Developments in Ethiopia After 1991
By: prof.Mammo Muchie **.
Abstract
All previous governments have not achieved three important matters that are essential to establish security and well being to the people living in the territory known as Ethiopia. The country has not avoided falling into endless armed conflict. It has not established an economic arrangement to reverse the situation, where over more than half of the population has continued to suffer from grinding and joyless poverty and the unattractive state of ill being. Except for the dynastic change from the Zagwe dynasty in 1270 AD to the Solomonic line craftily effected by Saint Tekle-Haimanot, the county has not seen changes of Government that has been peaceful, let alone one that is law-governed and predicable throughout its long history.
The question we need to ask is this. What have the new changes after 1991 brought in terms of ideas, institutional arrangements, practices and policy approaches?
There are three important issues necessary but not sufficient to measure the effectiveness of the changes:
1. Will war /violence be a thing of the past?,
2. Is the direction for poverty eradication been followed?
3. Will the change of Government be effected through peaceful, legal and predictable transfer and transition of power? In other words, is the condition altered, where past rulers can stay inside their country free from harassment, threat of death, exile and being or feeling forced to return to the bush?
This paper will reflect on these issues and try to provide a few insights.
THE NEW ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT IN THE ERA OF GLOBALISATION
The new government came in 1991 when globalisation has changed world politics and economics in favour of the rich, markets, corporations, private finance or speculative capital, and against the poor, the state, trade unions and even non-financial capital. State action has been deliberately forced to provide better opportunities for the well to do. It is not the needs of people but the right of business that Governments have been forced to pay their attention to. This international context confronted the guerrilla leaders that took over Addis Abeba and Asmera after the demise of the military regime.One of the consequences of the demise of the military government in Ethiopia is the return of development aid that was suspended by the Western Governments to the previous regime. The International Financial Institutions (IFIs) began to play a pivotal role in the dismantling of the planned system that the military regime has been introducing through the influence of Soviet and other Easter European advisors over fifteen years. The IFIs insisted on strict conditions on the Transitional Government to liberalise the economy and open it to free market and accept structural adjustment packages. The new inexperienced rulers were completely balled over by nearly a billion-dollar grant that they received from the IFIs and ditched overnight their own ideology for the ideology of globalisation. They tried to retain central political control for establishing their rule but wished to open the economy for private foreign capital in which their own political organisation and themselves have to be the primary beneficiaries. They never suspected that globalisation would erect barriers within nations at the rate it removes barriers to finance capital across nations.
While the proponents of economic globalisation argued for the free market to take over the country, the local political direction veered into fragmenting the unitary state into ethnic- based decentral fractions. Resources were supposed to be allocated based on the market and the new devolved ethnic based states. The planning state gave way to weak and fragmented regional states and planning gave way to free markets- perfect conditions for globalisation to try to re-shape Ethiopian economy and society. The polity was incapacitated from being able to exert any counter weight to the casual globalisation run over Ethiopia. Capital may refuse to choose Ethiopia, but its un-invitation of the past regime has been altered into welcome with open arms by the present regime. As this process was taking place, Ethiopia found herself becoming the principal supporting agent for Eritrea's break up from itself through diplomatic, economic and other bilateral exchanges. Its age-old quest to have access to the Red Sea was nullified by the retention of the major ports of Assab and Massawa within the new Eritrean map. The war of 1998 that lasted for two years was not officially related to recovering maritime rights to Ethiopia. It has been reported as a dispute over land and border demarcation across the 600km line separating Eritrea from Ethiopia. After a truce, the problem is now with the UN. There is a United Nation's sponsored peace-keeping force on the border areas and the two regimes have accepted in principle an international arbitration ruling from the Hague expected to take place in April, 2002. Whatever the outcome from the decision of the arbitrators, Ethiopia's position as a land locked country will remain an indelible humiliation in the national psyche of the country for a very long time to come.
