By H. Menelik

As one of the least developed countries, Ethiopia has many political, economic, social and cultural ills.The economy is stagnant. Population explosion is high, the endemic AIDS is still rampant, famine and starvation are real, tension in the hinterland, war with neighboring countries are both real and imminent. In this article I argue that if the country can adopt Liberal Democracy sooner than later, a radical shift can be made in the political system of the country that paves the way for rapid all-round development.

The Current Situation

There is confusion and inertia in Ethiopia’s political system. The confusion stems from the fact that the country is still under a revolution, ‘Revolutionary Democracy,’ a remnant of Maoism. After having undergone through a revolution, a Socialist system under the military dictatorship, the country should have made a smooth transition to Liberal Democracy, the logical subsequent political system, as has been done by the former East European Socialist countries.

Because of the confusion in the political system, 18 years have already elapsed and the leaders of the country still lack a political road map that can transform the country to Liberal Democracy, the best political system in the present day.

Stating the development of Liberal Democracy across the globe, after the Socialist system proved a failure in the Soviet Union, the rising star academician of our time, Professor Francis Fukuyama, in his famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, stressed the need to adopt this political system by all countries without exception. He even considered Liberal Democracy as the Last political system of human kind. That is why he termed the transformation as the end of history, but he later on corrected his hypothesis and concluded that the End of History will come about when the progress of science and technology make a halt. He loves the system that he propagates, underlining its inevitability once more in his latest book, ‘State-Building and Governance in the 21st Century’.

Indeed, Liberal Democracy, with all its deficiencies, is the best political system human kind has achieved so far. It affords mankind a unique opportunity by providing both individuals and groups freedom and democratic rights, unlike the Socialist System which deprives freedom and democratic rights. All of us Ethiopians know very well the effects of political and economic deprivations when we were under the yoke of the military regime which lasted 17 years. There was no freedom of conscience,freedom of religion,the right to assembly, peaceful demonstration etc.

Measured against this background, it is doubtless that now there is no a better political system than Liberal Democracy. That is why all the former Socialist countries including Russia, the champion of the old system are now buckling down to the task of rearranging the political system to suit to the parameters of Liberal Democracy. The former East European Socialist countries are also busy now clearing their houses and developing their all-round relations with the EU and NATO.

In a similar vein, China, since the time of the reformist Deng Xiaoping, is changing fast specially with regard to the the development of the economy. Unfortunately, China didn’t make a parallel change in its political system, its human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Suffice it to mention here the recent crackdown made by its authorities against Tibetans who are making a strenuous struggle to gain autonomy.

In Cuba, both the politics and the economy have stagnated. The average income in Cuba per month now is only 60 US dollars. It is funny also that Cubans were allowed to have mobile phones a few weeks ago. This simply shows the Socialist system for which Fidel Castro and his friends paid heavy sacrifice in the hay days of the student movement of the 1960s doesn’t work now. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the present Cuban leadership to make the necessary change at the right time.

The former Socialist countries in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, are streamlining both their political and economic systems. Why not Ethiopia, a country with three thousand years of history, a country which effectively resisted colonialism, a beacon of freedom and hope for the entire black race?

Ethiopia was a champion in the establishment of the Organization of African Unity which significantly contributed to the decolonization of Africa. South African’s first black president Nelson Madella took military training in Addis Ababa. The veteran African statesman in his autobiography paid tribute to the Ethiopian government for the training that he received. However, the veteran leader didn’t come to Ethiopia after he assumed political power. Can any one guess? My guess is that he was displeased by the current Ethiopian leadership in their role of dismembering the country which was a beacon of freedom.

Why the retrogression to tribal politics now? The reason is mainly lack of knowledge and experience. The present leaders of the country are all former leftist university students who have still the lingering effects of leftist political ideas of the Student Movement of the 1960s and 70s. All the leaders, specially Meles Zenawi, who claims to be the chief architect of the political system, most often, mentions the name of Wallelegn Mekonen, a revolutionary university student who advocated the equality of all nationalities in Ethiopia, as an acknowledged political scholar, his taught as a guide for present-day politics in Ethiopia. The problem, however, is that the world-wide student movement of 1968-1974 (in the case of Ethiopia) was a short lived one, the political experience of Wallelegn and Co was limited. Wallelegne and his friends who hijacked a passenger plane to Algiers had no exposure of Europe or North America where they could see what democracy is. Praising Cheguvera and Hochimin or Fidel Castro was the fad of the day. But no more after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

It is an indisputable fact that Wallelegn played a major role as a source of inspiration to the student movement but his ideas don’t serve for present-day Ethiopian politics. Now we are at globalization age, where the 192 member countries of the UN are busy connecting themselves to each other in trade, investment, economy, military alliances, cultural exchanges, scientific and technology cooperation — all of which demand dynamic leadership, not static political ideology that goes back to the student movement of the late 1960s.

