BY JOSEPH SOBOKA
Disorganization in its true meaning, particularly with reference to the society, is upsetting the social working system and throwing it into confusion. This was relentlessly attempted in Ethiopia to shake the country off its national balance and foundation.
In every society, several factors trigger or are the immediate causes of social disorganization. Systematic handling of these factors influences a community’s capacity to develop and maintain strong systems of social relationships.
To begin with, residential instability for instance, in Ethiopia, particularly in Addis, as we currently witness, is caused by high housing costs because of the fact that the number of residents in the city is increasing, clearly depicting the disparity between demand and supply. The number of those in need far exceeds the availability of the houses.
Due to their inability to pay the monthly house rent, people move from one location to the other and thus suffer from instability caused by the problem. To make the matter worse, when the cost of house is affordable, the instability still remains the same due to the poor quality of the new available house, making the situation of the occupants more miserable.
As a matter of fact, low-cost houses lack a number of essential facilities like private toilet, kitchen even bedroom forcing the occupants to divide the living room with partitionto get bed room. Furthermore, there are situations where neighbors share electric and water bills, the very cause for a dispute at the end of every month among them to settle the issue.
Many families live in one compound have no separate fences.As they are constructed in such a way,the buildings in most cases share one or two common walls. It means that they do not have a separate four or more sided house each.
The houses are attached all the way. In such situation, the occupants of the houses fail to coexist peacefully due to oddity of behavior and personality differences. For instance, when some come home early in the evening and others late got drunk,they disturb the peaceful life of the earlier.
In addition, sharing clothe lines is another bottle neck to peaceful coexistence of the neighbors. Family privacy becomes a rare amenity of life in such circumstance; everyone knows about each other in the neighborhood. It is a sort of disgruntled communal society where there is nothing good to share.
When the situation gets out of hand, at sundry times, the occupants are seen at one another’s neck as a means of settling the dispute related to the housing problem. It is possible to brand the situation as an unstable neighborhood – the very root of social disorganization.
Over and above, due to a large family of seven to ten members each, overcrowding, naturally, adds fuel to the problem. There is not enough space, at least for the children to play.
Homelessness, on the other hand, impacts families. In this case, homeless families experience ongoing trauma in the form of childhood abuse and neglect. Furthermore, domestic and community violence become common. The members of homeless people are often seen at the scenes of violence in the community here and there. The root of the violence is nothing other than the effort to scrambling for the limited resources that are essential to their daily life.
Homelessness is strongly linked to poverty that is the major cause of destabilization as is evident in Ethiopia and elsewhere in the world. Because of poverty, quite a number of young Ethiopians illegally flee their country only to be exposed to worse situation in the countries they have taken refugee status.
Its tragedy is that most of them might end up dying or come back home severely injured owing to the animosity they encounter in a foreign land. Yet, in spite of what has happened to them, after having recovered from their injuries, some of them go back to the same countries where they have a bad experience.
The situation is that of vicious circle; as much as homelessness causes poverty, extreme poverty, in turn, is the strongest predictor of homelessness for families.
These families are often forced to choose between housing and other necessities for their survival. In this economically chaotic time of history, many lead a hand-to-mouth life and they cannot afford to build a house for food and other basic needs are given top priority for their existence.
To save some money, in some situations, ten or more people sleep in a small room despite the inconveniences such accommodation causes. In fact there were incidences where these people die of suffocation due to the use of charcoal for fuel that emits carbon monoxide.
Abreast of this, teen parents are also particularly at risk of homelessness as they often lack the education and income of adults who become parents and most of them end up living on the streets perhaps begging which is a common scene in Addis Ababa and other major cities, too.
In Ethiopia, the society’s stability is affected by several factors of which ethnic and linguistic diversity becomes conspicuous. Therefore, it is wise to know what ethnic diversity is all about. Ethnicity is identity related to a specific cultural or national tradition.
Ethnic diversity, then, refers to the presence of different ethnic backgrounds or identities. As of late, Ethiopians, one way or the other, have unnecessarily experienced ethnic diversity at the expense of lives and properties.
The society has been destabilized based on the insidious act of anti-peace elements that secretly did harm to innocent civilians. They employed this system to override their years-long injustice to the whole nation and to evade the lash of justice.
On the surface, their system of rule appears as if it enriches the nation but underneath it is entirely the opposite. The country needs social cohesion. What is social cohesion, after all?
First, social cohesion may be regarded as the degree of interconnectedness between individuals that is both a result and cause of public and civic life. It encompasses feelings of commitment, trust, and norms of reciprocity and is demonstrated by participation in networks and civic organizations.
Second, the interconnectedness or ties between individuals may be formed by at least two modes: attitudinal such as dislike, trust, and fear and behavioral, contact and association.
The deliberate removal of such positive factors results in direct segregation which harms social cohesion. It is the decisive point where ethnical diversity supplants the national unity due to its perverse influence. There is strong effect of ethnic diversity and community disadvantage.
In terms of interethnic relations, physical and economic disadvantages can encourage interracial material competition, where minority ethnic groups can be perceived as a threat to the majority population’s position and/or as a competitor for scarce resources, fomenting negative attitudes towards members of the other group. In a nation, linguistic diversity is associated with reduced economic performance, which in turn, increases societal instability.
Nations which differ linguistically from their neighbors are also less stable. However, religious diversity between neighboring nations has the opposite effect, decreasing societal instability.
There is a fact to be noted here that is it is linguistic rather than ethnic diversities that have the strongest relationships to other variables. This may be due to the superior quality of the linguistic data, since languages are better-studied and easier to define than ethnic groups.
The more it linguistically different from its neighbors, the more unstable a nation becomes. Whilst the more religiously distinct a nation is from its neighbors, the less instability is created by linguistic diversity. We note that these effects, unlike the effects of diversity on societal instability, are not mediated by economic performance. Therefore, it is suspected that they operate at a more cultural or psychological level.
Obviously, in a geographical setting where instability gains momentum, economic performance fades farther and farther away. This is an undeniable fact.
The Ethiopian Herald January 6/2021
