Abiy Ahmed Ali, 41, sworn-in as Ethiopia's Prime Minister
The blood of Selassie 
Ethiopia is an interesting case on the whole benevolent dictatorship model that is modeled on comtemporary China that many Africans argue about. Ever since the democratization waves after the cold War and failure of SAPs many people looked to China with its growth as a better model. Ethiopia was a huge proponent of it and apart from Angola in the high oil price years has had one of the highest economic growth rate on the continent and the world. The idea that economic growth would create more cohesion has not stood up to scrutiny. One poster on skyscrapercity explained it well when he looked at the ethnic make up and composition of Ethiopia vs China. I have seen some papers showing that the model has wrked better in Asia than it has in Africa when tried.
While I think most people agree democracy is the preferred model of government participation for a population, I think in the west we have a bias in viewing it as a silver bullet. Singapore and also South Korea both went through periods of benevolent dictatorships following periods of destitute poverty or social instability similar to a lot of African nations. South Korea following the war was plagued with starvation and was on the same economic level as countries like Ethiopia. They then had a 30-40 years of a dictatorship before slowly democratizing their society. The amazing thing is that I would argue their population is much more political than the US. Look at their protests and the fact they just swiftly ousted their last president and it wasn't the first president they ousted.
I think once there is a certain amount of security economically, socially, educationally, and just personal security from violence then I think in these cases democratization can start to take place. This is also what happened in South Korea. Also hate to say it but dictatorships allow rapid development to take place. If you want something done, you can get it done. More checks and balances needed, the more redtape and bureaucracy is needed to maintain those checks and balances. I believe this is the case of Rwanda where many foreign investors like it because they can get permits and get their businesses setup with relative ease and speed.
This may be a good model for developing African nations. Rwanda is the most famous example. The problem is that it all hinges on one individual usually. If they die, or become corrupted the system falls apart.
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I think the problem is African countries have the type of multi-ethnic politics that East Asian countries do not have, the economic dividend is not enough if it also follows an established "our turn to eat" mentality. Dictators can also nation build which is what i think many proponents seem to think economic growth can produce by itself. Nation building along with economic growth work well together i don't think they are causal in nature especially on the continent. It reminds me of the statement in Half of a Yellow Sun were one of the characters I believe said "I am Igbo the British made me Nigerian". I actually think Ethiopia which has a President and PM could do both in having a nation builder and a technocrat all at once. Rwanda seems like a powder keg set up, a minority President presiding over a majority while using repressive tactics, it would be one thing if a minority ethnic group member is voted in by the party like Ramaphosa in SA rather than the situation where the majority may harbor resentment.
I actually was thinking about that when I wrote that and was tempted to go on a side tangent. Maybe I'm misinformed, but I thought tribal issues in Rwanda in particular have actually improved because they seem to be focused on a single Rwandan identity and its actually against the law to label each other by tribal origin. Is that incorrect? I thought was Kagame's partial claim to fame following the genocide.
You will have to kill tribal differences if you're going to try and go the nation state way of societal organization I think. Building a singular identity that people can identify with may be the fix and unfortunately, I can only imagine this being done by force by the government through laws. To go back to east Asia, this is actually what happened in Singapore. They had a bunch of issues with ethnic classes in the 50's and 60's and to tackle that issue, they basically instituted a bunch of forced programs such as making ethnic groups live together by quotas for example to tackle racism issues.
Those Asian countries culturally put hella emphasis on education. I'd rather see ridiculous money pumped into stem education and trades like plumbing, hvac, and electrician for infrastructure.
For there to be peace with Eritrea, Ethiopia would have to pull out of Badme. Both countries are improving, time to let the past be the past and respect each others borders.
Nothing will change til the TPLF is gone
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Superstar
Secure Da Bag
Veteran
Shouldn't Africa be more like "why is the AU allowing people older than my grandparents to host a Continental AARP party?"
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
Maybe him reaching out to Eritrea is tplf work also. Tigayans been trying to talk to Isaias for a long ass time but he refuses
