NEVIS
Review No 17
Section
I
Ref#
17.1
May
20, 2013
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THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MELES ZENAWI
By Alex De Waal
African Development: Dead Ends and
New Beginnings, by Meles Zenawi. Unpublished
Masters Dissertation: Erasmus University, Rotterdam, no date.
In the months following his death on
20 August, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has been eulogized and
demonized in equal measure. But his policies, and the transformational paradigm
on which they were based, have rarely been elucidated. While alive, Meles was
equally indifferent to praise and blame. To those who acclaimed Ethiopia's
remarkable economic growth, he would ask, do they understand that his policies
completely contradicted the neo-liberal Washington Consensus? To those who
condemned his measures against the political opposition and civil society
organizations, he demanded to know how they would define democracy and seek a
feasible path to it, in a political economy dominated by patronage and rent
seeking?
Meles did not hide his views, but
neither did he ever fully present his theory of the ‘democratic developmental
state’ to an international audience. Over nearly 25 years, I was fortunate to
be able to discuss political economy with him regularly, including critiquing
his incomplete and unpublished master's dissertation. During this time, his
thinking evolved, but his basic principles and sensibilities remained constant.
World leaders have lauded Meles'
economic achievements without acknowledging their theoretical basis. Human
rights organizations have decried his political record as though he were a
routine despot with no agenda other than hanging on to power. Reviewing his
writings on the developmental state, this essay shows the unity of his theory
and practice.
Meles had the quiet certitude of
someone who had been tested – and seen his people tested – to the limit. Along
with his comrades in arms in the leadership of the Tigray People's Liberation
Front (TPLF), he had looked into the abyss of collective destruction, and his
career was coloured by the knowledge that Ethiopia could still go over that
precipice.
Many times during sixteen years of
armed struggle in the mountains of northern Ethiopia against the then-military
regime led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Meles had close personal brushes
with death. In 1988, he and other central committee members avoided a likely-fatal
aerial bombing by just twenty minutes after their hideout was betrayed by a spy
and Ethiopian fighter-bombers targeted it. Later that year, he was taken
gravely ill with malaria and was evacuated to hospital in Khartoum – one of the
very few times he left the field during the entire armed struggle.
As Meles crossed the border back
into Ethiopia, I met him for the first time, and we began the first of our
seminars on political economy. As dusk fell, still recuperating in his pyjamas,
Comrade Meles climbed aboard a creaky Soviet Zil truck, captured from the
Ethiopian army. All travel was at night, to avoid the MiGs, and we bumped our
way along rocky tracks, first through the forested lowlands, camping out during
daylight hours under trees next to a dry riverbed. Such was the itinerant life
of the TPLF leadership. The next night our truck rumbled up a road cut through
the mountainside by the guerrillas, with hairpins so tight that our truck had
to make three-point turns. We spent the next day in caves at the TPLF's
temporary headquarters in a mountain called Dejena, and the next nightfall I
watched as an apparently uninhabited hillside gave forth a battalion of men, a
dozen trucks and a tank, all of them completely obscured by camouflage until
that moment. The TPLF had turned concealment into science.
The discomfort of the journey was
less memorable than the travelling discussion group of Comrade Meles, Comrade
Seyoum (head of TPLF foreign relations and later Ethiopia's longest-serving
Foreign Minister), a dozen fighters, a representative from a European
agricultural assistance agency, and myself. I learned quickly that the most
necessary attribute of a guerrilla fighter is functioning without sleep. Meles
was a voracious consumer of information and analysis, and a tireless
questioner. We discussed perestroika in the USSR, theories of people's
liberation warfare, the imperfections of grain markets, and, above all, peasant
survival strategies during drought. At one point we met a hunter on the track
and Meles spent an hour discussing with him the importance of conserving
endangered species.
Meles was a convinced
Marxist-Leninist, pragmatic but certain that the way of life of the Ethiopian
peasants had to change or die. Having just completed my doctoral dissertation
on famine survival strategies in Sudan, I tried to convince him that rural
people were best served by diversified livelihoods, and that pastoral nomadism
was an effective adaptation to the vagaries of life in a drought-prone
ecosystem. He did his best to convince me that traditional livelihoods were
doomed to stagnation and that Ethiopian peasants had to specialize in farming,
trade, or livestock rearing.
The abiding impression left by Meles
and the TPLF leadership was that their theory and practice were deeply rooted
in the realities of Ethiopia, and that they would succeed or fail on their
terms and no others. The TPLF had convinced the people, and that was all that
mattered. They did not measure their record or their policies against external
standards; on the contrary, they evaluated outside precepts against their own
experience and logic. It was a refreshing, even inspiring, dose of intellectual
self-reliance.