TEN YEARS AFTER ETHIC DEVOLUTION AND FREE MARKET
After ten years of this new direction (globalisation plus free markets and ethnically underpinned vernacular states), Ethiopia has been designated as the lowest per capita income earning country in the world by the World Bank's World Development Report of 2001.1 It looks that the country has not moved forward in terms of eradicating poverty. It seemed to have degraded backward. According to UNDP (2001) about 52 percent of the estimated 62.8 million population live below the poverty line. Ethiopia's score on the UNDP's Human development index (HDI) is 0.321, one of the lowest in the world.2 The HDI measure makes Ethiopia 158th of the 162 countries for which such index has been calculated. UNDP has gone to the extent of saying that poverty has become natural and unavoidable in Ethiopia.3 Income concentration in the hand of the few is growing rapidly at the rate that more and more people are falling below the poverty line. This indicates that the poverty incidence, intensity and severity is deeply rooted in the modes of accumulation, modes of regulation, and socio-economic relations- making ill being and rather than well being of the people- a structural feature of the country. Ethiopia today faces an acute crisis of justice. The ideas, institutions, practice; policies and impacts together accentuate the crises of justice. The pervasive ill being and poverty that triggers the state of injustice is located within the structural features of the modus operendi of the socio-economic system in Ethiopia. Together they retain and classify the country as a structurally violence prone and high-risk society.
The scale of poverty is ethically, politically and humanely unacceptable in Ethiopia. The country's standing in the world- in terms of its capacity for the provision of a decent livelihood for the population-is one of the poorest, if not the poorest in the world. The ever-yawning gap between the rich who are few and become still fewer and fewer, and the poor, who are many, does not make economic, political and moral sense.
The breakdown of Ethiopia's ecological capital, which is difficult to reproduce, is intimately tied with the prevailing poverty, prolonged radical social inequalities and injustices in society. The economic and political dis-empowerment of the poor has not been solved by the ruling party's choice to impose an ethnic model of social arrangement. The latter stands in the way of building social capital such as trust, social networks outside ethnic group relationships and civic composition of the idea of the Ethiopian citizen and so on. It erects new barriers for building a common purpose to bring about structural social-economic transformation. Those societies that have built high social capital is best fit to carry out social transformation.
Those with low social capital often are at high risk and vulnerable to violence and poverty. By social capital accumulation I mean the existence of trust, ability to set up lasting networks and engaging with problems of society with a civic sense, attitude and expression rather than with primordial sentiments. This is essential to establish new ventures, sustain projects and combine efforts to take new challenges and cope with adverse problems with solidarity and stable relationships.
The gradual building up of social capital facilitates the creation of structural transformation in society. The low level of social capital and the impact of bad politics that undermines its gradual formation have reduced the scope for starting to building up the country as a humane, moral, social, economic and political project.
While natural and social capital are difficult to reproduce, intellectual and production capital are relatively less difficult to reproduce. Even the relatively less difficult human and physical capital formations are not being handled with any predictable, coherent and consistent national development strategy or commitment. Financial capital often comes from external sources and not from domestic saving. External loans, grants and foreign investment (portfolio and FDI) come with strings and conditions and have not to date helped to dent the pressing poverty prevailing in the country. While it is true that training of human resources does occur, and that factories, roads, clinics, and houses are being built, the country still lacks a comprehensive infrastructural, information, communication, transport and intelligence grid/system. More worrying is the failure by the local elite to see through the rhetoric of "free market" by playing along with the public policy vacuum created by two decades of relentless IMF and World Bank sponsored structural adjustment policy (SAP) approaches. By following SAPs uncritically, the elite has subverted itself from mounting any credible and integrated plan and vision to build the country through independent selection of social and economic policies. The state and its social policy making powers have been clipped by the IFIs. Structural adjustment policy is the strategy by the IFIs to control the policy- making space completely by expelling the state from having a hand in social policy. The centrepiece of SAPs is the divorce of economic policy from social policy and a belief that the invisible hand can deliver economic growth with the expectation of possible trickle down effects to address social problems. An active income redistribution policy was discouraged for fear that will encourage the formation of bloated bureaucracies who may be inefficient. Instead the market was to stimulate economic growth and also redistribute efficiently the national income thus generated. The consequence from the expulsion of social reform, and asset redistribution as an "off-limit" by the SAPs strategy, and the reduction of social spending, that affect the real wellbeing of people, have degraded peoples livelihood to unacceptable levels.
