Shopping for new guards, an ex-pat I know spent a recent Saturday driving her NGO car around to embassies and aid agencies asking the guards in front what security company they worked for. She ended up having a meeting with the general manager of one of these companies. Soon after (and only because a friend she knows surfs opposition websites) she heard the company was very close to the government security apparatus. But before she knew this, she asked the man if he would hire some of her current watchmen if she decided to exchange them for a security company. Of course, he said. "But they'll object at first. Eventually they'll come around."
Welcome to the machine. Object, her NGO current guards certainly would. By simply hearing the name of the company, any Addis Abeban would know what they were getting into. But the benefits (or lack of options) to entering government enforcement, even this extended, indirect branch of it, would soon outweigh the political misgivings. Join they soon would as well.
Political machines have thrived everywhere in the world. Many a high-minded thinker subtly believe that they are a necessary stop on the road to something bigger. What would modern Chicago be without Richard Daley and the machine that helped put Kennedy in power. Jacques Chirac, president of France, would be a mere of historical also-ran if it weren't for the machine he built around his Mayoralty of Paris. Machines often evolve into 'the way things are done' (a point that Joseph Steiglitz indirectly makes in a recent essay.)
Since taking power in 1991, the EPRDF has made quite a machine for itself here in Ethiopia. And it's no small feat.
Like so many others in the world, this machine is ethnically based. The Tigray elite who lead the ruling party have developed an apparatus that manages to keep them in power despite the fact that their actual ethnicity is less than 10pc of the population and that their part of the country is one of the poorest.
At its core, the machine works by quasi-federalism. There are various regional states in Ethiopia, each one - on the face of it - designed to empower ethnicities or "nationalities" that were historically subjugated by the Amhara and Addis Abeba elite, as represented by the Emperor and later, the Derg regime. Each of these regional states is run by members of ethnic-based parties that fall under the EPRDF umbrella, parties like the AAPO in Amhara, or the OPDO, in Oromia. The top guys of each of this parties take part in the central committee of the EPRDF, which itself is led by the overwhelingly Tigray Politiburo, topped by the Prime Minister.
The whole government system that exists today was designed out of nothing by the EPRDF, and therefore, by the Politburo. Parliament, the House of Federation, the court system and every government body originates from the will and execution of the EPRDF. They are the ones who defeated the Derg, and, once anointed by the US, they are the ones who built the system they currently rule with.
This system, this machine, is one the government takes pride in. Built to satisfy the high-minded whims of the donor community, it bears all the signs of a checked-and-balanced democratic society. The system is presented as a democracy in the making: soon-to-be timeless institutions that are (or will be) bigger and greater than one man or political party. And for the most part, Western donors, have accepted this as a given. It's from this machine that Prime Minister Meles became the oft-mentioned 'darling' of the donor community, until the events of last year.
In the run-up to the 2005 election, in order for government system to pass the smell test with donors and to keep potentially dangerous opponents 'inside the fence', real opposition parties were allowed to emerge. Since the Eritrean War, these parties were a diffuse, and conflicting bunch, often bickering against one another and self-sabotaging through interethnic suspicion. It was in this light that the 2005 elections were declared (keeping to constitutional schedule). The EPRDF had little doubt that the machine, even with these opposition parties, would vote itself back in.
But the unthinkable happened. A scattered opposition began coalescing. Suddenly, the ruling party was no longer facing an alphabet soup of meaningless initials, but one great umbrella organization, the CUD, consisting of intellectuals and surprisingly worthy political tacticians, led by Berhanu Nega, a one-time New York professor who came back home to lead.
There was extreme excitement about the election. Not dissimilar to images in Iraq last year or Congo this year. It was a sight to behold and the run up to the May 15 was intense, often joyful and filled with anticipation; men and women who had never participated in a vote came to the polling stations in droves.
What the ruling party only realized too late, was that much of this excitement, in Addis at least, was anchored in the belief that the ruling party was going to be voted away from power. And almost overnight, and too late for it to be finessed in a way that would not offend Donors (or at least put them painfully on the spot), the election was to take place with the outcome extremely uncertain. The opposition was set to thrive 'inside the fence', setting itself up for victory even, by playing within the rules of the Ruling Party machine…