Abstract
The early 1990s ushered in a global transition from the tense East-West divide
to a hopeful post-Cold War politics of good governance, democracy, and human
rights promotion. In Ethiopia, this messy global transition was punctuated by a
violent overthrow of Ethiopia’s military socialist state by an ethnic rebel army in
1991. Upon seizing control of the national government, the victors of the civil
war, the Tigrean People’s Revolutionary Front (TPLF ), which had organized a
coalition party of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
(EPRDF ), introduced an experimental political paradigm along with pledging a
new beginning for Africa’s oldest nation.1 To this end, the TPLF/EPRDF, hereafter just EPRDF, boldly and emphatically enacted fiercely contested policy
measures.2 The new constitution that was drafted under the EPRDF ’s tutelage,
and ratified in 1995, provided the legal foundation for the reconstituted Ethiopian state. The most controversial provision of the new constitution is Article
39(1), which entitles “every nation, nationality and people an unconditional right
to self-determination, including the right to secession.”
In post-1991 Ethiopia and among the Ethiopian diaspora, incessant debates
on the radical provision of article 39(1) left little space for meaningful conversation about the relatively reasonable Sub-articles 2-5 of Article 39. Especially
pertinent to the empirical material analyzed in this chapter is Article 39(2),
which entitles what it refers to as nations, nationalities, and people (in short,
ethnic groups), the right to self-government in the territory they inhabit and the
right to equitable representation in state and federal governments. These provisions are part of legalizing the then-young rebels’ emphatic rhetoric about the
need to promote human rights with special emphasis on the rights of ethnic
minorities to self-government, partly as mechanism of rectifying historical injustices and decentralizing state power. The EPRDF declared that its vision of
radical change was to be institutionally enacted as ethnically structured federalism (Turton 2006; Feyissa 2011).3 A new ruling ideology of revolutionary
democracy (to be critically examined and elaborated later) guides EPRDF-led
federalism. The EPRDF ’s radical political model was predicated on its hypercritical, but not entirely unreasonable, reading of the nation’s history as one
marked by inequality, ethnic discrimination, cultural subjugation, and other
injustices (Eshete 2010). Stated simply, the EPRDF charged that the Amhara,
the ethnic group that had historically controlled the Ethiopian state, had dominated and subjugated all other ethnic groups. The EPRDF ’s antidote to this historic ill was to radically remake the state itself with a firm rhetorical emphasis on
minority rights.
In practice, the EPRDF ’s federalism combines some elements from neoliberal
capitalism (such as privatization of some sectors of the economy and tolerance
of consequent economic inequality), some elements from Marxism-Leninist
party centralism such as excessive power of party vanguards to control the state
bureaucracy, and some elements from essentializing identity politics. Elsewhere
I discuss the EPRDF ’s approach as Ethiopia’s third way to governance that
pivoted by 2005 towards an Asian model of developmental state (Barata 2012).
The architect of this contested yet remarkably successful (on some accounts)
venture was the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. In his article that was meant
to highlight the centrality of the developmental state concept in debates on good
growth and governance in Africa, Meles provides an expose of this haughty
concept (Zenawi 2012). Most notable here are Meles’s emphasis that while a
developmental state has to be an activist state that rewards and punishes certain
behaviors, it may or may not be a democratic state.4 In fact, Meles quotes Barrington Moore as saying “Most, if not all, the well-known developmental states
have not been democratic; they have at best been ‘semi-parliamentarian’ ” (cited
in Zenawi 2012, 168). While some elements of the EPRDF ’s rhetoric, including
the concepts of the developmental state and revolutionary democracy, may not
be wholly original, its application of these concepts as key tools of radical state
remaking are profoundly transformative, for better or for worse. Partly owing to
Ethiopia’s history of entrenched hierarchies (see Chapters 3 and 4), the EPRDF ’s
politics and policies generated conflicting responses from asymmetrically situated categories of citizens. While an appreciable segment of Ethiopia’s ethnic
minorities initially perceived the EPRDF approach as a legitimate route to
reclaiming ethnic equality, the elite from the Amharic-speaking national mainstream felt that not just its interests but also its very existence was under attack.
Despite fierce opposition from the resolute national elite, the EPRDF forged
ahead with implementing its project by completely dismantling long-established
state institutions it deemed ‘infrastructures of injustice’ and started to rebuild the
state anew.
This chapter provides an ethnographic account of this extraordinary national
experiment, with special focus on the lived experiences of ethnic minorities of
southern Ethiopia. More specifically, this chapter examines three interrelated
issues. First, it discusses how the globally inspired (in the language of democratic governance and human rights) and nationally designed state reform was
negotiated in a cultural landscape of endemic hierarchy of ethnicity, clan, status/
quasi-caste, class, and patriarchy. Second, the chapter scrutinizes how the new
politics of ethnic representation reconfigured yet again the often taken-forgranted boundary between the state, society, and culture. And third, the chapter
probes into how historically stigmatized cultural identities have become somewhat normalized and turned into new grounds of social struggle, not just in
southern Ethiopia but across the nation.5 My ethnography is especially focused
on understanding the lived experiences of ordinary persons who took seriously
the new state’s rhetoric of equal rights, and who sought to realize these values in
their interactions with the state and in the way they sought justice in interpersonal disputes. The chapter highlights gripping political tensions between globally prescribed ideals of human rights, the national state’s prerogative to
govern, and the on-the-ground realities of ethnic self-governance. The broader
aim of the chapter is to shed light on issues pertaining to culture, power, party,
the state, and globality in contemporary Africa.