Oromia-Ethiopia: Is Meles Zenawi courageous enough to find the ‘black box’ of good character?

By Urgessa Tura*

Meles Zenawi declared ostentatiously that he had found the ‘black box of development’ in a recent chapter he authored (States and Markets: Neoliberal Limitations and the Case for a Developmental State– available online at his buddies’ website http://www.aigaforum.com) in a book edited by Joseph Stiglitz critiquing the neoliberal economic philosophy of a weaker and smaller government as a path to prosperity. If his declaration stands to be true, I recommend nothing less than Kumbaya dance for a grateful nation whose meticulous leader unlocked the mystery of winning the battle against dehumanizing poverty. However, there are hungry people in shanty towns and remote rural areas across Ethiopia that seemingly make Meles’s finding of the development ‘black box’ like the proverbial cow in the heaven causing grievance to her owner because tapping her milk is hardly possible.

Being this as it may, I want to make clear at the outset that I am not interested in the substance of Meles’s argument why an ‘activist state’ makes a better institution than a noninterventionist ‘night watchman’ state to bring about the desired level of economic prosperity. Rather, I was ruthlessly attracted by Meles’s characterization of the developmentalist state.

Basically, he characterizes the developmentalist state as immune to patronage, clientelism and related forms of corrupt behaviors. He emphatically argues the state officials in a developmentalist state are not ‘self-interested actors’ like the rational choice theorists would like us to believe. These righteous state officials of the developmentalist persuasion sometimes engage deliberately in the business of creating rent for selected business elites and enterprises. But, Meles says this kind of rent creation is different from the kind of rent created by self-interested and individualist state officials of the neoliberal sect. Theirs is a ‘socially wasteful’ rent. The developmentalists’ rent is not. How could the developmentalists’ rent be ‘socially wasteful’ for they are thought to be altruistic – not self-interested at all?

He contends that a state filled by officials who are self-interested would definitely end up as an ‘arena of warring individuals’ – a recipe for Armageddon type anarchy. Self-interested state officials, Meles states, "would use their monopoly of coercion … to act like a predator to loot and rob.” What else could be named Armageddon than such state of naked use of coercion? According to his version of the world, we would have easily slipped back into the Hobbesian State of Nature, where might makes right. Since we are not in that kind of messy world, since we are in a globalized and relatively well-functioning world that is giving some breathing space to developmentalists from Africa like him a chance to thrive, the neoliberal paradigm of viewing the state officials as self-interested machines that create monopolies and rent for few who fall in line with their political projects is essentially wrong.

After making such a scathing critique of neoliberal version of self-interested state officials, Meles paints the portrait of the saintly developmentalist state officials. They are altruistic figures who are not interested in the worldly things of accumulating wealth through predatory acts. They are not interested in stashing away billions of dollars in overseas secret bank accounts. It must be the UFOs that laundered the more than 11.7 billion dollars lost to illicit outflow from Ethiopia as a recent report by the Global Financial Integrity shows (available online at http://www.gfintegrity.org). One of the co-authors of that report lamentably noted, "[n]o matter how hard … [Ethiopians] try to fight their way out of absolute destitution and poverty, they will be swimming upstream against the current of illicit capital leakage.”

The righteous developmentalists are neutral actors who do not favor one group of business over other based on ethnicity, political creed and other forms of favoritism. When such officials create rent for few selected groups, it is with the intent to encourage entrepreneurial adventurism in some sectors of the economy left behind by greedy and unhealthy bourgeoisie class. The funny thing is Meles didn’t elaborate further how his altruistic state officials would determine who should get the unwasteful state created rent. At least he has not argued for procedural transparency and fairness in selecting those who are entitled to receiving rent. In reality, the kind of state officials Meles describes do not exist anywhere in the world, including core developmentalist states of the so-called high performance economies of East Asia. At least, we know that each of them had maintained anti-corruption institutions to weed out the robber barons and lootocrats Meles himself has admitted when he critiqued the neoliberal version of the self-interested man.

