An opinion column published in Fortune where I've been working lately...
Life Beyond the Clipped Hedges
Two weeks ago, Fortune asked - rhetorically - if the EPRDF was on a publicity campaign. The answer was an unqualified yes, admitted as much by the Prime Minister's public relations guru, Bereket Simon.
This week that campaign reached almost unimaginable levels. Not only did the Prime Minister appear with the common folk, but he took the show out to the people instead of remaining confined to the cavernous reception chambers of Arat Kilo.
Yes, there he was in full daylight, consoling victims in Dire Dawa after the devastating effects of the flash floods. The Prime Minister was looking positively presidential. Last year, when the aftershocks of Hurricane Katrina caused so much disaster in New Orleans, it took President Bush almost a week to get his feet on the ground. The Prime Minister had him beat by a good few days.
The idea of an Ethiopian leader taking on this symbolic healer role is something close to historic. As far as the ruling classes are concerned, humanitarian disasters in Ethiopia often remain a farenji affair, even though the previous two leaders arguably lost their jobs partly because of poor disaster management. It is the aid agencies from the UN or elsewhere who track pending emergencies, and it is basically satellites of the same agencies that oversee the effort to do something about them.
One UN official I met last week said that when he recently conferred with a government counterpart over humanitarian fears in the South, the official looked to him as the responsible one in the whole affair. "So what are you guys at the UN going to do about this?".
What is so different, in the Dire Dawa case, is how far ahead the Prime Minister decided to get of the flood tragedy. It was almost as if the he was running for office. But election season is not for a few years, so what exactly is making the Prime Minister run?
The chattering classes from the Diaspora (especially ones in greater Washington D.C.) have their answer. To them, the government is on a campaign to blunt the effects of a bill in progress in US Congress, a resolution that officially admonishes Revolutionary Democrats for running Ethiopia in an inhumane fashion.
To the EPRDF, on the other hand, raising public relations to American levels is just an act of maturity, the absorption of hard earned lessons. After all the hullabaloo of last year's election, say Revolutionary Democrats, the ruling party has heard you, the people, and is mending its ways.
Whether either argument amounts to a hill of teff is open to debate. What exactly, we can wonder, will the effects of the bill in U.S. Congress be, if passed by a political body whose vast majority could care less about the nitty-gritty of liberation front dynamics? As long as the U.S. Embassy in Addis has its hundreds of vehicles running around the capital going about their daily business, it is hard to imagine that U.S. Congressmen will spark anything conspicuously transformational in Ethiopia.
The maturity argument seems a little weak too. The public relations campaign, as this paper argued, can only go so far and will hardly turn the page from bad blood created last year. In order for the next chapter to start, the Revolutionary Democrats are going to have to start thinking a little "transformationally" themselves.
And they are not doing that. By hanging medals on the necks of farmers, it is clear that corralling the land tilling 85pc of the population to their side is the goal, but without doing anything fundamental to transform the economic equation that rules them.
To be sure, with three years of solid highland rainfall (and this year looks good too) the rewards are there (a billion dollars in exports, right?), but what about the off years; what about the cities? The thousands of the 85pc who every year take a bus and make themselves part of the city dwelling 15pc are the ones who need impressing. And this growing army of Arsenal-supporting and Teddy-Afro-listening urbanites are not going to be satisfied unloading pineapples from Isuzu trucks for much longer, especially as a vast chunk of them spend whatever savings they do have on vocational training for professions that do not exist. The EPRDF needs city jobs and it needs them fast.
In a sense, with all their image work, the Prime Minister and his entourage are acting as if outside their ministry windows was a vibrant middle class, factory jobs and a minimum wage.
The ruling party members, in their newfound maturity, are acting like modern leaders, except that unfortunately, the country they rule (beyond the clipped hedges of Bole and Lideta, say) is still pre-modern.
In all their efforts to be seen as leaders of the Ethiopian tomorrow, they are forgetting about that little thing called today.