The many political changes and transitions from one set of elites to another have not dented the poverty and violence question in the country. Poverty and absolute deprivation have continued to occupy the Ethiopian landscape with total and unmitigated control. They have structural roots related to the condition of the social system, the broken state of the nation's ecological endowment, the deficit of social, intellectual and production capitals, the recipient status of the country in relation to donors' finance and ideas and other temporal and contingent factors. Epidemics, adverse weather conditions and imbalance between growing human numbers and a declining resource base to feed the population become additional reasons for the severity and intensity of poverty. Wars from neighbours have compounded the difficulties of the country. Restriction to use its own water resources- as the key country in the upstream Nile River group- has weakened the country.
Under globalisation Ethiopia has added new problems on top of the old problems. It has not moved out of the vicious cycle of war and violence, nor from poverty. Peace and stability have yet to be forged. There has not been a transition of government that can be said to rule out force and legitimise change through a democratic expression of the will of the people. The central problem is to create the necessary condition for development by moving Ethiopia out of the orbit of war, violence and poverty and unpredictable and uncertain political transition or transfer of power from one set of interests to another. The main effort should be the creation of a space of stability for political and economic relations to evolve not under the pressure of force and blackmail, but under the opportunity of a legitimate field of popular consent. Government must be rooted in a state of permanent consent of the population. The framework for change of government must be established on lawful, legitimate and accountable grounds where people have both economic right and full or unhindered political participation.
However, given a condition of worsening poverty, what options does a poor country with weak governing structures and capacities have? The country can either change the deep crises into an opportunity to solve its problems or poverty and violence might defeat the imagination and initiatives of the people and nation to prevail and survive. Such is the stark choice facing Ethiopians of every type: humiliation and death or survival and a steady movement to solve the poverty-violence destructive contour marring the future/destiny of this old country.
Poverty and Violence Defined
Everyone should enjoy basic well being and security. That is the ethical foundation that should guide any normal society and social arrangement. The content of human life should not be invaded by violence nor degraded by poverty. Here the notion of violence is treated in relation to social arrangements that impede and limit people from having the access and possibility to make a reasonable and fulfilling life that they have reason to select and value. A society where the structures, institutions, norms and values tolerate massive poverty such as exists in Ethiopia now is one that suffers from massive moral and justice failure.
Such a society oppresses human agency with poverty and opens no other reasonable outlet to human agency to search for justice other than a resort to violence. While morally and from a humane point of view no violence can be afforded or condoned, in radically poor and unequal society violence may not be avoided. The dilemma is that once the option of violence is selected as the weapon of the poor, its execution perforce leads to further suffering and exacerbation of the poverty situation. The condition of poverty opens the violence option; conversely the onset of violence aggravates the poverty situation. The two become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually cancelling. Ethiopia is one of these societies that provide the empirical case for such a pervasive reinforcement of poverty by violence and violence by poverty.
Violence can be broadly defined as a violation of human rights, against the expression of human agency through the imposition of force and/ or deception. Violence can be organised and individualised, institutionalised or policy- driven where individuals, states, communities, societies, groups, and other specific actors can be the targets. A violent phenomenon occurs when violations, impositions and constraints restrict people from living lives they have reason to select and value. It is also an exertion of physical power on people, nations and countries without their consent or negotiation leading to their humiliation, violation of the basis of self-respect, the destruction of their human self-worth, normal functions, identity, dignity and capacity. New forms of violence are spreading. Security firms, private armies, multiplying arms dealers and markets in arms are spreading. Poor societies are most vulnerable to the proliferation of drug and private-army related violence. The violence market is spreading in Ethiopia and more generally in Africa, fuelled by the prevalence of poverty.
