NEVIS Review NO 3
Section I
Ref# 3.1
Meles Zenawi and the Ethiopian state
:Understanding the late prime minister and his dream for the nation"
by
Medhane Tadessei
(credit:
pambazuka.com)
INTRODUCTION
Meles Zenawi and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)-led
Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power
in 1991 after a 16-year armed struggle in the countryside. In subsequent
years Meles Zenawi rose to have disproportionate power in the Ethiopian
state, rising above the TPLF/EPRDF. As an instructor, theoretician,
military strategist, intellectual and all-around, all-star politician of
the EPRDF Meles shaped Ethiopian politics for over two decades and
worked hard to sustain the political system he helped create. This is
crucial in understanding the meaning of his death and its impact on the
nature of political power in Ethiopia. And equally important, to
understand what this says about the character of the Ethiopian state.
Meles Zenawi, with a touch of overstatement, is the most important
person who has ever lived in the history of the TPLF and the post-1991
political order in Ethiopia. It need also be appreciated that Meles has
effectively become, or merged with, the state and hence his absence or
death is in effect a mortal blow to the health status of not only the
political system but also the Ethiopian state. [Ii] This is not the
place to write about the turning points in the political rise of Meles
Zenawi [iii] , but instead to draw from existing analysis a
comprehensive understanding of his political trajectory and the
otherwise-puzzling aspects of his legacy. [iv]
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Only few political leaders in contemporary Africa have been both great
thinkers and astute political operatives. Perhaps the most gifted of
them all was Meles Zenawi. Meles’s early rise to political supremacy has
always been an object of fascination yet one shrouded in mystery. There
are many ways to explain Meles’s rise to prominence in Ethiopian
politics. My own sense points to three, in fact four, major factors.
Prominent among which are his quick intelligence and communication
skills. Meles is the most gifted orator the TPLF has produced. He has
been a formidable debater, particularly in a closed circuit among party
disciples. Often, he could be convincing as well as flirtatious. A
veracious reader he had the tendency to read everything that mattered to
his cause. He was known for his piercing intellect and brutal study
schedule.
He read at a prodigious speed, extracting the essence of a book along
with a vast amount of detail, which he blended with information derived
from other sources and the reality of his environment. This doesn’t mean
all his ideas were great. Some of his inputs would be more brilliant
than others; and some might be wrong, but his hard work and his
propensity to supply fresh ideas would cumulatively convey the image of a
brilliant leader. Meles was an accomplished politician. He was also an
unusually gifted thinker. The intertwining of these talents formed the
overriding force behind his quiet and stealthy rise to power. But also
he was, by default or design, strategically placed to make an impact in
the early days of the struggle. He was fortunate in his assignment and
his colleagues, but he was more fortunate still in some of his closest
friends in the TPLF leadership. From the beginning of the armed struggle
Meles was well positioned to advance in the leadership of the TPLF.
The young revolutionary, whose rise to prominence owed everything to
quick study in the TPLF Cadre School, had little involvement in the war.
Meles’ work on political and ideological perspectives to the exclusion
of military or other responsibilities permitted him to develop a
considerable level of knowledge, as well as the opportunity to train and
organize cadres and disseminate his views. He used to invoke great
leaders and depict them in his style of teaching in order to get across
his arguments. He got on well with students, the rank and file and his
colleagues alike, because they expected him to know more than they did,
and they rarely knew enough to challenge him. These roles also gave him a
unique relationship with, and understanding of, the cadres that was to
prove beneficial in the future.
It was his skill as a political operative, his devotion to reading and
writing that won him the favour of his party leaders that it can be easy
to forget that he has spent the better part of his 16 years in the
armed struggle not as a military leader but an ideologue and debater.
Likewise, in the last three years that led to the downfall of the Derg,
while certainly immersed in military affairs, spent much of his time
putting out political fires and preparing himself for big roles. Was
this sharp intelligence, inexhaustible curiosity, and encyclopaedic
knowledge intimidating? Certainly. By late 1989 he was getting near the
top. He didn’t claim it; he earned it.
There are other ways, too, that Meles has departed from his comrades.
Far more interesting, and potentially more consequential, was his sense
of appreciation of power. Meles and his thoughts on the nature of
political power is a story that has received only intermittent attention
in the mainstream narrative of the TPLF/EPRDF. Though his theoretical
excursions were extremely relevant and highly considered by the top
leadership and Meles provided ideological perspectives to save the
organization, of equal significance was a contest over power. There is
an element there that is extraordinary creativity, but I can’t say it is
divorced from a sense of ambition. This is the more so because in
almost all the political struggles that broke out within the TPLF
personal differences figured prominently along with ideological
differences. No doubt, in each inter-party crisis Meles assumed a
leading role providing solutions, which at the same time enhanced his
power in the organization.
