Prime Minister Abiy’s recent speech at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos was not without irony. In his speech, Abiy full-heartedly embraced the neoliberal doctrine of the free market – improving the ‘ease of doing business’, the power of the private sector, open markets and integration, including Ethiopia’s commitment to accelerating accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Only seven years ago, Ethiopia’s former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi hosted the 2012 World Economic Forum on Africa in Addis Abeba where he told the financial elite, quite frankly, that neoliberalism was a totally failed project. Then, in 2012, Meles rejected neoliberal approaches to development in favor of his version of the ‘developmental state’ where the state sits, in theory at least, in the driver seat of development, with ownership over key sectors and a tightly regulated private sector that serves to advance the overall national development agenda.
There may be a sense among many Ethiopians that this is not the time for grand ideological debates. … Job creation has become a matter of national survival, with some seeing the large population of unemployed and underemployed youth as a ‘ticking time bomb’ leaving no time to dwell on economic theory but focusing only on getting young people into work.
However, what neoliberalism seeks to mask, in Ethiopia as much as anywhere else, is the fact that there is more than one way to create jobs and economic development – that there
is, in fact, an alternative. It is the essence of neoliberalism that it equates what’s good for General Motors and Volkswagen with what’s good for everyone, since wealth, supposedly, trickles down.
However, as the past decades of neoliberal globalization have shown, growth can be extremely unequal, creating the kind of misery seen in the growing number of urban slum dwellers – according to the UN more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. On the other hand, 26 billionaires now own as much as the bottom half of the world population. It should not come as surprise that the largely unelected financial elite in Davos, including many of world’s top billionaires, were very pleased with Ethiopia finally seeing the light of the free market.
While Meles’ authoritarian project like so many other regressive distortions of Marx in the 20th century was also, in many ways, a failed and inhumane project, we should remember his (and Marx’s!) insistence that the economic is always political and, indeed, ideological.
Therefore, one of the unanswered questions in the current euphoric discourse about Ethiopia’s democratic transformation is who gave Abiy (as this is becoming a Meles-like one-man-show) the mandate to put Ethiopia on a path to free-market capitalism with a potentially much reduced, or at least altered, role of the state. More importantly, we must ask the social question: in whose interests are reforms being carried out? What kind of Ethiopian society did people actually fight for?
For sure, the mostly rural anti-government protesters who ultimately brought down the TPLF dominated regime did not protest under the banner of the hammer and sickle. Yet, it would be a mistake to ignore the underlying social nature of these protests and reduce the uprising primarily to an expression of backward narrow nationalism or ethnic chauvinism. From the beginning, the protests that broke out in 2015 among the Oromia region’s rural and mostly impoverished youth included struggles over class and identity, challenging multiple forms of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination.
Protesters carried out many attacks against factories, especially joint ventures between foreign investors and local elites which the protesters accused of land grabbing and not providing decent job opportunities to locals. The uprising always included calls for political rights as well as demands for economic rights and economic participation.
Upon coming to power last year, Abiy has implemented nothing short of a political revolution from within the one-party state. What remains less clear is whether Abiy is willing to take on the social question too. In the absence of a clear answer to this, progressive forces in Ethiopia must exploit the political space to ensure that liberal democracy does not become a Trojan horse for restructuring the country’s political economy in a way that serves the interests of the elites and the country’s tiny middle class at the expense of Ethiopia’s majority poor.
While Ethiopia may not feel like it has the time for ideological debates, it can even less afford to blindly follow an economic model that serves the interests of the few while creating misery for the many….
If Ethiopia wants to ensure that economic growth and development are truly broad-based, it will need to continue investing enormous amounts of public funds in social services and infrastructure. While these complex reforms will of course require a very high level of technical expertise, at the core, these reforms remain political and the country will have to decide over questions such as whether Ethiopia really can afford tax holidays for investors or whether these taxes are precisely the kind of revenues required to finance inclusive development. …
With Ethiopia currently undergoing significant economic reforms we should ask Dr. Abiy who is driving this agenda (are there any business lobbyists or global billionaires involved?) and who will benefit. Will the new tax code ensure that enough of the wealth created in the country will be redistributed to those who will not be able to lift themselves out of poverty in the foreseeable future?
The quietness on the social question in the current debate on political reform may explain why the country’s wealthy and middle class sat back rather quietly for years when their fellow country men and women in the rural areas were imprisoned or killed while fighting for political and social change (there were almost no protests in Addis). Maybe, after all, many of Ethiopia’s professionals and business owners do not fundamentally disagree with the country’s existing class relations and related inequality which allow nearly every middle-class household to employ a live-in maid for a pitiful wage or enjoying the cheap services of hairdressers, car washers, waitresses and others.
While Ethiopia’s urban elites and their diaspora allies are largely ecstatic about their pop star prime minister and new political freedom, progressives must remind them that it was not their revolution and that people did not sacrifice their lives for the prospect of free trade that may make imported cars, wines and flat screen TVs more affordable for the few.
Italian political theorist Gramsci wrote in the 1930s that the ‘crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. While Ethiopia must deal with the many morbid symptoms it is currently experiencing, including new forms of conflict and the displacement of nearly 3 million people, it must focus on tackling the underlying causes of poverty and widening inequality. Forgoing a democratic debate on the kind of economic model the country will pursue, could result in Meles’ development without democracy becoming Abiy’s democracy without development for the large majority of the country’s poor. (This piece was abridged from the original article for space constraints. The full article is available on addisstandard.com)
The Ethiopian Herald February 20/2019
BY STEPHANIE JAY
