Mereja Forum

[sarcasm]

By Teferi Mergo - 30 March 2021

Teferi Mergo argues that faced with limited options the international community must support a political settlement between Ethiopia’s warring federalist and the unitary camps.

The Ethiopian state is facing an existential threat, with devastating civil conflicts raging in many parts of the country. The key drivers of these conflicts are the unresolved contestations between the two opposing views about the identity of the country (the federalist and the unitarist views), and they must be resolved adequately to avert a calamitous collapse of the state. The only course of action that can restore some semblance of peace and stability to the country appears to be a robust measure by the international community – a concerted effort backed by a credible threat that induces the warring parties to resolve their differences through dialogue.

Powerful nations from the West and the East have supported successive authoritarian Ethiopian regimes for their own strategic and geopolitical reasons. Although some of the foreign aid to Ethiopia has been utilized properly (e.g., the improvements in health outcomes in Ethiopia can be linked to the investments made in its health sector, made possible with foreign aid from the West), Ethiopia’s Autocracy and Authority scores have worsened, even as the volume of aid to the country increased monotonically.

An empirically unsupportable variant of modernization theory – the hypothesis that democracy is an outcome of economic progress – has been used to justify authoritarianism in Ethiopia, while the country addressed its pressing economic problems. However, the facts on the ground suggest that democracy can’t wait in Ethiopia, with different nationalities demanding to secure the right to self-determination enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Still, there might be some within the international community who continue to advocate for a revamped version of the same old policies, with the view that the so-called developmental state approach – where an authoritarian leadership can “deliver on ambitious development plans” – might be more appropriate for a country like Ethiopia. Worse, there are influential people who have bought into the idea that the existing federal order in Ethiopia must be replaced with other political arrangements to “unify” the country.

Both perspectives are wrong. While Ethiopia is not expected to become a Jeffersonian democracy anytime soon, there is no reason why the country lags its African peers in terms of human freedom. It ranks within the bottom tenth of African countries in terms of the Human Freedom Index, and it has been classified recently as not free, despite undergoing major upheavals in the last fifty years to institute a democratic government.

The recent change in the country was powered by the youth who believed in the cause of freedom and justice, and it is unlikely that millions of the same young people – who are unemployed, and educated enough to understand the impact of governance on other indicators of development – will settle for anything less than having a government that is representative and accountable to all Ethiopians. In particular, if Ethiopia’s governance record continues to deteriorate, and its misery index worsens (high levels of unemployment coupled with skyrocketing inflation), it is difficult to see how the youth will take kindly to their deteriorating prospects for better life.

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[sarcasm]

"An empirically unsupportable variant of modernization theory – the hypothesis that democracy is an outcome of economic progress – has been used to justify authoritarianism in Ethiopia, while the country addressed its pressing economic problems. However, the facts on the ground suggest that democracy can’t wait in Ethiopia, with different nationalities demanding to secure the right to self-determination enshrined in the country’s constitution."

[sarcasm]

While Ethiopia is not expected to become a Jeffersonian democracy anytime soon, there is no reason why the country lags its African peers in terms of human freedom. It ranks within the bottom tenth of African countries in terms of the Human Freedom Index, and it has been classified recently as not free, despite undergoing major upheavals in the last fifty years to institute a democratic government.

The recent change in the country was powered by the youth who believed in the cause of freedom and justice, and it is unlikely that millions of the same young people – who are unemployed, and educated enough to understand the impact of governance on other indicators of development – will settle for anything less than having a government that is representative and accountable to all Ethiopians. In particular, if Ethiopia’s governance record continues to deteriorate, and its misery index worsens (high levels of unemployment coupled with skyrocketing inflation), it is difficult to see how the youth will take kindly to their deteriorating prospects for better life.

[Sam Ebalalehu]

The headline itself is stupid. No reasonable person read the article after reading the headline — accommodate or perish. Who the [deleted] is he to give an ultimatum to more than 100 million people.