Not Imperial Vision but Sovereign and United Ethiopia
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Reading The Economist and Horn Review Against the Four Singular Interests
By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)*
Editorial Foreword
Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls in an election whose conduct this publication has already documented in unsparing detail, from the 143 polling stations that never opened to the telecommunications blackouts that left whole zones uncounted the temptation, in Addis Ababa and the diaspora alike, is to settle on a verdict about the man who presided over it. Was the vote the death rattle of competitive politics, as The Economist concluded in its election-eve assessment of an “imperial vision”? Or was it, as Horn Review argued in the same week, the legitimate capstone of a state being patiently and irreversibly reconstituted? Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s essay, the latest in a series that has run in these pages since his analysis of Adwa, GERD and the Red Sea, refuses both verdicts and in refusing them, makes an argument this newspaper considers worth taking seriously, even where it does not take it whole.
His method is to insist that both readings, for all their sophistication, make the same mistake from opposite directions: each makes Abiy Ahmed the subject, when the architecture of the state is what actually determines what any leader can or cannot do. Readers of this series will recognise the scaffolding the four singular interests of unity, Red Sea sovereignty, broad-based development and GERD and what is new here is the discipline with which it is turned, in a single essay, against a Western newsmagazine and against a publication closely identified with the governing party itself. The section on the constitution’s vesting of sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” rather than in the citizen is, whatever else readers make of the piece, among the clearest statements of that argument we have published.
It is also, in places, an argument with this newspaper. Dr Hailu engages directly with our 29 May piece on The Economist‘s leader, “The Geography of Delusion,” and while his scepticism of the “imperial vision” framing runs in a similar direction to ours, his route there differs in ways readers should weigh rather than wave through not least his treatment of Article 51 and the Doumeira–Beilul claim, where the line between “peaceful priority” and a reserved right of last resort is doing a great deal of work, and where this newspaper’s own coverage of Eritrean and regional perspectives has been less sanguine about how that distinction is heard in Asmara and beyond. Similarly, his “ledger” of the second mandate crediting the float, the wheat programme and the corridor projects as deposits against a development account that this paper’s reporting has more often shown in deficit will strike some readers as generous in ways the polling-day record of 1 June, recounted in his own footnotes, does not obviously support.
We publish the essay not because it resolves these tensions but because it sharpens them, and because the question it poses is it the constitution, stupid? is one this publication has circled for months without naming so directly. Readers will form their own view of how far structural diagnosis should extend absolution to the men who govern within, and profit from, the structure. That argument is the one worth having, and Dr Hailu has, characteristically, made it harder to avoid.
The full essay, with its complete argument, references and accompanying tables, can be read at the following link :-
∗The author, aka MGH, is a global technical expert trained at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The views expressed are his own and do not represent any institutional position. MGH can be reached via mefkereseb.hailu1990@gmail.com.
Endex, Editorial Chief
