The Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) is undertaking major overhaul, Defence Minister Siraj Fegessa said last Tuesday.

In his appearance at the House of Peoples’ Representatives to present quarterly report, the Minister disclosed that ENDF has launched a three-phased ‘leadership replacement’ (metekakat) plan.

The plan, which has already commenced in the last budget year (2009/10), consists replacing 561 ranking officers in two years period.

The Minister indicated that 13 Generals and 303 Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels had been discharged in the two-phases of the plan so far completed.

The objective of the plan was presented by the Minister in the context of building the capacity of the military and empowering a new generation of leadership.

The Minister was quoted, by the Ethiopian Television, as saying that:

“Ministry of National Defence has a firm determination to build a professional army that has strong trust on the Constitution,” he said. Offering capacity building trainings is one of the means employed to enhance the competence of the army. Hence, to empower new and old leadership in the army, a range of military training institutions have been established throughout the country.”

The term the Minister used for the plan – ‘Metekakat’ – echoes an on-going similar plan of the ruling party, EPRDF(Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front), to transfer senior leadership posts to a new generation in five years time. The ruling party’s leadership replacement plan, which commenced in mid-2009, is expected to be completed with the replacement of the party’s current chairperson, PM Meles Zenawi, in mid-2014. The plan targets senior parties of the party who served since the days of the armed struggle that ousted the military regime in 1991.

The army is similarly dominated by officers who took part in the armed struggle, though they are no longer party members. Thus, it seems a similar generational change is deemed necessary in the Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF).

It is also probable to that the leadership change is intended to enhance the ethnic composition of the ranking officers of the army.

The Minister also indicated that an affirmative action measure is in place to enhance the ethnic composition of the army. The measure, which applies for ethnic groups underrepresented in the army, includes lowering the level of formal educational qualification of new recruits and the psychometric evaluation result required to attend officers’ training.

The Amharic version of Ethiopian Reporter published a data of the regional composition  of the army, which is apparently included in the Minister’s report to the parliament.

The data, which is suggestive of the ethnic composition, is presented in the table below.

* It is not clear whether the data in the table is complete.

Note that: The size of active military personnel was estimated 138,000 in year 2008, according to the latest available data on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute(SIPRI) and the World Development Indicators (WDI) databases.

You can find the data on the size and budget of the Ethiopian Army (from SIPRI and WDI databases) are in the following two posts in this blog:

• Military expenditure at a historic low | Ethiopia
• Africa: Top 25 Military Spending Countries

Also related:

• Ethiopian Army orders 200 tanks for $100 mln
• Ethiopia Air Force orders UAVs and aeronautic technologies