In the last few months there were speculations as to whether this year’s nationwide elections in Ethiopia would take place in May 2020 as it was the tradition and in accordance with the constitutional provisions. Although the government had made it clear that the elections will take place as scheduled, many politicians expressed their doubts. According to some opinions, conditions are not suitable for holding the elections this year. Hence it would be more appropriate to postpone them for a year or two until proper conditions would be created. Their doubts are based on the security situation in some parts of the country and inside a number of universities where ethnic politics had led to conflicts, deaths and injuries among many students.
The problem is that there is no perfect condition for holding elections anywhere in the world. The US elections that are generally considered the most democratic ones, have always been beset by conflicts, controversies and difficult conditions. As a matter of coincidence, this year’s American and Ethiopian elections take place in the same year. American politics too has been disturbed by a series of violent acts in which many black communities were targeted by ultra-right nationalist individuals or groups that took the lives of many black youngsters in many US states.
And now American election is rocked by the impeachment proceedings of Donald Trump that is setting Republicans against democrats in what is described as the third presidential impeachment in US history. This conflict of political interests is bound to characterize or determine the outcome of this year’s US elections. By the same token ethnic conflicts in some parts of Ethiopia are bound to shape the contours or contexts of elections in many regions.
so, the point is that there is no perfect condition to hold elections and all elections are by definition take place in the midst of conflicts and disputes. if there were no disputes, it would be unnecessary to hold elections because a dispute-free country would be a country where there is no conflict of interests and that is impossible to achieve.
Those who have been advocating and are still calling for postponement of the elections seem to be in the minority although their position looks reasonable at first sight. The proponents of postponement of elections may be seriously concerned about the security situation in the country. However, elections have taken place around the world in more serious security situations where armed groups were engaged in violent confrontations. Afghanistan is a good example. Elections in many African countries take place in similar situations. last year’s elections in DRC Congo is another example.
Security concerns aside, the basic reason why elections should take place in Ethiopia according to the constitutional provisions is because the present transitional administration would lose its mandate to govern unless elections are held and a permanent government is elected by the people. Not holding the elections as scheduled would be tantamount to breaching serious constitutional provisions and may even lead to a government crisis that may in turn lead to political chaos that would make it impossible to hold elections at all. The present government would finish its mandate to govern in the process and that would be a dangerous political gamble.
The proponents of postponing the elections do not set or suggest their own ideal time table and simply leave the issue hanging in the air. This might in turn mean that the elections would be postponed indefinitely and that would be like creating a power vacuum that would be even more dangerous than a governance crisis because a political vacuum is likely to be filled with all sorts of undesirable elements because society like nature abhors vacuum.
On the other hand, the majority of political parties both in government and in the opposition are preparing to take part in the elections however difficult the political situation might turn out to be. According to these forces, holding the ballots would not be as a serious mistake as postponing election day. A well-managed, fair and free election, on the contrary would lead to a more stable, peaceful condition as conflicts would be resolved by the government that will earn its legitimacy through the ballots.
One of the reasons why the Dr. Aby’s administration is reluctant to take appropriate measures to manage the sporadic ethnic conflicts across the country may be its lack of a democratic electoral mandate and that it is governing in its capacity as a transitional authority whose main worry is to respect human rights and basic freedoms rather than using force to curb inter-ethnic violence as some people have been calling for.
For now it seems that the no postponement lobby has won the day and the elections are scheduled to take place sometime next August. This year’s national election in Ethiopia has entered another critical phase with the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) setting the balloting day and the majority of parties seem to agree with this time table. subpoena
The next critical phase would be the holding of debates among the contesting parties in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the electors. If we go by the present situation, the next Ethiopian election is largely shaped by nationalist or ethnic politics that is the dominant agenda in almost all ethnic-based parties. the process is apparently setting one kind of nationalism against another one in addition to setting one political party against the other within one nationalist bloc.
The send and opposed agenda is seemingly revolving around another kind of nationalism that many people call “Ethiopianism” or Ethiopian nationalism that has quite a considerable number of followers who are not comfortable with the ethnic or nationalist type of politics they see as narrow in focus and conducted by emotion or passion rather than reason. The opponents of ethnic nationalism seem to think that in the present Ethiopia there is no “oppressor” and oppressed” nations and that it would be more meaningful if all ethnic parties could come together to fight for a better future for the country as a whole instead of being fixated on their respective nationalisms.