Poverty is the destruction of human wellbeing and human rights through the lack of access, entitlement and capacity to command the following human needs:
� basic well-being (food, clothing, shelter),
� additive well-being( education, physical health and psychic health),
� subtractive change from wellbeing into ill-being: i.e.,freedom from
the invasive practices that convert wellbeing into ill-being such as violence, crime, torture, genocide, divisive discrimination, domestic violence, child abuse, sexism, racism, ethnic cleansing, militarism, xenophobia ,arbitrary Government control and so on,
� multiplicative growth in human wellbeing development (freedom and ability to experience aesthetic, artistic, intellectual and moral/super ego level pursuits, enrichment of the content of living, psychic fulfilment, contentment, pursuit of cultural capital through knowledge and wisdom while being free from worries of material constraints)
Poverty is said to be a form of silent violence while violence subtracts, degrades and destroys the fabric of society, exposing whole communities in the end to poverty. The existence of the combination of violence and poverty in a given society is morally, politically and economically undesirable. Ethiopia is one of the countries in the world where the society, the state and markets have not worked together to reduce the threshold of poverty and violence.
Change that roots out poverty and violence is necessary. The ultimate objective function is to bring about change in order to attain a poverty and violence (PV) state where:
J=N
�PV=0
i= 1
i��.J Represent the different forms and acts of violence and the variety of forms of poverty. In the case of poverty, it includes the poverty experienced by many social groups. In the case of violence, it includes wars directed by others to the country. If the country is prosperous and can defend itself, that nation-state can produce a deterrence against those that may wish to violate its sovereign rights. If it appears weak and poor, others, even poorer and smaller neighbours like Eritrea and Somalia, will be tempted to attack the country. The basic deterrence against attack from others is the eradication of poverty in the country.
�PV is a summation of the representation of the state of existence of poverty and violence and their symbiotic relationship. �PV =0 is an expression of ambition or vision suggesting an end-goal that the society as a whole should strive to reach, an optimum social attainment. The politics, economics, legal, security and cultural systems need to be realigned and cohere to realise this objective and end-point with minimum cost and optimal efficiency. The social arrangement that needs to be promoted is that with a potential and a built in self-correcting mechanism for reducing poverty and violence in a direction through time that ultimately will bring them to zero (the state of poverty eradication).
The rate of change defines the speed at which the PV prevalent state changes into a PV reduction state, and the latter abbreviates into a PV eradication state. The state �PV=0 can be reached at a faster rate only when national ideological purpose, political, economic and legal arrangements are made to work in concert with the norms of high public ethics and public service.
There is a need to build a national consensus in order to recognise the eradication of PV as a national priority. There is also a need to accelerate the speed of change of PV from state to state until progressively the final poverty and violence eradicated state (PVe State) is attained. This requires a new thinking and approach to imagine not only the ' reduction' of poverty and violence (the stuff of current official thinking) but also total eradication (the expected desirable state that must be created!). The lower the expectation for changing PV states the higher the probability that PV will be persistent. The higher the expectation that PV will be eradicated, the lower the probability that PV states will persist.
The society needs to create a new moral foundation, courage and enterprising expectations for change free from deception and coercion. That foundation will assist the society to find feasible trajectories and drastic alternatives that are acceptable to the population without a radical polarisation of society with wealth concentration in the hands of the very few and poverty for the many. The key to build a self-reliant way out of poverty is through self-reliance and not reliance on donors and their game plans. This paper tries to offer some hypothetical insight on how the structural problems that have confounded Ethiopia's future may be dealt with.
