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Suffragio takes a break — until next week

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Suffragio is on hiatus for the next week — I’ll have extremely minimal access to the Internet, and I’ll be busy meeting new friends in a new place.

In the meanwhile, there’s going to be quite a bit of electoral politics to watch:

  • Ireland Ireland Iconvotes on May 22 in a referendum to permit same-sex marriage. If polls are correct, it would mark the first time an entire country chooses by direct vote to legalize marriage equality. Ireland, however, remains a socially conservative country where the Catholic church’s influence is strong. Abortion was essentially legalized only in 2013, and there’s every possibility that anti-marriage forces could win an upset. Polls may not be accurately capturing ‘shy’ anti-LGBT voters and, although there’s a majority of Irish voters in favor of marriage equality, it might not be as motivated as anti-marriage voters.
    RELATED: Scotland passes same-sex marriage,
    joining England and Wales
  • Ethiopia votes oethiopia_640n May 24 in what it calls an election. But there’s no indication that the vote will be free and fair, especially in a government climate that disrespects press freedom and has suppressed Oromo and other ethnic groups. Prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, a southerner, is the nominal successor to the late Meles Zenawi, but there’s no real indication he is anything more than a figurehead. Meles’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, or የኢትዮጵያ ሕዝቦች አብዮታዊ ዲሞክራሲያዊ ግንባር) and, in particular, Tigray figures within its leadership, continue to call the shots.
    RELATED: Can Hailemariam retain power in Ethiopia?
  • Poland vPoland_Flag_Iconotes on May 24 in a runoff to determine the chiefly ceremonial president. Polish president Bronisław Komorowski narrowly trailed his conservative rival Andrzej Duda in the first round on May 10, with over 20% of voters choosing neither candidate and instead supporting former rock musician Paweł Kukiz. The two contenders are now facing a too-close-to-call runoff. If Komorowski loses (and even if he narrowly wins reelection), it could mean trouble for the ruling Platforma Obywatelska (PO, Civic Platform), which has held power since 2007.
    RELATED: Komorowski trails in shock Polish presidential vote result
    RELATED: Kopacz puts imprint on Poland’s new government
  • Spain holds regSpain_Flag_Iconional elections on May 24, a harbinger of December’s general election, in 13 of its 17 autonomous communities. The most populous include Madrid, Valencia and Castile and León. The elections will be a test for the two traditional Spanish parties, prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Partido Popular (PP, People’s Party) and the center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party), which have both presided over difficult economic conditions and budget contractions in the past six years. It’s also a test for two newer groups that hope to displace them, the anti-austerity, leftist Podemos and the centrist  Ciudadanos (C’s, Citizens).
    RELATED: Socialists thrive in Andalusian regional elections

Upon return, on May 26, I’ll have some brief thoughts on each election and, in particular, Ethiopia, which is one of the most fascinating and dynamic countries in sub-Saharan Africa today, even if its political system remains essentially authoritarian.

On May 31, Italy holds regional elections in several parts of the country, including some of the largest Italian regions like Puglia, Campania, Tuscany and Veneto.

The most important elections of the summer come on one day — June 7. That’s when Mexico holds midterm congressional elections and Turkey holds parliamentary elections.

It’s still a quiet spring and summer for electoral politics after the blitz of 2014’s elections. But there’s still much to look forward to later this autumn — from Guatemala to Canada, from Burma/Myanmar to  Denmark and from Portugal to Argentina. And the lull in electoral politics will provide a chance to delve into the fascinating political dynamics of China and the Middle East — just because a country doesn’t have elections doesn’t mean it doesn’t have politics. Suffragio will be there for all of it.

In the meanwhile…

15 in 15, Argentina, Burma/Myanmar, Burundi, Canada, Ethiopia, Greece, Haiti, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Venezuela

15 in 2015: Fifteen world elections to watch in 2015

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2015Photo credit to letyg84 / 123RF.

Over the past 12 months, the world witnessed a pivotal general election in India, presidential elections in Indonesia, congressional midterm elections in the United States, European parliamentary elections and elections (of varying competitiveness) in over a dozen of additional countries in the world, all pivotal in their own ways — Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, South Africa, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Serbia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Belgium, Sweden and independence referenda in Scotland and Catalunya.

