For Abiy, big reforms carry big risks
ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia’s new prime minister Abiy Ahmed has announced a flurry of reforms to reshape the nation but implementing them will be harder, analysts say. Last week alone, Abiy shook up the security services, ended a nationwide state of emergency and announced plans to liberalize the economy and resolve a two-decade-old conflict with Eritrea. Yet those moves represent dramatic shifts in the power balance within Africa’s second-most populous country. It remains unclear how deep Abiy’s support runs within the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) for carrying them out.
And if the reforms are bungled, he risks inflaming relations between the country’s many ethnic groups. “There is political expectation on the part of the public for very quick change,” said Awol Allo, an Ethiopian commentator who teaches law in Britain. “My worry is that he’s moving too fast in a country without the institutional safeguards to implement these policies.” Observers say that the EPRDF, in unchecked control of Ethiopia since 1991, was forced to shift course by anti-government protests, led by the country’s two largest ethnicities, that started in late 2015 and left hundreds dead. The unrest prompted a 10-month state of emergency, declared in Oct 2016.
The upheaval was seen as one reason behind the February resignation of Abiy’s predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, and the immediate imposition of a second emergency declaration that parliament repealed last week. Elevated by the ruling party to the prime minister’s office in April, Abiy is the first leader from the largest ethnicity, the Oromo. Even though he has been cast as a reformer, few expected him to move so fast.
1991 redux
Abiy last week reversed decades of policy, announcing key state-run industries - among them Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio Telecom, the country’s only internet and telephone provider - would be opened up to foreign and private investors. In a still more surprising move, Abiy declared Ethiopia would respect a 2002 United Nations commission ruling that demarcated the country’s border with Eritrea, setting the stage to end years of hostility between the two countries.
The prime minister then removed Ethiopia’s intelligence and military chiefs along with the national security advisor, the latest in a host of older government officials Abiy has shown the door to since taking over. “These people have been in the system for far too long and are by and large blamed by the public for the problems,” Awol said. Longtime independent Ethiopia researcher Rene Lefort compared Abiy’s reforms to 1991, when the EPRDF, then a rebel army, stormed the capital Addis Ababa and removed the Derg military junta from power. “I expected some changes, but only stepby-step. But so fast, and so deep, that’s astonishing,” he said.—ÅFP