Behind Ethiopia's Power Plays
APRIL
12, 2015
Construction
workers in a section of Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, March 31, 2015. (Tiksa
Negeri / Reuters)
In 1991,
as the Cold War drew to an end, the only African country that had never been
colonized by European imperialists was but a pale reflection of the Great
Ethiopia that generations of the kingdom’s monarchs had pursued. A million
people lay dead following two decades of civil war. Secessionist movements in
the provinces clamored for self-determination. The economy was in tatters, and
another catastrophic famine loomed. The world came to associate Ethiopia with
images hoards of starving children, and the country’s regional and domestic
decline opened questions about its very survival.
Nationalist historians trace the Ethiopian state’s roots to the
second millennium BCE. With the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba as
one of its founding myths, Ethiopia’s history has between entwined with the
development of the Abrahamic faiths: the Jewish presence in the Ethiopian
Highlands predates the destruction of the Temple; Ethiopian Orthodox Christians
claim that the Ark of the Covenant is located in Axum; and the first Muslim hijra, or flight from Mecca to escape religious persecution, was to
Ethiopia. Mystical ancestry and military greatness provided legitimacy to
Ethiopia’s rulers for centuries as they controlled their formidably diverse
empire through a policy of violent internal assimilation and external
expansion.
But ideas of that greatness lay shattered as rebel soldiers from
the countryside marched on Addis Ababa in May 1991 and overthrew the (formerly
Soviet sponsored) dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The leftist liberation
movement promised a constitution that would give self-determination to
Ethiopia’s ninety-plus nations and nationalities and address the
political-economic inequities that had torn the country apart, but observers
were sceptical about the ability of the Horn of Africa’s once mightiest empire
to reconstitute itself. When the northeastern territory of Eritrea voted for
and got independence in 1993, it not only cut Ethiopia off from the sea, but
also risked triggering cascading claims for self-rule.
A quarter-century on, though, the mood in Addis Ababa could not
be more changed. Between 2001 and 2012–13, Ethiopia’s economy grew more than seven percent per year on
average. It was the only African country to move at a pace comparable to the
East Asian tigers—and to do so without a hydrocarbons boom or a huge mining
sector. The economic miracle resulted in real pro-poor growth, lifting millions
of people out of the vicious cycle of poverty, hunger, and poor health. While
the country’s population soared from roughly 40 million in the 1980s to nearly
100 million today, it achieved the 2000–15 Millennium Development Goals for
child mortality and is likely to also meet them for combating HIV/AIDS and rolling back malaria. Ethiopia is also making
giant strides tackling income volatility and illiteracy. And, with sequential
bumper harvests of Ethiopia’s staple crop, tef (a cereal similar to millet),
millions of smallholder farmers might well be able to escape the productivity
traps that historically have kept them in abject poverty.
Ethiopian
farmers collect wheat north of Addis Ababa, October 21, 2009. (Barry
Malone / Reuters)
Ethiopia’s economic resurgence has underwritten an ambitious
state-building project by the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF) that differs resoundingly from Washington Consensus
recipes of electoral democracy and laissez-faire economics. Ethiopia has become
the prime example of what my colleagues and I have termed “Africa’s illiberal state-builders.” In the aftermath of two
decades of war, the EPRDF established a durable political order that seeks
autonomy from internal and external threats, builds functional institutions,
and establishes hegemonic control over the political economy. The economy’s commanding
heights are in the hands of state-owned enterprises and business elites closely
wedded to the EPRDF project. In the last parliamentary election, the EPRDF and its allies won all
but two of 547 available seats. The party is emphatically statist when it comes
to development, and it relies on a relatively narrow social base, but its
organization is extraordinary in political and coercive terms. The latter is
derived from decades of armed struggle and close cooperation with the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), which advised the EPRDF in its drive to recruit five
million new members between 2005 and 2010 and has developed deep party-to-party
ties. There is no state in Africa where talk of a “China Model” sounds more
substantive than in Ethiopia under EPRDF rule.
With its domestic authority seemingly firmly consolidated, a
decade ago, the Ethiopian government re-embraced huge regional ambitions under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who governed Ethiopia from 1991
until his death in 2012. Central to this is a vision of a Great Ethiopia
“finally” fulfilling its historical destiny by casting off the shackles of
poverty to lead Africa: domestic and regional ambitions were always closely
entwined in the mind of the premier. On the one hand, Meles understood that
forging alliances and acquiring international legitimacy would boost the
Ethiopian economy and consolidate ERPDF rule. On the other hand, he saw a
domestically secure Ethiopia as uniquely capable of ridding Africa of the
epithet “the hopeless continent.”