After such a crowded 2014 calendar, it’s not surprising that 2015 will not bring the same volume of electoral activity. But there’s still plenty at stake, especially as volatile oil prices, Chinese economic slowdown and the return of recession in Europe and Japan could stifle global economic potential. The most important of those elections that will determine policy that affects the lives of billions of people worldwide.

Without further ado, here is Suffragio‘s guide to the top 15 elections to watch as 2015 unfolds — beginning in Greece, where the government fell earlier this week.  Continue reading 15 in 2015: Fifteen world elections to watch in 2015 →

Cameroon

The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon

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As soon as she stepped off the airplane, she became the instant, unexpected hit of the White House’s summit of African leaders in Washington, D.C.cameroon

No, it’s not Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, who cancelled plans to visit Washington in the wake of the devastating Ebola outbreak in west Africa.

Africa’s only other female head of state, Catherine Samba-Panza, who is struggling as interim president of the Central African Republic to pacify what’s now been a year of civil war, wasn’t even invited to the summit. (Under the African Union’s rules, no CAR leader was eligible to attend until the country holds new, democratic elections.)

Instead, it’s Chantal Biya, whose flamboyant hairstyle has grabbed headlines from New York to Los Angeles. The Washington Post‘s hard-hitting coverage noted when Chantal Biya ‘and her hair’ touched down in Washington, DC. It’s disappointing that the US media, given so many governance crises across sub-Saharan Africa, has emphasized style over substance during this week’s summit.

Chantal Biya’s husband, Paul Biya, has served as president of Cameroon, a west-central African country that shares a long border with Nigeria, since 1982 — the second year of the Reagan administration in the United States. His 32-year record isn’t exactly admirable. It’s a country that has a GDP per capita of less than $1,300, according to the International Monetary Fund, and it would be even less if not for oil production. For a first lady who confesses a weakness for Dior and Chanel, her husband presides over a country of nearly 22 million people where nearly 40% live at or below the poverty level.  Continue reading The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon →

14 in 14, Australia, CAR (Centrafrique), Catalonia, DRC / Congo, Eritrea, European Union, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Spain, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam

14 potential game-changers for world politics in 2014

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Though I rang in the new year with a list of 14 world elections to watch in the coming year (and 14 more honorable mentions to keep an eye on), I wanted to showcase a few more thoughts about what to watch for in world politics and foreign affairs in 2014.

Accordingly, here are 14 possible game-changers — they’re not predictions per se, but neither are they as far-fetched as they might seem.  No one can say with certainty that they will come to pass in 2014.  Instead, consider these something between rote predictions (e.g., that violence in Iraq is getting worse) and outrageous fat-tail risks (e.g., the impending breakup of the United States).

There’s an old album of small pieces conducted by the late English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, a delightfully playful album entitled Lollipops that contains some of the old master’s favorite, most lively short pieces.

Think of these as Suffragio‘s 14 world politics lollipops to watch in 2014.

We start in France… Continue reading 14 potential game-changers for world politics in 2014 →

Libya, United States

Neither Republicans nor Democrats learned the real lesson of Benghazi

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In the United States, ‘Benghazi’ has become a code word for conservative Republicans hinting at a dark cover-up within the administration of US president Barack Obama about who actually perpetrated the attack on September 11, 2012 against the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya’s second-most populous city.Libya_Flag_IconUSflag

The furor stems largely from comments by Susan Rice, then the US ambassador to the United  Nations and a candidate to succeed Hillary Clinton as US secretary of state, that indicated the attack was entirely spontaneous, caused by protests to a purported film trailer, ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ that ridiculed Islam and the prophet Mohammed.  Republicans immediately seized on the comments, arguing that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack, which left four US officials dead, including Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya at the time, a volatile period following the US-backed NATO efforts to assist rebels in their effort to end the 42-year rule of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

An amazingly detailed report in The New York Times by David Kirkpatrick on Saturday reveals that there’s no evidence that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack.  While it was more planned than the spontaneous anti-film riots that rocked the US embassy in Cairo the same day, the Benghazi incident was carried out by local extremist militias.  Kirkpatrick singles out, in particular, Abu Khattala, a local construction worker and militia leader, but he also identifies other radical militias within Benghazi, such as Ansar al-Sharia, which may not have been responsible, but still seem relatively sympathetic to anti-American sentiment:

Mohammed Ali al-Zahawi, the leader of Ansar al-Shariah, told The Washington Post that he disapproved of attacking Western diplomats, but he added, “If it had been our attack on the U.S. Consulate, we would have flattened it.”