The third bloc around which Ethiopian politicians are congregating is what they call citizen-oriented politics with its main focus on democratic rights, personal freedoms irrespective of ethnic qualifications and demands. This group of politicians may be in the minority but they have substantial followers within the ethnic blocs and outside them and among the non-ethnically marked groups of people whose ethnic identity has no clear demarcation. This is a group comprising people who have different ethnic identities on their parents’ sides and prefer to subscribe to a common agenda than align themselves to this or that ethnic group. If properly mobilized this group of people is numerically considerable to shift the balance in favor of the above two parties at the ballots.
So, the forthcoming debates may be determined by the above three groups of political tendencies although there may be other parties with quite different ideas or a mix of the above tendencies. For most people, what matters most is the democratic nature of the elections rather than the present ethnic or non-ethnic polarizations and making the elections fair, free and plausible is another formidable challenge of the NEBE that has no experience of holding a truly democratic election in the past.
Past elections in Ethiopia were rightly called a mockery of democracy and farcical displays worthy of Moliere’s Tartuffe. The actors were known in advance, the scripts written by the conductors and the acting controlled by the producers. And the outcome was a big collective laughter, and a fraud that sometimes ended in tragic ways. They were shows that took place once in five years and started as comedies and ended as tragedies. The winners were also known in advance because they were beatified by the pope who sat in the palace overseeing the show from a distance with remote control and always won and those who lost were always dubbed the villains by the election theatre.
Election debates were also funny times on TV shows where the same old politicians from both the government and opposition parties sit in circles arguing over economic growth figures released by the government and finally accepted as universal truths. The theatres goers are often glued to their TV sets and tried to decipher what the learned officials were saying. Total silence reigned in the TV showrooms where a click of glass or the sound of “cheers” might be translated as “victory for the opposition” by the plainclothesmen who were sniffing for some dissenting odors in the showrooms.
The election farce script was staged five times over a period of 20 years, that is until people were tired and sick and decided to change the script, the actors, the beginnings and endings of the same old drama. History repeated itself twice, once as a tragedy and the second time as a farce. In Ethiopia electoral history has been repeating itself always as a farce and sometimes as a tragedy.
Anyway Ethiopia is now bracing for its sixth general election and it has to learn many lessons from its past. To make a long story short, the forthcoming May 2020 election is expected to be a real one and not a sham as it used to be in the past. What are the characteristics of a genuine election? A genuine election is expected to be free, fair, plausible and conducted according to well-established international standards of a democracy. Is Ethiopia ready to conduct such an election? Yes, it is because it has spent more than 45 years since the 1974 revolution in learning what is the difference between democratic and sham elections disguised as genuine ones.
More than four decades is a very long time to learn the essentials of a democratic election. The other lesson is the way elections are managed and organized. The nation has proved effective in establishing well-functioning electoral infrastructure. The NEBE was the main guarantor of victory for the incumbents. All the regimes that succeeded one another over the last four decades were also effective in organizing elections. Problems appeared in the process of using the election infrastructures and during vote counting. The whole thing crumbled like a house of card and all the money spent in conducted those types of elections was money thrown into the deep sea.
Regrettably, election debates in the past were also organized by the government in power. The agendas were set by offices under the direct control of the government or by individuals linked to the authorities and taking orders from them. The opposition parties were so weakened that they did not have the strength or influence to force the electoral authorities adopt election agendas that were relevant to specific political and economic demands of the electorate. For this reason, the debates were set and conducted the way the government wanted it and not the way the opposition parties and electors wanted it.
The formats of the debates were also laid down the way the authorities wanted it. Most of them took place in the form of questions and answers among the representatives of the government and the opposition. The chairmen were seldom impartial or fair in their handling of the debates and often favored pro-government candidates enjoy more air time in their deliberations. In brief, the debates were conducted in an unjust manner and the outcomes were also unjust. They were the causes behind the post-election distress and the chaos that followed the 2005 votes that went down as the darkest spots in electoral history.
Now things have apparently changed for good.
As we said above, in the past election debates centered around issues carefully selected by the authorities and the boundaries are drawn in such a way as they do not spill over into unwanted territories. This year’s election time should provide the first opportunity for setting the agendas in common, with both government and opposition party representatives sitting down and agreeing what items to put on the table for discussion.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 26 January 2020
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
