Ethiopia’s long-benighted opposition dares to dream of a democratic Ethiopia.
These days, optimists rarely get the opportunity to say “I told you so.”
Yet the zeal with which Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s 41-year-old Prime Minister has attacked his country’s political and economic crises caught many by surprise. Almost overnight, he became the most popular politician in a country of 100 million in the strategically vital Horn of Africa that commands some of the world’s busiest and most dangerous shipping lanes.
Following years of protest, Mr. Ahmed entered office on April 2nd promising to be a peacemaker and reformer. Within weeks, he met with spoke with opposition leaders to discuss “opening political space.” Who had been sentenced for dubious terrorism charges under a law passed by a ruling coalition that won 100 percent of the vote in 2015 elections, according to the ruling coalition. In July, Mr. Ahmed set his sights on achieving peace with Ethiopia’s longtime rival Eritrea and opening up the $194 billion economy to private investment.
“The seriousness of reform is no longer in doubt.” said Mohammed Ademo, an Oromo journalist and founder of OPride.com who returned to Ethiopia after a 16-year exile in the United States.
The reforms are a response to protests that erupted in late 2015 that plunged the country into a political crisis. Not for the first time, security forces fired live rounds in its attempts at riot control and hundreds of protestors were killed. The government gave itself emergency powers to imprison protestors and blamed the protests on Ethiopia’s diaspora media networks.
However, this strategy failed to restore order. In late 2017, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) began to release political prisoners. Pressure within the ruling coalition for new tactics led Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn to resign unexpectedly in February.
“People understand their own power” Mr. Ademo said. If the government were to back away from reforms, “it wouldn’t go down well with the people of Ethiopia” and people would be back in the streets, according to Mr. Ademo.
In July, Mr. Ahmed agreed to implement a 2000 peace agreement with Eritrea, ending the state of war. Ethiopia handed over a near-worthless strip of desert to Eritrea in return for access to Eritrean ports. In the 1998 war, the two sides deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers in miles of WWI-style trenches that bristled with ex-Soviet tanks and heavy artillery. Within two years, as many as 100,000 people were killed.
Decades of wars and famines fueled a brain drain that robbed Ethiopia of some of its most skilled workers. Those who fled during the 1980s and 1990s established communities in Minneapolis and Washington D.C that attracted later migrants. The number of Ethiopia-born Americans grew from 63,000 in 2000 to over 200,000 in 2015. A study that year found that 75 percent of Ethiopia’s professionals had left in the prior decade.
“Some of my friends spent a decade in refugee camps” said Mohammed Ademo, who left for the United States in 2002 after being in and out of prison as a student activist. “There was no freedom, no academic freedom of any kind. Especially for Oromo.”
Mr. Ahmed used the promise of political reforms as an olive branch to Ethiopia’s diaspora. In July, Mr. Ademo accompanied the Prime Minister on his six-day visit to Ethiopian communities in Washington D.C, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Instead of blaming them for internal unrest like previous governments, Mr. Ahmed promised the cheering crowds he would bring democracy to Ethiopia in a speech on the theme, “Break the Wall, Build the Bridge.”
“I believe the Prime Minister is finally turning Ethiopia around” said Adam Abay, an American student whose parents fled Ethiopia in the 1980s.
“It’s incredible how much it has changed.” Mr. Abay said. “The last time I was there I was eight. Now, they have paved roads and skyscrapers, and hope.”
The restoration of diplomatic ties between Eritrea and Ethiopia allowed thousands of families separated by the heavily guarded border to reconnect. Families called each other over reconnected phone lines, often for the first time in 20 years, and Ethiopian Airlines resumed flights to Eritrea.
Eritrea’s acrimonious relations with its neighbors and appalling treatment of its own citizens left it a pariah state. Young men flee conscription from its army and compulsory-labor program. The regime’s tight grip on its people has earned it the nickname “Africa’s North Korea.” In 2009, the United Nations Security Council levied sanctions against Eritrea amidst accusations it was supporting al-Shabaab, a terror group in Somalia.
Mr. Ahmed seized the opportunity to bring Eritrea out from the cold and in doing so re-orient Ethiopia’s foreign policy as a good neighbor in an unstable region. Ethiopia used its rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council to recommend that sanctions on Eritrea be lifted. Subsequently, Ethiopia offered to resolve Eritrea’s decade-old dispute with Djibouti.
The Eritrean war also robbed Ethiopia of access to the sea, leaving regional trade to atrophy. Prior to the war, two-thirds of landlocked Ethiopia’s trade went through Eritrean ports. Now, Ethiopian exports are dangerously reliant on a single Chinese-built railway from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to over-crowded ports in tiny Djibouti.
The constraints on trade have severely cramped Ethiopia’s growth. DP World, a shipping firm locked in a dispute over a commercial port in Djibouti, estimates that the entire Horn of Africa region needs 10-12 ports to access global markets, but possesses only half that. In order to accommodate future growth, even more ports are going to need to be built in Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti.