What Professor Fukuyama stated in his latest book mentioned above, about sub-Saharan African countries holds also true to the current situation in Ethiopia. He characterized the present sub-Saharan African countries as “neopatrimonial” — that is, with political power used to service a cliantelistic network of supporters of the country’s leaders. Leaders who embezzle the finance of the country are described as having a predatory behavior, while the others who stand for the benefit of their ethnic groups, like Meles Zenawi, exercise rent-seeking –that is, use of the public sector to reallocate property rights to the benefit of a particular interest, that is directed to a single family, tribe, region or ethnic groups.

It would telling the obvious to try to retell the story of power abuse, nepotism, corruption, naked partiality to the region of Tigrai under the current government. Using the state power as an exclusive domain, the regime of Meles Zenawi, established an extensive economic empire, no less than 50 in number for Tigrai, not for the other regions of Ethiopia. The article which was posted in a web site by the officials of the region, specially Dr. Solomon Enquaoi, clearly demonstrates the extent of the uneven development made by the regime in favor of their region. Meles repeated what Mobutu did in his birth place. Mobutu, it was reported, made infrastructural development in his birth place depriving other regions same opportunity.

Meles gets mad when somebody tries to speak against such injustice, unfair economic development in Tigrai region. A former MP who denounced the unbalanced development in the same region at the rubber-stamp parliament some years ago, was severely rebuked by the brutal dictator, and fled the country after receiving a death threat by the security agents. Meles labeled the out-spoken MP as a deadly enemy of the people of Tigrai. Even now, if someone speaks any thing against Tigrai and Meles, he is liable to be categorized as genocidal, Interhamwee, and even risks his life.

Ethiopia has also become a country of nepotism par excellence. The so-called freedom fighters, who are mostly from the same region have virtually dominated the military and the public service. They call this an affirmative action, to give it a democratic color. However, it is an outrageous tribalism modeled after Ziad Barre’s Merihan-style of domination. It behooves, therefore, that Ethiopian politicians make a radical but peaceful change by transforming the country to Liberal Democracy to undo the imbalances and to open a level field for all citizens of the country.

The Prospect of Liberal Democracy In Ethiopia

Before coming to raise the possibilities of Liberal Democracy in Ethiopia, I would like to make a highlight on the development of democracy throughout the world in the past two decades. Studies made in this regard indicate that since 1974-1986 democracy has expanded throughout the world embracing Greece, Spain, in nine Latin American countries, Philippines, Korea, Taiwan. By 1987, the third wave of democratization had spread to the point where about two of every five states in the world were democracies: all of Western Europe, much of Asia, and most of Latin America. But that still left gap in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East. Democracy was still a regional phenomenons situation has changed dramatically with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. By 1990,most of the states of Eastern Europe and even poor and isolated Mongolia held competitive elections and began to institutionalize democracy.

In February 1990 two seminal events launched a new wave of democratic transitions in Africa. In Benin, a coalition of forces in civil society, organized in a “sovereign national conference,” claimed governing authority and launched a transition to democracy. In South Africa, the apartheid regime released Nelson Mandela from prison and launched a process of political duologue and normalization that gave birth to democracy in 1994. When these two events occurred, there were only three democratic countries in Africa — the Gambia, Botswana, and Mauritius. But starting in 1990, Africa experienced a rolling tide of democratic change. Under heavy pressure from international donors as well as their own peoples, most African states by 1997 had at least legalized opposition parties, opened space in civil society, and held multi- party elections. Many of these openings were largely a facade, marred by continued repression and blatant rigging of the vote. But well over a dozen met the minimum conditions of democracy, and in several cases, long-ruling incumbent parties were defeated.

As democracy spread to Eastern Europe, a few states in the former Soviet Union, and a number in Africa, while extending deeper into Asia and Latin America, it came during the 1990s to be a global phenomenon, the predominant form of government, and the only broadly legitimate form of government in the world. Today, about three-fifths of all the world’s states (by the count of Freedom House, 121 of 193) are democracies. There are no global rivals to democracy as a broad model of government. Communism is dead. Military rule everywhere lacks appeal and normative justification. One-party states have largely disappeared, for what single party — in this day and age — can credibly claim the wisdom and moral righteousness to rule indefinitely and without criticism or challenge? Only the vague model of an Islamic state has any moral and ideological appeal as an alternative form of government.