Similarly named groups have emerged throughout north Africa and the Arabian peninsula over the past few years — a group calling itself Ansar al-Sharia, not ‘al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ (AQAP), took control of portions of southern Yemen after the battle of Zinjibar in 2011.  The United States ultimately listed ‘Ansar al-Sharia’ as an alias for AQAP, but it’s unclear the degree to which the two are (or were) separate.  It also underscores the degree to which local Islamist groups like AQAP are necessarily fueled by local interests and concerns .  Most Yemenis fighting alongside AQAP are doing so for local reasons in a country that remains split on tribal and geographic lines — South Yemen could claim to be an independent state as recently as 1990.  Groups also named Ansar al-Sharia also operate  in Mali, Tunisia, Mauritania, Morocco and Egypt, and some of them have links to al-Qaeda affiliates and personnel.  Others do not.

If Khattala, as The New York Times reports, is the culprit behind the consulate attack (and the US government continues to seek him in response to the attack), he fits the profile less of a notorious international terror mastermind and more of a local, off-kilter eccentric:

Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, a member of Parliament from Benghazi close to many hard-line Islamists, who spent 22 years in Abu Salim, said, “Even in prison, he was always alone.”  He added: “He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit. I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?”

Moreover, if there’s a scandal involving the Obama administration, it’s the way in which the United States came to enter the Libyan conflict in 2011.  The Obama administration refused to seek authorization from the US Congress when it ordered military action in Libya in support of the NATO mission and to establish a no-fly zone, pushing a potentially unconstitutional interpretation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which requires Congressional authorization for open-ended conflicts that last for more than 60 days.  Ironically, Obama’s case for ignoring Congress was actually stronger with respect to potential airstrikes on Syria earlier this year, though Obama’ ultimately decided to seek Congressional support for a potential military strike in August in response to the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s military. 

Republicans, who control the US House of Representatives but not the US Senate, the upper house of the US Congress, just as they did in 2011, could have (and should have) held Obama more accountable for his decision vis-à-vis the War Powers Resolution.  Instead, they’ve colluded with a conservative echo chamber that mutters ‘Benghazi’ like some unhinged conspiracy theory, suggesting that somehow the Obama administration purposefully lied about what happened that day.  The reality is that the Obama administration was as caught off guard as anyone by the attack.  Democrats that would have howled with disgust over Benghazi if it had happened under the previous administration of Republican George W. Bush have remained incredibly docile during the Obama administration — to say nothing of the Obama administration’s encroaching internet surveillance, ongoing war in Afghanistan, frequent use of drone attacks and pioneering use of ‘targeted killings’ (including assassination of US citizens).

Kirkpatrick’s report showed that while US intelligence agencies were tracing an individual with tangential ties to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, they largely missed the more local threats like Khattala and Ansar al-Sharia:

The C.I.A. kept its closest watch on people who had known ties to terrorist networks abroad, especially those connected to Al Qaeda. Intelligence briefings for diplomats often mentioned Sufian bin Qumu, a former driver for a company run by Bin Laden.  Mr. Qumu had been apprehended in Pakistan in 2001 and detained for six years at Guantánamo Bay before returning home to Derna, a coastal city near Benghazi that was known for a high concentration of Islamist extremists.

But neither Mr. Qumu nor anyone else in Derna appears to have played a significant role in the attack on the American Mission, officials briefed on the investigation and the intelligence said.  “We heard a lot about Sufian bin Qumu,” said one American diplomat in Libya at the time. “I don’t know if we ever heard anything about Ansar al-Shariah.”

That, in turn, highlights the real lesson of Benghazi — both the Obama administration and the national security apparatus that it has empowered, and the conservative opposition to the Obama administration are missing the larger problem with the way that the United States engages the world.  It’s a point that rings most clearly in the words of Khattala himself:

“The enmity between the American government and the peoples of the world is an old case,” he said. “Why is the United States always trying to use force to implement its agendas?”….