However, the event that transformed Meles into an undisputed leader in
the organization and the country as a whole was the 2001 split within
the TPLF, which dealt a serious blow to democratic centralism and
collective leadership, while at the same time giving Meles a major
tactical advantage. The turn of events in the last round of the war with
Eritrea and the crisis within the TPLF brought Meles back into the
center stage of Ethiopian politics. He was the first to suffer
personally from the war and its outcome. But he made the best out of it
and emerged much stronger. Once the most formidable leaders of the TPLF,
who made collective leadership both possible and attractive, were
pushed from the scene, it was probably a matter of time before Meles
would become the unchallenged leader of the country. The few prophetic
views which drew attention to this trend passed unheeded both within and
outside the party. Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister, chairman of both the
TPLF and EPRDF, together with his close followers quickly assumed the
upper hand in the contest and then initiated what was held to be a
wide-ranging restructuring of power in the Ethiopian state. Everything
that happened after that was the direct consequence of this fateful
political intermission.
THE PROCESS OF CONSOLIDATION
Right after the Ethiopia-Eritrea war and the split with in his core
political party the TPLF, Meles had concentrated power in his own hands
and a tiny group of advisors. The irony of the whole matter appeared in
the fact that the leader who stood to lose from the blowback effect of
the war quickly turned the situation to his advantage and emerged
victorious. Thanks to his extraordinary talent aided by the generosity
of fate, Meles did not only wither away the threat to his power but he
had slowly but steadily worked his way to a supreme position in the
Ethiopian state. At the time John and myself concluded that ‘Ideological
concerns and struggles for power merged in ways that can still not be
completely understood, but it can be said with confidence that the
result is a shift in power from Tigray to the central government in
Addis Ababa, from the instruments of the party to the state, and from a
group among the TPLF Central Committee to Meles.’ [vi] Almost
instanteneously, probably the last major obstacle in his path to
political supremacy was removed. This marked the beginning of a long
process of the personification of the state.
The rise of Meles to a dominant and undisputed position in the Ethiopian
state had far reaching political implications. It weakened the rest of
the political forces within and outside the ruling party, decimated
other centers of power and influence and immobilized the TPLF, the most
organized political force in the post-1991 Ethiopian landscape. [Vii]
There is no doubt that the removal of the rather well-entrenched and
adamant party leaders would give him the opportunity to seize the full
reins of power and make a clean start in the affairs of the state. He
tried hard to relocate his power base from Tigray and the TPLF to the
Center and the EPRDF with some success. Thus the progressive political
ascendancy of Meles was paralleled by growing political strength at the
Center. He created a centralized government and a party leader unified
with the state, making the party, the government of the day and the
state one and the same. He promoted loyal bureaucrats than party
loyalists which served to reinforce a clearly identifiable power
pyramid. In doing this he created a power base independent of all the
members of the ruling party. While this made the TPLF less influential
in the EPRDF it also made the EPRDF less relevant in running the
government, much less so the Ethiopian state.
As predicted the merger of Meles and the Ethiopian state heated up after
the 2005 elections. In the next seven years or so Meles, more able and
astute than his inveterate subordinates, continued his steady rise. From
such a base he launched the Developmental State in Ethiopia. Having
attained the height of power, Meles stood poised to start his ambitious
experiment. This was not accidental as he had a philosophy in favour of a
strong state with a strong leader as a prerequisite for the successful
running of a developmental state. This was the life that he decided to
live, and the mission he wanted to pursue. Consolidating his power and
increasing the developmental mission of the Ethiopian state were Meles’s
consuming focus. Both were inseparable. It was to be the major
historical achievement of Meles that he finally spread the tentacles of
the developmental state in Ethiopia. Without this, he surely would have
become a mere footnote in modern Ethiopian history. Meles’s project of
modernizing Ethiopia through the prism of a developmental state had a
bearing on the kind of political order that evolved over the last seven
years. This is closely related to his view towards state power, how he
exercised it and the style of his leadership. This informs his
personality, his place in Ethiopian history and the nature of the
problem his successors face.
MELES’S PROJECT OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE
Whatever we might say about Meles Zenawi, we must grant that he had a
well-prepared and well-sequenced plan for inserting his version of the
developmental state. And it is crucial to keep in mind the things that
influenced his theory of developmental state. Meles was particularly
fascinated by the process of industrial development in East Asia,
particularly South Korea in the 1960’s. [viii] He took pains to extract
the most original elements from the thought and acts of General Park
Chung Hee of South Korea whose work is more compatible with his. [ix]
Park’s supreme attraction to Meles was economic. The important thing is
that the Park regime initiated a successful program of industrialization
for South Korea based upon export-oriented industries which were guided
and aided by the government. One of the first things Park did after
assuming power, more or less replicated in Ethiopia, was to persecute
South Korean business leaders for profiting from the corruption in the
South Korean government. The motivation for this was to gain control of
the flow of capital in the country so it could be directed into the
sectors that the government wanted to develop.
