Ethiopia’s Unresolved Political Problems – 50 Years after
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Loading... - Kofi Eshun
- 27 Jan 2023
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As Ethiopia plows its way out of two years of debilitating war in the North, it is now confronted with another slowly developing insurgency that is diffused, decentralized, and increasingly more lethal. The political issues behind the wars in the North and now in Oromia are different, but they harken back to the issue of Ethiopia’s existence as a “Nation of Nations,” according to the Ethiopian Constitution.
How do you create a viable, strong country that could defend its sovereignty, grow, and prosper out of the multitude of ethnic communities organized as states? Wishful thinking aside, the “national question” which was supposed to have been resolved through the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution and Ethnic Federalism remains a force that we must deal with. It has morphed into a more intractable political problem resulting in endless internal border disputes, displacements and generalized conflict that pits communities against each other.
The war between forces led by TPLF and the Federal Government was not about the national question or the Constitution per se, though TPLF saw political advantage in depicting it as such. It was a war imposed on Ethiopia to restore TPLF to its predominant position prior to the change of government. Portraying the struggle as a heroic fight by a small minority not to be swallowed and subjugated by its numerically larger ethnic groups created a powerful narrative that animated the West and the gullible Western media.
More perniciously, other ethnic elites who strive to see the end of Ethiopia as a state saw it as a struggle to assert “the right of nations.” Falsely, they accused the government of engaging to recreate a unitarian state. This massive confusion deliberately promoted by Oromo intellectuals who soured on Abiy because of his incessant talk about Ethiopian unity, won supporters in Oromia. Hence the disgruntlement of OLF, OFC and others who endured the harsh TPLF-led oppression in the past.
This suited TPLF’s ideologues who have one foot in the Ethiopian State and one foot in the future Tigray nation. Ethiopia is important to them only if it is under their domination. Short of that, the preference is to leave it for a “more cohesive, better organized Tigray nation” with international borders. This is a case of TPLF national liberation ideology trumping historical reality. Their approach to Ethiopia is transactional. Read More…
