Understanding Meles Zenawi

[Somalina]

ANALYSIS

 

The United States considers Ethiopia its strategic ally in this part of the world, where its interests are challenged by the existence of Al-Quida associated Al-Shabab in Somalia, and the rogue regime in Eritrea. In the eyes of American senior diplomats, the destabilization of Ethiopia “could affect the entire Horn of Africa region”. And the man who is on the wheel driving this country, Meles Zenawi, was a subject of a psychometric test meant to determine his psychological preferences, reports TAMRAT G. GIORGIS, Fortune

 

One of the many thousands of cables filed from Addis Abeba’s US Embassy, and leaked by Wikileaks last week, includes a cable sent in March 2009 by Donald Yamamoto, former US ambassador to Ethiopia, and currently a senior diplomat in the State Department. He took a rare effort to examine Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s personality, employing an instrument used in diplomacy, military and the corporate world in order to understand individuals’ preferences: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

 

Yamamoto, who arrived in Addis Abeba subsequent to one of the most trying periods of the country in recent memory, post-2005 electoral turmoil, categorized Meles as having personality traits of “ISTJ”.

 

“After scores of meeting with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Post [the Embassy] has strong confidence in our ability to infer Meles’s Myers-Briggs type,” writes Yamamoto, who was here in Addis a few weeks ago for a day’s visit, en-route to Uganda, in his cable titled “Biographic Note”. “We have a high degree of confidence that Meles is a moderate-to-strong ‘I’.”

 

The literature on MBTI, which was first published in 1962 by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, describes a person with “I” for having an attitude of “introversion”, one who prefers to reflect before acting.

 

According to the literature on the subject, individuals with such attributes need time alone, away from activity, and they are largely inward looking. As opposed to extraverts who are action oriented, introverts are more “thought oriented”.

 

Such is the man Yamamoto saw in Meles back in 2009; a man who rather prefers to think and reflect than act in a knee-jerk approach.

 

Meles is not “a man about town” but rather “quiet and deliberative”, according to Yamamoto.

 

“He thrives on one-on-one or small group discussions (such as with renown economists, talking about imperial Japanese history, or the US founding fathers), while being far more reserved in larger groups,” says Yamamoto.

 

He may have shy personality, agrees a long time friend of Meles who has known him since his years in the field.

 

“Yet his is a conversation you couldn’t possibly get bored,” he said. “He is very attentive listener, engaging and with a give and take conversations.”

 

Yamamoto’s analysis hardly limits itself there. It goes into examining what sort of preferences Meles may have in other indicators. Yamamoto’s cable shows that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister has personal preferences that are opposite to those who may likely be considered as strong “introvert” attitudes developed by the MBTI.

 

Designed to understand how people perceive the world and make decisions, MBTI is an instrument evolved from the works of Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss born (1875) thinker known for his works on analytical psychology and dream analysis.

 

His works in relations to personal preferences was first published in 1921; Briggs and her daughter further developed his theory and these indicators during the Second World War.

 

This was a period where men in the United States and Europe were enlisted to the war, leaving behind empty industries and weapon factories. Women, with a slogan “It’s Possible”, had entered the industrial world. Briggs and Myers had hoped knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time in identifying jobs in which they felt most comfortable and effective.

 

It has become very popular as an instrument of insight to personalities, over two million assessments are conducted annually in the United States, according to Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP) Inc., publishers of the MBTI.

 

“Much more than just a product, MBTI assessment is a powerfully versatile solution that has helped millions of people around the world better understand themselves and how they interact with others,” declares the company on its official website, www.cpp.com.

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The corporate world uses this instrument widely for recruitment purposes; of the 100 American companies in the FORTUNE 100, 89 companies make use of MBTI, “for recruitment and selection or to help employees understand themselves or their co-workers”, according to psychometric-success, a website dedicated on issues of personal development.

 

Other organizations exercise the indicator, whose questioners ought to rather be filled by the person concerned, in order to determine personal attitude and preferences of prominent personalities.

 

For instance, editors from USA Today once asked the author of “Types Talk: The 16 Personality Types That Determine How We Live, Love and Work”, to assess the preferences of George W. Bush. The author, Otto Kroeger, who also runs the Florida based Center for Applications of Psychological Type, described the former US President as “INFP”: Introvert, intuitive, feeler and perceptive. It is a type of personality that acts before it reflects and acts again. It is categorically opposite to what Yamamoto described Meles could be, with the exception of sharing the “introversion” trait.

