ADDIS ABABA (The Economist) — Worries about Ethiopia’s election, due in May, are growing. Aid-giving Western governments hope it will pass off without the strife that followed the last one, in 2005, when 200 people were killed, thousands were imprisoned, and the democratic credentials of Meles Zenawi, despite his re-election, were left in tatters.
Though poor and fragile, Ethiopia carries a lot of weight in the region. A grubby election could worsen things in neighbouring Sudan, where civil war threatens to recur. The borderlands near Kenya, where cattle raiding, poaching and banditry are rife, would become still more dangerous. A renewal of unrest in Ethiopia would be exploited by its [Woyanne regime] arch-enemy, Eritrea, which already backs sundry rebel groups in an effort to undermine the country’s government Woyanne. And it could make matters even worse in Somalia, where jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaeda want to weaken “Christian” Ethiopia, where a third of the people are in fact Muslim. Foreign intelligence sources have long feared a jihadist attack in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia is a country of contradictions. With its present population of around 82m growing by 2m a year, it is poised to overtake Egypt as Africa’s second-most-populous country after Nigeria, with around 150m. It hosts the seat of the African Union. It runs one of Africa’s biggest airlines. This year its economy is predicted to grow by 7%, one of the fastest rates in the world [according to the Meles regime]. It is wooing foreign investors with offers to lease 3 million hectares of arable land [pushing out local farmers]. It is expensively branding its coffee for export.
Yet the grim side is just as striking. Hunger periodically stalks the land. Some 5m people rely on emergency food to survive; another 7m get food aid. Few people benefit from the country’s free market [the beneficiaries are only members of the ruling party]. Ethiopia has one of Africa’s lowest rates of mobile-phone ownership [to keep the people in the dark age]. Income per head is one of the most meagre in the continent.
All this is the responsibility of Mr Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which has run the show since 1991. The party is dominated by former Marxist rebels from Tigray, even though Tigrayans, among them Mr Meles, make up only 6% of Ethiopia’s population. Not that Tigrayans want to cling to power, says Mr Meles brusquely. It is just that Ethiopia needs consistency to pursue a long-term development agenda. And the EPRDF can point to some successes. Since Mr Meles came to power, infant mortality has fallen by half, school attendance has risen dramatically and life expectancy has increased from 45 to 55 years.
Nourishing a liberal democracy or upholding human rights, however, has never been central to that agenda, even less so after Mr Meles clobbered the opposition in 2005. Some Western diplomats insist, implausibly, that politics has got better since. The government and some opposition parties have, for instance, signed a code of conduct for the coming election. Some of the opposition groups are genuine, but others are in hock to the EPRDF. In any case, the main opposition grouping, Forum, refused to join the talks, arguing that the EPRDF would exploit any agreement for its own ends. The government has been smothering potential sources of independent opposition, such as foreign and local NGOs. It insists it does not censor the press, but newspapers continue to close and independent journalists are moving abroad. Some farmers allege they are being denied food aid for political reasons.
Forum is demanding the release of one its leaders, Birtukan Mideksa, from prison. She was jailed with other opposition figures after the 2005 election, later pardoned, then arrested again. She is unlikely to be let out again before the poll as she could, some say, pose a real threat to the EPRDF in Addis Ababa and other cities.
Yet most Western governments seem keen to downplay Mr Meles’s human-rights record, hoping his re-election will keep his country stable. America is to disburse $1 billion in state aid to Ethiopia this year, more if covert stuff is included. Ethiopia can expect a similar amount from the European Union, multilaterally and through bilateral arrangements with Britain and others. And climate-change deals may bring Mr Meles even more cash.
A fierce storm appears to have caused the crash of an Ethiopian Airline jet that plunged in a ball of fire into the sea with 90 people on board, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr said yesterday.
“Bad weather was apparently the cause of the crash,” Mr Murr said.
“We have ruled out foul play so far,” he added, noting that soldiers combing the Lebanese shoreline had recovered pieces of the plane.
“When there is an explosion (on board an airplane) nothing is usually left.”
A massive international search and rescue operation was hastily scrambled as Lebanese President Michel Sleiman ruled out foul play and officials played down hopes of any survivors from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 bound for Addis Ababa.
“Up until now, we have ruled out foul play,” Mr Sleiman said.
