A SERIES OF NOTES FROM THE WORLD’S DEVELOPMENTAL FRONTIER NOTES FROM AFRICA 1: Ethiopia (Part I)
Map of Ethiopia, Administrative Division. Library of Congress, USA / Joe Studwell
Joe Studwell is a legendary figure in the world of economic analysis. The publication he founded in 1997, China Economic Quarterly, remains a valuable source of information on economic processes in East Asia to this day.
His book, How Asia Works, was recognized as a Book of the Year by The Economist and The Financial Times, and Bill Gates called it the best book on economic development, often writing about it. Recently, Studwell has added another area of research to his focus on Asia: Africa.
Exclusively for Huxley, Joe Studwell has prepared an article titled «A Series of Notes on the Global Frontier of Development. Notes from Africa 1: Ethiopia». In the past, Studwell made significant efforts to introduce the world to China. Perhaps the lessons from Africa will prove relevant for Ukraine. Developing countries can learn much from each other, both politically and economically, and sometimes it’s easier to open up prospects for economic cooperation…
So, together with Joe Studwell, let’s travel to Ethiopia, a country with a population of over 112 million people. This exclusive report on that journey is brought to you by Huxley readers.
Ethiopia is experiencing what may be the most significant political crisis on the African continent for a generation. Certainly, it is the most serious crisis to face Ethiopia, Africa’s most promising developmental state and its second most populous country, since the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), defeated the Maoist Derg , junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
The crisis stems from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s decision in early November to take military action against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
From 1991 until Abiy — Ethiopians are traditionally referred to by their given names — became Prime Minister in April 2018, the TPLF dominated the ruling EPRDF coalition. Although the northern federal state of Tigray accounts for only six percent of the Ethiopian population, Tigrayans dominated the cabinet, filled the majority of senior civil service positions, ran the federal army, and held key offices in the intelligence services.
‘Power,’ observed the British historian Lord Acton, ‘tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Although led until his passing in 2012 by perhaps the most erudite developmental leader the world has seen, Meles Zenawi, the TPLF enjoyed something close to absolute power. Tigrayans came to control much of the economy of the capital, Addis Ababa, and they did not make much of their money honestly.
The army engaged in widespread smuggling operations, using federal military transportation equipment. It bilked large sums through its control of Africa’s biggest energy project, the five-gigawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), on the Sudan border.
The corruption was never Kenyan-or Democratic Republic of Congo-style kleptocracy, but it delayed the critical dam project (see below) and dragged increasingly on an economy that has grown out of hunger and dire poverty at 10 percent a year.
So Abiy, from the largest lowland ethnic group, the Oromo, which accounts for 35 percent of the Ethiopian population, decided to take down the TPLF. Whether it was necessary to do this militarily — as Abiy is trying — and whether a political solution was instead possible is a subject of intense debate, both in Ethiopia and in international diplomatic circles. As with any counterfactual, we will never know the absolute truth.
Equally, the question of which side kicked off the fighting between federal forces and the TPLF is a complex one. Abiy Ahmed’s government says that the TPLF attacked bases and the headquarters of federal Northern Command forces on 3-4 November, taking command of ethnic Tigrayan forces and looting vast amounts of military equipment.
The TPLF says that troop movements on the Tigrayan and Eritrean borders prior to this attack made clear Abiy’s determination to pursue a military confrontation and that it was acting in self-defense. As with the origins of the First World War, analysts can argue in more than one direction.
In 2019, 16 of the 30 fastest-growing economies in the world were in Africa. The coronavirus crisis significantly disrupted the plans of Africa’s inhabitants. At the same time, The Economist notes that the pandemic could serve as a catalyst for weak economies, allowing them to grow faster than strong ones. We are witnessing a global race among major players for influence over the African continent. Country risks here are incomparably higher than the European average, yet few things today can rival the high returns on investments in African projects
NOT YOUR AVERAGE EMPIRE
It is not possible to understand what is going on in Ethiopia without understanding the historical and ethnic inheritance of this country of 110 million persons. Like Germany, Russia, and China, Ethiopia developed as a contiguous empire that expanded at its periphery.
