ETHIOPIA- AU must implement the Democracy and Governance Charter
Scandinavian Chapter
Press Release No. 32
Title: The AU Must Implement the Democracy and Governance Charter: to Bring African -wide Democratic Stability Soon!
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
By Abraham Lincoln, A US president of the 19th century!
1. The big Mistake: Disembedding the economy from politics?
Just as Nkrumah said the independence of Ghana is incomplete without the total liberation of Africa, today in this third millennium Africans everywhere must think, say, act, do and feel coherently and bring about democracy in each of the states so that together and in unison all can create a democratic society. True leadership of Africans today is inseparable from advocating democracy in every part of Africa so that the democratic whole becomes greater than the sum of the democratic parts! Africa needs to integrate first on the basis of values and principles in order to integrate its institutions, economies, peoples, communities, societies and so on. Nations that do not feed themselves can only lose their politics. Once they lose their politics, they cannot map the directions and contours of national development. The African national democratic rebirth is a necessary condition to regain the politics that Africa has lost through the elite’s shameful pursuit of the politics of the belly and chasing after money. African leaders signed the Lagos Plan of Action in 1980. And before their signature dried up, they signed to the Berg Report (1981) that launched the now highly infamous structural adjustment programme that made Africa lose its politics for two decades whilst a few of the leaders filled their fat bellies and fat bank accounts!
At the current Summit in Banjul, Gambia, African foreign ministers rejected the African Democracy and Governance Charter recommended by the able and far sighted AU president Omar Conare whose opening speech avoided all diplomatic niceties and told the leaders to their face that they better live up to the ideals of a Pan-African future. Only with Pan-African unity, he said, Africa has a chance. Not with structural adjustment, and not with the notion of trying to increase narrowly and econocentrically the rate of economic growth by rupturing the economy from the democratically anchored political control of the people.
2. The African Development Agenda: Structural Adjustment at large! Structural adjustment has been re-formulated within the developing world to do two things in the 21st century:
1. Achieve poverty reduction by implementing donor and local elite negotiated poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs);
2. Achieve also the Millennium Development Goals (hereafter MDGs).
Many African states are expected to be able to meet these two objectives. The twenty year period of structural adjustment is supposed to have prepared them to meet these goals. The question is whether structural adjustment has been conceptualised in a necessary and/or sufficient way to help meet these goals?
The answer is of course no. The main weakness of the structural adjustment approach coming from the Washington institutions is the rupture of the economy from politics. One of the key weaknesses of the structural adjustment ideology is the sufferance of what Karl Polyani calls of the rupture or disembeddedment of the economy from society. The economy was conceived separately from the politics that should guide it. The market is seen as a technical instrument devoid of political implications. The economy was supposed to be managed technocratically and politics was to enter into the economy adjusted itself to serve mainly narrow economic goals dictated by market and private relations. By applying this twisted logic, a process was set where autonomy and accountability, growth and redistribution and consensus and inclusiveness moved in opposite or bifurcated directions. Structural inequalities and poverty grew rather than attenuating. Inequalities of representation, distribution, capabilities and opportunities widened along with poverty, which far from being reduced, became an insidious phenomenon, where poverty production dominated the African economic and political landscape since the 1970s.
1. Structurally Adjusted Good Governance vs. democratic governance?
The case of Ethiopia illustrates this dilemma emanating from structural adjustment policies. I shall illustrate the point by taking the issue of governance and show how through structural adjustment and the so-called good governance rhetoric the donor community has allied with the polluting tyranny of the Meles regime to defeat democracy and the Ethiopian people. The adoption of the AU Charter on Democracy and Governance is critically relevant to Ethiopia’s epic struggle to bring democracy and defeat dictatorship.