A Lebanese security official said that by noon (9pm AEDT), 21 bodies had been pulled from the sea, including that of a child. One rescue official said that the bodies recovered were dismembered. Eight empty seats from the Boeing 737-800, as well as luggage and personal belongings, had started washing up on the Lebanese shoreline, just south of the airport. Soldiers on the beach dragged large metal chunks of the plane.
He added that Prime Minister Saad Hariri would chair an emergency ministerial meeting later Monday to assess the situation.
The plane exploded into four pieces before crashing shortly after takeoff at 2.30am. Investigators were trying to determine whether lightning had hit the jet.
A worker at a petrol station near the site said he heard an explosion and saw “a huge ball of fire” as the plane crashed into the sea. Another witness said: “It was like the whole sea lit up.”
Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said Flight 409 had lost contact with the airport control tower shortly after takeoff and crashed into the Mediterranean 3.5km off the coastal town of Naameh, south of the airport.
“The control tower was assisting the pilot of the plane on takeoff and suddenly lost contact for no known reason,” Mr Aridi said.
The Lebanese army and navy, as well as the UN Interim Force in Lebanon and aircraft from France, Britain and the US, were assisting in the rescue.
Officials listed 83 passengers and seven crew members on board the flight. The passengers include 54 Lebanese, 22 Ethiopians, one French woman and one British national. Among the Lebanese were two children. The French passenger was identified as Marla Sanchez Pietton, wife of France’s ambassador to Lebanon, Denis Pietton.
Families of the passengers, some of them weeping uncontrollably, huddled at the VIP lounge of Beirut International Airport to await news of their loved ones.
One woman was sobbing and screaming, “Why, why?” as others fainted and had to be carried away by Red Cross volunteers.
“I know they won’t find him,” wailed one woman, referring to her husband, who was on board the flight.
Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Girma Wake said in Addis Ababa that the aircraft had been serviced on December 25 and passed inspection.
British Aviation safety analyst Chris Yates noted that modern aircraft were built to withstand all but the foulest weather. He said that reports of fire could suggest “some cataclysmic failure of one of the engines” or that something had been sucked into the engine, such as a bird or debris.
Lebanon has been lashed by storms in the past two days that have caused flooding and damage in some parts of the country.
When news of the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash broke this morning my heart sank at the thought of covering yet another negative story about Ethiopia.
It’s particularly galling for Ethiopians that the airline is one of the few international success stories for a country known mostly for famine and war.
When the news emerged I also immediately knew how hard the company’s staff would take it. I’ve been to the sprawling campus that serves as headquarters to Africa’s arguably flagship airline many times. The last time was just last week to interview CEO Girma Wake and I left with a gift of Ethiopian coffee and the impression that I’d rarely seen people so passionate or proud about their work and what it does for their country.
Ethiopian Airlines is a company that Ethiopians are proud of. It has consistently expanded and remained profitable through tough times for other airlines and all manner of global economic strife. It has prioritized safety in a continent with a lamentable record and it is aggressively expanding into China and India.
It had an impressive safety record before today, last suffering a disaster in 1996 when Somali hijackers demanded to be flown to Australia, causing the plane to run out of fuel and ditch off the Comoros, killing 123 of its 175 passengers.
Ethiopians I spoke to this morning said they didn’t think people outside of the country would be surprised that an Ethiopian Airlines plane had crashed, so negative are foreign perceptions of the country. But the fact is: it is a surprise.
The airline is a symbol of hope for Ethiopia. And Ethiopia is a truly unique and propitious country of 80 million people — albeit with a desperate history.
Democracy is now — debatably — slowly emerging, a middle class has appeared, the economy is growing, more Ethiopians than ever before are being educated, and ambitious and fiercely patriotic Ethiopians are taking control of the future of one of Africa’s most exciting prospects. Ethiopia is not just bad news anymore.
The cause of the crash is still unknown. But it would be a shame if this one incident damages perceptions of an emerging airline and a promising country.
