Just a few years ago, Ethiopia was a developmental state. For all its flaws, it was operating on the logic of delivering public goods including welfare, broad-based economic growth, and governing institutions. Governance was centralized and authoritarian.
Today, government in Ethiopia resembles the classic ‘big man’ style of personalistic, patrimonial ‘politics of the belly’ that we have seen in many dysfunctional states. It operates on the principles of instrumentalizing disorder, manipulating domestic constituencies through ‘divide and rule’, while maintaining a simulacrum of an institutionalized state for external donors that are ready to be gullible.
The new paper, ‘The Story of Governance in Ethiopia’, analyses how this came about, using the framework of the political marketplace.
The account begins with the advent of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to power in 1991. The EPRDF government was based on the logic of a tightly regulated monopoly over power without competitive bargaining. During this time, the leadership of the EPRDF monopolized the control of the three crucial instruments of power: cash, communication, and most importantly, coercion. They were utilized to promote a particular vision that included, at its core, developmental transformation. The outcome was that Ethiopia achieved an unprecedented level of economic and social development. The critical factors that enabled the EPRDF’s government to begin and continue as a centralized public service monopoly were: the clarity of thought within and among the members of the EPRDF coalition that was cemented by the drafting and ratifying of the federal constitution; the centralized form of rent collection and allocation; and the resilience of the tested vanguard model of leadership.
Despite its origin in an ideologically and organizationally cohesive leadership, however, the EPRDF’s centralized logic of managing its internal politics later evolved towards a system where coalition members colluded and partly competed with one another for power. As a result, this ‘public service monopoly’ model began to erode rapidly. Three things happened in the 2010s: the advent of decentralized access to resources; the entrenchment of ‘administrative nationalism’ (whereby political elites organized around member states of the federation used those governing apparatuses to consolidate power and privilege); and the withering away of the vanguard model of leadership (exacerbated by the death of its long-serving leader). These all contributed to the shift. The governing model became one of rivals within an oligopoly contending for control over accessing and allocating rents, while guarding their position against new entrants to the political marketplace.
In this competition to dominate, coalition members struggled against each other to weaken ‘the other’ so that no member could accumulate the strength to dominate everyone. These rivalries negatively affected the coalition’s capacity to produce political goods. The equilibrium that maintained the oligarchy was shaken and one of the coalition members, namely the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), with the junior partnership of the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), dominated and began shaping what they hoped would be a new institutional settlement. Eventually, the new rulers fully disbanded the EPRDF and formed a new party called Prosperity Party.
The EPRDF’s consensus-based decision-making model was scrapped and replaced by obscure deals. Members of the coalition threatened or used force against one another, and those conflicts mutated into wars against the people. The long-held tradition of open debates and discussions was replaced by monologues by the leader and sycophantic responses from party members and parliamentarians. If a majority were needed in the legislature, the ruler secured the result he needed by secretive side dealings—bribery and threats.
In short, national politics rapidly evolved into a re-centralized patrimonial state that functions along the logic of African ‘big man’ politics which is a highly personalized form of rule, akin to the court of a medieval king. The big man state is the antithesis of a Weberian state and a developmental state. It is run by a self-interested, rent-seeking, and autocratic leader, who can do more than use a Machiavellian playbook to remain in power.
