The two great modern day dictators of the Ethiopian empire, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Meles Zenawi, complement each other almost completely with or without knowing. Now Mengistu may be vegetating slowly in Zimbabwe. These days we read articles in Ethiomedia.com which seem to try to raise him to a cult figure, defiant as ever. We read there that he is writing a book on his days.. For certain extremely chauvinist and dogmatic Amhara elements he remains a hero, a saviour. Ironically, his legacy is extended and advanced systematically and cynically by his enemy and successor, Meles Zenawi. Both using the same mechanism to control land and labor in a slightly different way due to a different global situation. Not only that. In my last article on the killing of Hasan Juure, I did mention kabelle structures. The politico-economic military superstructures and substructures used by the two regimes are almost identical, different only in name. ‘Society is the horse, the Party is the rider’ Stalin had said. Well, the horses in the colonized nations of the Ethiopian empire, especially in Oromia, are ridden extra hard and would not hesitate to dismantle it if they can. That is why both Mengistu and Meles had to create almost the equivalents or carbon copies of the apparatchiks, the nomenklatura and extremely brutal security forces.
Not only government ministries and their departments, but also schools, universities, trade unions, managers of big hotels, newspaper editors, football teams, even fire brigades and the so called private sector are under the control of TPLF cadres and hirelings, an elaborate network of ethnic Tigray political patronage on a scale unknown elsewhere in black Africa except perhaps in neighbouring Eritrea under Afeworqe, who is said to be, paradoxically, Meles Zenwi’s number one enemy. Perhaps one can call them all, Mengistu included, enemy friends, if you like. In practice this means the TPLF keeps a series of lists of all the positions that demand its presence in every corner of the bureaucracy and outside it. The criteria for recruiting such people are not mainly professional experience and qualification but ethnic and party loyalty, meaning loyalty also to Meles Zenawi personally.
Massive efforts are made to achieve complete control over the masses which will prove really futile sooner or later. Actually it may turn out to be a nail in the coffin of Woyane hegemony. .Up to now countless Ethiopians, being used to the totalitarian regimes in a contaminated social and political atmosphere for centuries, have accepted the situation as unchangeable, even normal, a fact that perpetuates oppression and destroys moral integrity. Woyane ideologues believe, like new Amhara supremacists who hide under the Ethiopian flag, that nations of the empire would not mind which ethnic elite dominates them if they are well fed. They have a very low and negative picture of humanity. This situation may change suddenly with mounting misery among masses of poor peoples and the development of a new awareness in their elites.
Western regimes, which used to denounce the system in which the appatatchiks and nomenklatura worked in the Soviet years are completely silent when it comes to Ethiopia. Why not as long as the regime serves their interests? I think we live in a world partially mad.
True, the Woyane has built roads but mainly to facilitate its military deployment. Let us not forget for a single moment that TPLF is a military organization in the first place. This is the most important factor in the making of its hegemony, as all Ethiopians know, the second factor being the Anglo-American backing. That is why Meles keeps inviting and challenging the opponents to fight him in the battlefield in the spirit of and in accordance with the time honoured tradition of feudal Abyssinia. True, Woyane has built also inefficient schools and universities for propaganda reasons while the children of the Tigrayan elite go elsewhere to receive proper education.
Since he declared himself victorious in the last “election”, Meles Zenawi is bent on galvanizing his party, enforcing more rigid hierarchical discipline along military lines, purging the system from potential opponents from within and sending double messages to the international circles not to pressurize or criticize him in any way. Like a spoilt child he wants to have his way completely and is not in the mood to make even minor concessions.