If democracy can emerge and persist in an extremely poor, landlocked, overwhelmingly Muslim country like Mali — in which the majority of adults are illiterate and live in absolute poverty and the life expectancy is 44 years — then there is no reason in principle why democracy cannot develop in most other very poor countries. In fact, if we examine the 36 countries that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) classifies as having “Low Human Development,” 11 are democracies today. If we widen our scope to look at the bottom third of states classified by the UNDP, the percentage of democracies rises from nearly a third to 41 percent. About a dozen of these have been democracies for a decade or longer. That there should be so many democracies among the world’s least developed countries is a phenomenon at least as noteworthy as the overall predominance of democracy in the world, and one profoundly in defiance of established social science theories.

Empirically, the implication that authoritarian and conflict-ridden states should emphasize the rule of law rather than democracy is viable only as a transitional strategy. In reality, democracy and freedom are closely related in the world. Even if we forget about the wealthy countries of the West — all liberal democracies — and examine only the developing and post -communist countries, we find that the countries where civil liberties and the rule of law are best respected are democracies, and the human rights (and humanitarian) emergencies are invariably to be found in non-democracies.

Each year Freedom House rates each country from 1 to 7 along two scales, political rights (basically to participate and compete democratically) and civil liberties, with 1 being most free and 7 most repressive. There are only two countries in the world that are not democracies and yet have a civil-liberties score below the midpoint on the seven-point scale: Tonga, and Antigua and Barbuda. One can hardly advance a general theory of political development based on these two micro states. To be sure, there are some pretty illiberal democracies in the world, with serious problems of human rights and the rule of law, but the only countries that give their citizens extensive civic freedom and a thorough rule of law are democracies.

In one respect, democracy is still not quite a global phenomenon. In every region of the world — except for one — at least a third of the states are democracies. Thirty of the 33 states in Latin America and the Caribbean are democracies, and about half of them are now fairly liberal in terms of their levels of freedom. Two-thirds of the former communist countries, half of the Asian states, and even about two-fifths of the African states are now democracies. Only in the Middle East is democracy virtually absent. In fact, among the 16 Arab countries, there is not a single democracy and, with the exception of Lebanon.

Most dictatorships in the world survive for a simple reason. Their leaders enjoy having unchallenged power as well as having the ability that power confers to accumulate great personal wealth. It is just not possible to look at the evidence from the ground (and from the public opinion surveys) in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and argue that their peoples don’t mind living under dictatorship. Of course, no one could maintain that the majority of people in every country want a fully democratic system or that all peoples understand all the institutions of liberal democracy. But most people do want freedom. Given the choice, they would like to be able to constrain the arbitrary power of government, to replace bad and corrupt leaders, to have a predictable and secure life under some kind of just rule of law. When one assembles these basic political preferences, it begins to look an awful lot like democracy, even if the word may have different (or unsure) meanings in many places.

There is a lot of work to be done around the world to build the culture of democracy — the understanding of its rules, possibilities, obligations, and limits, the norms of tolerance, civility, participation, and mutual respect. Some of this cultural change happens with economic development, increasing education, and exposure to the global environment. Much of it can and should happen through deliberate programs of civic education and civil society construction. External democracy promotion programs and domestic civil society efforts have made some progress toward these goals. Much more remains to be done.

But the principal obstacle to the expansion of democracy in the world is not the people of the remaining authoritarian states. The problem is the ruling elites who have hijacked the structures of state power and barricaded themselves inside. As long as these rulers can corner a sufficient flow of resources to feed their apparatus of political predation and domination, they can survive.

That is where the international environment enters in. Predatory authoritarian regimes do not generate resources organically from within their own societies very well. Rather, they inhibit domestic investment, innovation, entrepreneurship, and hence economic growth by violating property rights and other individual freedoms. Such arbitrary rule also discourages foreign investment — except in the enclave economy of oil or other natural resource extraction.

This characterizes well the present situation in Ethiopia where a predatory authoritarian regime held in check the ownership of private properties, political freedoms of individuals. It has reversed the democratic aspirations of the 74 million people of Ethiopia. Though the scenario for the introduction of Liberal Democracy seems to be bleak, all Ethiopians living in the country or abroad have the duty to liberate themselves from the shackles of the tribal regime.