It is a truism that poverty eradication without a foundation in democratic governance will unravel or will not be irreversible. Only democratic governance and not what is often sold as ?good governance’ provides the necessary condition for doing away structurally poverty at the root. The difference between democratic governance and good governance is significant. The donors invented what they call ?good governance’ and mean by it anything but democratic capacitating of citizens. By good governance, they stress very often authoritarian managerial ability such as: capacity to repress a people to keep law and order with authoritarianism, technocratic ability to implement donor-local elite negotiated agenda such as the so-called poverty reductions strategy papers and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As long as a regime controls the people and is willing to follow the foreign policy of the major donors, it can even qualify for special ally status. This has been the way the so-called ?new generation leaders’ have been selected in Africa, not how democratic they are to their people, but how ?good’ and receptive they are to the donors. It is the donors that dubbed them as ?new generation leaders’ and not their own people! None of them are qualified as ?new’ for practising any form of democratic governance. It is their volunteered ?commitment to poverty reduction, economic growth and support to global security interests’ that have been considered for their positive evaluation, graduation and qualification. And they have been feted and given generous budget support despite the fact they have been violating human rights, repressing the people and violating the rule of law and basic freedoms in their societies.
In some cases for ?good governance’, donors recommend what they call civil society oversight over the state. But the sort of civil society that gets invited or selected to do the oversight is often loyal to the regime and makes often inconsequential criticisms. It has been used to forestall real participation by the appearance or form and not the content of real popular participation and inscription of people’s interest in the state. Loyal civil society is often recruited to legitimise authoritarian action by undemocratic regimes and injures real democratic progress by postponing the participation of the people under the guise that they have representatives that are assumed to carry out oversight over the state regardless of whether the agents such as NGOs from civil society represent constituencies or not.
Standing for, and qualifying for democratic governance is a wholly different conceptual matter in relation with standing and qualifying for good governance. The opposite of good governance is bad governance. Good and bad in relation to governance connotes degrees in capacities to govern. That ability can be with or without democratic accountability and legitimacy. It connotes degrees of effectiveness and capacities based on criteria that may or may not include democratic dispensation.
The opposite of democratic governance is either non- or/and anti-democratic governance. This explicitly factors in democracy as the bedrock for measuring the effectiveness and capability of governance. This is not thus a semantic quibble. It relates to a substantial way by which donors frame the politics and economics of the governance of the development process.
Democratic governance is based on people’s choice. It centres people and their real and effective presence or participation in Government directly or through their legitimate representatives. Good governance centres elite capacity to govern and manage economic growth. It focuses more on the economy and security rather than politics and democratic development in a country. In democratic governance, legitimacy comes from people and society and not external donors. Democratic governance stresses political capacity based on people’s voices and choices and not authoritarian managerial and technocratic ability to employ authoritarian methods to deal with poverty. Democracy capacitates the citizen, the society and the people by making the state accountable. Democratic Governance shuns authoritarianism and celebrates democratic accountability to the rule of law and human rights and the protection of basic freedoms. The major donors have been often lukewarm to democratic governance and quick to prefer and advocate what they describe as ?good governance,’ in the form of what they often describe as capacity building. Democratic governance capacitates the individual, the society and the people and the nation. Dictatorship in Africa debilitates, while democracy can revitalise and infuse life with a spirit of freedom to create, imagine and make futures.
2. Meeting MDGs?
Is Ethiopia or for that matter, indeed much of Africa on target to meet the MDGs? According to a 2005 report by the IMF and World Bank, the prospect that the MDGs would be met by 2015 appears dim. So what does it mean when World Bank officials claim that the regime in Ethiopia is committed to poverty reduction and meeting MDGs? Why is it that Ethiopia is still a food-dependent economy? How can a country be sovereign truly when it begs the most essential matter of all-food for the people in a country that has enough arable land to feed not only itself but even much of the people in the Middle East? What kind of economic management and capacity has this regime? We know it has a capacity to kill, but to create economy and food security after 15 years in power, that we have not seen, much as we would like to.
Even when donors laud success, it is often at the expense or loss of what will build an African national economy. Take the case of the cut flower market. Donors laud economies like Ethiopia’s entering the cut-flower market. The weird thing about it is that a lot of the East African economies are involved in this cut- flower business. The source for the cultured seed for the flowers comes from Holland. Donors talk about how these economies are on the move and the example of success that was bandied about is cut-flower. What is interesting is that large arable land is devoted in all these regions to this business and the seed producer has the last laugh creating many sources for production thus creating reduction in prices prompting each economy to increase the volume of production. Is this sensible economic management? Whatever happens to African regional integration when economies not only compete for the same markets on primary commodities, but also on value added manufactures? In Ethiopia who benefits from this trade and who owns the cut-flower business? That is yet another matter donors do not see before they praise a regime on its success in the cut flower business.