 

 

 

Yamamoto, who was known to be a diplomat very critical of Meles’s administration in private but accommodating in public, wrote in his cable that Meles could be a person with “strongly sensing”, “likely thinking” and “defiantly judging” preferences.

 

Meles is a man of details, according to Yamamoto.

 

“He knows them inside and out, and he deploys them and precisely to establish and defend his arguments,” he said. “Whenever we raise concerns, he responds with highly nuanced and highly specific details to counter our arguments.”

 

A now retired western diplomat, with closer knowledge of leaders in the region, including Eritrea’s Issayas Afeworki, agrees with this assessment.

 

“Talking to Issayas, for instance, you don’t blink your eyes and you have to be very assertive. He could be intimidating,” said this diplomat. “Meles is a person more argumentative, yet ensures that you remain friends after sharp differences and heated debates.”

 

It is a tradition for foreign dignitaries, such as ministers of foreign affairs, to be provided very brief “briefings” and talking-notes by their missions in host countries or desk officers assigned to the country, which they often read aboard their flight.

 

Yamamoto observed that their understanding of issues is limited to such briefings of perhaps two-page, and disarming to counter Meles’s detailed responses.

 

The former US Ambassador to Ethiopia, who has also served in similar positions in Djibouti and Eritrea, describes Meles as a moderate to strong “thinker”, although party dynamics may require him to navigate employing his “feelings”. In that, Yamamoto understands Meles as an individual who gives higher place to “objectives” than “values”, judging him on two counts.

 

Meles’s passion for the ideals of revolutionary democracy and developmental state - the latter evolved much later due to influences by academics such as Jeffery Sachs (PhD) and Joseph Stiglitz (PhD), both renowned development economists - is evidence for his judgment in favour of “feelings”. Meles’s skillful navigations, not to be vetoed by executive committee members of TPLF where Yamamoto sees there are “a lot of strong and dogmatic personalities”, and his expertise to “know his audience, carefully chose his language to deliver carefully-crafted and audience specific arguments” may weigh more on his preferences to “feelings” than “thinking”.

 

Nonetheless, Yamamoto remains adamant in his cable to argue Meles to be a strong “thinker” on the side of “objectives and ends” judging him for his decision to break ties with Seeye Abraha, a man America’s career diplomat said was Meles’s “best, closest and oldest friend”.

 

Yamamoto states: “When push comes to shove, he [Meles] is far more wedded to tasks than interpersonal relationships.”

 

If there were any American senior diplomats who dealt with Meles’s administration and its senior officials during times of difficulties, Yamamoto could only be rivaled perhaps by David Shinn (PhD), an adjunct professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University.

 

Shinn’s time in Ethiopia, during his second ambassadorial assignment after Burkina Faso, was mired by a cold shoulder from Ethiopian authorities due to his public criticisms when Ethiopia was at war with Eritrea in the two years beginning in 1998.

 

He left Ethiopia hardly mending his fallout with them.

[Somalina]

Yamamoto arrived in Ethiopia in December of 2006, only a month after an electoral showdown between protestors and government forces left 193 dead and over 700 people wounded, while tens of thousands of people were rounded up and dispatched to military camps. The public’s memory and the collective trauma as a result of the electoral violence were fresh when he had first met Meles in April that year.

 

The three years he had served in Ethiopia saw the trail, convictions and pardon of opposition leaders; the coming into laws of four very controversial legislations (on charities, media, political parties and anti-terrorism) which were viewed as instruments that narrowed political space in Ethiopia; and intensified insurgency and counter-insurgency in the Ogden between Ethiopian armed forces and the Ogden National Liberation Front (ONLF). It was also a time when Ethiopia sent troops to Mogadishu in its bid to defeat forces mobilized under the Union of Islamic Courts, an act many in the west believed was a proxy war waged on behalf of the United States, but the Prime Minister staunchly denied.

 

Yamamoto has dealt with all of these issues with Meles through the years. His verdict on the Prime Minister, as read in the cable he wired in the same year he had departed, was that Meles is “certainly a strong ‘J’ ”, which stands for judgmental.

 

“Throughout our scores of meetings with the Prime Minister, in which he consistently operates without notes, Meles delivers points on any range of issues than can be precisely diagrammed into an outline,” observed Yamamoto. “Meles is a linear thinker, starting from the beginning, then reaching the end before broaching a new issue.”

 

The upshot of Yamamoto’s psychometric analysis is that Meles is a person with string preferences to “thinking” and “judging” or “TJ”, although there is a certain element about him that includes a “feeling and judging” side; the latter is a type of person who is “empathetic”. It appears that the former US Ambassador to Ethiopia believes Meles is a “TJ” type personality, which MBTI describes as individuals who “tend to appear to the world as logical who like to have matters settled”.