Radical Inequalities and Poverty Intensity
A people or nation wishing to compose a society where the various well-being functioning's described above can be sustained and promoted needs to counter radical inequality in power, status and access to resources, coercion and deception as moral imperatives for designing social arrangements.
By assumption, a social arrangement that evolves in non-deceptive and non-coercive ways ought to counter such corrosive social negatives (bads) as severe and radical inequalities that in turn induce heavy social burdens and poverty intensity. Reduction of inequalities is necessary in order to pave the way to change the state of the poor in the country. Inequalities are one of the crucial factors for the maintenance of poverty in the country:
� The poor are very badly off in absolute and relative terms.
� Inequalities are distributed and reinforced by the economic, legal,
political, institutional and cultural arrangements- together these constrain the poor. vThese arrangements need to change to improve substantially the situation of the poor.
� Inequality is pervasive and growing, giving rise to an unacceptable level of poverty intensity. There is a dramatic polarisation of wealth. The well off are becoming fewer and fewer whilst the poor are growing in number. Such a pervasive and growing poverty is being reinforced by the Malthusian problem: human numbers increase while resources are being diminished largely from a combination of ecological constraints and bad government policy.i
� A national consensus for reducing inequality, and hence poverty and violence eradication, is the top priority amongst other priorities that need to be formed. Poverty can be eradicated provided capacity, competence and a single national purpose can be deployed politically, intellectually, economically and morally to mobilise the country's hands, brains, spirits and emotions for the task.
� The attitude of the relatively few well to do feel pitted against the poor has to change and their resistance neutralised through persuasion rather than violence or deception. This can be done in part by demonstrating that the lives of the poor can be improved without a loss of well being and wealth by the rich. For example, many of the well-off people who lost during the Derg's iiperiod are still better off than many of the people whom the Derg's measures and decrees were ostensibly supposed to serve. Similarly many of the people who became better off during the Derg's regime still enjoy a relatively more well off life than the majority who were and remain poor under the EPDRFiii period. It is possible to surmise that many of those who became better off under the EPDRF will still be better off (though their status and wealth may have attenuated) than many of the 52 % population living below the poverty line, should a post-EPDRF situation emerge in the country. In all cases, unless they became the unlucky ones who faced either death or incarceration, most of them were able to switch sides opportunistically, and in some cases flee for better opportunities in the USA and Europe. They have maintained a reasonable livelihood whether abroad or inside the country. On the other hand, the poor who fled as migrants are scattered in the African and Middle East regions.
The Scalar vs. the Vector Approach to Poverty-Violence Eradication
The approach to poverty has thus far been conceptualised with some feeble terms such as poverty reduction or alleviation usually imported from donors, pushed often upon recipients in the form of conditions for receiving their loans and grants. Conflict resolution has been the concept most used to reduce violence in Africa. Over half of the armed conflicts taking place in the world have been reported to be in Africa.4 New actors in violence have proliferated after the Cold War ended. Companies with "blood diamonds"a, oil and other strategic minerals, non-state actors, soldiers turning bandits after their daily duties, have created a murky and horizontal violence market. The development of the privatisation of armies has made conflict resolution a very onerous task in Africa. There has also been a resurgence of armed activity by states in the second half of the 1990s. While the rise of violence is worrying, a more problematic situation is the degree to which the concept and practice of conflict resolution used is appropriate or adequate to bring about a reduction-cum eradication of a state of violence.
The concept of conflict resolution needs to be scrapped and changed by violence and armed violence eradication. Like the prevalence of poverty, violence is prevalent in Africa. It needs to change into a state of violence reduction followed by a state of violence eradication. There is a welcome side to conflict as long as it does not take armed and violent forms. Conflict can be creative, while violence is destructive. The former is necessary for development while the latter must be avoided.