Since the dawn of African independence from colonialism in the early 1960s, African liberation leaders and founding fathers qua dictators, military junta and “new breed” leaders have sought to justify the one-man, one-party state — and avoid genuine multiparty democracy — by fabricating a blend of self-serving arguments which converge on the notion that in Africa there is a democracy before democracy. The core argument can be restated in different ways: Before Africa can have political democracy, it must have economic democracy. Africans are more concerned about meeting their economic needs than having abstract political rights. Economic development necessarily requires sacrifices in political rights. African democracy is a different species of democracy which has roots in African culture and history. African societies are plagued by ethnic, tribal and religious conflicts which can be solved not by Western-style liberal democracy but within the framework of the traditional African institutions of consensus-building, elder mediation and conciliation. Western-style democracy is unworkable, alien and inappropriate to Africans because the necessary preconditions for such a system are not present. Widespread poverty, low per capita incomes, a tiny middle class and the absence of a democratic civic culture render such a system incongruous with African realities. Liberal democracy could come to Africa only after significant economic development has been achieved. Any premature introduction or misguided imposition of it by the West could actually harm Africans by destroying their budding faith in democracy itself.
Stripped of rhetorical flourish, such self-serving arguments exploit manifest contradictions and deficits in African societies for the purposes of justifying the consolidation and fortification of the powers of the one-man, one-party state, and preventing the institutionalization of a competitive multiparty democratic process with electoral and constitutional accountability. The claim of primacy of “economic democracy” is based on an impressionistic (not empirically substantiated) assumption that the masses of poor, illiterate, hungry and sick Africans are too dumb to appreciate “political democracy”. In other words, the African masses are interested in the politics of the belly and not the politics of democracy and political rights. Africans live for and by bread alone. Elections, legal rights and liberties are meaningless to the poor and hungry masses. This assumption is pure nonsense as various well designed and executed empirical studies of democratic attitudes in Africa have shown. The claim of ethnic conflict to justify the one-man, one-party system is internally self-contradictory. If indeed the communalism and the institutions of traditional, pre-colonial African societies are the most effective means for dispute resolution and consensus-building, it is illogical to insist on investing a single leader and his party with sweeping and expansive powers.
All the layered sophistry and paralogism of African dictators is intended to mask their insatiable hunger for power and produce one set of self-serving axiomatic conclusions: Africa is not yet ready for genuine multiparty democracy. The one-man, one-party system is the only means to save Africa from itself, and from complete social, economic and political implosion. The one-man, one-party system will evolve into a genuine multiparty democracy at some undetermined time in the future. In the meantime, the one-man, one-party show must go on.
Post-independence African history is instructive in understanding the scourge of the one-man, and the curse of one-party rule in Africa. Ghana’s independence from colonialism as the first sub-Saharan African country in 1957, and the role played by its first prime minister and later president Kwame Nkrumah is central to understanding the pervasive problem of civilian and military dictatorships in Africa. Ghana was undoubtedly the most economically and socially advanced country in sub-Saharan Africa with an advanced educational system and relatively well-developed infrastructures when it gained its independence. Nkrumah was a role model for the dozens of leaders of African countries that achieved independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite Nkruma’s status as the unrivalled champion of Pan-Africanism and strong advocacy for a united Africa, he was also the single individual most responsible for casting the mold for the one-man, one-party dictatorship in post-independence Africa. Barely a year into his administration, the once fiery anti-colonial advocate of political rights and democracy had transformed himself into a power-hungry despot. He enacted a law making labor strikes illegal. He declared it was unpatriotic to strike. Paranoid about his opposition, he enacted a preventive detention act which gave him sweeping powers to arrest and detain any person suspected of treason without due process of law. He even dismissed the chief justice of Ghanaian Supreme Court, Sir Arku Korsah, when a three-judge panel Korsah headed acquitted suspects accused of plotting a coup. Nkrumah amended the constitution making his party, the Convention People’s Party, the only legal party in the country. He capped his political career by having himself declared president-for-life.
Other African leaders followed in Nkrumah’s footsteps. Julius Nyrere became the first president of Tanganyka (Tanzania) in 1962 and announced his brand of African socialism built around rural folks and their traditional values in a ujamma (extended family) system. Millions of villagers were forced into collectivized agriculture. He modeled his constitution after Ghana’s and followed Nkruma’s script. Nyrere established a one-man, one-party state around his Tanganyika African National Union, outlawed strikes, nationalized private banks and industries, duplicated Nkruma’s preventive detention act to go after his opponents and greatly increased his personal power.
With the exception of a few countries, Africa had been incurably infected by Nkrumah’s one-man, one-party virus before the end of the 1960s. Most of the leaders of the newly independent African countries followed Nkrumaha’s political formula by declaring states of emergency, suspending their constitutions, conferring unlimited executive powers upon themselves, and enacting oppressive laws which enabled them to arrest, detain and persecute their rivals, dissenters, and others they considered threats at will.
