Meles leaves behind a shining legacy

Mobhare Matinyi, Washington DC. The Citizen, Tanzania. Thursday, 23 August 2012 22:08.
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For the third time in less than five months Africa has lost another leader, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who died on Monday at a Brussels hospital aged 57. First it was Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika, 78, in April before Ghanaian President John Atta Mills, 68, passed away in July.

Meles, then an intelligent young man who had dropped out of a medical school to lead a rebellion that ousted Mengistu Haile Mariam, the head of a brutal communist military junta in 1991, leaves behind a remarkable yet questionable legacy from the time he led his war-ravaged nation as president for four years and later as prime minister in 1995.

Once described as a hardline Marxist-Leninist politician, Meles who proved to be visionary, pragmatic, controversial, authoritarian, powerful, divisive, and often a spokesman for Africa, lifted Ethiopia from being one of the hopeless countries in Africa, a starving nation, and a failing state, to one of the fastest growing economies in the world. No doubt he defied the odds.

Ethiopia, a country best remembered for the 1984 famine that for a while marked it as a symbol of Africa’s poverty, was at the point of collapse when a network of rebels overthrew Mengistu’s government which at the time had the continent’s second largest military that never fought impressively against any rebellion. Although Mengistu is still living in exile in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia’s Supreme Court has already sentenced him to death since 2008, apparently the second conviction after a life sentence in 2006.

Meles under his political party, Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TLPF), created a linguistic and ethnic-based federalism in an attempt to end the so-called Amhara domination of centralized administration, politics and culture, a measure which received criticism from some opposition quarters. However, that step angered the Oromo ethnic group who complained that the country was still dominated by Amhara and Tigray. The Oromo produce Ethiopia’s celebrated long distance runners.

Amidst criticism and many other challenges, Meles managed to forge ahead with reforms that enabled Ethiopia’s economy to grow at a staggering rate of almost double digits, and although relatively the country remains one of the poorest in the world, several performance awards that Meles received across the world tell many wonderful stories.

As former US President Bill Clinton once said, Meles was in the same league with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni; this was of course back then. Meles proved himself to be a results-oriented leader.

The second half of the last decade attests to Ethiopia’s story of success, so impressive that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) commented in 2008, “Ethiopia’s economy was the fastest-growing for a non-oil exporting country in Sub-Saharan Africa,” at a time when the country ranked as the second-most attractive in the region for investment. Meles knew where his country came from and where it was going; he knew why Ethiopia was poor.

His involvement in the war against terror was totally misunderstood by many, thinking that he was turning himself into a puppet of western powers, but he was in fact taking advantage of that situation to address Ethiopia’s strategic security interests. The Somali Islamic fighters made a mistake when they vowed to revive a border dispute with Ethiopia, and that drew Meles closer to George Bush’s anti-terror adventures. Ethiopia still cooperates militarily with the US in several secret missions in the Horn of Africa to target terrorist elements.

Meles will be remembered for responding to Eritrea’s attacks that caused a costly and bloody war between the two poor countries from May 1998 to June 2000.Eritrea was born out of the ashes of the demise of Mengistu’s regime. Ethiopia waited until December 2006 to once again show its military might when it severely punished the Somali Islamic Courts Union sending the ungoverned country into deeper chaos. Ethiopian troops returned home in 2007.

To make sure that he does not lose the grip of power, Meles chose to become an oppressive leader who gave no room to civic organizations, political opposition, the press and even the worldwide web, to challenge him. He was of the 99-percent victory club and jailed many of his critics; he however gave more rights to women. Meles didn’t accept any kind of pluralism.

Western democratic ideals may not always approve of Meles’s leadership style but to a large extent his style helped Ethiopia to stay focused and to address development challenges.

Probably, it’s true that in Africa progress can only be achieved by way of a heavy hand.Meles may not have been the kind of leader that everybody wished he would be but he certainly showed the right way in many aspects and today many Ethiopians are proud of their fallen hero. Despite his poor human rights records, he did play his part in building his country.