire a pathetic faith. They were introduced in Ethiopia in the 1950s by the imperial regime, and have been staged more or less regularly under its successors with various brand names – imperial democracy, peoples’ democracy, popular democracy. The popular brand currently is liberal democracy that has its own history in Africa, where it functions as a façade for all types of misrule: keeping political scientists in business classifying types of ‘hybrid democracy’.
Liberal democracy is the opium of the westernized elite, the urban minority that rules Africa. ‘The debate on democracy among African scholars is threatening to become an unabashed celebration of liberalism’ noted the Tanzanian scholar, Issa Shivji (1991) ‘This is where the first pitfall of the debate on democracy lies. So long as it remains imprisoned within the four walls of liberalism, I dare say, The Debate has not begun - it may be a Diversion but not a Debate.’ Reduced to its institutional minimum of periodic elections, liberal democracy is not a representative system. It is a reliable tool of minority rule that excludes the rural masses, entertaining them periodically with theatrical performances called elections. Elections in Africa are not taken seriously by anyone, even democracy’s fervent promoters from the West. Witness the praise heaped on the ‘democratically elected government’ of Ethiopia by Barack Obama following the 2015 elections, which the regime ‘won’ by 100 percent of the vote.
Is this farce to be repeated in 2020 as planned? Predicted to involve over 100 political factions, nearly all of them ethnically based, can it rationally be expected to accomplish anything other than to inflate tribalism, the political capital traded by the ethnic entrepreneurs now queuing up to register for the elections. Cannot the long-suffering Ethiopians not look inward to devise systems and institutions that can take root in their country’s soil, to serve its entire people, in the cities and the villages, the highland and the lowland, recognizing and respecting their differences?
The present crisis is unfolding somewhat differently from previous episodes. While the EPRDF regime has essentially collapsed more than one year earlier, there is still no definitive regime change. This opens a rare window of opportunity to reflect on what went wrong in the past and to debate on what needs to be done to attain a government system that would be consensual, legitimate, accountable and stable; something unknown in Ethiopia’s modern history.
This cannot be left to politicians. Nor can it be left to the westernized urban elite, a small minority that has misruled the country to date. Their training has deprived this class of the ability to think independently, outside the box imposed by the modernity dogma, and to relate empathetically with the rural masses, the overwhelming majority of the population they seek to ‘modernize.’
What has been called the ‘decolonization of the mind’ is imperative for the production of knowledge based on Ethiopia’s reality – history, culture, custom, traditional systems of authority, rulemaking and conflict resolution. This is not to reject universal values that are the inheritance of all humankind. It is to ‘naturalize’ them by adapting and integrating them into the native patrimony. An ‘African solution’ the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani explains is a ‘contextual’ solution: ‘Context is not opposite to universal value or standards. Context is an understanding that any concrete situation is an outcome of multiple processes; historical, political, economic, social, moral and so on’ (Mamdani 2014).