Since the May general elections in Ethiopia the country has been gripped by political and security conflicts. The country is only slowly returning to normal this week after a week-long stndoff called by the opposition who believed that the government robbed it of victory through unfair means.

Both in June soon after the elections and now several people have been killed and many more imprisoned. While elections are supposed to indicate where the wishes of the people lay and both winners and losers are expected to respect them it is not often that easy in situations where neither is prepared for the result.

Sometimes defeat can sound like victory and some victory could be interpreted as defeat if the cost is too high. The other problem has to do with the attitude of the winners and losers.

In Ethiopia, it is clear that neither the ruling EPRDF nor the two main Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF) were prepared for the results and the obligation that they impose on them in a democratic setting. For the first time since the EPRDF came into power 15 years ago, it faced a more challenging and credible electoral opposition. It lost all the seats in the capital to the opposition and in other regions. Its immediate response was to see the result as a challenge to its authority and the losers as security risk.

It was obvious that its political and security intelligence misinformed it about its popularity. It was clear to most observers that after 15 years especially the first 10 years of which democratic opposition has been at best weak due both to relative strength of the government and the opposition’s own limited political vision compromised by sectarianism the EPRDF has become vulnerable.

As the likelihood of an armed overthrow of the regime has diminished even among the country’s largest nationality, the Oromo (who have been the longest military opponents of the EPRDF) peaceful resistance and democratic opposition has grown. As it happened to other post-revolutionary regimes across Africa, the longer the EPRDF stayed in power the less ‘grateful’ people became for its liberation struggle.

Uganda will be an obvious parallel. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, like President Museveni before him, became a former revolutionary turned free-market reformer with new best friends in Washington, London, Brussels, and other patented capitals of what he would have called rightly ‘centres of imperialism’ before.

Like other clubbers in the now ageing ‘new generation of African leaders’, Mr Zenawi is a very fiercely intellectual leader who is able to stoutly articulate and defend his positions and often intimidating to Western journalists, policy makers and leaders who were too used to dealing with supine African leaders who were too desperate to say yes to any western demand. Again, like Uganda, Ethiopia is heavily dependent on aid but somehow, the EPRDF until recent years, managed to stave off Western intervention in its political affairs.

A kind of dual mandate partnership (familiar to Ugandans) developed whereby Zenawi pursues neo-liberal economic policies and the IMF/World Bank and the dominant western powers gave him a huge discount on internal political matters.

However, market reforms as Gorbachev discovered too late in Russia with Perestroika and Glasnost have their own unpleasant political logic. In these days of neo-liberal hegemony, China has been the only country that has been able to combine free market with unfree politics without provoking violent opposition internally or risking serious political intervention from outside.

But then China is productively big enough and has a more developed internal market (desperately lusted after by Western companies) to contain external intervention. The so-called Asian tigers are also parallels to China albeit in a more limited way. Imagine if China’s development budget had been the result of goodwill from the IMF/World Bank and Western do gooders!
But acceptance in the West also comes with its own conflicting demands and expectations. It is always the case that the more our leaders become popular abroad the less they are at home and the more complacent they become about their domestic constituency, hence they are ill-prepared to think of any possible defeat.

The opposition on the one hand, after overcoming initial timidity, lack of clarity or better alternative socio-economic policies, begin to unite in opposition to the Prime Minister or President and the ruling party.

Some people will just want change for the sake of it, becoming tired of the same official pictures on their walls, televisions and in their newspapers and same names on their radios. Younger generations also emerge who now take the gains of the past as their starting point not the ceiling on what is possible.

This is where former revolutionaries in power become reactionaries taking political opposition to be treason, shooting demonstrators, jailing leaders of the opposition generally punishing the people for not “voting wisely” which means electing them in perpetuity!

The opposition too, having spent too long in opposition is often unprepared for its victories and react either too triumphantly or with selective delegitimation. The former exaggerates how close they believe they have come to seizing the state house while the latter makes them to always query the result only in areas where they did not win. A process of mutual demonisation ensues between an insecure government humbled by the polls especially losing in the capital where the government is based thereby becoming psychologically an occupying force.

on the other hand the opposition suffers the delusion that its control of the centre and a few cities also meant that it is de facto government and is often tempted to behave so by unleashing ‘people power’ which is often met by Government ‘power show’.

These de facto/ de jure conflicts need statesmanship and leadership to break the impasse. The tragedy for Ethiopia so far has been the absence of such vision.

The government needs to accept that those who voted against it have not committed any sin while the opposition also have to accept that those in power are not from Mars but fellow Ethiopians with whom they have political differences.

There cannot be meaningful dialogue if the government uses guns and prisons as its first weapon of choice and the opposition regards the government as illegitimate. We need to cultivate a democratic culture that does not equate political opposition with enmity or the attitude that if we cannot get in then everything should crumble.

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