“It is always the same two teams, but all that changes is the ball,” he said in an interview. “They are just laughing at their own people.” Continue reading Neither Republicans nor Democrats learned the real lesson of Benghazi →

Egypt

What comes next for Egypt

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sabahi

PARIS, France — Honestly, I cannot tell you  (and no one outside Egypt can tell you) what comes next for the country.egypt_flag_new

If the army has decided that Mohammed Morsi is no longer the head of state, well, Morsi’s probably no longer the head of state.  That’s significant, and it’s probably the most significant moment since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power over two years ago in February 2011.  It’s even more significant because Morsi himself elevated Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to the top of the Egyptian military last summer.  Revolutionaries who wanted a liberal democracy will be happy with today’s apparent putsch by the Egyptian military after days of illiberal restraints upon anti-Morsi protestors. Proponents of pure democracy, however, will be unhappy.  After all, despite the dissatisfaction with Morsi, he was the duly elected president of the Egyptian electorate.

Though Egypt now seems headed toward a state where a secular military ‘guarantees’ the Egyptian democracy — giving the Egyptian military the role that Turkey’s military played for nearly a century in Turkish democracy — it’s not certain that Egypt is anywhere near the end of its revolutionary tumult.  If anything, its future is now more likely violent and uncertain.

What comes next is incredibly unsure.  In the immediate future, Aldy Mansour seems sets to become the choice of the Egyptian military as head of state.  But who knows if the Muslim Brotherhood will contest that decision.

In the meanwhile, keep an eye on two persons.

The first is Ahmed Shafiq, who only narrowly lost the presidency to Morsi last year.  He was quite clearly the preferred choice of the Egyptian military, and if it wants to install a leader with the most amount of democratic legitimacy, Shafiq is their man.

The other is Hamdeen Sabahi.  If the army looks to place a civilian leader into power, it would be Sabahi, who placed a narrow third to Morsi and Shafiq in the 2012 presidential election, and who has assumed a position as the most credible opposition leader to Morsi.  As a nationalist political leader, it was Sabahi who seemed like, more than either Morsi or Shafiq, the next potential Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only 2012 presidential candidate with the scope and ambition to chart a course toward a new era of Egyptian dominance of the Arab world.

Egypt, it seems pretty clear, won’t put up with a government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for the next year.  It has economic problems that, unlike in 2011, it can no longer push aside.  Egypt needs a full-time president, with a full-time agenda for the Egyptian economy and, Morsi, with his increasingly pro-Islamist agenda, was simply not in a position to fulfill that need.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi have failed to make even the smallest progress.  So the armed forces will be looking to the civilian most likely to succeed where Morsi failed — and that’s more likely than not going to be Shafiq or Sabahi.

We’re in for a very long 48 hours or more in Egypt — no one can tell you what will happen.  Uncharted territory.

Egypt, Ethiopia

Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics?

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Though you might think of the Nile as a primarily Egyptian river in Africa, its roots go much deeper.  The White Nile originates far within sub-Saharan Africa at Lake Victoria, winding up through Juba, the capital of the newly-minted country of South Sudan, and the Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in northeastern Ethiopia, and it joins the While Nile near Khartoum, the capital of (north) Sudan. egypt_flag_newethiopia_640

But the rights to the water originating from the Blue Nile have become the subject of an increasingly tense showdown between Egypt and Ethiopia, with Ethiopia moving forward to bring its long-planned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam into operating, sparking a diplomatic showdown between the two countries and a crisis between two relatively new leaders, both of whom took office in summer 2012 — Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

The Renaissance Dam and the politics of the Nile were no less fraught between former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi.  But with the project moving forward, Hailemariam and Morsi are locked in a diplomatic tussle that could escalate into something much worse.  Morsi has recently warned Ethiopia that ‘all options are open,’ which conceivably includes an Egyptian air attack to bomb the Renaissance Dam, which would initiate military confrontation between the second-most and third-most populous countries on the continent of Africa.

The Renaissance Dam is Meles’s legacy project and, with a price tag of between $4 billion and $5 billion, it’s embedded with an atypical amount of Ethiopian national pride.  When it is completed, the dam will make Ethiopia a huge hydroelectric producer, perhaps Africa’s largest energy producer, with an estimated generation of 6,000 megawatts of electricity.  To put that in perspective, the Hoover Dam in the southwestern United States has a maximum generation of around 2,100 megawatts and Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam has a maximum of around 2,500 megawatta, while China’s Three Gorges Dam has a maximum capacity of 22,500 megawatts.

