Blogger/Addis Looking at the chaos that has happened in Kenya the last two weeks, it would be naïve for us to disregard the importance of reducing corruption in Ethiopia. After all, the opposition party in Kenya made corruption their number one concern against the government of President Kibaki.
Using Kenya as an example, it is easy to see the role of ethnicity in corruption since the Kenyan opposition fight against corruption has led to a fight against the privileged ethnicity of Kikuyu. So what can we learn from Kenya? For more than a century, all Ethiopians know that the ethnic Amhara has been more advantaged and today it might be both Amahra and Tigre. When people conclude these statements, many other northern Ethiopians defend themselves by saying that the “peasant Amhara” has been disadvantaged too. But this is laughable and at worst disputable on many grounds. Being advantaged is not just a word to throw around. It has a valid socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic foundation. These include the use of Amharic as the working language of Ethiopia and the social & ethnic background along with the connection to power that comes with it. Thus, to say that a peasant in the north has been disadvantaged as much as the rest of oppressed nations and nationalities in Ethiopia is merely a cover up to reality on the ground. Particularly, an attempt to conceal the ethhnolinguistic advantage a small portion of Ethiopians have over the large portion is doomed to failure.
It is in this and other perspectives that corruption should also be tackled. Today corruption can be discussed in ethnic, clan and political languages. Those who support the people in power have always received better treatment for many decades. Due to this we have witnessed a clan or sub-division of one single ethnicity getting more share than another clan of the same ethnicity. Good examples of these problems are in the Somali, Gambella and Oromia regions of Ethiopia where a clan or a sub-division of one ethnicity is loyal to the government and gets more advantage than another clan of the same ethnicity. This advantage covers promotion, power, opportunity, foreign investment, employment just to name a few. So the fact that leaders today can say that power is distributed fairly among Oromia, Amhara, Tigray, Gambella Somali etc is meaningless. The real question becomes, is power and wealth distributed fairly INSIDE Oromia or INSIDE Somali region? Clearly it is not.
So what are the ways to solve our problems in Ethiopia? I believe the main approach to solve our problems is to first know & fear the consequences of not doing so. By looking at the chaos in Kenya, we should make sure that will never happen in Ethiopia in the future. But more importantly we should critique the Kenyan opposition because there is one noticeable “stupidity” we can easily see in the Kenyan opposition. By looting & damaging property in Kenya, BY harming small businesses, BY violently targeting ethnicities, BY damaging Kenyan tourism industry and BY pushing away investors from Kenya, the chaos and the riots in Kenya have ALREADY done more harm to Kenya in 2 weeks than what corruption has done in 5 years! This is a caution for all Ethiopians since a wrong approach to solving corruption and injustice can end up more disastrous like in Kenya. The only way forward is a peaceful movement for good governance and an independent anti-corruption commission. Power can be distributed fairly when an elected and legitimate leadership controls Ethiopia and doesn’t need to induce a group of Ethiopians over another group of Ethiopians in order to survive. We can also achieve equal and fair distribution of wealth the same way. The Kenyan opposition has sacrificed efficiency in their attempt to achieve equity. Sadly, they lost both at the end. It is simple. A peaceful, dependable and democratic movement for a better Ethiopia will help transfer power to a peaceful, dependable and democratic government.
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The writer lives in America and he can be reached by ethiom842 @ yahoo.com -------------------------------------------------------------------
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