Stagnant export revenues makes it difficult for Ethiopia to acquire foreign currency. The foreign exchange crisis in a country that imports most of its food and heavy machinery has led to supply shortages for many businesses. Having no financial market to speak of, most of Ethiopia’s debts are denominated in foreign currency. Supply shortages have kept inflation around 10 percent since 2012, hurting consumers and discouraging saving. As a result, the IMF raised the risk of debt distress this year to “high” despite a relatively low debt-to-GDP ratio.
Moreover, Ethiopia’s domestic market remains tiny. Ethiopians spends less than the Dominican Republic. That makes it difficult for Ethiopia to build domestic industries by selling to its own people and thus needs access to international markets in order to fuel growth.
Peace with Eritrea would diversify Ethiopia’s trade routes, giving it more stable access to foreign currency. In order to add commercial capacity, Djibouti took out loans from China worth $1 billion, a little over half its 2015 GDP. In May, the Center for Global Development identified Djibouti as vulnerable to systemic risk due to Chinese loans, falling into what many observers call China’s “debt trap diplomacy.” If it falls into default, China could end up seizing parts of Djibouti territory and gaining a stronger hand over commercial trade through the country.
In order to solve the immediate foreign currency crisis, Mr. Ahmed hopes to raise money by selling off state-run businesses. In August, his chief of staff announced the creation of a privatization advisory council to oversee the sale of businesses in electricity, logistics, and the lucrative state-run airline to reduce graft. Other industries like sugar, railways, hospitality, and manufacturing are also to be fully or partially privatized.
Yet economic liberalization faces the hurdle of sheer inertia that often characterizes state-run economies. The economy is managed by 620,000 bureaucrats and decades of outdated socialist-era regulations. As a result, it often takes months for imports of basic goods to be processed, leading to regular work stoppages while goods sit on the docks. A serious and concentrated political effort will be required to improve Ethiopia’s 161st-in-the-world business environment.
If these reforms pan out, this would be a fundamental shift away from the EPRDF’s official ideology of “developmental democracy,” according to Lovise Aalen, researcher and author of a book on Africa’s inclusive autocracies.
“The EPRDF used state-run endowment corporations not only to facilitate growth, but also to enrich themselves.” She said. “They said to the people ‘we give you economic growth and some autonomy for the biggest ethnic groups and you accept unquestioningly our right to rule.’”
This strategy has undeniably borne some fruit. Ethiopia’s GDP growth averaged 10 percent per year since 2004, albeit from a low base. As a result, the number of folks living in extreme poverty declined from 44 percent in 2000 percent to 26.7 percent in 2015. During this time, the number of public universities sprang from two to a few dozen and public health investments improved life expectancy by a decade.
Yet development seems to be distributed pretty unevenly said Mrs. Aalen. “The intense focus on urban & industrial growth has meant that cities have boomed while most rural areas and small towns remain pretty poor.”
At the same time, the EPRDF monopolized political discourse. The coalition holds all parliamentary seats and engages in heavy-handed censorship of print, radio, and television media. The regime also blocked websites critical of the government. Internet penetration is only 10 percent in the country, so many rural areas rely on radio while print media enjoys wide circulation among the 18 percent of Ethiopians that live in urban areas.
Yet ethnic-Tigray control of the party and military has fueled a sense of political and economic marginalization among the Oromo and Amhara. These ethno-linguistic groups are the two largest in the country, accounting for 34 percent and 27 percent of the population respectively. The next-largest groups are Somali and Tigray which each make up six percent of Ethiopians. Protests over corruption and neglect by the central government that spread from Oromia care what ultimately led to the inauguration of Mr. Ahmed.
Of course, not everybody is happy with the reforms. A July editorial from TigraiOnline, an independent website that was allowed to flourish by the Tigray-dominated government, lambasted Mr. Ahmed as “leading Ethiopia to oblivion” for his decision to release prisoners designated as terrorists by the parliament.
One way to dislodge incumbent political interests would be to open up politics to long-excluded groups. To that end, Mr. Ahmed has promised “real multi-party democracy” and invited opposition leaders back into the country after a long exile.
With his honeymoon drawing to a close, however, Mr. Ahmed faces the reality of managing a country with deep and bitter ethnic divides. In late December, observers had warned Ethiopia that violence along the Ogaden-Oromia border between Somali and Oromo groups threatened to unravel the country.
In July, reports of violence against non-Somali populations in Ogaden led to the intervention of federal forces. They fought with local police and deposed regional officials. Human Rights Watch accused local police of arbitrary detention, brutality and neglect towards its prisoners.
Despite the optimism of observers and many Ethiopians, Mr. Ahmed’s biggest challenge will be to follow through on his lofty promises.
“There is growing recognition across divides” said Mr. Ademo. “But the ultimate test is free and fair elections.”
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