(Author’s name withheld upon request)
In 1965, the renowned American Political thinker, Samuel Huntington, published an article titled Political Development and Decay wherein he detailed the main problem of developing countries: the absence of a viable state! For Huntington, the most basic distinction among countries concerns not their forms of government but their degree of government. Americans, Huntington warned, did not understand the challenges of, and more importantly the need for, building a strong state or/and government in developing countries because they were born with a government/a state which had been imported from Britain. As such, the “Lockean American is so fundamentally anti-government that he identifies government with restrictions on government”. The problem, however, is that authority had to exist before it could be limited and it was authority which was and is in scarce supply in developing countries where governments have always been “at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students”.
Francis Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria, Huntington’s protégées, have recently confessed that they should have listened to their mentor. Fukuyama has even authored two consecutive books where he argues, “The reason that [Africa] is so much poorer… than booming regions like East Asia can be traced directly to its lack of strong government institutions”. It is rather ironic that Harvard University granted Fukuyama a Medal of Honor this week for rewriting and updating Huntington i.e. for understanding Huntington half a century later!
The creation of a strong modern government is, in turn, predicated on the creation of one strong political party: “The distinctive institution of the modern polity… is the political party”. And in terms of political development, Huntington contends, states with one highly institutionalized political party “are markedly more stable than states which lack such a party. States with no parties or many weak parties are the least stable”.
When Huntington wrote his book on “Political Order in Changing Societies”, Ethiopia’s current Prime Minister HMD was not born (he was probably few months away from coming to this world) nor had his senior comrades established the party that he now leads. The EPRDF is currently 42 years old and has been in power for 25 years. This makes the EPRDF the second longest regime in power after the reign of HSI. This is such an impressive achievement in and of itself. But what has happened during these years is by far more impressive. The party has not only outlived and outsmarted its rivals but also itself!
The strength of political parties varies with their scope of support and their level of institutionalization. Scope refers to the extent to which the political party encompasses activity in society. Its membership size and class composition can be used to measure this scope.
The level of institutionalization of any political party/system, on the other hand, can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and structure.
By employing the scope-institutionalization nexus, this piece argues that few political parties, and even fewer guerrilla movements, have historically been as successful and dynamic as the EPRDF.
Adaptability has been the strongest quality of the EPRDF in its half-a-century existence and quarter-a-century-rule; while maintaining its hitherto coherence remains to be the key challenge given the increase of its members from half a million to six million in just a decade. In this part, I will focus on the adaptability quality of the EPRDFites and the tasks and challenges ahead.
The adaptability of a political party can be measured in three ways. The first is simply chronological age: the longer a political party has been in existence, the more likely it is able to continue to exist in the future. According to Huntington, the probability that a political party which is hundred years old will survive one additional year is perhaps one hundred times greater than the probability that a one-year-old party will survive one additional year.
A second measure of adaptability is generational age. If a political party still has its first set of leaders and its procedures are still performed by those who first performed it, its adaptability is still in question. The success of a party to surmount the problem of peaceful succession and its ability to replace one set or generation of leaders with another tells the institutional adaptability of a party. This entails both intra-generation and inter-generation succession. Surmounting a succession crisis by replacing one set of leaders by another i.e intra-generational shift counts for something in terms of institutional adaptability: the shift from Lenin to Stalin finds its equivalent in the shift from Aboy Sibhat to Meles Zenawi in the sense that both had similar organizational experience as guerrilla fighters. As much as this is a sign of a certain level of adaptability, it is not as significant as a shift in leadership generations. The historically unprecedented smooth power succession to PM Hailemariam Desalegn after the untimely death of the late PM Meles Zenawi is enormous in this regard. And by the way, this happened by design, not by chance.
Both intra and inter-generation successions are unprecedented in Ethiopian political history that Isaias Afeworki had reportedly mocked Aboy Sibhat for transferring party leadership to “inexperienced kids” while many still believe Meles is ruling from behind the grave. No, PM Hailemariam Desalegn, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, is ruling from the Menelik Palace and it is time for analysts to catch-up with reality!
The third and perhaps most fundamental measure of adaptability is a functional one. Since organizations are created to perform one particular function, they face a major crisis after the original function is no longer needed. A party that can successfully adapt itself to changed functions, that is able to change one constituency to the representation of another or to acquire power and then act like a governing party is more of an institution than one which cannot.
From an ethnic party that represents the peasantry to a coalition of national parties that represents not only the majority of the country but also other social forces such as the national bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, the EPRDF has transformed in its scope and size. More importantly, the EPRDF has not only transformed from a guerrilla movement to a ruling party capable of governing such a diverse and difficult country but also proceeded into further tasks: addressing national questions and carrying out accelerated development and massive transformation at home, and bringing regional integration, maintaining regional stability and offering an alternative development model to the region and the continent. Truth be told, few guerrilla movements in history have been equally dynamic!
As the party celebrates its Silver Jubilee, the twin goals of finalizing inter-generational succession within the party and translating the hitherto double-digit growth into a sustained structural transformation and industrialization are – or should be – the two key tasks on the to-do-list of the EPRDFites. If history is any guide, the next tasks seem to be within the realm of the possible or even easier. According to Huntington’s calculations, “the first hurdle is the biggest one. Success in adapting to one environmental challenge paves the way for successful adaptation to subsequent environmental challenges. If, for instance, the probability of successful adjustment to the first challenge is 50 per cent, the probability of successful adjustment to the second challenge might be 75 per cent, to the third challenge 87.5 per cent, to the fourth 93.75 per cent, and so on”.
So as to succeed in achieving the twin goals of intergenerational succession and industrialization, however, the party should maintain – or alas regain – the coherence it lost when it increased its membership size to millions and then when the late PM died. As the party song prophesied, the few and the disciplined have become millions but that has become the main problem now. When numbers increased, discipline and efficiency declined: Coherence perished when “everybody pressed in to share its privileges”. I will return to this problem in the next piece.
Happy Silver Jubilee, EPRDFites! But as you celebrate your Silver Jubilee, you should keep these words in mind and, for Heaven’s sake, in action: “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There”!
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