Rightly or wrongly, I consider myself to be a pretty well-educated person, and I have almost increasingly struggled to know more practically every day, but my standard of living has progressively deteriorated since the end of the regain of Emperor Haile Selassie. My life then is now only a sweet dream which I cannot possibly rejoin during my remaining years.
In the good old days I would dine and wine at the Castelli Restaurant at the Piassa which now can be entered only by well-dressed millionaires who can afford to pay over a thousand Birr for a sumptuous meal. As the Derg military junta was trumpeting the downfall of the great Emperor, I moved into a rented studio (the rent was slashed following the confiscation of extra houses by the Derg) in the full knowledge that I would soon have my own villa built at a cost of about 30,000 Birr. Life was a bit more difficult than under the Emperor but it was pretty good. I could eat and dress well and liked my studio for the privacy and solitude it offered me. So I prevaricated on having my dream villa built, but in the meantime somehow the cost of living was gradually rising and life was getting progressively more and more difficult. I realized I could no longer have my villa built at anything like the price I thought I could. I tried to save more skipping even the basic necessities. I was having the worst of both worlds: my dream was receding farther and farther as my standard of living was teetering on the brink of starvation, since missing meals was being used (by me) as a means of saving money under the regime which replaced the Derg, particularly during the latter half of its horrible reign.
Then, to make things worse, my boss sacked me for no good reason with a two-sentence letter of dismissal. I got really mad, because I could not find any good justification for terminating my job contract. Rightly or wrongly, I thought I was one of the hardest-working employees of the institution, although I could not in all honesty vouch for my own innate or native ability. Anyway, I had to stare life in the eye on a pittance of a pension barely enough for food let alone anything other than that bare subsistence. Luckily, the money I saved for my dream villa came to my rescue, and I nibbled at it like a rodent. Besides, my almost natural predilection for asking crazy questions like, “Can we scientifically prove the existence of God?” kept me away from artificially creating wants and needs and therefore from spending sprees that could have bankrupted me overnight. So, after painful cogitation, I went to one of my best friends and told him: “Eureka! I have found the answer.” If matter evolved infinitely in infinite time and space, the end result cannot just stop at the human brain, but must go all the way to the brain of a demigod and then that of God Himself. That is actually what Hegel meant by the Absolute Idea!” My friend sort of blinked, but soon returned to his usual refrain: “If God exists why does He not reveal himself to us and stop all the injustice in the world?” But I returned to my own refrain and said: “You are using human logic which cannot possibly substitute divine logic”. As usual, we agreed to disagree and went about our own business.
Another brand new day dawns and it would be another long and boring day unless I try to keep myself busy somehow: I return to my usual routine of racking my brains on things like the relationship between intense intellectual activity and the sex drive and questions like which is stronger, the hunger drive or the sex drive and never stop wondering at the genius of Sigmund Freud who emerged in one piece after delving so deep into the unconscious mind. My favorites, however, are Karl Marx and Ayan Rand. Why did Karl Marx juxtapose labor against capital as antagonistic when in actual fact capital is a higher form of labor? Labor grows (evolves) into capital, but socialism attempts to assert and derail this growth process by enjoining labor to remain as labor, i.e., workers as workers, and not rise to the status of capitalists by the fruits of their own labor. For God’s sake, what is wrong with saving a worker’s wages and converting them into capital, in the form of capital equipment, and then becoming a capitalist?
On the other hand, to Ayan Rand, capital is a manifestation of the realization of the power and potential of the individual ego. According to her, human progress is driven by self-interest (“The Virtue of Selfishness”). Every normal human being strives to consummate the desires and aspirations of his ego by creating a cornucopia of values which materially and morally benefit and uplift humanity which in turn accrue to the wealth, prestige and power of the individual who in the first place created the cornucopia (capital) by the power of his ego. Strange, isn’t it, that egoism eventually morphs into altruism. Look no farther than Bill Gates for overwhelming evidence, bearing testimony to the intrinsic logical beauty of Engels, “The Dialectics of Nature”. Speaking of dialectics, would it be farfetched to conclude that if egoism, after consummating itself, transforms itself into its dialectical opposite of altruism, then private capital, after completing its growth potential and transforming itself into, say, fused human and artificial intelligence, gets to be no more private capital but communal (not to say communist) capital, serving humanity as a sort of post-industrial cornucopia dishing out every conceivable good and service on the Marxian distribution principle of “to each according to his need. . .”
Then my mind would wonder to the awesome mystery of the DNA, which is said to be a densely compact molecule containing the coded information of life, much like digital information on a micro chip. The other day I came across a piece of news which revealed that bio-technocrats successfully uploaded digital information to the DNA. Wow! What might the implications of all this be? Don’t know, but it kept me busy thinking about how man is getting closer to unraveling the coded and sequenced mystery of organic life. Is homo sapiens dialectically transforming into homo deus? This is what most of the civilized and scientific world is preoccupied with. What on earth are we doing here in Ethiopia? Most of the scientific world is trying to fuse human intelligence with artificial intelligence; Debretsion Gebrremichael is trying to separate Tigreans, the original Ethiopians, from the rest of Ethiopians. What a criminal waste of time and brain power!