Egypt’s chief concern is that the dam will reduce the amount of water that currently flows from the Blue Nile to the Nile Delta, and Ethiopia has already started to divert the course of the Blue Nile to start filling the Renaissance Dam’s reservoir (see below a map of the Nile and its tributaries).  While that process is expected to temporarily reduce the amount of water that flows to Sudan and to Egypt for up to three years, Egyptian officials have voiced concerns that the Renaissance Dam might permanently reduce the flow of the Nile through Egypt, despite technical reassurances to the contrary.  Moreover, Egyptian officials point to colonial-era treaties with the United Kingdom from 1929 and 1959 that purported to divide the Nile’s riparian rights solely as between Egypt and the Sudan, without regard for Ethiopian, Ugandan, Tanzanian or other upriver national claims.  Ethiopian anger at exclusion from the 1959 Nile basin negotiations led, in part, to the decision by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I to claim the independence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the Coptic Orthodox Church based in Alexandria, Egypt.

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It’s clear however, where Ethiopia’s Nile neighbors stand on the issue — the leaders of South Sudan and Uganda have voiced their approval for the project, and even Sudan, which will also mark some reduction in Nile water while the dam is constructed, is inclined to support it, which will result in a wider source of crucial electricity throughout the Horn of Africa, east Africa and beyond.  Ironically, it could even be Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for atrocities stemming from the Darfur humanitarian crisis in the mid-2000s, who has the regional credibility with both Cairo and Addis Ababa to diffuse the crisis.  Continue reading Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics? →

Ethiopia

Can Hailemariam retain power in Ethiopia?

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Hailemariam Desalegn was always a curious leader to succeed former Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi after Meles’s death late in August.

He’s from the south when Meles himself came from the far northern Tigray ethnic group (Meles’s rule was itself a derogation from hundreds of years of Amharic emperors in Ethiopia).  Hailermariam hails not even from among the largest southern ethnic group, the Oromo, but the much smaller Wolyata group, which represents just under 2.5% of Ethiopian’s population.

Hailemariam is also somewhat new to the highest echelons of Ethiopian power — he became deputy prime minister and foreign minister under Meles only in October 2010 after serving as president of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region from 2001 to 2006.

As a southerner, however, Hailemariam was thought after Meles’s death to have less-than-firm control over the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, or የኢትዮጵያ ሕዝቦች አብዮታዊ ዲሞክራሲያዊ ግንባር) as an outsider from the dominant faction of the EPRDM, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (the TPLF, ሕዝባዊ ወያኔ ሓርነት ትግራይ,), which retains control over Ethiopia’s security apparatus.  Hailemariam’s support base lies not among the Tigray ethnic group of the far north of Ethiopia or the previously dominant Amharic ethnic group of the broad north-central highlands, but in the historically less-than-powerful south.

As such, when Hailemariam assumed power as interim prime minister in August, few people believed he would last.

But he was elected as prime minister formally in September, perhaps precisely because he’s associated with none of the various Tigray factions, which means that he should have some time until the next elections in 2015 to consolidate the office and his power base as Ethiopia’s new prime minister, even as Ethiopia continues to mourn Meles.

His first major step, in what appears to be a power-balancing cabinet reshuffle on November 29, was to appoint two additional deputy prime ministers — Debretsion Gebremichael, from the TPLF, is also minister of information technology, and Muktar Kedir, from the Oromo faction within the EPRDF, have joined Demeke Mekonnen, Hailemariam’s first deputy prime minister, who is from the Amhara faction of the EPRDM and minister of education.

Hailemariam also promoted Ethiopia’s minister of health Tedros Adhanom to become Ethiopia’s foreign minister.  Also a top Tigray official, Tedros has served as minister of health since 2005 and spent part of his childhood and undergraduate studies in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.  He’s attracted international praise for his work as health minister — for example, he won the 2011 Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian Award for his work to reduce HIV/AIDS and malaria in Ethiopia.  Despite his obvious qualifications, Tedros is close to Meles’s widow, Azeb Mesfin, who is also a member of the nine-person executive committee of the EPRDF, and is thought to have designs on winning power in her own right.

It’s worth noting that this is only the third transfer of power in Ethiopia in the past century — the country’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, came to power in 1928, was deposed in a military-led coup in 1974 and ultimately died in captivity in 1975.  The Derg, the Soviet-style commission that ruled until 1991, with often disastrous result, was overthrown by Meles and the TPLF, which eventually morphed into a government dominated by Tigray officials.

