Ethiopia : a leadership in disarray

By RENÉ LEFORT

It may be that, in Ethiopia, history is so powerful that the past permeates the present, and it repeats itself. In this case, what we see today is simply another interregnum between two powerful men.

“Can you tell me who is in charge in the government?”, asks Tamrat Gebregiorgis, publisher of the reference weekly Addis Fortune, at the latest of the regular press conferences held by Prime Minister Hailmariam Dessalegn. He replies by first underlining the efforts being made to remedy a few small defects like corruption, then rounds off with a joke: the answer is probably in your “gossip columns”.

The effrontery of the question was staggering. It would have been inconceivable during the reign of previous Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who died in August 2012. It would also have been groundless: he held sole sway at the summit of the Party/State pyramid. On the tier below, the key figures of the TPLF (Tigrean People’s Liberation Front) were in command, including the immense public and semi-public sector of the “modern” economy. The other three components of the de facto single party, the EPRDF (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front), were largely satellites of the Front. Finally, with its six million members, the tentacles of the EPRDF extended right down to the basic five-person household unit.

While the colossal body of the pyramid is more or less intact and still performs its main functions, its single apex has exploded into multiple centres of power, of unequal weight, none of which has achieved critical mass. While it would be an overstatement to speak of paralysis, the party’s pinnacle is at least “in a disarray”[1]. Or rather the country is in the grip of a threefold transition.  The first, unexpected unforeseen transition, is Meles’ succession. Meles decided and launched the second: the “veterans” passing the reins to the next generation. The third will be inescapable: the state economy is no longer adequate for driving growth; the private sector needs the scope to take up the slack.

Read more @ http://cyberethiopia.com/2013/?p=945