The Ethiopian Tribune

Editor’s Foreword & Synopsis

Collective Stupidity

An Intellectual Infection Consuming Ethiopia’s Educated Class

Girma Berhanu (Professor) · University of Gothenburg

Editor’s Foreword

A Frenchman in Ayat once asked his masons to seal a doorway. They did the work beautifully — plumb, level, the mortar clean — and only when the last brick went in did anyone notice they had walled themselves inside. The craftsmanship was flawless. The judgement was not.

Professor Girma Berhanu offers this story midway through the essay that follows, and it is the hinge on which his whole argument turns. Ethiopia does not suffer from a shortage of skilled hands. It suffers from a shortage of the question that ought to precede the work: when this wall is finished, who will still be inside?

We publish this essay knowing precisely who will read it. The Tribune’s readership is the educated class — the graduates, the ministry advisers, the diaspora professionals, the academics, the commentators. Professor Girma is not writing about a distant elite. He is writing about us, and about himself; he says so, and the admission is what earns him the right to say the rest. An essay that accused only its enemies would be another entry in the long Ethiopian tradition of finger-pointing that he identifies as part of the disease. This one implicates its own author, and it will implicate most of those who finish it.

The charge is serious. For sixty years, he argues, Ethiopia’s intelligentsia have been present at every catastrophe — as architects, as legitimisers, or as the silent men in the room who understood exactly what was being decided and said nothing. From the student movement of the 1960s to the Derg, from the EPRDF to the present arrangement, credentials have stood in for rigour, conformity for judgement, and opportunism for principle. His roll-call of exceptions — Gebrehiwot Baykedagn, Girmame Neway, Berhanu Dinke, Getachew Maru, Berhanu Meskel Reda, Mesfin Woldemariam — is brief enough to be devastating.

Some readers will resist his account of the Orthodox tradition of learning, and they should test it. But the point he draws from it is harder to dismiss than its theological setting suggests: an education that measured authority by wisdom and humility rather than by certification produced a different kind of person from one that measures it by employability. He does not ask Ethiopia to choose tradition over modernity. He asks why it chose replacement over integration — and notes, from Bhutan, that the choice was never forced.

Readers who look for a policy prescription will not find one, and that is deliberate. The essay’s demand is prior to policy. No reform survives contact with a class that has lost the habit of asking whether it might be wrong. Intellectual humility is not the ornament of good governance; it is the precondition.

The Tribune’s editorial position has never been that Ethiopia is failed only by its rulers. It is that a country gets the silence it tolerates. Professor Girma has broken his. The reasonable response is not agreement. It is the honest self-inventory he asks for — beginning with those of us who publish.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Ethiopia’s crisis, Professor Girma Berhanu argues, is not merely political but intellectual — and its authors hold degrees.

Drawing on psychology, educational theory and six decades of Ethiopian political history, this essay diagnoses a collapse of collective intelligence within the country’s educated class: the condition in which capable individuals, acting together, repeatedly produce decisions that damage the common good. Credentials have displaced rigour, conformity has displaced independent judgement, and ambition has displaced responsibility.

The argument moves across several registers. It traces the paradox of an intelligentsia that has legitimised successive authoritarian projects since the 1960s, reading that record through Paul Hollander’s account of intellectual resentment and Noam Chomsky’s insistence that privileged access to knowledge carries a moral obligation. It contrasts a modern educational system built to certify technical competence with the Orthodox tradition of holistic formation, in which authority was measured by wisdom and humility rather than by paper — and asks why Ethiopia’s reformers chose replacement over synthesis. It examines language policy and the contested memory of Adwa as instances of the same error: the dismantling of what already works to prove a political point. And, through the Dunning–Kruger effect and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s work on confident incompetence, it turns the analysis on the diaspora and on the author himself.

Ethiopia’s talent, Professor Girma concludes, is not scarce; the institutions that would let it compound are. Reversing collective stupidity is therefore not an educational problem but a national imperative — the precondition for any reform worth attempting.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg and a regular contributor to The Ethiopian Tribune. He writes on intelligence, education and the moral responsibilities of the intellectual class.