The historical environment, values, and cultural conditions including the way the political and power structure operate and function influence how members of an organisation are engaged in a project by building relationships and allies for realising fully coordinated and cooperative effective action. How the members bond is not merely a matter of the dynamics within an organisation. It also depends on the environment, historical situation; culture, belief systems and language games members deal with and respond to in their interactions with and from their surroundings. For example, when we look at the political history of Ethiopia over the last hundred years, one matter stands out over the rest. Every power seeker has always done two things that are hugely embarrassing: fought a potential rival by plotting and often lying and organising secretly against a rival together with seeking a foreign ally that would weaken the opponent. Look at who supported General Napier to defeat Twedros. Look at who supported Menelik to defeat Yohannes. Look at how Teferi defeated Lij Eyasu.Look at how every political group today in the country is backed by one or another foreign power overtly and covertly. As soon as one decides to ascend to power and started manoeuvring to do so, the urge to enlist foreign backers become irresistible and the cruel and dehumanising attacks against opponents spread like wild fire. This misdirection makes it impossible to solve problems within a national context with national dialogue. It is a recipe to recreate the country’s problems rather than seeking a national mobilisation and conversation to understand the priorities and create national consensus to address them with foresight, imagination, intelligence and vision. With an external factor playing so negatively how can quality relationship between people in the country with trust and empathy in order to undertake a mission together ever be carried out?
Thus, to be sure, in Ethiopia both the environment and culture- both historical and contemporary, and the way the political and power structure have been organised and functioned in reality through the ages have not engendered or encouraged the development of social capital. Of all the deficits the country suffers from, the one that is even more worrying than any material deprivation is the low or underdeveloped level of social capital throughout the ages. We still suffer and may even suffer more in the future from lack of social capital necessary to undertake effective coordinated cooperative actions. For social capital to be promoted the internal culture to address any problem however complex and intractable with dialogue, consultation and conversation however long it takes to talk must be a preferred strategy and route. More importantly, the desire to enlist external actors to subdue internal opponents must also be curbed if this comes at the expense of social capital building to solve the country’s major problems. Lack of social capital is at the heart of the collective failure of the country’s institutions, leadership, talents and ingenuities to solve the country’s problems. Only breakdown of natural capital is as severe as the lack of social capital. Both are very difficult to create or reproduce.
5. Significance of the absence of Social Capital
In Ethiopia, when the country suffers from the breakdown of natural capital, it is because of our lack of imagination, capability, resources and inability to stem deforestation, change our rain fed agriculture system into diversified agriculture, and our allowing the contraction of arable land due to soil erosion and desertification. Although the World Bank has reported that the size of Ethiopia’s economy is growing, the country still lacks financial capital to create the human capital to feed into building education for all, health for all and multimodal infrastructure (physical capital) and manufacturing to move people and goods and services with ease and speed. It may have financial capital to build individual capital, but that is not the same thing as making the country wealthy. The wealth of a country is broader. It includes the health, education, the state of nature repair of a country and the economy of a country. It is not thus just the economy that matters as the economy in fact is the instrument to bring about individual, ecological and social wellbeing development. It includes the social, natural and cultural aspects of a country’s wealth. Wealth is not to be reckoned simply as income in the pockets of individuals. If Ethiopia and indeed nearly all African countries had financial capital, they would not be in the loan-grant and aid system where they keep looking to the external world, i.e., to the donors to beg finance to support our economic growth and development.
Social capital is at the heart for capacitating collective citizen action. It requires trust, civic sense, engagement with social problems as citizens expressing their social consciousness and ability to network the self in a web of relationships and interactions with others to achieve pre-imagined and pre-planned activities, actions and projects. When social capital is low, a society suffers from all kinds of negative fall outs. Networks of interactions, relationships based on observing shared norms, rules, procedures, and institutions suffer. This in turn leads to limiting our abilities for mustering the required solidarity, sympathy, norms of reciprocity and courage to undertake collective action. Without the ability to sustain collective action, it will be hard to change Ethiopia’s millennial static society. In Ethiopia, the ability to take specifically triggered collective action and even spectacular action is in abundance, but the ability to sustain such collective actions by overcoming threats, dangers, challenges, complex and intricate problems with long-term solidarity to maintain coordinated, organised and cooperative action appears to be unimaginably inadequate…