The economic and political outcomes of the one-man, one-party dictatorships by the end of the 1960s were dismal. Nkrumah’s program of rapid industrialization by reducing Ghana’s dependence on foreign capital and imports had a devastating effect on its important cocoa export sector. Many of the socialist economic development projects he launched failed. By the time he was overthrown in a military coup in 1966, Ghana had fallen from one of the richest African countries to one of the poorest. Similarly, Tanzania nose-dived from the largest exporter of agricultural products in Africa to the largest importer of agricultural products. The one-man, one-party state also proved to be ineffective in reducing ethnic tensions and preventing conflict. Civil wars, genocides, low level ethnic conflicts and corruption spread throughout the continent like wildfire.
Waiting in the wings were Africa’s soldiers. Accusing the civilian governments of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement of the economy and claiming a patriotic duty to rescue their countries from collapse, military officers knocked off these governments one by one. Gen. Joseph Mobutu seized power in the Congo (Zaire) following a protracted political struggle between Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu. Col. Houari Boumedienne overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria. A group of army officers overthrew the monarchy in Brundi. In the Central African Republic, Col. Bokassa (later Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa) overthrew David Dacko. Gen. Idi Amin overthrew Milton Obote in Uganda. Nigeria flipped two coups, one by Gen. Johnson Ironsi who was overthrown by Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Many other African countries suffered similar fates.
There is overwhelming evidence to show that the one-man, one-party state has been a total failure in Africa over the past one-half century. Under these dictatorships, African countries have faced civil and border wars and ethnic and religious strife. Famine, malnutrition and insufficient food production have caused the deaths of millions of Africans. The poverty and unemployment rates continue to rise despite billions in foreign aid and loans. Infant mortality is nearly 100 per thousand (compared to 5 in the United States). Africans have the lowest life expectancies in the world. After fifty years of independence per capita income in much of Africa had declined so much that President Obama had to artfully remind Africans in his speech in Ghana: “Countries like Kenya, which had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born, have been badly outpaced.” Politically, the one-man, one-party dictatorships have brought neither ethnic harmony nor good governance; and they have failed to forge a common national identity for their people.
Today we still hear the same rubbish about a democracy before democracy recycled by a “new breed” of silver-tongued African leaders. Meles Zenawi, the chief architect of the one-man, one-party state in Ethiopia says:
Establishing democracy in Africa is bound to take a long time and that elections alone will not produce democracy and do not necessarily bring about democratic culture or guarantee a democratic exercise of rule. Creating a democracy in poverty-ridden and illiterate societies that have not yet fully embraced democratic values and are not yet familiar with democratic concepts, rules and procedures is bound to take a long time and to exact huge costs.
Similar arguments are made by Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda; and even the wily old coyote, Robert Mugabe, pulls the same stunt at age 85 to justify clinging to power.
The “new breed” dictators are trying to sell the same old snake oil in a new bottle to Africans. But no one is fooled by the sweet-talking, iron-fisted new breed dictators who try to put a kinder and gentler face on their dictatorship, brutality and corruption. They should spare us their empty promises and hypocritical moral pontifications. For one-half century, Africans have been told democracy requires sacrifices and pain; and they must look inwards to their village communities, traditional elders and consensus dialogue to find the answers. Africans don’t want to hear that “democracy” takes time and they must wait, and wait and wait as the new breed of dictators pick the continent clean right down to the bare bones. Africans want Africa to no longer be the world’s cesspool of corruption, criminality and cruelty.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as democracy before democracy. There could be either democracy or one-man, one-party dictatorships in Africa. We all know exactly what the latter means. The only question is how best to implement constitutional multiparty systems in Africa. On this question, there may be an ironic twist of history. As Ghana was the original model of the one-man, one-party state in Africa, Ghana today could be the model of constitutional multiparty democracy in Africa.
