By T. Mesfin

On February 15, 2005 C. Bryson Hull of Reuters wrote a curious piece under the heading, “Ethiopia’s Meles can weather political storms.” The “analysis” is very likely a well-timed plant.

Hull may not have done it deliberately, but it is a clever piece of disinformation being pushed by regime propagandists. The disinformers have dual objectives: to demoralize the opposition and to shore up the regime’s base.

Why an article about regime survival now? Someone obviously thought it was important. The story comes at a time when the hardheadedness of Zenawi has created a siege mentality and a sense of international isolation.

Reports from Addis Ababa indicate a sense of desperation and frustration even among the intelligence services of Meles Zenawi, leading them to wonder about regime survival.

Beyond public relations maneuvering, there are substantial domestic and international reasons that indicate that the regime of the Tigrai Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) may not survive for long.

Internal Factors

Domestically, support for the ruling group is at an all time low. The harsh crackdown against opposition forces has further exacerbated an already tense situation. It has also effectively closed the route to any negotiations.

The TPLF has little legitimacy outside of its narrow base. All indications are that even if the Prime Minister’s Tigrian ethnic base, which numbers less than 10 percent, is not solidly behind him. Party cadres whose survival and livelihood depend on the government and a few direct beneficiaries of the patronage system make up the regime’s base of support.

Economic activity in Addis Ababa, the preeminent per capital, has been at a standstill for almost year owing to election-related uncertainties. The service sector has been performing poorly. There is very little long term investment.

The price of everyday commodities has increased dramatically, making life difficult even for the middle class. The price of teff, the staple grain, cooking oil, sugar, etc. have skyrocketed.

Oil prices too have gone up as well. A liter of petrol now costs birr 5.50. The government just decided to increase the local price to birr 6.88 per liter. The country now spends close to $1 billion, a 250 percent increase over two years ago, soaking up almost 40 percent of all imports.

Foreign exchange reserves are at an all time low. There is a booming underground market in foreign currency. One US dollar ($1) now fetches almost 10 birr on the black market, instead of the official birr 8.63.

Add to these political and economic woes 2.6 million Ethiopians that the World Food Program says need emergency food assistance.

External Factors

Mr. Zenawi has carefully and methodically cultivated in the last 15 years the image of a progressive African leader. This carefully orchestrated picture came to unravel back in June once the security forces began spraying unarmed civilians with machine gun bullets.

The Prime Minister’s fabled charm appears to have gone out the window as well. Donors don’t look kindly on regimes that have an aversion to using tear gas or water cannons.

Mr. Zenaw’s government has been rewarded with very generous foreign assistance since coming to power almost 15 years ago. It received $1.5 billion a year, $500 of which was in direct budgetary support with little accounting.

Awash with foreign largesse meant for Ethiopia’s poor, the regime continues to spend lavishly on an elaborate spy network to suppress dissent and to buy off people both at home and abroad.

Money meant for the poor is being spent on lobbyists and public relations firms. McGuire Woods is one of the firms siphoning money from Ethiopia’s poor. Another expensive lobbyist and public relations firm is Scribe Strategies and Advisors.

Add to this the hiring of Annette Scheckler, former head of the Voice of America Horn of Africa service as a special advisor to Prime Minister Zenawi.

The propaganda and disinformation machine is in full throttle.

Fortunately, no amount of public relations prettying can hide the ugly deeds of a nasty regime. Foreign donors too appear to be waking up to the true nature of this violent, kleptocratic group. Witness the cold shoulder Tony Blair gave to his old pal Zenawi at the recent “progressives” summit in South Africa.

Zenawi understands the language of money well. Thus when the European Union threatened to withhold some $500 million in annual budgetary support, he arranged for a secret emergency trip to Brussels to plead with EU authorities.

The bottom line: the pressure by the Diaspora and the financial squeeze is working.

We may never know the details of how Bryson Hull’s story was assembled. But there are interesting facts both about the writer and the so-called experts.

C. Bryson Hull is an American journalist who has in-depth expertise on issues related to Texas, including the Enron Scandal. His expertise in Africa consists of reporting from Nairobi for less than a year. He had an expertise of exactly two weeks in Ethiopia when he filed his analysis of why Meles will survive the political storm.

Another expert who predicts “little brushfire rebellions” and not a national uprising is Matt Bryden of the International Crisis Group. What, you may wonder, is Mr. Bryden’s expertise on Ethiopia? Mr. Bryden had a two-year stint (1994-1996) as a UN field officer in what appears to be the distribution of emergency food. It does not take much to read tealeaves in Africa.

Seasoned experts such as Christopher Clapham of Cambridge University with decades of experience were not consulted. Clapham wrote back in November, 2005:

“It now seems to me beyond any plausible likelihood that the EPRDF government can re-establish its position as an acceptable public authority …It has now reached the point, reached by the imperial and Derg regimes before it, at which its authority has withered away, and cannot be recovered. It has lost ‘the mandate of heaven.”. He concludes:

“The transition in Ethiopia is already under way, and the concern both of Ethiopians and of the international community should be to do whatever they can to make it as quick and as peaceful as possible.”

Turmoil at home and the tightening of screws by donors abroad clearly do not bode well for Zenawi and company. The genie of democracy is clearly out of the bottle. The TPLF Houdini who pulled so many tricks in his long, violent career won’t be able to put this one back in the bottle.

The writer can be reached at [email protected]