Just six months ago, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was considered the pride of the nation. It was a symbol of what Ethiopians could accomplish if only they put their heads together, one of the few initiatives forwarded by EPRDF that even its most ardent detractors looked favourably upon.
But EPRDF has since changed, and there seem to be few things that its new leaders like about the old order. The dislike has extended to the Renaissance Dam, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) reportedly said would not generate power at full capacity if construction continued along its current rate. Fingers were pointed at MetEC, the government’s military-industrial conglomerate, that had a contractual agreement to install the electromechanical and hydraulic steel structures of the dam.
Of course, after the contracts for Tana Beles I, Tana Beles II and Omo Kuraz I sugar factories were retracted from the conglomerate, not many people came to its defense. Persistent irritants for observers have been delays and wastage related to infrastructure projects. Worse still, the outcomes can sometimes be roads that deteriorate prematurely and transformers with fuses that blow out constantly.
Informed by these, which cast a large shadow over the virtue of centralised planning and massive public spending, the National Planning Commission has been brought in to assess mega-projects before they commence. In a country where delays and cost overruns have been normalised, the initiative to introduce one more check before projects are green-lighted is commendable. The culture has become so pervasive that even in the private sector, large projects completed a year late are considered a success.
The empowerment of the Commission by the administration should be seen in light of previous efforts to infuse government with checks and balances. The Diaspora Trust Fund and the partial privatisation of major state enterprises, both of which will allow the government to gain substantial windfalls that can easily be capture to networks of patronage, have gained advisory councils to support their implementation for the public good.
But how effective this new arrangement will be is questionable. It is not as if there has never been any oversight over the implementation of mega projects. Parliament is mandated to bring executive government bodies to account for every delay, wastage and poor delivery that occurs under their watch. They just have not been doing a good job of it.
This has not been as a result of failure to see what should have been obvious. Local and federal parliaments approve the budgets of local and federal projects. Too many times, we have seen them show little enthusiasm to question or strike down proposals.
In this year’s federal fiscal budget, the only comment parliamentarians could muster were some copy editing mistakes in the budget document they have been handed. During the hearings where standing committees deliberate on the performances of ministries, parliamentarians fail to even pass punitive measures against ministers who do not to show up without giving any notice of their absence.
A lack of checks and balances has not been due to failures to notice the elephant in the room but the absence of an incentive to do so.
They are all members of the same party, why should they undercut each other? Because public office makes people upstanding citizens?
Likewise, there should not be a reason to believe that the Planning Commission will not be capture to the same hazard. It is a body whose commissioner, currently Eyob Tekelagne, is appointed by the Prime Minister without parliamentary approval. Of course, this would not have mattered much in our current political state.
There should be an incentive to give high government officials, who in the end are politicians, reason to worry about the public good. There is a reason we see Democrats in the United States grilling every one of President Donald Trump’s nominees during Senate hearings, while Republicans ask superfluous questions. The Democrats may have an actual principled goal, but it is chiefly because they want to make political gains.
We do not have that in our parliament. The EPRDF and its allies are in total control of parliament. Even the bureaucracy, local administrative bodies, universities and democratic institutions have been permeated. Putting this into order will be a difficult task likely to take years.
Thus, Abiy’s administration ought to introduce a similar provision for mega-projects as was the case with the Diaspora Trust Fund. There should be an advisory council able to scrutinise projects over a certain cost threshold.
The administration had done a good job of picking members that the public can generally rally behind, even if there have been some reservations over inclusiveness. New initiatives to shovel great loads of public money into projects require a similar level of scrutiny until a time when a more diverse parliament can be created.
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