 

Yamamoto advised in his cable to American diplomats and officials who may deal with Ethiopia’s Prime Minister to have their messages delivered privately, in a focused, clear and linear manner.

 

“If our message is one that he is likely to oppose, our arguments will be much more effective if delivered in a way that emphasizes the objective,” advised Yamamoto. “Meles particularly understands and appreciates arguments that clearly reflect the explicit pursuit of national interests.”

 

It all depends on what people would take to Meles, says his long time friend. If people go to see him with anecdotal and empirical subject matters, he would deliberate on that; he would do likewise with people who would be interested to talk on macro and philosophical level; and he would engage in any issue, according to this friend of Meles.

 

“Where he strikes me most is that it is as if there is no issue that he seems alien to,” says his friend. “I am equally impressed when he sums up discussions and by the manner in which he frames conclusions.”

 

Whether or not MBTI instruments are as conclusive as Yamamoto described, Meles is highly controversial in the psychological field of study. The MBTI isn’t used nearly as much as it used to be in the diplomatic world, says an American diplomat, who has done many such psychometric analyses of leaders and prominent personalities in many of the countries he has served in.

 

The instrument, which divides peoples’ preferences in 16 distinguishable personality types with low and high scores, is far from being a scientific psychometric testing tool, critics of the works by Myers and Briggs argue. The National Research Council, an entity within the US National Academy of Science, discovered after conducting examinations of tests conducted using MBTI in 1991 that it is not “valid, reliable and effective” to have a conclusive view on individuals’ behavior.

 

One such critic is David J. Pittenger (PhD), psychometric researcher and dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Marshall University.

 

“I believe that MBTI attempts to force the complexities of human personality into an artificial and limiting classification scheme,” said Pittenger, in a short paper he presented.

 

By TAMRAT G. GIORGIS,

FORTUNE STAFF WRITER

[Abtigiis]

Somalina;746299 wrote:

 

 

Nonetheless, Yamamoto remains adamant in his cable to argue Meles to be a strong “thinker” on the side of “objectives and ends” judging him for his decision to break ties with Seeye Abraha, a man America’s career diplomat said was Meles’s “best, closest and oldest friend”.

 

Yamamoto states: “When push comes to shove, he [Meles] is far more wedded to tasks than interpersonal relationships.”.

A clear case of the blind describing an elephant. Everybody knows Seye has never been a close friend to Meles during the struggle days and Meles envied Seye's popularity with the TPLF fighters and alleged bravery. Everybody knows Seye comes from a part of Tigray which claims to be the traditional throne-holders (Ras Mengasha Siyoum's lineage) and Meles from the largely underpriviledged (until now) Adwa. Everybody knows Seye was threating TPLF Central Committee members who were not in favour of toppling Meles during the TPLF infighting. So, saying Meles broke with Seye is incorrect. Meles saved himself by doing that. It has to do with survival rather than objectives and ends. This alone shows the shallowness of this supposedly scientific character-analysis of Meles.

 

Also, while the Americans whom he serves as errand boy can say whatever they want, Ethiopians never associate Meles with careful speak and sedate arguments. Everytime he comes to the TV, he is known to say inflammatory things that make people angry. To his credit, he reads a lot and knows many things. And there is little doubt he is clever. But he is not someone who likes to introvert. In fact, he displays lots of 'see-me' tendencies with his regular press interviews. If you watch him very carefully, you can see a person desperate for attention and admiration.

 

This 'developmental State' model has been punctured with a simple question? How does it come about? Meles uses the developmental state argument to run away from multiparty democracy and as a way of smuggling his barely disguised communist orientations into Ethiopian politics. For instance, suppose Ethiopia is lucky it got a 'developmental state' led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. All has to copy from it to make economic and social progress. But that nagging question is not asnwered. What do countries have to do to get a developmental state? The rest of the content of what a developmental state should or should not do fall under the discussion of what economic development models it should folllow. There is a lot on the menue when it comes to which type of development model the thrid world countries should follow, and the developmental state one is just a continuation of that. From Hirschman's "unbalanced growth" theories to "Harod-Domar's" model which emphasizes saving and national growth targets, the literature on economic growth and economic development models are enormous. Luckily, Meles found the developmental state model user-friendly to justify his control of every facet of Ethiopia: politics, economy, religious establishment, the military etc. Whether Yamamotto deoderises the stinking political behind of meles with fake scientific postualtions or not, with Meles, you are dealing with a despot with strong tribalist tendacies.