The dominant people in this empire building were highlanders, driven to expansion by population pressure and the desire for more fertile land. The Tigrayans use the term abay, employed in a manner that is roughly equivalent to the German colonial-era word lebensraum (literally, ‘living space’), to express their expansionist instincts. But before the Tigrayans, it was their Amhara neighbors who led the quest for living space.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Emperor Menelik grabbed large swathes of lowland territory south-west to what is now the Kenyan border, south-east into today’s Somalia, and west to the current borders of Sudan and South Sudan.
He was also the only African leader to defeat an entire European army, an Italian one, at Adwa in Tigray in 1896. Menelik’s successor was Emperor Haile Selassie, crowned in 1930 in the new imperial capital of Addis Ababa (the event is brilliantly recounted in Evelyn Waugh’s Remote People).
Before his coronation, Haile Selassie was Ras Tafari or Prince Tafari. Descendants of Jamaican slaves determined that this small man, an African who held the white man at bay, was, in fact, a living god and built the principles of Rastafarianism around him. However, it was not all plain sailing.
In 1935, Mussolini’s army returned to Ethiopia with chemical weapons, killing hundreds of thousands, and occupied the country for five years. The Italians had already occupied Eritrea since 1889. In 1941, however, the Italians lost their Horn of Africa possessions to the Allied East Africa campaign. Ras Tafari and Ethiopia were free again; the emperor annexed Eritrea in 1952.
Haile Selassie continued to rule for another 30 years. He stripped out manufacturing plants the Italians had installed in Eritrea and moved them to Addis Ababa, building up his capital at the country’s ethnic crossroads. He followed a logic similar to that of the Spanish when they created a capital bang in the middle of their fractious state. Thousands of Eritrean business people, artisans, and technical workers migrated to Addis.
Haile Selassie was, in some respects, a reformer. But he was also an aristocrat and an emperor with an Addis casino and a lot of expensive French wine. He never confronted the most explosive issue in any developing state — land inequality — and this cost him his life.
In 1974, an army mutiny ushered in the Derg, a Maoist dictatorship that undertook land reform but then killed hundreds of thousands through forced collectivization of agriculture, forced population relocations, and consequent famine. The Derg junta boasted the biggest army in Africa and Russian backing, including MiG fighter jets.
And yet the Derg was taken down, after a long struggle, by an ethnic coalition of guerrilla warriors led by the Tigrayan Meles Zenawi. The Tigrayans have long spun this victory as theirs. In reality, Eritrean fighters were more numerous and often more important, particularly in the fall of the capital in 1991.
Meles Zenawi’s military genius was to hold together a coalition that included a kaleidoscope of ethnic groups. The critical point to digest from all this history is that Ethiopia is not an empire like Germany, Russia, or China. Unlike those empires, Ethiopia has been politically dominated by different ethnic groups.
The African Union currently consists of 55 member states from the continent, organized into 8 different regional economic communities. Integration ambitions are sometimes so strong that the idea of a unified pan-African currency is occasionally discussed. The African Union’s headquarters is located in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. This choice is not accidental: Ethiopia’s economy is currently the fastest-growing on the continent and one of the most rapidly developing in the world
First, the Amhara of Menelik and Haile Selassie. From 1991, the Tigrayans of Meles Zenawi. And since 2018, there has been Abiy, a lowland Oromo, the most populous group. In the background are the coastal Eritreans, who overwhelmingly chose independence in a referendum in 1993, whose Ethiopia-based compatriots were expelled by Meles Zenawi, and who were subjected to a devastating, Tigrayan-provoked border war in 1998-2000 which left 100,000 dead.
Nonetheless, the Eritreans have not forgotten that they were the leading force in Ethiopia’s economy under Haile Selassie or that they contributed as much as any group to the defeat of the Derg. Today, each of these four ethnic groups wants its day in the political sun. And many underemployed young men and wily older men who manipulate them are ready to shed blood to get it.
