Ethiopia’s growth without rights unravelling rapidly

By Muthoni Wanyeki

One week ago, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency.

While its application is unclear, its provisions allow for broad, open-ended and severe limitations on the freedoms of expression (including through the shutdown of mass media), association, peaceful assembly and movement. Even more alarmingly, they allow for the suspension of any substantive and procedural law as its Command Post determines.

This militarised response goes hand-in-hand with appeasement — at least on the face of it. The ruling political party, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front, has promised engagement with civil society and the political opposition on electoral reform. It is hard to see how that engagement could possibly take place.

Civil society has been highly constrained — in fact, decimated — for years by the Charities and Societies Proclamation. Bloggers and journalists are routinely arrested and detained under the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation. As are leaders and members of the opposition.

In fact, following the Irrecha celebration massacre, the arbitrary arrests and detentions of civil society and the opposition have increased. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government blames the escalating protests held across the country during the “week of rage” that followed the Irrecha massacre on “terrorists” of Ginbot 7 and the Oromo Liberation Front.

These actions do not indicate a desire for engagement with the protesters’ demands. In Oromia region, the protests initially had to do with fear of land dispossession in furtherance of the Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan. But, given the violent repression of the protests, not even the January cancellation of the Master Plan could quell them.

Now, the protesters want accountability for the deaths, arrests and reported torture of protesters. They also want the domination of the federal state by the largely Tigrayan EPRDF ended.

The Irrecha massacre re-triggered the protests. Now the protesters simply want the EPRDF out. And anybody they see as supporting the EPRDF; in some areas of Oromia region, local administrators have been removed and self-government declared. Foreign investors, deemed to be in bed with the EPRDF haven’t been spared.

Protests during the “week of rage” specifically targeted foreign businesses — whether Dutch, Nigerian or Turkish-owned.

Meanwhile, Amhara region joined the protests in July, initially protesting the arrest of the Wolkait Amhara Identity and Self-Determination Committee. The Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples region jumped in in August, demanding self-determination. Disturbingly, in the SNNP region, the protests took an ethnic turn, with protesters targeting Guraghe businesses (the Guraghe not being seen as indigenous to Gideo zone).

Clearly, the federal political model adopted with the fall of the Derg to manage Ethiopia’s ethnic diversity and create a sense of political inclusion has failed. Clearly too, the EPRDF has reached the limits of its “development without rights” economic model.

The prospects are not good in the short-term. Even if the EPRDF contains the protests and keeps its military together, the heavy-handed way in which it is likely to do so, given its past track record, will only fuel more “rage.” Do we face yet another implosion in the region?

Source: The East African