Meles was unflinchingly optimistic
about the prospects for the armed struggle and assured me that the Tigrayan
guerrillas, until a few months previously confined to the hills and the
borderlands with Sudan, would penetrate as far south as Shewa, the Amhara
heartland just a hundred miles from the capital Addis Ababa, within a year. I
did not take his promise seriously (neither did any other non-Ethiopian). But
he was correct, and within two and a half years, the TPLF – now a member of the
Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition – achieved
the remarkable feat of capturing the capital city.
The EPRDF took Addis Ababa on 28 May
1991, amid international predictions that Ethiopia would go the way of Somalia,
where guerrillas had overrun Mogadishu just four months earlier. On 31 May,
government salaries and pensions were due. They were paid on time. Police were
back on the street within days.
During the next 21 years, Meles
often looked as though he was camping out in the palace. He moved into his
predecessor's semi-subterranean bunker home in the sprawling grounds of the old
palace of the Emperor Menelik, and took over Mengistu's spacious but damp
modernist executive office. The artwork scarcely changed over the next two
decades, the carpets just once. Meles was not interested in the trappings of
power, only in what could be done with it.
From the outset, what needed to be
done was to conquer poverty. From his early days in the field through to his
last years as an international statesman, Meles was absolutely consistent in
this aim. Ethiopia's overriding national challenge was to end poverty, and in
turn this needed a comprehensive, theoretically rigorous practice of
development. Marxism-Leninism was, for him, not a dogma but a rigorous method
for assembling evidence and argument, to be bent to the realities of armed struggle
and development. When the TPLF first administered ‘liberated’ territories in
the 1970s, it took a conventional leftist line, tried to regulate trade and
moneylending, and failed. The Front responded by adjusting its policies to
encourage the local petit bourgeoisie in the villages and small towns it
controlled. When the great famine of 1984–5 struck, the TPLF took the strategic
decision to make feeding the peasantry its priority, even at the expense of
losing ground to the enemy.
Meles was primus inter pares in the
EPRDF's collective leadership and chief economic theoretician. In an episode
made famous by Joseph Stiglitz [1] Meles objected to the IMF position that
international assistance was too unpredictable to be incorporated into national
budget planning purposes, with the absurd consequence that national spending on
infrastructure, health, and education could not be increased in line with
foreign aid flows. Meles produced arguments and data and forced the Bretton
Woods Institutions to rethink.
Meles inverted Kissinger's dictum
that holding office consumes intellectual capital rather than creating it. He
was always learning, reading, debating, and writing, and while he never
abandoned the fundamental principles forged in the field, his views evolved
greatly. After 1991, he studied for a degree in Business Administration at the
Open University (graduating first in his class) and subsequently a Masters in
Economics at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, under the supervision of the former
Minister of Development Cooperation, Jan Pronk. He never finished his thesis
due to the outbreak of war with Eritrea in 1998, but the draft manuscript,
‘African Development: Dead Ends and New Beginnings’, was the justification and
blueprint for a ‘democratic developmental state’. Excerpts are available online
with the intriguing disclaimer: ‘The author is the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.
The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the official
position of the Government.’ Some of his analysis is also contained in a
chapter in a recent collection edited by Akbar Noman and others[3]
The war with Eritrea not only
interrupted Meles' studies but provoked the most bitter dissension within the
EPRDF. Meles was accused of having been soft on Eritrea and blind to Eritrean
preparations for war, and subsequently for stopping the war once Ethiopia had
expelled the invader from occupied territory. The internal party debate then
took an ideological turn that seems to outsiders to be oddly anachronistic,
replete with references to Bonapartism and the ‘Kulak line’. Meles clearly
stated that there should be no confusion that the EPRDF's mission was to build
a capitalist state. He further stated that rent seeking and patronage within
the ruling party posed the key dangers to this objective, and they needed to be
thoroughly stamped out. Meles' adversaries accused him of selling his
revolutionary soul to imperialism and serving Eritrea at the expense of
Ethiopia. Meles won by the skin of his teeth – just two votes in the Central
Committee of the TPLF. His rivals then walked out and Meles seized the moment
to consolidate his power. The next decade was to be his chance both to hone and
to implement his theory of ‘democratic developmentalism’.
One may disagree with Meles' thesis
or argue that he failed to implement it properly. But without question it
represents a serious attempt to develop, and apply, an authentically African
philosophy of the goals and strategies of development.