3. Poverty Reduction?
The story of the regime’s commitment to poverty reduction is no different from the failure to meet MDGs. Even if this donor assessment of the regime’s assumed commitment to poverty reduction were to be taken at face value, commitment to poverty reduction should not be used to deny commitment to democracy. In fact if a government is not able to resource self-reliantly poverty reduction, deploy institutions, put in place systems and incentives, and implement policies based on democratic legitimacy, there is no doubt the commitment to poverty reduction would end up being shallow or even misguided. It is to be disingenuous by donors to repeat the commitment of the Meles regime to poverty reduction while watering down the much needed donor understanding and resolute stand on the side of the people that revealed their own agency for democratic governance on May 15, 2005 so splendidly. It is not simply enough to praise tyrants who kill and exonerate their dictatorial sins for their subservience to ideas for poverty reduction that is doomed not to lead to an irreversible eradication of poverty from Ethiopian soil by launching a simultaneous white revolution (milk production), blue revolution (water production) and green revolution (agricultural food production) in the Ethiopian country side. Deep democracy is the necessary foundation for the eradication of poverty in Ethiopia by creating the legitimacy to undertake the much over due green, blue and white revolutions in the world of the Ethiopian country side.
6. Concluding remark
Donors and the African elite dependent on them for money and policy ideas such as structural adjustment must understand that poverty reduction by itself does not make regimes democratic no matter how much this is repeated in their rhetoric. The people must own politics and not just assets. Democracy bestows African people ownership of the politics of their countries. The cynical use of the poverty reduction rhetoric imposed on the people to deny them the right to struggle and own the politics of their country is unconscionable.
Equally the use of good governance to deny the people to create democratic governance is equally condemnable. The distinction between ?good’ and democratic governance remains critically important conceptually and in relation to the implications to policy decisions and implementation strategies. To overlook the distinction is tantamount to fighting democracy itself in Africa under the guise of fighting poverty. Dyed in the wool tyrants in Africa are tolerated when they must be fought and told off in no uncertain terms for violating democracy because they are assumed committed to poverty reduction (mind you not poverty eradication!) Unfortunately, the donors are trapped by their own discourse of preferring to subordinate democratic governance to regimes’ gratuitous claims of commitment to poverty reduction and meeting the MDGs. This donor argument does not stand up to critical scrutiny, and unfortunately makes their feeble stand against tyranny to be politically, morally and intellectually susceptible.
The donors and the AU heads of States must stop rupturing commitment to democracy and commitment to poverty reduction and meeting MDGs, if they wish to be politically, morally and intellectually sensitive and consistent. That requires they learn to be different actors, which is not easy to be. They learn to ditch the structural adjustment and so -called good governance rhetoric in its various guises and squarely permit the people to define their collective democratic future. Trust the people. That is what we learned in Ethiopia where the people knew how to vote, for whom to vote once they knew the debates and facts before them to make informed decisions. African people must not be patronised. Given the opportunity they can shape the future if not left to the ill-advice that comes honeyed with money to defeat their democratic aspirations.
There must be a world wide African wide mobilisation to make sure that the AU’s Democracy and Governance Charter is not only adopted but implemented without delay. We in Ethiopia must continue our struggle to create a democratic framework that can serve as an example to our brothers and sisters in the rest of Africa. The democratic movement comes above all else. Only democracy can assist Africans to own their politics and bridge the chasm between politics and economics created by foreign and local self-interested technocrats in order to eradicate poverty and inequalities for good.
– Professor Mammo Muchie, Chair of NES-Scandinavian Chapter
– Berhanu G. Balcha, Vice- Chair of NES-Scandinavian Chapter
– Tekola Worku, Secretary of NES-Scandinavian Chapter
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