Politics

Is Ethiopia a failed state?

The decibel levels have lately been a notch up from Addis in protest of the description of the country as a failed state by a Washington based non-profit organization that happened to publish Foreign Policy, one of the most influential journals in its field. The Ethiopian government’s objection to this description was ambiguous and very confusing consisting as it usually does the most incoherent combination of apologetics, illogic and some half truths. Fortunately, this objection was mostly teletubed to us through the person of Samuel Assefa, the ‘Lecturer’-turned-diplomat who serves as the regime’s person in DC.
So, one can learn from the lengthy interview this man did with the magazine that the regime’s objection to this description boils down to the following. First is the alleged fact that the indicators used by the Fund for Peace, the US think thank that came with the description in its annual report on states’ vulnerability, are arbitrary. Second, partly because of the first, the evaluation that follows is given to a higher dose of subjectivity. Hence, thirdly, the report doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground.
I don’t feel like supporting or chastising any one of these parties. But I’d like to set the record straight on certain which I believe should be incontestable.
A venerable Sudanese professor one told me that every country in the Horn of Africa smacks of failure. This is a veritable truth. Every one of the five states that comprise this big chunk of Africa is a failure in one way or another. And I don’t mean this in the over-generalized, they-failed-their-people kind of way. Rather, it means that all of these countries have become both contested areas and areas of contest. As with the case with most of postcolonial Africa, many of the things these states stand for or against are contested, resulting in deep divisions among the society whose only recourse to resolve these divisions is to violence.
Ethiopia was not immune from this. It fought with itself for most of the 20th c. and the advent of the current ruling coalition didn’t change anything. I know the EPRDF apologists would like to think that it did the best thing by adopting what is called ethnic federalism and that this has gone a long way in solving the historic contradictions created throughout centuries of oppression. But for all the rhetoric sweeping generalizations, the empirical results have not been to their liking. The Bedeno, Awassa, Tepi, Gambella and other underreported massacres reflect a reality that is at odds with the official propaganda. What’s more, with its ‘good’ intentions remaining largely adornments, the policy of ethnic federalism has come to entrench the elites of a certain ethnicity in power further aggravating what is an already difficult situation.