Is Ethiopia already a failed state?

Ethiopia is at a dangerous crossroads. The ill-fated war in Tigray, which started in November 2020, has morphed into a civil war involving six of Ethiopia’s ten federal states. Ethnic and political polarization is rife. The ruling elite and their allies unabashedly fuel genocidal rhetoric on social and mainstream media, with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed characterizing Tigrayans as cancer and weeds.

Abiy inherited an authoritarian state amid a political crisis. But, despite liberal promises, his mishandling of the transitional period has only made things worse. As the Tigray conflict escalates amid looming famine, Ethiopia is effectively a failed state on the verge of disintegration.

Ethiopia’s mounting economic and political woes indeed point to state failure. Under Abiy, GDP took a nosedive from an already meager $96.6 billion in 2019 to its current $93 billion. For a population of 110 million, this is embarrassing. With ethnic war raging in the north and the insurgency in the Oromia state gathering momentum, a more downward economic trend is expected for the remainder of 2021 and beyond.

Investor confidence has plummeted. Abiy’s ill-advised and untimely currency change led to a monetary crisis. The abrupt banknotes change eroded the value of the birr: The rate now stands at 65 birr for a dollar in the informal market, up from 35 birr to a dollar last August when currency change became effective.

The Tigray war could not have come at a worse time for Ethiopia. Inflation is skyrocketing at 20 percent, with food items almost out of reach of the ordinary citizen. The gross domestic product is growing at a sluggish 2 percent compared to the average 10 percent per annum for much of the last two decades.

The U.S. government is weighing additional financial sanctions against Ethiopia over the Tigray war. This could impact decisions by the World Bank and IMF to not approve the Abiy Administration’s request for debt relief. Sadly, a denial of debt relief would profusely bleed an economy that is already faltering. It is already saddled with a debt burden of $64 billion or 70 percent of its GDP in 2021.

Further sanctions and withholding of overseas aid would worsen Ethiopia’s already dismal Human Development Index, one of the lowest in the world. Out of 187 countries, Ethiopia occupies the unenviable position of 180th. As such, more than 60 percent of the 110 million Ethiopians live on food aid.

With the Abiy administration’s attempt to blockade the Tigray region, famine and starvation loom on the horizon, if not already happening. Coupled with the underreported conflict in Oromia and Benishangul Gumuz, Ethiopia is embroiled in a quagmire. The combined impacts of these conflicts may hasten the demise of this progress-averse empire.

A state of terror 

Ethiopia had been beset by perennial wars and vicious cycles of violence since the birth of the modern Empire. The genesis of the current conflicts lies in Emperor Menelik II’s conquest of the South. Menelik rose to the throne violently and, in a short period, crowned himself as the Emperor of Ethiopia, thereby pacifying King Yohannes of Tigray. From there on, Menelik launched a massacre spree of Wollo Oromo and forced Mohamed Ali, the viceroy of Wollo, to convert to Christianity in exchange for safety for himself and his family. The same murderous pillage was replicated as Menelik expanded his nascent empire further South. Since then, Ethiopia has been a state of terror and a humpty-dumpty collection of nations and nationalities held together not by the rule of law but by brute force.

In the last 60 years, Ethiopian rulers flirted with a feudal system during Emperor Haile Selassie, a communist military dictatorship under Mengistu Hailemariam, and an authoritarian one-dominant party system under the now-defunct Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Abiy’s Prosperity Party kept the dominant one-party apparatus intact while claiming “pragmatism” as its ideology. None of these regimes brought stability to the country. Characteristic of the winner-takes-all Abyssinian culture, all these regimes failed to address Ethiopia’s political problems adequately.

Ethiopian exceptionalism

Ethiopia is one of the only two African states to escape the scourge of colonialism. As a result, given its long history of statehood, many scholars and Africanists assumed that Ethiopia had the benefit of “history” for progress and modernization. In particular, Ethiopianists such Harold Markus, Donald Levine, and Richard Pankhurst, among others, put their faith in this notion of Ethiopian exceptionalism.

