First we need to acknowledge that poverty and violence in our country
By: prof.Mammo Muchie
I am a bit worried to open another internet based debate on the political questions that elites have been grappling with over the last generation of so: nationality vs. class, federal vs.unitary, republic vs monarchy and so. I remember being involved in Ethioforum and EEDN and discussing and re-discussing these matters endlessly. Once we open the pandora box of debate, often there is no closure. And equally the debate never progresses to a worthwhile conclusion. People often take things personally and there is hardly a point to the exercise. I think we need to follow a different tack in this forum: First we need to acknowledge that poverty and violence in our country and region have structural roots-economics, ecology, history, competing ideas of the good, contradictory responses to threats on tradition/beliefs coming from various and often conflicting projects of modernity,politics, elitism from the elite and other related matters. The post war experience of the country shows that these problems have defied any form of government on offer and any form of governing ideas that were forced on the population. We need to conclude from this that there is in poverty and violence something difficult that cannot easily be solved by getting politics right,or economics right, or security right. While finding arrangements and putting together a constellation of actors to get politics, economics, security,ecology and other matters right may help and perhaps necessary and desirable; by all means can these conditions suffice to solve the country's millenial afflictions of poverty and violence. We therefore need to frame and name strategies for the structural eradication of these twin scourges. This will not happen by replacing EPDRF with some other regime which will inherit the problem and will certainly be beaten by it as the others before EPDRF and now EPDRF have found out. What we need is to build a national consensus at various levels in finding our native solutions to the problems of poverty and violence. We need to forge a coherent intellectual, political, economic and innovative approach to tackle the problem. We need to create a forum for discussing how we may create a national consensus to solve the problem that degrade people- poverty and violence. I think this network should identify people who are willing to carry out research and policy ideas that may be useful to find lasting resolutions to the enduring problems. I say the independent variables are poverty and violence and the way governments have been organised from Monarchy to ethnocracy have been contingent and replaceable. What we need is to root modes of economic activities, political arrangement and security arrangments from the recognition of total eradication of poverty and violence. One must be aware that all the efforts by the succesive regimes to find political and economic models for solving these problems have failed. Monarchy plus market, military-stalinism plus planning, ethnocracy plus market have been imposed on the country successively and they collectively have resulted in the creation of more poverty and more violence. They have made certain elites to be beneficiaries: Nobles and those related to them in the Monarchy period, military brass and those others loyal to them in the Military period, and EPLF cadres and Tigryan elites and others loyal to them in the Ethnocratic phase at present. The vast majority of our people have been losers. A narrow band of elites have been winners. This situation of many losers and a few winners is a bad game for our country. It is not the rules of the game that must change; it is the game itself and the way it is conceptualised, defined, framed and narrated. The replacement of the EPDRF is not to play another game but to play a different game. It is not another regime we want. It must be a new mode of thinking, acting, feeling and speaking- coherent in all in its moral, intellectual, political and economic dimensions- that must form the social arrangments and the actors that need to come intoa healthy transaction and currency in order to address the real issues and solve the real problems of the people. We need a new game based in rooting out the conditions that generate violence, poverty and gross inequalities. We need a new moral philosophy; and a new intellectual matrix and a new dialogue that engages ordinary people in the making and becoming of the very agency and author of their own history and traditions. We must look at the every day life of people, their beliefs, their metaphysical world views and anxieties and their expectations. We must look at how existing arrangements respond to their life- needs or block them. We need to learn and innovate how to unlock the blocking arrangements and release the native genius that exists frightened within the bosom of our own society. We need to catalyse everyone to be independent, a problem- solver, an innovator and a learner. We need to explore and understand the native institutions and root innovation and learning in them in order to bring about structural ttransformation. This we should do in order to bring non- dislocational and non- disruptive structrural transformation- all with negotiation, conversation and deliberative dialogue between ourselves and our people. No one can solve the problem of the Ethiopian people; not the USA, not Britain, not the World Bank grants and none- other than our unity, our coherence and our willigness to engage, to learn and find solutions that make sense to people. This is the direction that can inform a new intellectual orientation and education. It is no good for us to repeat Eurocentric words our people cannot easily find empirical exemplification to their lives like democracy, free market, ethnic federalism, stalinism and the like. We need to find a new dialogue with tradition and the home- grown institutions people have created for their survival. What they create for survival then may not be adequate now. They ave deficit now. We need to find ways of building on them to make them surive now and even progress them to modernity without loss of self- worh and their sense and sensibility. That means we need to explore Ethiopia's own metaphysics and find ways of progressing that from the state of statis to a state of dynamics. We can be good facilitators if we are humble, are willing to engage and reflect and create coherence in thought, feeling , word and deed. Moreover, we also make it a moral norm that we do not easily risk other peoples lives by applying the simple rule: that we do not want anyone to be in a situation that each of us do not like to be escpecially to make decisions or be involved in decisions that which risks ones life. That re- orientation for us is no easy matter.If we are intellectuals, the real work that matters to change our peoples lives and to make a difference has not been started yet. First are we truly intellectuals that are willing to create, innovate, invent , learn and re- learn constantly or simply parrots willing to be given to mechanistic repition of what ewe see and hear from Europe. If we ant to make Ethiopia like Europe, I imagine Europeans can do a better job than ourselves. We must build on the Ethiopian civilization as part of an African civilisation at once distinct and able to catapult the nation into a world where Ethiopia's citizens live dignified lives. As intellectuals willing to engage in the problems of others and not simply our own, we owe it to our people to come together and address the problem of the people with honesty and integrity and unite ourselves coherently behind ideas that are directly instrumental in solving the real issues and problems of people, nation and country. ACTION I like to ask if there are people amongst us to come together and establish a theoretical journal that can explore these issues in depth to inform a new social movement for bringing about an enduring renaissance of the people, nation and country we love so much, but have been unable to be relevant directly to make a difference to the lives of the people. I think an on line journal named Journal of Ethiopian Renaissance(JER) should be started and let us try to identify the procedures, rules, protocols and individuals that may wish to be involved and the sort of contribution the wish to bring to it.
Mammo Muchie
Aalborg, Denmark