Why the Developmental State Failed in Ethiopia

Giday Gebrekidan

 

Polarized Background

In May 1991 the Derg regime collapsed and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) took over Eritrea and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) with its new coalition of national fronts, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), took over Ethiopia. The Eritrean problem was solved by formally accepting Eritrean independence in 1993. What remained was finding solutions to the rest of Ethiopia’s problems short of granting independence to the other nationalities.

Tigray’s Achilles’ Hill

A prelude 

Tigray is the heartland of the historical Aksumite Empire. In its Golden Era Aksum was a superpower of the era. The Persian religious leader Mani in the 3rd C. A.D. mentions Aksum as one of the superpowers of the time along Rome, China and Persia. At the time Aksum was minting her own gold and silver coins; this shows the truth of her power and riches.

Today Tigray is located in northern Ethiopia. It is bordered by Eritrea, Sudan, Amhara and Afar. Tigrayans are inhabitants of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. The spread of their settlement spans from the Red Sea in the East to the Sudanese border in the West. For an academic reading on the topic the study by Nyssen of Ghent University entitled “Western Tigray in 117 historical and 33 ethno-linguistic maps (1607-2014)” is available online. 

The Cat and the Rooster

Giday Gebrekidan 

In the fable “The Cat and the Rooster” the cat catches the rooster to devour it, the cat must have been planning and drooling for long before it got its hands on the rooster. Before devouring the rooster piece by piece the cat wants to do it in good conscience and looks for an excuse. Yes the cat did look for an excuse, it’s a fable.

The cat tells the rooster it has been a nuisance to men because it crowed at night and wouldn’t let them sleep and the cat is here to put an end to that. But the rooster had a good reply that made the excuse unacceptable. He is doing that only for the sake of men, to help them get up and do their daily business as usual. The cat was pissed off, it scowled and gave the rooster a stern look of surprise. There is another grievance the cat must address and accuses the rooster of a transgression against nature, by mating with its sisters and mother. The rooster replied it only does that to give men as much eggs as possible.

True Religion: Freedom, Individuality, Existence

Giday Gebrekidan

A true religion must understand the human condition. It must understand and accept that man is free, it must admit the individuality of man and God, and it must show the existential dilemma of man. Why? Because these three points are true and logical and so if a religion claims to be divine wisdom then at least it must not miss these points.

Ethiopian Books: Pornographic, Patriotic, Religious

Giday Gebrekidan 

In Ethiopia if a book is to be a bestseller then it will have to be either pornographic or patriotic or religious. It doesn’t matter if it is fictional or non-fictional. Whatever form or style you chose to write with, whether you present your topics humorously, sordidly or gravely if the three ingredients (pornography, patriotism and religion) are not used as a hook then you will find no reader.

If you see most of the books that sell well their covers are nude women, Ethiopian map or Ethiopian historical figures or religious icons.  

The American Experiment: Failure and Dilemma

Giday Gebrekidan

This little essay is not written for the rank and file activist who is busy and happy in getting furious in the hustle and bustle of his activities. It is purely personal reflection on the ‘spirit of history’ or more probably on man’s effort to establish a tolerable order of things and make the world a fair place where all have equal chance of fulfilling their personal pursuits or nourishing their talents to their full potential. 

Does man make history or does the merciless march of history make man? For thousands of years starting from the Greek philosophers, thinkers have hypothesized to come up with a social system best suited for the respect of individual’s freedom and societal peace and justice. A republic was the dream. It has always failed due to its own success. As soon as a republic becomes prosperous and powerful the masses exhibit moral decay and the ruling elite that sprang conspires to gain political control. Republics have turned to empires and empires have crumbled. After centuries of learning and experience, it was given another chance in a newly discovered continent. America.   

Giday vs. the World: the Five Stages of Grief

Giday Gebrekidan
No need for any alarm I’m not in a bad place, but I have lost the world and I was grieving that. Now that the grief is over I can write about it. When I was grief stricken and passing through the different stages of grief it was all the more confounding because I lost the world to stupidity. Stupidity! This made acceptance of its loss even harder. 
My grief is not neatly arranged in all the five stages perfectly. Sometimes there were lapses, sometimes there was nothing, until the final acceptance. 
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, the five stages which I might call the five floating stages because they are confusingly on and off and don’t necessarily appear in linear stages. 

The Grand Inquisitor

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(The Brothers Karamazov, Chapter 5)

"What would Jesus say and do, if he returned today?"

This question, frequently posed from Christian pulpits far and wide, is a recurring theme in world literature. The most profound and enduring literary treatment of the question is by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the fifth chapter of the novel, Dostoevsky, through the narrator Ivan Karamazov. offers his answer to the question, "what if Jesus were to appear among us again?"

A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1711)

Jonathan Swift

A classic piece of parody from the great English satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. The particular butt of Swift’s sharp pen in this instance was Robert Boyle and his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), in which various everyday subjects (mirrors, fruit-trees, fish) were likened to religious themes – man’s relationship to God, man’s relationship to his soul, etc. Swift came across the book during his stay in the household of William Temple, for whom he was employed as a secretary. The book was supposedly very popular in the Temple household and Swift would often read aloud from it to an audience of ladies. However, becoming bored with the predictability of Boyle’s points, Swift penned his own Meditation (“upon a broomstick”) and inserted it into the Temple’s copy. Legend has it that, when it came round to Swift’s next recital from