In the case of poverty, even when some talk about a war on want or a war on poverty, what they mean is a reduction in the number of people who live below the poverty line, i.e., reducing a number to lower the poverty index. The idea of structural change in the sense of a total elimination or eradication of poverty hardly seems to motivate any flaming rhetoric against poverty. The economic, political and security policies have therefore been largely deployed to bring about changes in magnitude and not in direction and structure with regard to both violence and poverty. For example, for a long time a policy set for reducing the poverty index the donors and the successive ruling elites in Ethiopia have advocated figure. The attitude of donors to Ethiopia's victimisation by wars brought in by others has often been superficial. They never seem to help to treat the causes of violence. They simply prefer to underwrite deals, which are not anchored in principles to bring about a situation of non-violence.
In the case of poverty, all the help from the outside has been a case of "giving the fish and not teaching the Ethiopian how to fish for his own food."e As a consequence, Ethiopia has had a succession of famines in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It is very likely that Ethiopia will face more famines during the twenty-first century. Can Ethiopia claim the 21st century by recapturing a delayed renaissance? That is an important question that stares all of us in the face.
The major theorem of this paper is that donor led or fed development or modernisation implemented locally by successive ruling elites (e.g., be they monarchic, Militarist-Stalinist or ethnicist) have not succeeded to change the structures that engender poverty and violence. At best, their thoughts and deeds seem to have an impact in changing only the poverty index. That is to say, the policies of donors and their ruling elite allies have yielded no better results than at best some incremental and reversible change in the magnitude of poverty and/or threshold of poverty.
An alternative policy set rooted in the economics, politics and security arrangements for the eradication of poverty and violence is necessary. A policy set from the scalar approach to poverty-violence reduction currently being followed by the current donor cum local elite must change to a vector approach to directional change. The current donor cum local ruling elite approach fails to combine magnitude change (scalar) with an outcome that has an arrow or direction related to structural transformation (vector). I shall call the changes by donors and the local elites scalar to designate its magnitude orientation, its instrumentalism and its focus on narrow economic results. The scalar concept designates and embraces both the approach and the consequence. I claim--and I know it is a strong claim- that to date donors and the ruling elites they fund have been capable of producing no more than reversible scalar changes. They do not touch the power relations that underpins the crises of justice and the care more about the political economy of system maintenance rather than social change.
I would like to suggest an alternative strategy for change.
� First, the language that is appropriate is the eradication of poverty and violence. The soft expressions of alleviation, attenuation and reduction are feeble morally, politically and intellectually and suggest the fear of radical redistribution of power and assets such as land and other assets including public goods provisions for the poor.
� Second, poverty eradication can only take place if there are political, economic, human and national security policy approaches for making structural change and not simply shifts or changes in the poverty index figures and magnitude of number of people falling below the poverty line.
� Third, such a structural change is not simply a change of magnitude but also a change of direction. In addition, such a change of direction has an irreversible arrow and can therefore be designated roughly as a vector. The vector designation suggests an irreversible arrow or public commitment to eradicate poverty by implementing power redistribution if necessary.
� Fourth, success for bringing about the necessary condition (though not sufficient) is the existence of the capacity of the state to align poverty reduction with poverty eradication. That is, there is reform that leads to irreversible change: i.e., there is a scalar change that can lead to a vector change to bring about a critical magnitude and unidirectional change relating reduction in poverty and deprivation, mal-nutrition and hunger, radical inequality and injustice with their eventual eradication.
CONCLUDING REMARK The central problem is to open the space for a comprehensive well-being development direction away from the conditions that generate ill being. Globalisation is known to accord well having for the winning some and to spread social waste and ill being to losers, who are often the majority. By endorsing globalisation fully, the regime of the 1990s has become part of the problem rather than the solution in redressing this injustice. It plays along with the rules of the game that others have set. It is not even part of those regimes that try to contest the rules of the game. It fails to styme the violence and poverty afflictions of millennia. There is a need to bring into public life a national conversation; national consensus to find home- brewed approaches to solve poverty and violence for good.
[Opinions in this article are solely that of the writer.]