EPDRF’s
massive landslide victory does not under any stretch of the imagination portray
the swansong of multi-party democracy in Ethiopia.
10/0/2010
Ethiopia - an
oasis of peace and stability in a troubled Horn of Africa - held its fourth national
elections to the House of People’s Representatives and State Councils on the 23rd
May 2010. The turnout was huge by any
standard, as close to 32 million Ethiopians (87% of eligible voters) cast their
votes in 44.000 polling stations. The presence of Ethiopian Government invited European
Union (EU EOM) and African Union Observer Mission (AU EOM) as well as a large
army of local voluntary organizations and CSOs was conspicuous across the
nation. As preliminary results (final
result due on the 22nd June) started to be made public by a recently
souped-up National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE), the sheer size of
EPDRF’s landslide victory caught everyone by surprise. Though an EPDRF win was predicted, a tsunami
of such magnitude that it completely wiped-out Ethiopia’s goulash opposition
parties from the electoral map of Ethiopia at least for the life time of this
parliament, was deemed by many a futile exercise in surrealism.
All agree
that the result represented the freely expressed will of voters. While EU EOM’s Interim Report did make largely
unsubstantiated claims of harassment of opposition supporters in the lead up to
the Election, it did not dare to challenge the authenticity of the Election
results. Ethiopians need no reminding by
a foreign election guru of the glaring truth that electoral processes in both
developed and developing countries, especially so where democratic culture is
still at its infancy and where the electoral process itself is technologically challenged;
elections cannot be immune to periodic manifestations of flaws and
irregularities. After all, “Democracy”
as American journalist and writer, Irving Kristol, once argued, “does not
guarantee equality of conditions; it only guarantees equality of opportunity.” That explains why the EPDRF’s government’s
attention over the years was focused on building democratic institutions, on
broadening the political space, on ensuring that there exists a level playing
field at all times and not only at elections, on making the state media
available to all opposition parties and on making funds available to opposition
parties election campaign.
Cynicism of
the Government’s commitment to multi-party democracy, then, would not be wrong,
but mistaken. This is so for not only
had EPDRF paid Moloch-like sacrifices for the prevalence of pluralistic
democracy in Ethiopia during the liberation years, but because it today
genuinely believes that in a veritable democracy, the opposition is not only
tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is
indispensable.
Two weeks after
the Election dust has settled, and with Ethiopians accepting the verdict of the
majority of voters with grace, some foreign critics and their cheer-leaders
from the Ethiopian vocal Diaspora are breast-beating about the presumed death
of multi-party democracy in Ethiopia.
This farcical display of mourning can only be a futile exercise in
damage limitation. They know in their
heart-of-hearts that voters had rejected opposition parties because of their
demerits, and not because they were wooed, cajoled, intimidated or harassed by
EPDRF. Voters could not continue to put
up with the endless bickering amongst opposition parties who spent the entire
election campaign highlighting EPDRF’s presumed short-comings and nothing about
what they intend to do once elected.
Incidentally, no one articulated the disdain Ethiopian voters have for
the opposition-at-large better than the interminable de facto party ideologue
of hate politics, Prof Al Mariam, who in his weekly Monday sermon lambasted the
leaders in words hitherto unheard of from opposition supporters in the
Diaspora. Add to this the gallimaufry (gooramailay)
and fragmented nature of the opposition and what you get is a golden
opportunity for strong and united EPDRF to eskista its way through to success.
It is, nevertheless, unfortunate that EPDRF
has become victim of its own success story, and is getting blamed for the
opposition’s poor election campaign and for their inadequacies. Where in the world, then, do you see blame
being placed on a party which has won an impressive landslide victory? Surely, this cannot be right, and must not
pass unchallenged. Those foreign NGOs
intent on fishing in troubled-waters, and their political bedfellows from the
Ethiopian Diaspora are leaving no stone unturned to discredit the Election
result.
The opposition
parties in Ethiopia know only too well that they can no longer hoodwink the
Ethiopian voter into rejecting the verdict of the majority. With NEBE rejecting Medrek’s and AEUP’s
request for a rerun of the Election, and with morale among their supporters at
an all time low, these opposition parties
have been burning the mid-night oil to come up with some sort of a
face-saving device. Failure to come up
with a win-win formula has left Medrek and AEUP in the doldrums. To them, salvation comes not from faith in
the Ethiopian people and the work they do, but from foreign intervention. That is why we have started observing a
flurry of activities by the avatars of hate politics as they jet-hose the
international community with their omelette of fabrications and outright lies
in an attempt to arm-lock the Government of Ethiopia into accepting a rerun of
the Election. What are mind boggling
here is the realisation that the toxic Diaspora’s gaggle of Ethiopian
Professors, Doctors and Engineers continue repeating the same mistakes they
made during the aftermath of the 2005 National Elections? Then their trans-continental “Stop Aid to
Ethiopia” crusade had boomeranged against them and left them in disarray. They failed then because the people and
Government of Ethiopia refused to be dormant to their evil machinations, and
door-mat to power-mongers. That staunch
resolve not to sneeze every time a super power takes a snuff, and not to get
pneumonia every time London, Washington, Paris or Brussels, etc catches cold is
very much alive and kicking today in the people and Government of Ethiopia as
it had been when they first started the tortuous journey of reinventing
Ethiopia into a modern, secular and pluralistic democracy 19 years ago. Hands off Ethiopia!