In Appreciation of your
article on "Marketing Instability"
Dear Medhane,
The illusion of invincibility born and bred from the three-decades-old bitter and bloody but victorious liberation struggle that was undeniably the 'kissing cousin' of instability, chaos and bloodshed has forced the short-sighted leadership of the EPLF/PFDJ to expend their limited resources and 'organisational' skills on the only trade that they have mastered for so long: the art of war-making, mass killings and tortures of their own subjects as well as marketing/exporting instability and destabilization to their immediate bigger neighbours once they understood well that the latter were not prepared to become client regimes to the PFDJ supreme leader, Issaias Afewerki, as expected from them. Hence the history of 'marketing instability' as soundly argued by yourself in the aforementioned article. I cannot agree more; it was well articulated and exposed. Thanks for this thrilling and thought-provoking article.
One of the most crucial problems for the adoption and development of democracy, good governance and rule of law in post-independence Africa has been the inability of post-colonial liberation movements to take a clean and clear break with the past, that is, to graduate from the legacy of authoritarianism and the use of force practised by their former colonial masters, and their failure to manage their multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies except through the use of tyrannical methods. As we all know, most African states have been ruled for many decades since independence by militant and militaristic liberation movements "which have been characterized by forms of personalized power, gross human rights violations, lack of institutionalized good governance, centralized command and control structures", and numerous other attendant ills thus becoming the burden of national liberation processes.
In this regard, even the later-day liberation fronts which fought and ousted oppressive national regimes and installed themselves at the helm of state power, promising liberation from fear and want, peace, democracy and prosperity to their poor masses, could not, in most cases, fare much better than their predecessors. Except for a few cases, again, most of them ended up in the latter's shoes, perpetuating the same misrule of the previous regimes. This is mainly because of the fact that "when former liberation movements/fronts come to power they are mostly characterized by structural flaws which impede the building up of democratic institutions and the rule of law. When these liberation movements took control of the state machinery and reorganized themselves as political organizations/parties, and when the command structures of the militarily organized movements were simply transferred to civil society, these most often resulted in a rejection of or resistance to democratic change, personal dominance including in the business sector, rent-seeking and corruption.
The liberation movements claimed their legitimacy to rule stemmed from the decolonization process or from toppling oppressive regimes and thus assumed themselves as 'democratically elected' representatives of the majority of the people who allied with them during the struggle. Since then, with varying results (and sometimes accepting the use of further physical violence), they have been able to strengthen their political dominance and to maintain control over the state. Most of these liberation movements however have so far failed miserably to move away from their militant mode of misrule and thus be able to tackle the problems confronting the respective nations constructively and self-critically, which sadly led to a situation where victims in the role of liberation fighters have become perpetrators themselves. Unless a deep political will or commitment is prevalent amongst the leadership of these liberation movements toward a democratic and transformative change--to make a gradual and incremental change via a period of democratization to a democratic transition and consolidation--the future of Africa in particular and the Third World in general remains bleak and unpredictable. This is only some food for thought and not a critique on your brilliant article. Keep well and bye.
Yours sincerely,
Ambassador Tesfaye Habisso
AA, Ethiopia,
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