Opportunists are the new enemies of the EPRDF. They were declared as threats back in mid-March, first in a prime space column in the state-owned daily, Addis Zemen, and then later, at the congresses of the EPRDF and its member parties.
The specific behaviour under attack is expressed in various harsh terminologies, found in the local languages, in particular the equivalents of the English words: “chameleon” – someone who could be whatever his hosts wanted him to be, or who changes his opinions and behaviour according to the situation, and “charlatan” – a person who usually makes showy pretenses of knowledge or ability.
Such prioritisation of threats by the ruling party, and understanding the exact meanings, is not an abstract intellectual exercise. Instead, it is indicative of what will dominate the ruling party’s internal meetings of performance evaluation and, eventually, the grading system of civil servants’ performance.
At first, one gets the impression that the party is eying a cultural revolution, as chameleons and charlatans are found virtually in all organisations – be it public , private, civic service organisation (CSO) or religious. Indeed, such behavioural tendencies are reinforced by weak personalities and the oft-used excuse of “poverty”. However, it is the institutional settings prevalent in the nation that nurtures such personalities.
The modus operandi of educational institutions is invariably designed to nurture yes-men. Neither is there any meaningful effort to make assertiveness a less costly course of action in the civil service and other public service institutions.
It is no surprise then that Ethiopian bosses, wherever they are, have a strong yearning for a lord-tenant type relationship with their employees, and prefer to leave organisational rules open-ended.
Changing that would not be an impossible revolution. It simply requires a leadership bold enough to reform the state of administrative laws, which are pretty much in line with the old Ethiopian adage that “it is the lord’s fault, but the tenant should pay compensation”.
But, there is no hint of such changes in the oral and printed explanations from the ruling party. Rather, the prescribed solutions are extensive ideological trainings and stronger “internal struggles” amongst members.
Upon a closer look, it is simply a campaign for ideological purity with a different name. That is what one observes from the context in which the problematic behaviour was explained, both at the general meeting and during group discussions of the ruling party congresses.
It appears that the ruling party is warming up for another purge, which is a logical corollary to its exponential growth within the past few years.
EPRDF’s membership has ballooned in size, almost nine-fold, since the 2005 post-election violence; most of the new members were recruited in the first two to three years. Though such an exponential growth can threaten the cohesiveness of any organisation, it was deemed useful for tactical and strategic reasons.
Such mass recruitment helped eliminate the negative attitude attached to party membership, especially in the urban middle-class and universities, where members used to be considered as “informants”. On the other-hand, the mass membership diluted the power of old members who were deemed to have failed the party, either by not keeping up with changes in their surroundings or by using their membership as immunity from public grievances.
On a strategic level, it was a move to broaden the party’s political base to attain a hegemonic status, enlarge its pool of technocrats and to make the party conducive to being molded in line with the Developmental State teachings, introduced by Meles Zenawi.
Truth be told, what expedited the mass recruitment was not the effectiveness of policy training forums, as the party would want us to believe, nor governmental pressure, as Western rights groups claim. Rather, it was opportunism and the tendency to jump on the bandwagon.
In fact, at the end of one of the first rounds of such trainings, in 2005, a senior EPRDF official laughed in disbelief when he learned that almost all participants had filled out membership forms. He instructed his deputies to encourage those who wished to leave to do so. But few participants accepted the offer.
Unsurprisingly, many of the new entrants did not endure the demanding membership obligations of the EPRDF, which obviously cannot provide incentives for each of them. Nor does it seem to have the flexibility and capacity to follow-up with each member.
Thus, it is little wonder that guesstimates, based on the party’s annual revenue, suggest that around one third of its 6.1 million registered members are not paying membership fees – a misconduct that leads to automatic expulsion from the party. However, this does not necessarily mean that those who fulfill the membership duties are any better.
Opportunism was reinforced by the party’s decision to recruit and empower “leading elements” of the society, which is defined on the performance score one receives from their institution – a process that favours opportunists more often than not. The same can be said about the party’s internal performance evaluation system, as it often fails to filter out opportunists.
Of course, this is indirectly reinforced by the ruling party’s attempts to promote the values of “entrepreneurship” and being “successful”, whilst at the same time discouraging using short-cuts, to that end.
The effect of this was the dilution of the stature and value of party membership, especially within the urban middle-class, which was one of the primary targets of the mass recruitment. Members hardly feel the duty to set an example, nor does the public see them as role models. To the dismay of the top leadership, these members concur with the prevailing political opinion in their vicinity, rather than boldly echoing the party line.
Now, the party wants to purge such “fence-sitters” and strengthen its organisational cohesiveness and public standing. Indeed, provided that the party deploys a sufficient scale of indoctrination, as well as peer pressure and disciplinary measures, through evaluation forums, it can manage to achieve that.
However, in the absence of efforts to first root out legal and attitudinal factors that nurture such behaviours, successfully rooting out the incompetents is unlikely.
That should be a legitimate worry of a party, which just replaced approximately one third of its 180 leaders as part of its plan to hand over power to the “new generation”.
A senior EPRDF official recently cautioned that opportunist tendencies are widely seen at the lower levels. And, there are signs of it, too, in the mid-level leadership. It will be dangerous if it gains ground in the higher leadership, he noted. Let us hope that we have not passed that stage already.
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