If Melesian description of an altruistic state official of a developmentalist government is true, we will not witness the increase of corruption at an alarming rate in Ethiopia as some indexes published annually by credible institutions, such as Transparency International, demonstrate. Meles’s government has sued his former telecom executives for wasting billions of Birr, and they were at least nominally convicted by his Kangaroo courts. It is also in our recent memory that Meles dismantled the Oromian State machinery –allegedly for corruption and sent many of the senior and mid-level officials to jail.

Moreover, his party satellite business enterprises had come close to monopoly over almost every sector of the Ethiopian economy. The former Chief Executive Officer of EFFORT, Mr. Sibhat Nega, has told the VOA (Amharic Service) more than a year ago that the business empire owned by EFFORT ranks top in Africa in terms of capital accumulation and extensive involvement in different sectors of the Ethiopian economy. The success of EFFORT has nothing to do with entrepreneurial innovation or expansion of their business globally. EFFORT accumulated the wealth Sibhat proudly spoke about through the kind of rent Meles Zenawi said a developmentalist state is committed to create for selected companies. We didn’t witness EFFORT investing in forgotten sectors of the economy where the government wants to create leverage in order to attract companies to strategic economic sectors. Again, it is in our collective memory that Meles’s government seized export-ready coffee of the six largest coffee exporters, who had been in business for three generations under the veil of stamping out illicit hoarding so as to pave the way for monopolization of the coffee export business by GUNA TRADING, one of the many subsidiaries of EFFORT. Besides the coffee trade, EFFORT is involved in almost everything from the retail business to cement production. While strengthening and expanding the business reach of EFFORT, other party satellite corporations were deliberately weakened and their business projects and ideas looted. A case in point is DINSHO, symbolically owned by OPDO. Note the double standard in the distribution of the so-called unwasteful rent. EFFORT qualifies to receive the rent while, by some mysterious criterion, DINSHO does not.

In addition, altruistic state officials should not engage in economically nonsensical acts of kicking out of business owners of businesses, which refused to fall in line with ‘revolutionary democracy.’ Altruistic state elites of the developmentalist creed should not shackle Oromo investors with a number of encumbrances so as to drive them out of market on the unfounded suspicion that they may support the political convictions of the OLF. Altruistic developmentalists should not give away land at ridiculously cheap prices to foreign investors while their own people suffer from food scarcity, some of them due to shortage of farmland. A recent report by Oakland Institute (available online athttp://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OI_Ethiopa_Land_Investment_report.pdf) confirmed the fact that foreign companies from India and the Middle East got vast tracts of land for unbelievably low amount of leasehold payment prompting them to dub their acquisition as a ‘green gold’ windfall. Moreover, the report (see page 23 of the report) uncovered through its field study that more than 75% of the domestic investors who got such lucrative land deals are investors from Tigray – the select nominated for distribution of unwasteful state created rent. These are the oddities on the ground that seemingly contradict Melesian version of altruistic developmentalist stewards. So Meles needs to explain how his developmentalist state officials allowed all this to happen if he wants to be honest enough and serious about his critique of the self-interested man of neoliberals.

What we demand from our accidental leader is not to author us with bizarre and false version of the nature of his government or officials. We are looking for serious reflection on the character of his leadership which has been vehemently erratic in the last 20 years. Ironically, as he has made a relentless effort to find the ‘black box’ of development, he should make equally forceful endeavor of finding the ‘black box’ of good character. All the citizens of that nation, severely hit by crushing poverty and stratospheric inflation, which his government’s policies had created and worsened, are asking from him is one simple and straightforward thing – propriety. Don’t author us with false hopes of altruistic developmentalists saving us from the tyranny of want. Instead, unshackle us from ‘unfreedoms’ (to borrow from Amartya Sen) your rule-by-iron-fist had imposed on us. If you unshackle us, we promise you that we will be fine. We will be able to unleash our full potentials and get involved in the reconstruction of our life and country – and finally find, unlike you, the true ‘black box’ of development.

* The writer, Urgessa Tura, is currently a graduate student at Harvard University: you may contact him @ ugonu2008@gmail.com for comments, suggestions or questions, if any.