As I have argued previously argued[1], Ghana today has a functioning competitive multiparty political system guided by its Constitution. Article 55 guarantees “Every citizen of Ghana of voting age has the right to join a political party.” Political parties are free to organize and “disseminate information on political ideas, social and economic programmes of a national character.” BUT TRIBAL AND ETHNIC PARTIES ARE ILLEGAL IN GHANA under Article 55 (4). That is the key to Ghana’s political success. The Ghanaians also have an independent Electoral Commission which ensures the integrity of the electoral process, and under Article 46 is an institution “not subject to the direction or control of any person or authority.” Ghanaians enjoy many a panoply of political civil, economic, social and cultural rights. In 2008, Ghana (population 23 million) ranked 31 out of 173 countries worldwide on World Press Freedom Index (Ethiopia- population 80 million ranked 142/173). There are more than 133 private newspapers, 110 FM radio stations and 2 state-owned dailies. Ghanaians express their opinions without fear of government retaliation. The rule of law is upheld and the government follows and respects the Constitution. Ghana has an independent judiciary which is vital to the observance of the rule of law and protection of civil liberties. Political leaders and public officials abide by the rulings and decisions of the courts and other fact-finding inquiry commissions. Ghana is certainly not a utopia, but it is proof positive that multiparty constitutional democracy can and will work in Africa.
Africa’s and Ethiopia’s future in the 21st Brave New Globalized Century lie in genuine multiparty democracy, not in recycled one-man, one-party, pie-in-the-sky-promising dictatorships. Poverty, ethnic conflict, illiteracy and all of the other social ills will continue to haunt Africa for decades to come. Dealing effectively with these issues can not be left to failed-beyond-a-shadow-of-doubt, one-man, one-party dictatorships. If Africa is to be saved from total collapse, its ordinary people must be fully empowered in an open, pluralistic and competitive multiparty political process. For those who have any doubts about Ethiopia’s readiness for genuine multiparty democracy, let them look at the facts of the 2005 election: 26 million eligible Ethiopians were registered to vote in that election out of a population of 74 million.A stunning 90 percent of the 26 million actually voted. NO MORE ONE-MAN, ONE-PARTY DICTATORSHIPS IN AFRICA. GENUINE MULTIPARTY DEMOCRACY, NOW!
[1] http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/10396
Alemayehu G. Mariam, is a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an attorney based in Los Angeles. He writes a regular blog on The Huffington Post, and his commentaries appear regularly on Pambazuka News and New American Media.
BEIRUT (Reuters) – An Ethiopian Airlines plane with 85 passengers on board crashed into the Mediterranean sea shortly after taking off from Beirut international airport in the early hours of Monday, airport sources said. The plane, said to be a Boeing (BA.N) 737 by one source, disappeared off the radar some five minutes after takeoff.
About 50 passengers were Lebanese nationals, most of the others were Ethiopians, the sources said. There were thought to be seven crew members.
The plane took off shortly after its scheduled time of 3:10 a.m. (0010 GMT), flying south-west, the sources said.
Ethiopian Airlines’ website shows it has a flight from Beirut to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa around that time, operating a Boeing 737. The airline could not immediately be reached for comment.
According to one source, residents on the coast saw a plane on fire crashing.
Senior Lebanese officials headed to Rafik Hariri International Airport after news of the crash. The plane had flown in from Addis Ababa earlier in the night, the sources said.
Hundreds of Ethiopians work as domestic helpers in Lebanon.
(Reporting by Nadim Ladki; editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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Ethiopian Review has been collecting suggestions on potential candidates for the next president of Ethiopia, if there is a free and fair election, and system is presidential, and not the current fake parliamentary. The response has been massive. Within the past 3 days we have received over 170 suggestions, out of which we have prepared a list of 15 candidates. Please vote above by clicking in the small box next to the name of the candidates you prefer. Vote for two candidates: President and Vice-President
As the numerous suggestions prove, Ethiopia is rich with able individuals who are well qualified to govern the country better than the current genocidal murderer in power. Meles Zenawi and gang are not governing the country. They are destroying Ethiopia piece by piece.
The candidates are from divers background — age, gender, ethnic, education, and profession wise. We would have liked to see more women in the list.
After you vote, please explain in the comment box below your reasons for the choice you made — campaign for your candidate.
Criminals such as Meles Zenawi and traitors such as Hailu Shawel have been disqualified from the list.
President Isaias Afwerki’s name came up several times. We could not include him in the list for the obvious reason. Let him confederate Ethiopia and Eritrea and he will be every one’s first choice. It’s within his power to do it.
When news of the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash broke this morning my heart sank at the thought of covering yet another negative story about Ethiopia.
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