Compare that with the economic policies of the Ethiopian government
especially as it is related to banking and telecommunication sector. The
control of these resources was critical for Meles. The priority has
been on state directed investment, political control, the economic
empowerment of the peasantry, infrastructural development and the
control of capital with a clear tension between control and development.
He had a firm belief few things should be met as a prerequisite for
economic transformation in Ethiopia: Stability, ethnicity and social
mobilization, strong state and the mobilization of international
resource. He had created all of them. This became the essence of Meles’s
developmental state in Ethiopia. The role of the state in encouraging
and directing investment was highly pronounced but also attracting
international aid and finances as well as investment was strongly
pursued. A strong state and stability for economic development also
informed the conduct of his foreign policy, peacekeeping role and the
war on terror. [x] The main objective was to secure regional prominence
as a stabilizing force, raise the status of the country, and increase
its relevance which would in turn would attract international finances.
Accordingly, he worked hard to restructure the Ethiopian state and its
economy with a profound impact. He tried to bridge the gap between the
state and development, a recurring problem in the African context. He
initiated the arduous process of reorganizing the state, with a
particular focus on building the structural foundations of a dynamic
economy. Even the bedrock of his foreign policy was highly monetized to
support the grand project. Effectively using foreign aid for development
was another important weapon. [xi] He was focused and precise on his
programmes. Meles had done what he intended to do and followed his plan
meticulously until his death. Here was a man with immense energy and
enormous vitality. He attempted to reorient Ethiopia’s political economy
by carrying out far-reaching reforms, and in particular introducing the
fundamentals, for what it’s worth, of an Ethiopian version of a
developmental state. Needless to say Meles had a rigorously empirical
understanding of the way it operated. It is against this background that
his absence and its far-reaching implications need to be understood.
Arguably, Meles seems to have decided to delay, or probably ignore
altogether, the process of democratization for the sake of solidifying
the developmental state. He believed practicing the details of Western
democracy stands in the way of fully implementing the fundamentals of
such a state. He argued the new economic structures and institutions
required their own political organization such as a hegemonic party. On
this he had clear thinking and meticulously invested on it. His was a
conscious decision. He believed human rights, free press and strong
parliament distracts the agendas of the developmental state particularly
in its formative stage. Meanwhile he questioned the assertion that
human rights and democracy are closely linked to economic development in
Africa where primitive accumulation of wealth takes center stage.
Decidedly, he shelved democratic transition in favour of modernizing
Ethiopia through a strong state. On the other hand he didn’t feel the
pressure to democratize. In the meantime he expected a speedy
socio-economic delivery that could fundamentally change the political
marketplace. And he thought the Ethiopian context, history and political
culture would allow him to do that for sometime to come. In this regard
it is highly likely that he had been informed by the so-called Oriental
Despotism. Ethiopia, like many in the East which economically
transformed themselves within a short period of time can be a fertile
ground for authoritarian rule, a prerequisite for entrenching the
developmental state. The thesis is both understandable and mildly
disingenuous.
There is no doubt some aspects of Ethiopia’s political culture stand in
the way of the widespread democratic aspirations of Ethiopians.
Totalitarian culture- top-down rule; primacy of the collective over the
individual; a well-organized, self-serving mammoth bureaucracy; a
subservient, fatalistic attitude towards officials and politics; lack of
public spirit - has existed in Ethiopia for thousands of years and has
formed certain ingrained mind-sets and habits which still endure as the
most tenacious obstacle in the country’s path toward true democracy.
Compounding this was Meles’s openly declared hegemonic project. We do
not know enough about the impact of Ethiopian history in Meles’s
thinking at this time to say for certain how profound an effect this had
on the events following the 2005 elections. But it is fair to say that
he promoted the notion that an aggressive policy confined exclusively on
economic development is worth pursuing.
