Why Zenawi leaves an indelible mark in Africa’s politics

By Okello Oculi

Meles Zenawi was a heroic revolutionary at home and a modern technocratic Pan-Africanist and post-Cold War strategist beyond Ethiopia’s borders.

He was a dictator who did not hesitate to silence those who opposed him in elections he repeatedly rigged; and a puppet in the service of an American plot to suppress Muslim nationalism in Africa.

Both assessments may have elements of validity. They give us a springboard from which to do a remembrance of one of the rulers who came into power by passing through revolutionary armed struggle against Africa’s own local post-colonial rulers.

In his own case, he was a product of a revolutionary youth movement, led by students of Addis Ababa University, which had felt betrayed by a military junta that had itself overthrown and murdered Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 as he ruled in his 58th year in power.

Meles Zenawi started his safari in power with the clear advantage that the dirty work of breaking down the pillars of Haile Selassie’s imperial power had been done by Mengistu Haile Mariam. Egged on by radical university students and as a way of drawing them away from the seat of power Addis Ababa, the military rulers (known as the “Dergue”), carried out a redistribution of land from a serfdom, which was so deeply entrenched over the centuries that its intended beneficiaries were reluctant to accept land ownership fearing that landlords would come back with slaughter and fury as they got their land back.

Not only was parliament also disbanded and the monarchy unbelievably abolished, but, acting on a rumour that the Americans planned to invade and free politicians and government officials in detention, had rushed to the prison and slaughtered all of them. A sophisticated class of political engineers with a long and tested tradition of plotting for power were in one fell swoop swept off the stage by the time Meles and fellow fighters took power in May 1991.

Imperial gridlock

Mengistu had also put socialism on the stage of public administration in Ethiopia despite, subsequently, hiding under its cover to slaughter the students who had popularised it in their struggle to inject democratic fresh air through cracks in Haile Selassie’s imperial gridlock.

For a ruling group who came from among the Tigraway who constitute only six per cent of Ethiopia’s population, the ideological legacy of socialism and its Soviet legacies of messianic “vanguard single party” rule under Mengistu had left them valuable tools for keeping power away from the former ruling Amhara nationality who constitute 27 per cent of the population; as well as a stirred formerly dominated Oromo nationality who constitute 35 per cent of the population.

With a strategy meant to appease the Oromo and disintegrate the power structure of Amhara rule, Zenawi and his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, EPRDF, set up a federal system of government rooted in nationality identities.

The Oromo, for example, not only got a political space of their own, free from Amhara domination, but also one in which the language of administration, including traffic signboards, was in their language, oromia, and not Amharic. Amharic was always a tool of domination against which resentment could be fanned.

Loss of imperial power, cultural hegemony, and economic power in feudal land ownership, was expected to animate Amhara elite into fighting to roll back a military minority Tigrinya power over them. With Sudan and Libya to the west; Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea, and Somali nationalists hungering to yank back the Ogaden region, EPRDF was going to experience subversive intrusions aimed at arousing the Oromo to fight for power. The fight against Somalia would draw in Soviet support and Cuban troops in 1998.

An Ethiopian Professor at Howard University was convinced that the war between Zenawi and his counterpart in Eritrea was rooted in Zenawi’s group of Tigres taunting the Eritrean rulers as sons of their cooks and houseboys.

The war of June 1988 to December 12, 2000, between Ethiopia and Eritrea was estimated to have cost Ethiopia more than $3 billion. This was on top of Ethiopia having sent troops into Somalia in July 2006 to fight Islamists – who might link up with the Oromo Liberation Movement inside Ethiopia – and a drought-induced famine for which the country had to seek food aid amounting to $325 million.

Burning coals

Between November 2005 and February 2006, the regime dragged over 3,000 Oromo nationalists into preventive detention. Zenawi was dancing among burning coals.

This picture also explains his handling of the elections of 2005 and 2010. Commentators accused his regime of much naivety in assuming that land reform and the sharing of power into nine nationality-based states, would win the election for EPRDF.

Their underestimation of fear among village communities that former landlords would come back to reclaim their lands combined with a groundswell of Amhara pride led Zenawi’s regime into a panic when opposition parties won seats even in Addis Ababa. In a panic, the regime shot and killed 36 demonstrators and arrested up to 3,000 opposition politicians. 

By the 2010 elections, however, researchers found that rural communities had begun to appreciate the health clinics, schools, roads, fertilisers, and lack of seizure of their annual harvests by equivalents of former landlords had combined with intensive political education to earn genuine legitimacy and support for a public administration of change for better lives.

The picture on the ground was not rosy. Meles, a trained economist, had inherited a country whose literacy rate was miserable. After his 17 years in power, it had crawled up to only 29 per cent of the population. Only 17 per cent of the population lived in urban areas where piped water, electricity, modern sewage structures, and industrial production may be easily established.

As high as 46 per cent of the population are below the productive age of 15 years, while poverty has ensured that only three per cent of the population live up to be 65 years of age.

Only seven of 1,000 people own television sets, and there are two vehicles on roads for every 1,000 people. The Government had been dragged into too many wars to push even the little money it earned from foreign trade and aid into economic growth. It supported a huge and unproductive army of 138,000 troops.

Ruthless exploitation

Reversing 58 years of Haile Selassie’s imperial rule over a population which ruthless exploitation kept wrecked inside poverty, illiteracy and early death, required an environment of calm cooperation which Amhara elite and Islamist-nationality groups were incapable of allowing Zenawi to benefit from.

Meles joined cerebral cohorts like Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdullayi Wade of Senegal, and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria to draw other African leaders into crafting and adopting a common economic and political governance architecture and vision that has come to be known as the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development, (Nepad).

Horrified that Muammar Gadaffi was likely to buy support from moneyless African leaders to win their support for the movement of the headquarters of the African Union out of Addis Ababa to Tripoli, Zenawi rushed to win Chinese support for a construction project similar to the Tazara Railway from Dar-es- Salaam port terminal in Tanzania to Lusaka in Zambia.

China constructed the new $200 million worth headquarters of the African Union. It was most fitting that it was opened and South Africa as a new entrant into African international affairs, would field a winning candidate who would be the first woman ever to head the AU before he was gone.

The writer is a Ugandan novelist, scholar and poet living in Abuja, Nigeria. okellooculi@yahoo.com