He explained the background to me.
‘For the first ten years after we took over,’ he said, ‘we were bewildered by
the changes. The New World Order was very visible and especially so in this
part of the world. The prospect of an independent line appeared very bleak. So
we fought a rearguard action not to privatize too much.[4]
Meles was doubly constrained:
internally the EPRDF was regressing, rehearsing its rhetoric but practising
what Meles came to dub pervasive ‘socially wasteful rent seeking.’[5]But after
emerging from the fractious debates of 2000–1, Meles had the upper hand, at the
same time as international thinking shifted away from the neo-liberal demand
for a non-interventionist ‘night-watchman’ state towards recognizing the need
for a capable state to lead development. Meles agreed with the neo-liberals
that the ‘predatory state’ of Africa's first post-colonial decades was one dead
end, but argued that allowing the market to rule was a second dead end. ‘You
cannot change a rent-seeking political economy just by reducing the size and
role of the state. The neo-liberal paradigm does not allow for technological
capacity accumulation, which lies at the heart of development. For that, an
activist state is needed, that will allocate state rents in a productive
manner.’ [6]
South Korea and Taiwan were Meles'
favourite examples of developmental states that succeeded by subverting
neo-liberal dogma. China's rise provided something else: by challenging
American dominance it made space for alternatives. In his thesis he wrote,
‘there has to be more political space for experimentation in development policy
than has been the case so far in Africa … The international community
has a role in creating such a space by tolerating development paradigms that
are different from the orthodoxy preached by it. Africans have to demand and
create such a space’ (p. 39).
Meles' starting point was that
Ethiopia (and indeed Africa as a whole) lacked comparative advantage in any
productive field. He laid out his case in one discussion we held. [7] ‘African
workers produce textiles at nine times the price of the Chinese.’ Similarly,
African foodstuffs could not compete in international markets. ‘In these
circumstances, the best way to make money is through rent: natural resource rent,
aid rent, policy rent. So the private sector will be rent-seeking not value
creating, it will go for the easy way and make money through rent.’ [8] In reaction to this, Ethiopia
postponed private land ownership and kept state control of the financial sector
and telecoms.
The argument continued, ‘If the
state guides the private sector, there is a possibility of shifting to value
creation – it needs state action to lead the private sector from its preference
(rent seeking) to its long-term interest (value creation). So the state needs
autonomy.’ [9]The government
should choose when and how to partner with the private sector (an example was
developing Ethiopia's leather industry) and should invest in education and
research.
Meles clearly identified the challenge
of development as primarily a political one: it is necessary to master the
technicalities of economics, but essential not to let them become a dogma that
masters you. It is the politics of the state that unlocks development.
The ‘developmental state’ should, he
argued, be obsessed with value creation, making accelerated and broad-based
growth a matter of national survival. If Ethiopia could sustain its growth
levels – which have been running at close to 10 percent per annum for most of
the last decade – it could achieve middle-income status and escape from its
trap. To succeed in this, a third element was needed, namely the hegemony of
developmental discourse, in the Gramscian sense that it is an internalized set
of assumptions, not an imposed order. Meles liked to give the example of
corrupt customs officials in Taiwan, who exacted bribes worth 12 percent of the
value of imports of consumer goods, while not demanding bribes on imported
capital goods, illustrating how value creation had been internalized in this
way – so that even the thieves followed the norm.
African countries might have the
trappings of human rights and democracy, but, he said, ‘there is no sustainable
democracy in a society characterized by pervasive rent seeking. We need value
creation to be dominant for there to be a foundation of democracy, for politics
to be more than a zero sum game, a competition to control state rents.’ Worse,
he added, ‘I am convinced that we will cease to exist as a nation unless we
grow fast and share our growth.’ [10]
Thus far, I found Meles' case
compelling, though I questioned if it were possible to create a common mindset
of value creation in a country as vast and diverse as Ethiopia, in such a short
period. Was there not a danger that a theory, however sophisticated, would
degenerate into a set of dogmas parroted by party cadres who scarcely
understood the meaning of ‘pervasive rent seeking’ but who knew the rewards of
loyally following the party line? Meles' response was that the EPRDF had indeed
neglected political education and party organization for years, which explained
the 2000–1 internal crisis and the poor performance in the 2005 elections,
including being wiped out in the major cities. But, he argued, a new generation
of leaders was emerging, he was renewing the party at all levels, and, above
all, his policies were delivering results. Ethiopians had never, ever,
experienced anything like the recent economic growth and the spectacular
expansion in infrastructure and services – and this, he said, would transform
the country in the next fifteen years.