In the face of insurmountable challenges, Abiy refuses to change course. His intransigence is informed by a misguided belief in Ethiopian exceptionalism and denialism. Ethiopian exceptionalism is a nostalgic view of the violent past as glorious and a distorted view of the present that denies and suppresses diversity in favor of an elusive national unity. Abiy’s nostalgia for the exclusive past is evident in his vanity palace renovation, speeches, Medemer books, and revisionist understanding of Ethiopia’s complex history.

Since Abiy took power in April 2018, the country’s politics has deteriorated rapidly. There is a broad perception that he wants to resurrect the violent centralized state where non-Abyssinians are relegated to second-class citizen status. At a minimum, he is hell-bent on watering down the current federal arrangement, which is the only glue holding together this multinational behemoth.

The causes of the Tigray war are controversial. What is not controversial is the massive propaganda and disinformation spewed by the central government and its allies before and during the war. Nonetheless, the war’s message to many oppressed nationalities in the South is that Abiy wants to reestablish a strong central government that prioritizes the Amhara narrative and history, thus restoring Amhara supremacy. That is why many in the South focus more on stopping Abiy and less on holding the Tigray People’s Liberation Front responsible for past crimes or the misrule of the last 27 years.

Southern nations should be alarmed by Abiy’s Amhara-centric narrative, revisionist approach to Ethiopia’s complex history, and genocidal rhetoric. For this and many other reasons, most in Ethiopia neither approve of the war in Tigray nor the involvement of regional militia in the theater. In practical terms, many question the rationale of using the less trained rag-tag regional militias to face the Tigrayan army that defeated the Ethiopian National Defense Forces.

For example, in the Somali region, the decision to contribute troops from its special police forces was met with disapproval. It is likely to erode the legitimacy of the regional leaders further. There is also fear of a potential erosion of the uneasy peace that reigned in the state since the 2018 peace agreement between the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Ethiopian government.

At a glance, two conclusions are inescapable. First, despite its claim to 3000 years of “history,” Ethiopia fares worse than most post-colonial African countries in governance and development. Second, Western scholars, Ethiopianists in particular, have grossly misread Ethiopia’s “history,” thereby misinforming the world about the character and identity of this change-averse empire. Most Ethiopianists, many of them from the ranks of Jesuit scholarship, promoted a racist Euro-centric idea of Ethiopian exceptionalism that said the country had a unique “history” that separated it from sub-Saharan Africa. They completely ignored entire histories of non-Abyssinian civilizations in the empire. Because of this “unique history,” which resembled that of Europe, they argued, Ethiopia is poised to organize a progressive state amicable to the Westen notion of modernization.

Clearly, the projection that Ethiopia would transition into a modern democratic state was at best exaggerated. In addition to perennial conflicts, the archaic feudo-imperial culture, which is anathema to modernization, is crippling the country’s hope for moving forward politically and economically.

The way forward

Ethiopia’s political and economic stagnation calls to mind a debate that transpired in Africa in the 1960s: Should we prioritize fixing our political culture or focus on improving the economy? I submit that, at least in Ethiopia, no progress is possible unless the political culture is fixed.

To this end, a democratic multinational federation or confederation could still keep together the nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia. But to end the active conflicts and pave the way for a suitable political environment to chart a framework for a negotiated settlement, the Abiy administration must prioritize the following measures:

• Agree on a negotiated ceasefire in Tigray, Oromia, and elsewhere with clear operational rules and responsibilities for warring factions, including on the protection of civilians and the delivery of humanitarian aid;
• Release all political prisoners without any preconditions and expunge all records related to their alleged crimes against the state;
• Recall and nullify the June elections, suspend polls scheduled for September, and agree on a roadmap for genuine national and regional elections;
• Establish a Transitional Federal Government to run the day-to-day operations of government;
• Launch an all-inclusive national dialogue facilitated by a neutral third party with the active participation of all armed and unarmed political actors, including but not limited to the Tigray Defense Forces, Oromo Liberation Army, Benishangul Gumuz rebels, and Somali dissidents.