TRISTEN TAYLOR: Endorsement of Ethiopia’s Abiy shows Ramaphosa is no democrat

Tribal elders in Ethiopia’s Afar region are encouraging girls to marry at 13. A new cohort of fighters is required for a war of revenge.

Tigrayan rebels invaded the region during the Tigray War (2020-22) and slaughtered livestock. Billboards in Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, memorialise Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front “heroes” crossing rivers of blood. 

In the north of the county the Amhara region is in revolt. Amhara fighters backed by Eritrea were crucial in the national government’s victory over Tigrayan forces: a victory drenched in mass rape, famine and perhaps up to 600,000 dead. The Amhara Fano militia is now fighting the Ethiopian National Defence Force, and large parts of the region are ungovernable.

The fighting has spilt over into the Oromia region, where Fano and the Oromo Liberation Army have been clashing, adding another layer of violence to the long-standing and deeply entrenched Oromo insurgency against the government. Since Amhara and Oromia account for half the country’s population of 120-million, the risk of a full-scale civil war is real. 

Welcome to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia. 

The root cause of the conflicts is Abiy’s efforts to destroy the country’s federal structure. He has centralised power and crushed the opposition and is now a dictator in all but name. People in Addis Ababa talk in whispers. The next election, whenever that might be, is highly unlikely to be free and fair. Stand by for one of those 96% wins for the incumbent. Like last time. 

There are greater ironies than Abiy’s 2019 Nobel peace prize. He fired his minister for peace, Taye Dendea, in December. Dendea’s sin was to criticise the government for failing to maintain peace.

Abiy’s erratic foreign policy flirts with even more war. In October he said landlocked Ethiopia had a right to access the sea, naming the Eritrean ports of Assab and Massawa. The Eritrean government was not amused that Abiy was essentially claiming Ethiopian rule over its ports. Both governments reportedly mobilised troops along the border.

This dispute was on top of another ongoing uncertainty. Despite the peace agreement that ended the Tigray War, signed in Pretoria in November 2022, Eritrean soldiers remain in Tigray. 

Given that Eritrea wasn’t obliging enough to hand over a port or two, Abiy turned to the unrecognised state of Somaliland and cut a deal. According to Al Jazeera, Ethiopia gets a military base in the country and will lease 20km of the coastline to obtain a port. Somaliland gets official recognition and shares in Ethiopian Airlines.

While Somaliland should be recognised as a state, having endured the Isaaq genocide (1987-89) and having won the Somaliland war of independence (1981-91) against Somalia’s brutal military dictator, Siad Barre, the pact has upset the geopolitical balance, with unknown outcomes. 

Somalia considers the unexpected agreement, signed on January 1, to be an extreme violation of its sovereignty. One thing preventing another conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia — the two countries went hard at it from 1977 to 1978 — is the latter’s seemingly forever civil war against al-Shabaab. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa and the SA department of international relations & co-operation took a good look at the unholy mess that is Abiy’s Ethiopia ... and decided the war-torn and politically repressed country should join Brics, lobbying hard for its inclusion. Make no mistake, having Ethiopia in was Ramaphosa’s personal quest and thus amounts to his personal endorsement of Abiy’s rule.

Ethiopia formally entered “Brics+” on January 1 along with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Iran. At this point one should surely step back and take a look at attitudes to democracy in the Global South. The original Brics grouping was a majority democratic institution. SA, India and Brazil are all functioning liberal democracies with free and fair elections and have a combined population of 1.7-billion, more than China and Russia put together. 

Argentina is an actual democracy, as opposed to Iran or Egypt, and it was supposed to join Brics+. However, the new president, Javier Milei, changed the country’s policy late in December and decided not to sign up. Milei is a strange anarcho-capitalist cat — controversial is an understatement — but hey, that’s democracy for you. When societies respect both the institutions and, more importantly, the moral values of democracy, the system provides a peaceful and efficient method of political change. 

In a recent survey conducted in 34 African countries and published late in 2023, Afrobarometer pointed out that about 68% of Africans want democracy and an even larger majority reject military, authoritarian and one-person (strongman) political systems. Ninety percent of Ethiopians polled said they want democracy. 

Democratic moral values include freedom of religion and gender equality. Basically, stacks full of tolerance and a complete rejection of the righteousness of imposing your beliefs on others.

How do we know a politician is actually a democrat? If she or he acts like a democrat. Both at home and abroad. Talking doesn’t cut the mustard, and you aren’t born a democrat — you become one through your conscious acts. 

Brics yardstick

The expansion of the Brics bloc membership is a decent yardstick to judge Ramaphosa and the ANC’s democratic credentials. The governing party’s deputy secretary-general, Nomvula Mokonyane, stated in August that with Brics “we reaffirm our historic mission of creating a more humane, just, equitable, democratic and free international society”.

That was clearly Orwellian doublespeak, for there is no way such a position can be held with any sincerity while doing all that one can to get Abiy’s Ethiopia into the club. Ramaphosa and his government could have instead punted Nigeria or Kenya, troubled democracies but democracies nonetheless.

Had Argentina not opted out, that would have meant Brics+ would’ve been split equally between democracies and, well, the totalitarianism of Xi Jinping and a retinue of dictatorships, absolute monarchies and Islamic fundamentalists. 

Put another way, Ramaphosa managed to turn a majority democratic Global South institution into one where the bulk of the member governments explicitly reject democratic moral values. For instance, this opinion piece is of the kind that would be banned in those Brics+ countries. 

Democratic politicians act in ways that further democracy inside and outside their countries. If they don’t, that means they no longer consider democracy to be a moral good owed to all human beings by virtue of them simply being human. Democrats most certainly don’t endorse blood-soaked dictators wielding starvation and violation. 

Mokonyane is right about one thing: the mission is history.

• Dr Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.