Included in Meles' paradigm was a
theory of democracy. He writes, ‘Even if a developmental state was to be solely
concerned about accelerating growth, it would have to build the high social
capital that is vital for its endeavours. It would have to stamp out patronage
and rent seeking. These are the very same things that create the basis for
democratic politics that is relatively free from patronage’ (p. 10).
Meles condemned liberal formulae as
‘trickle-up democracy’ and said that, in a poor developing nation, political
parties and NGOs would easily become patronage mechanisms, rather than the
basis for a true associational political culture and sustainable development.
He feared a ‘no-choice democracy’ in which factions contested for which one
could best loot the state.
Developmental states could come in
several forms, Meles argued, provided that they maintained the hegemony of
value creation, were autonomous from the private sector, stamped out rent
seeking and patronage, and maintained policy continuity for sufficiently long
to succeed. A developmental state could be authoritarian, but in Africa's
ethnically diverse societies, democratic legitimacy was a sine qua non.
Ethiopia's ethnic federalism and decentralization reflected this. Meles said
his preference was to have two competing parties, each of which stood for
developmental values, but in their absence the option would be a stable
dominant party or dominant coalition, such as Japan or Sweden enjoyed in
post-war decades. In the Ethiopian case, he wrote, ‘the peasant is the bedrock
of a stable developmental coalition’. His critics said this denied them the
chance of voting for real alternatives.
Hence, Meles' approach to democracy
and human rights was all of a piece with his overall theory. He said, ‘when
[the developmental state] has done its job it will undermine its own social
base, to be replaced by a social democratic or liberal democratic coalition’.
Meanwhile, he argued, what meaning did liberal civil and political rights have
in a context of abject poverty or political chaos? Development and a strong
state were prerequisites for human rights, and Ethiopia needed to establish
these first. Justifiable or not, this is a serious argument that deserves
serious assessment.
In early 2011, I asked Meles why he
had been so reticent about his theory. He replied that he should not jeopardize
Ethiopia's interests by pursuing a personal intellectual agenda that would be
sure to draw fire from his numerous critics and detractors. However, he added
that his ideas, which had been heretical just a few years earlier, were
becoming common currency, and that as the time approached for him to leave
office at the 2015 elections, he planned to update his dissertation and publish
it. [11]
Almost 25 years ago, Meles was
indifferent to opinion and argument that failed to match his own standards, and
was quietly confident that Ethiopians would shape their own history, and that
history would prove him right. Recently, when I asked Meles what he would
consider his legacy, he was uninterested in those who hailed his government as
triumph or disaster, and addressed only the question of whether
developmentalism was becoming hegemonic in Ethiopia. [12] It would be another decade, he said, before that question could be answered.
Meles also said that the intellectual work of articulating the theoretical
grounding of his politics, and extending that analysis to what he called the
‘archetypal’ African state, characterized by a vigorous political marketplace,
was just beginning. Enough of Meles' writings are in the public sphere to
demonstrate that Meles was a truly original thinker. Let us hope that his
unpublished papers provide sufficient material to fill out the other, less
explored, areas of his intellectual inquiries.
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References
1. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization
and Its Discontents (Norton, New York, NY, 2002), pp. 27–30.
3. Meles Zenawi, ‘State and markets:
neoliberal limitations and the case for a developmental state’ in Akbar Noman,
Kwesi Botchwey, Howard Stein, and Joseph Stiglitz (eds), Good Growth and
Governance in Africa: Rethinking development strategies (Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 2012).
4. Discussion, Meles Zenawi, Prime
Minister's Office, Addis Ababa, 16 October 2010.
5. Zenawi, ‘States and markets,’ p.
169.
6. Discussion, Meles Zenawi, Prime
Minister's Office, Addis Ababa, 26 February 2011.
7. Discussion, Zenawi, 16 October
2010.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Discussion, Meles Zenawi, Prime
Ministers Office, Addis Ababa, 17 October 2008.
11. Discussion, Zenawi, 26 February
2011.
12. Ibid.
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(Ed’s note- We would
really like to thank Alex de Waal for allowing us to reproduce the
article in our NEVIS Review. If you have any questions or comments on the above
article, you may write us in inbox or here in comment section, and we will pass
on your questions for the author to respond.Alex de Waal is executive director
of the World Peace Foundation and a research professor at Tufts University.
From 2009 to 2011, he served as senior advisor to the African Union High Level
Implementation Panel for Sudan. His academic research has focused on issues of
famine, conflict and human rights in Africa.
The above article can also be accessed at http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org.)
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