So the apparent seamlessness of the post-Meles transition (so far, at least), and the lack of any political violence or upheaval marks somewhat of a success for Ethiopia.  But the fundamental question remains whether Hailemariam will be able to govern in his own right:

[The succession] raises questions about how far any new prime minister can reshape the political landscape and has led to open speculation that Hailemariam’s appointment is a calculated political move by and for the TPLF, allowing them to maintain de facto political authority behind a cloak of ethnic pluralism.

Meles’ death exposes the dangers of a state built around one man, but he also leaves behind a formidable political machine. For Hailemariam the challenge is whether and how he can manage the machine. Members of competing elites may fight for control of this machine and ethnic movements on the periphery could be emboldened to exploit a perceived power vacuum.

As for Ethiopia, its government will face any number of political and economic tasks in the coming years. Continue reading Can Hailemariam retain power in Ethiopia? →

Ethiopia, Personal

Some thoughts on Meles Zenawi’s legacy in Ethiopia

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Although Meles Zenawi died in mid-August, he’s still very much an active presence in Ethiopia — so much that he still eclipses his successor, prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

Not to be flip, but I know a personality cult when I see one — and no matter where you go in Ethiopia, Meles follows.

He looks down from large signs, not just in the capital of Addis Ababa, but far beyond throughout the Amharic and Tigray hinterlands of northern Ethiopia as well.  He’s also on dashboards of vehicles, and he graces storefronts, the stalls in labyrinthine markets and insurance companies, not to mention government offices and museums..  In downtown Addis, near the Hilton, there’s an entire wall featuring a dozen or so larger-than life panels picturing Meles.

You’d be forgiven if you thought Meles was actually still in charge, although there are more than enough memorial displays, too, to let you know Ethiopia’s still in a sort of mourning:

In the ten days I spent in northern and central Ethiopia, I found much in the country — 85 million people and growing fast — and its people to give me hope about the country’s future, but I also saw a lot of room for institutional improvement — in education and literacy, in transportation and infrastructure, in providing services to improve health and lessen poverty, and also in building more robust democratic institutions and better regional relations.

In the same way, I found that if you dig underneath the surface of it all, many Ethiopians have an equally conflicted view of Meles’s legacy. Continue reading Some thoughts on Meles Zenawi’s legacy in Ethiopia →

Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi has died

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The prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, has died after a long illness. He was 57.  Deputy prime minister Haile-Mariam Desalegne will be sworn in as acting prime minister.

Since taking power in 1991, Ethiopia really hasn’t known a leader in the post-Cold War era other than Meles.  He inherited a country decimated from a grinding famine in the 1980s and a war with Eritrea (that resulted in Eritrea’s independence in 1991) and transformed it into a stable regional power in a country that’s relatively untouched by the colonial experience, but which is the second-most populous African nation after Nigeria.

Meles’s death comes just days after the death of the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, Abune Paulos, at age 77, who was himself appointed by Meles.

Meles came to power after participating in the coup that removed Mengistu Haile Mariam, a leader of the Derg that governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987 — Mengistu ruled in his own right through 1991. He presided over the writing of a new federalism-based constitution for Ethiopia in 1994, and he kind of opened Ethiopia to the ritual of regular elections, however rigged in favor of Meles.

In his last election in 2010, Meles and his Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, or የኢትዮጵያ ሕዝቦች አብዮታዊ ዲሞክራሲያዊ ግንባር) won the majority in the Ethiopian parliament, despite widespread allegations of fraud.  His victory in the relatively fairer 2005 election was met with massive — and sometimes violent — protest, which Meles met with a general crackdown on political dissidents.  For all the stability that Meles brought to Ethiopia, democratic norms and institutions were not among his chief reforms.  For example, opposition leader Birtukan Medeksa was imprisoned from 2007 to 2010.

But Meles can certainly be credited with taking steps to strengthen Ethiopia’s economy — it has grown fantastically since Meles came to power, but for two blips in 1998 and in 2003.  Last year saw the lowest GDP growth since 2004, but it still managed to top 7%.  Ethiopia’s significant growth belies its horrific starting point as one of the poorest countries on the planet — its GDP per capita is just barely over $1,000. Continue reading Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi has died →