The late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s reputation was complicated. His technocratic focus on pro-poor, conservation-based sustainable development and positions on Somalia and Sudan made him an aid darling and the United States’ junior sheriff in the Horn of Africa. Yet he defied neoliberal economic prescriptions for growth, disrespected human rights and violated political and civil liberties.
Ethiopia has maintained an average growth rate between 8% and 11% since 2000, primarily the result of foreign investment in the country’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors. But was this growth worth the political cost? What did the aid that his regime received from Western nations accomplish, and how did it factor into the complex governance strategies that left journalists and diplomats befuddled as to how to describe him after his August 2012 death? More importantly, almost 16 months since his passing, what has the void signaled about the validity of his governance strategies?
Statistics and stories
To answer those questions, we must place Meles’ governance strategy in context, both statistically and historically. Firstly, a few statistics will help set the scene. Official development assistance has increased significantly, with the average between 2000 and 2010 reaching $2.395 billion. In 2010, Ethiopia was the largest aid recipient in Africa and the second largest in the world. In 2011, its greatest bilateral donor, the United States, provided $847 million in aid, over a third of which was in food aid. In 2010, 34% of the aid went to social sectors, 17% was programmatic, and 16% was humanitarian. Moss and Subramanian found in 2005 that 23% of Ethiopia’s GDP was derived from aid, marking it an aid-dependent country.
Second, a selective reading of the country’s history shows a tendency for both political instability and famine. Pressured by economic crisis, drought, famine, corruption, and the Eritrean nationalist movement, Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime yielded to revolutionary protests in 1974. The provisional administrative council of soldiers (i.e., the Derg) that deposed him installed an infiltratory Marxist government. Mengistu Haile Mariam’s regime fared no better at alleviating drought. Impoverishing socialist economic policies coupled with famine encouraged through war against self-determinism caused millions to starve in the “Biblical” famine of the 1980s. In spite of a new constitution adopted in 1987 that devolved federal power, giving more autonomy to ethnic regions, most nationalist movements coordinated military strategies as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).
What is aid aiding?
With Meles at the helm, the EPRDF took political control in 1991 and elections in 1995 established a “multiparty” democracy. Because the regime largely determines the country’s development direction (and stability is seen as a prerequisite for development), critics are labeled “anti-development” or “anti-peace.” Sometimes, thanks to the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation No. 652, they are even labeled “terrorists.”
History repeats itself. The Meles regime, too, denied opposition ethnic groups human rights in order to maintain power. Not unlike Mengistu in the 1980s, in summer 2007 and fall 2011, amidst continuing drought and famine across the Horn of Africa, Meles employed aid as a tool of repression, denying food, seed, and fertilizer to the Ogaden region while insisting its blockades merely prevented guns and material from reaching the separatist (and “terrorist”) Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).
But why would a government knowingly calculate that the best way to secure itself is to undermine part of the population it was “elected” to serve? Exactly who is food aid to Ethiopia aiding?
Aspects of politics in Africa such as neopatrimonialism (a system in which states possess formal modern bureaucracies yet utilize informal patrimonial principles like personalist authority, weak checks and balances, and clientelism) and patronage (the politically motivated distribution of favors to groups) must be recognized as ends to governance strategies that may sometimes take precedence. While these things can impede development in some countries (Museveni’s Uganda being one example), whether they do depends on the governance strategy of the regime.
In Meles’ case, human rights were often abused to ensure regime security, but strides were nonetheless made toward development objectives. His strategy (as well as that of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame) was classified by some analysts as developmentally patrimonial — focused on achieving long term economic development for itself and others in spite of its political intolerance. In this way, human rights abuses came in stride with economic gains, which although they made the population as a whole better off, certainly preferenced some ethnic populations over others.
Why might a regime whose economic growth is still somewhat defined through agriculture choose to undermine its success? Again, the answer is rooted in politics. However, the tendency of food aid to be used politically and geopolitically is not unique to Ethiopia (other notable examples include Zimbabwe and Sudan) — which remains a low-income food-deficit country despite its recent growth.
Politics aside (if that is ever possible), food insecurity remains a problem. It is a product of the population’s low purchasing power and poor infrastructure. There is also a direct correlation with the amount of food imported (and food aid received) and the volatility in the price of exports, more than 75% of which are agricultural. While some economic liberalization was necessary to escape the damage of import substitution industrialization from the Derg era, the regime’s continued prudence about liberalizing is appropriate. Too closely following neoliberal prescriptions may defeat efforts to improve food security.
What of the future?: Implications and conclusions
There are a number of conclusions to be drawn. First, it is difficult to conclude that aid is facilitating a “big push” toward modernization as is often claimed, since the objective of the bulk of aid received (particularly with Ethiopia’s large percentage of food aid) is not meant to impact economic growth, or, in the case of most social expenditures, cannot do so in the short term.
Second, neoliberal standards regarding economic governance ignore the political considerations that influence the regime’s effort to maintain power. When overlooked, decisions to withhold food from communities, defy conditionalities, (or, as other neighboring countries have done, fund a rebel movement, maintain violence in part of the country, or pay voters to maintain the status quo) may appear illogical. Ultimately, this underscores the importance of understanding the interests, ideas, and ideologies of politics in Africa.
Third, neopatrimonial systems need not be juxtaposed with development objectives. Contrary to the good governance agenda’s assumptions, corruption and patronage need not derail economic growth. This upholds a conclusion noted by many others and explains the success that Meles had in fostering growth in comparison to neighboring Uganda’s Museveni: the personalized nature of governance makes some strategies more developmentally effective, stable, or skilled than others.
Fourth, the article’s discussion of development coming at the expense of meaningful democracy illustrates the difficulty of realizing neoliberal expectations that aid might encourage democratization. This seems to endorse Moss, Pettersson, and van de Walle’s conclusion that substantial aid revenues may make regimes less accountable. However, the differing nature of democracy in Africa and the use of patronage and clientelism to connect with politically relevant citizens make identifying causality difficult.
More than a year after Meles’ death, Ethiopia’s political situation remains interesting to watch. In the aftermath of Meles’ death, some expressed concerns about political tension within the ruling coalition rising to the surface and mixing with tensions from the larger populous derived from economic and political exclusion. The prime ministership passed from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to another party in the coalition when former deputy PM Hailemariam Desalegn was appointed successor without incident — perhaps because Meles’ widow Azeb Mesfin’s role as CEO of the TPLF’s Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Tigray (EFFORT) initially made Hailemariam simply a figurehead.
When Hailemariam was elected prime minister in his own right in March by the ruling coalition, deputies from the three other parties cooperating with his Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement (SEPDM) in the EPDRF were appointed — a move that some allege signals paranoia rather than an effort toward harmony. Yet, in spite of initial failure last October, the International Crisis Group has issued a call that Hailemariam consider extending an olive branch to the ONLF again. Only time will tell if smoothing over ethnic relations with Meles’ greatest rivals spells an end to a long history of depriving opposing ethnic groups of food aid and economic success.
This article is an updated excerpt of a longer scholarly article published for Consilience last fall. The original may be found here.