Configuration of Contemporary Ethiopian Soceity
Meles Zenawi, the deceased former leader and strongman of the TPLF/EERDF, was not said to be an “evil genius” for nothing. His contorted ego used hate as a means of attaining political power. He maintained and perpetuated his regime in power for about twenty years not only by the gun but also by a patronage system based on rampant corruption. He re-configured Ethiopian society into low value-creating peasants and industrial (cottage, micro, small and medium) workers of extremely low productivity, parasitic politicians and bureaucrats, docile soldiers and officers, exploitative traders and middlemen and the rest of the Ethiopian people who are largely unemployed and dependent.
In this rather crippling social configuration, overall production has remained low on account of use of primitive and backward technologies and counter-productive land, manpower development and credit policies. Meles Zenawi’s patronage system was primed by heavy taxation (including a flat rate of 30 percent!), currency printing, domestic bank lending to government, external grants and loans, etc.
As output growth fell below population growth and domestic monetary expansion accelerated the growth of the money supply (broad money), inflation soared uncontrollably. Exploitative traders and middlemen, parasitic politicians and bureaucrats and other beneficiaries of the patronage system benefited from this economic situation. The rest of the Ethiopian people, including the value-creating peasants and industrial workers, suffered immeasurably. In the face of the relentless population growth, division and re-division of peasant plots reduced productivity further, negatively affecting overall food production.
More specifically, the social groups most affected negatively by the untoward social re-configuration of Ethiopian society wrought by the TPLF/EPRDF regime are: the unemployed and dependants, government pensioners, ordinary government employees including soldiers, peasant farmers and industrial workers, who definitely make up the vast majority of the Ethiopian population. In this re-configured Ethiopian society, the confrontation is not between classes of the Marxian types, but essentially between value subtractors on the one hand and small-scale value creators, the unemployed and the dependents on the other hand. In the Marxian paradigm, capitalists do create value, but their problem is that they are believed to extract as well the surplus value created by the working class.
The Glaring Reality on the Ground
The fake eleven percent growth narrative of the government cannot possibly hide the glaring economic misery of the vast majority of the Ethiopian people we are unfortunate enough to witness every day. The parasitic and exploitative social groups own luxury automobiles, with which to kill 5,000 people per year in road accidents and mercilessly pollute the air with exhaust pipe fumes. They own sumptuous villas where some of them may stage harems to act out their wildest hedonistic fantasies; as owners of high-rise buildings built on possibly massive non-repayable bank loans, they amass tons of cash in rents, which, while fueling inflation, they use to beat everybody else in offering the highest price in the market place and buying up everything available in the market.
The flip side of this narrative is gut-wrenching. Millions of kids are stunted for lack of adequate nutrition; thousands collapse in schools from vertigo caused by hidden hunger and malnutrition. Thousands more scramble over plastic bags of left –over food to get a morsel. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians of all ages have been reduced to road –side begging. The unemployed throng the streets in urban areas in their tens of thousands, occasionally stretching their hands for loose change. In the face of this near-apocalyptic economic landscape, statistics, massaged ones at that, do not mean much. A cumulative inflation rate of over 4,000 percent or a birr depreciation of nearly 94 percent do not really capture the deep sense of agony felt at not being able to buy a loaf of bread because its price has risen by 100 percent while the relentless pangs of hunger urge you to grab one and just run!
Defenstration of the Parasitic and Exploitative Social Groups
The parasitic and exploitative social groups are the basic problem of the country. They are so callous to the misery of the Ethiopian people that mention of parasitism and exploitation would cause them to draw their guns in self defense in a similar fashion to what Debretison Gebremichael is presently trying to do. They cannot engage in rational discourse because they have long flouted reason and opted for the barrel of the gun, and most of them are now pretty well-armed. They are too closely accustomed to the spoils of crime to let go and make peace. What to do? I would suggest: chuck them out and lock them up! But how? That is indeed the question: How to defenestrate the social parasites and exploiters. The question seems to require more mental energy than the issue of uploading digital information to the human DNA. But I would consider myself to be a despicable coward to let these people further erode my standard of living which has now hit rock bottom because of the incessant cumulative inflation they have deliberately caused. I would rather have vertigo from thinking hard to chuck these parasites out and have them locked up than from going hungry like those poor students at school!. Or pretty soon, I would not have any energy left to think and may well be forced to grab that loaf of bread and just run!
The Ethiopian Herald June 30, 2019
BY TEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICHAEL
