Analyzing the Political Philosophy of Meles Zenawi

[Abtigiis]

Stretching semantics for mischievous ends

 

A fraught political entity, inherently predisposed by the bankruptcy of its primordial birth, always stretches the semantic range of theories, concepts, and words, creating a new condition where same arguments end up undermining the very foundation that coined them, while supporting the cause against which they were instituted and fronted. I am talking about Meles Zenawi and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

 

We have always known varnishing old or existing knowledge spheres, ideologies, and systems with fresh colours and marketing them as significant departures from dominant thinking regimes of any given time is the unmistakable attribute of novice intellectuals. We now know it is also the exclusive franchise of learned dictators who seek theoretical disguise to entrench dictatorship. These dictators hence fill hollow ideological jars with rebranded secondhand paradigms, made more alluring and malleable through ba.st.ar.dized and selective political and economic narratives that borrow from any and every tradition to justify profane ambitions of absolute and unending political power.

 

‘Paradigm shift’, ‘Thinking outside the box’, and ‘the third way’ are the much-maligned aromatic terminologies which are now at a risk of joining the growing list of overused clichés. There are genuine paradigm shifts. There is unpretentious thinking outside the box. There are always alternative ways, the middle ground. But these genuine breaks from orthodoxy are conspicuous in their ingenuity. They are not the ‘supplements’ that Jacques Derida derided as an ‘indication of a certain lack of originality’ (Of grammatology, 1976). They are not what adolescent Addis Ababa vagrants call ‘the same boqolo (maize)-different Joniya (Sack)’, with awesome insolence in heavily-accented Amenglish (Amharic-English).

 

http://www.wardheernews.com/Articles_11/Nov/Mukhtar/18_The_political_philosophy_of_Zenawi.html

[Abtigiis]

Ambushing healthy postulates

 

Let us see what Omano Edigheji, a proponent scholar of the democratic developmentalist state, thinks about the defining principles of the liberal democracy that Meles is saying is a dead end. Liberal democracy offers citizen participation (meaning choosing their leaders), equality, political tolerance, accountability, transparency, regular free and fair elections, economic freedom, control of the abuse of power, a bill of rights, the separation of the powers of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, accepting the result of elections, human rights, a multiparty system, and the rule of law. These are not principles one associates with the regime of Meles Zenawi.

 

Knowing that these principles are impervious to the TPLF’s soul, Zenawi seized on the limitations of neo-liberal economic paradigm – market failure, rent-seeking and the absence of equity to perfume dictatorship; challenges recognized by mainstream economists all along, and whose solution does not lie in a fit-all prescription or on jumping onto state-led economy which itself is not immune to rent-seeking and market distortions. Serious economists have looked at all sides of the argument and arrived at the conclusion that the net gain of market liberalization has been positive. Some scholars even ascribe the success of Asian economies largely to these countries’ embracing of free-market ideals and not to the economic activism of their governments.

 

With impish abandon, Meles disregards the nuance that ‘the specificity of certain political and economic conditions must be taken into account’ when prescribing a developmentist State. Meles invokes Korea, Scandinavia, Japan, Botswana and sundry to explicate the point that a dominant political party that rules for a century or half-century can only establish developmentalist state in Africa. The analogy is false and dishonest. The Social Democrats in Scandinavian countries ruled for many years by appealing to voters, not by intimidating the electorate. They did not steal elections; beat political opponents, closed political space for rival ideas. The Japanese transformation was led by the Liberal Democratic Party, espousing various economic growth and development models at any given time, but with leadership that was coming to power through democratic elections. They wore the cloak of the dominant party by charm, not by coercion and pilfering ballot-boxes.

 

Edigheji warns against the type of dominant party that Meles is imposing on Ethiopia under the subterfuge of democratic developmental state, when he says that a “democratic developmental state requires a political system that is able to accommodate diverse political interests and not one that prescribes one party”. Ever selective, Meles travels to Italy to escape such reprimand. The differing social values and capital in North and South of Italy is raised to defer democracy. The reasoning is that the prevailing social organization in Ethiopia is similar to that of South Italy and therefore time is needed before opening up the political space for contending ideas.

 

Indeed, all parties in Ethiopia, and idiosyncratically the TPLF, has every features of the Social organization in Southern Italy - the "amoral familialism", which is the ‘vertical linkage variety’ based on primordial/ancestral connections. The horizontal programmatic coalitions (based on common programmes and orientations, not on ethnicity) that is the defining institutional attribute of a developemental state is awfully lacking in the TPLF as a party and in the government it leads. The democratic developemntalist state paradigm emphasizes that an electoral system that promotes accountability is more important than the number of political parties involved in the election process; not that electoral democracy should be forfeited or deferred to ensure unelected dominant party stays in power until its ‘development’ goals are achieved. Register this willful misunderstanding by Meles!