It would be a mistake to see all this as fatalistic and a deliberate
negative assault on the process of democratization in Ethiopia. However
controversial this may sound Meles had his own best hopes. And he was
eager to be validated and this is discernible in the sense of urgency of
his actions. He craved his economic polices would bring about quick
results on the ground changing the political mood in the country in his
favour. As such he thought the democratic upheaval in 2005 as a
pointless disruption. Right after the brutal crackdown of opposition
protesters he resolved to speed up economic delivery. It was meant to be
Ethiopia’s Tiananmen. Practical results in economic terms became his
constant and prime concern. He never let go of the conviction that
Ethiopia will turn a page and change the national mood and turn the
opposition in to a fringe movement and the margins of society. [xii]
Part of Meles’s difficulty is that his worldview was inherently leftist
and thoroughly authoritarian. But intellectual honesty demands
acknowledging that his moral vision derives, to a considerable extent,
from the tradition and political culture of the TPLF and Ethiopia at
large. The culture that produced Meles Zenawi is pretty much the same
culture, it seems fair to say, that created previous leaders and that
runs our country right now. His inability to see the need to allow more
political space and parallel development of democracy and the severity
and determination with which he decided to crush the opposition and for
that matter any form of dissent-one of orders of magnitude - suggests an
ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a
political project or a creed. As a result there are some grounds for
questioning whether Meles’s project is even fair, safe or meaningful.
The fundamentals of the developmental state in Ethiopia, however useful
and important it may sound, need to be revisited. In any case, it’s hard
to believe that Meles’s wholesale offensive against any form of
independent centers of power such as free media, free organizations,
free business; persecution of critical journalists and enactment of
repressive laws were unconnected to his creed of the developmental
state. Meles tried to insert the rudiments of the developmental state
and it is up to the rest of Ethiopians and the country’s emerging
leaders to make it more humane. It is possible to reform the developmental state without
allowing its pillars being eaten away by usual termites: ethnic
entrepreneurs, countless locust oligarchs, political repression, rent
seeking and corruption.
We should not, though, conclude that there’s no debate whatever to be
had between developmental state and political liberalization. The view
and political project championed by Meles that the two endeavors are
utterly distinct and thus incapable of interfering with each other is
overly simplistic, toxic and dangerous. It is equally possible to
isolate Meles’s preoccupation with duality of authoritarianism and
economic development. It is possible to have both a strong and well
governed state. No decent analyst can fail to be repulsed by the sins
committed in the name of the developmental state. So we all agree:
mingling development with authoritarianism can be bad. But the critical
question is: compared to what? Where do we draw the line between what
the developmental state can accomplish and what it should be allowed to
accomplish. These questions are difficult and might merit an honest and
extended discussion among all concerned Ethiopians, and it is exactly
for the same reason Ethiopia’s emerging leaders should not suppress
critical thinking. But if such discussions are to be worthwhile, they
will have to take place at a far higher level of sophistication and
within the context of a more open and conducive political environment.
CONCLUSION
At his best, Meles inserted the rudiments of the developmental state in
Ethiopia, but at his worst he made it intimidating and suffocating. It
is the latter that should draw the attention of Ethiopia’s emerging
leaders as the most urgent problem that needs to be fixed. It is time
for the country to move beyond its authoritarian past and build a
democracy that matches the democratic aspirations of its people and
supports its development.
KEY ISSUES
The modalities of the developmental state need to be redefined. There is
a need for political reforms both to meet the democratic aspirations of
the Ethiopian people, achieve political stability as well as the
revitalize the much needed developmental state model [xiii].
Ethiopia’s economic development must be anchored in a strong political
process, a prerequisite for long-term stability. If the current trend
persists, it is extremely worrisome development for the health, perhaps
the viability, of the Ethiopian state.
Political reform must include appropriate constitutional reform, such as
the articles related to the power of the Prime Minister as well as the
governance of the security sector.
.
END NOTES
[ii]Writing this piece started long before the untimely death of Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi and it became apparent to update it to fit into
the current reality. Interests in the political life and legacy of Meles
Zenawi seem to come in waves. When asked about the legacy of Meles
Zenawi by the media I said I was impressed by his focus on the economy
and disappointed by his political record. His sudden death was harrowing
news as I had the hope that he would introduce political reform and
retire. This might have been the only path for a win-win situation for
him as a leader and the country he led.
[iii] Medhane Tadesse & John Young, TPLF: Reform or Decline. Review
of African Political Economy. London 2001.
[iv] This study inevitably has depended largely on free quotations from
earlier works of the author on the same subject and some discussions
with individuals, but for reasons that will be apparent the sources
cannot always be acknowledged.
[V] Many remember him in his portrayal of Mao Tse-tung in the TPLF Cadre
School.
[vi] TPLF: Reform or Decline in Review of African Political Economy
2001.
[vii] This partly explains the great deal of apprehension associated
with his death; that is why all life, it seems, is up in the air.
[viii] Upon meeting the Korean president Lee Myung-bak in 2010 Meles is
said to have greatly impressed him on his knowledge about the process of
industrialization in that country. ix Park Chung Hee, To Build A
Nation. Acropolis Books. Washington DC, 1971. His economic plan followed
the creation of a new constitution, the Yushin Constitution, which
increased the power of the government and suppressed political
opposition. The same happened in Ethiopia after the 2005 elections while
draconian laws were introduced after the 2010 elections