Blogger/UKhabesha If everyone is Woyane, then no one is really Woyane Alas, ordinary Ethiopians have given up on appealing to Ethiopian political opposition groups to unite against public enemy number one:
Woyane. It is a waste of breath, they would tell you. Over the years, the opposition groups have been relentlessly engaged in political bickering and name calling against each other. Hence the chief enemy,
Woyane, has been spared from any formidable grand political opposition that would have secured a better Ethiopia from Woyane’s ruthless jaw.
The squabble within the opposition crowd has recently taken a slightly different and more destructive tone. The
Woyane label is being thrown around at almost anyone. Individuals and groups that are known to be ardent opponents of the
Woyane regime have been branded as
Woyane. For example, who would take the claim that CUD leaders like W/t Birtukan and Dr. Berhanu Nega are sold-out
Woyane? That is utterly farfetched. These are brave individuals who stood up against the
Woyane regime and paid a two-year jail term. I don’t mean to suggest that such individuals should be beyond reproach, but bundling together everyone we disagree with under the
Woyane title is seriously devaluing the label of
Woyane.
Such a tendency to sling the
Woyane mud at everybody and devalue the
Woyane title would seriously damage the opposition politics and the hope of a better Ethiopia for obvious reasons. First, it underrates
Woyane’s nearly two-decades of blunder and thereby undermines the much needed resolve by Ethiopians to rally against their real enemy. Second, it blurs the already fuzzy line between those that are the voice of the downtrodden majority in Ethiopia and those that give a mere lip service to the people’s cause. Finally, it stamps out any opportunity for a meaningful controversy among opposition groups – if all they have to say to each other is: “you are
Woyane”.
So here is a different kind of plea from ordinary Ethiopians: let us be economic with our use of the
Woyane label.
Woyane is an altogether different kind of beast. I will leave you with Shumet Sishagne’s apt characterisation of
Woyane’s regime early on as: “a unique phenomenon in which a ruling elite sets out to rule a country whose existence it doubts and whose history it despises.....The power elite does not even recognise the necessity of maintaining the territorial integrity of the very country it rules.”
The blogger can be reached by crailo@onetel.com -------------------------------------------------------------------
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