To fulfil his ambitions, the prime minister developed excellent
relations with a wide variety of partners, guided by the belief that depending
too closely on one set of friends would expose Ethiopia to their whims. And so
Meles struck up personal friendships with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Bill
Gates and Joseph Stiglitz. He also went on trips to study the South Korean
economic miracle, and debated the economics of big infrastructure with Hu
Jintao. He played the role of spokesman of the developing world with equal
verve, representing Africa at the G–20 and climate change summits, where he
denounced the inequities of the global political economy and the
marginalization of his continent. And as the EPRDF developed its institutional
ties with the CCP, Meles saw no contradiction with Addis Ababa fulfilling the
role of Washington’s regional “deputy sheriff” in the Global War on Terror.
Ethiopian diplomats, generals, and spooks have been crucial U.S. allies in the
Horn of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. With U.S. officials fretting
over the stability of old allies in Egypt, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia’s
reliability and effectiveness in the war on terror is seen as vital.
A boy
stands in front of wind turbines at the Ashegoda Wind Farm 485 miles north of
Addis Ababa, October 25, 2013. (Kumerra Gemechu /
Reuters)
Meles, his successor Hailemariam Desalegn, and the party’s
powerful politburo cast their vision of a Great Ethiopia in terms of benign
regional hegemony: What is good for Ethiopia is good for the Horn of Africa.
And so, growing Ethiopian clout is increasingly projected through the regional
organizations that Addis Ababa dominates. Its immediate security agenda for the
region focuses on conflict prevention (it deployed thousands of Ethiopian UN peacekeepers to the Abyei border region between Sudan and South Sudan),
conflict management (hosting mediation efforts for the South Sudanese civil
war), and combating terrorism (continual military action against Somalia’s
Al-Shabab). Its longer-term strategy revolves around regional integration through energy and water infrastructure. The plan is to tie the
region to Ethiopia by exporting thousands of megawatts of electricity generated by dams on the Blue Nile and Ethiopian rivers.
This is a financially lucrative proposition for Ethiopia and its
energy-hungry neighbors, but above all, it would shift the regional balance of
power away from Nairobi, Khartoum, and Cairo to Addis Ababa. The construction
of the Grand Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam (GERD)
in particular is an audacious bid to reset power relations in the Nile Basin,
with one mega-project. The dam is Africa’s biggest infrastructural project;
because of the sheer volume of its reservoir, GERD will be singularly able to
undermine the hydropolitical status-quo that for decades gave Egypt such
disproportionate weight in regional politics. The EPRDF vision for regional
integration is thus one of economic interdependence, but very much on
Ethiopia’s terms. The relative gains of Ethiopia’s dam program are as important
as the absolute gains stressed in technocratic language of “benefit
sharing.”
Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is welcomed by Ethiopian Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn at the Bole International Airport in Ethiopia's capital
Addis Ababa, March 23, 2015.(Tiksa Negeri / Reuters)
Take, for example, the heavily publicized “Nile Deal” of March 2015 between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan:
the “Declaration of Principles” includes an
embryonic mechanism for dealing with water disputes and the recognition that
downstream countries such as Ethiopia have the right to prioritize electricity
generation. It is therefore a de facto admission by Cairo’s General Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi that Ethiopia, and not Egypt, is now the most influential state
on the Nile. In other words, Ethiopia’s vision of regional integration under
emerging Ethiopian hegemony is increasingly becoming a reality. African and
Arab states alike (and Egypt in particular) are fast recognizing that it is better
to improve relations with Addis Ababa now, than try to postpone it and be
forced into cooperation in five years’ time with an even stronger Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s emergence as a regional hegemon is, of course, not
inevitable. World Bank economists, ambassadors, and NGOs fret over the
stability of the country’s financial system, the enduring poverty in rural
areas, and the discontent of millions of citizens who lack civil liberties.
Internationally, Ethiopia has contained conflict in South Sudan and Somalia but
has not been successful at resolving it—historical grievances against Addis Ababa run deep in the region and this limits its capacity to act as a
neutral broker. Moreover, “no war, no peace” relations with Eritrea remain the
Ethiopian security establishment’s obsession, with the hawks offering little
beyond continued containment of what they call Africa’s “rogue regime.”
Ethiopia needs Eritrea’s ports to further boost its economic transformation,
yet Addis Ababa has no credible plan to either deal with a predicted collapse
of Eritrea (and the giant refugee flows this would generate) or to spur reform
from within.
Ethiopia has come a long way since the dark days of a
quarter-century ago. Its resurgence, domestically and internationally, is
unmistakable. Never have so many Ethiopians had so much reason to be optimistic
and confident about the future. The Ethiopian vision of a Nile Basin where
resources no longer lead to zero-sum competition and violent (proxy) wars, but
rather to joint strategies to tackle poverty, unemployment, and climate change
deserves wide-ranging support. Simultaneously, however, Ethiopia’s rulers know
that they will face a long, uphill struggle to persuade their neighbours of
their good intentions: In a region where interdependence has historically been
considered a political liability as opposed to an economic opportunity,
Ethiopia’s strategy generates plenty of blowback. How successful the country
will prove in its mission will determine the sustainability of its own
resurgence and the future of the Horn of Africa.
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