The silence of Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds”
Professor A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the renowned Indian scientist
(“Missile Man of India”) and Eleventh President of India (2002-2007)
said, “If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.”
Recently, the World Bank released its 448-page World Bank (WB) report, “Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia”
with evidence galore showing that Ethiopia under the absolute
dictatorship of the Meles Zenawi regime has become a full-fledged
corruptocracy (a regime controlled and operated by a small clique of
corrupt-to-the-core vampiric kleptocrats who cling to power to enrich
themselves at public expense). Perhaps the report’s findings should not
come as surprise to anyone since “power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely”.
Over the past several weeks, I have made a number of cursory remarks
on the shocking findings of the WB report. I have also discreetly
appealed to a segment of Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds” (its teachers,
professors, economists, political and social scientists, lawyers, and
other members of the learned professions) to critically examine the
report and inform their compatriots on the devastating impact of
corruption on the future of their poor country and make some
recommendations on how to deal with it. I even challenged the political opposition to issue a “white paper” and
make crystal clear their position on accountability and transparency
and make some concrete proposals to remedy the endemic corruption that
has metastasized in the Ethiopian body politic.
I have yet to see any substantive analysis or commentary on the WB’s
“diagnosis of corruption” in Ethiopia in the popular media or in the
scholarly journals; nor have I seen any proposals on how to sever the
vampiric tentacles of corruption sucking the lifeblood from the
Ethiopian people. Could it be that Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds”
can’t handle ugly truths? Or do Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds” turn
faint-hearted when it comes to speaking ugly truths to power?
Few can tell the ugly truth about corruption in Ethiopia more bluntly thanGlobal Financial Integrity (GFI), the renowned organization that reports on “illicit financial flows” (illegal
capital flight, mispricing, bulk cash movements, hawala transactions,
smuggling, etc.) out of developing countries. In 2011, GFI told the
world, “The people of Ethiopia are being bled dry. No matter how hard
they try to fight their way out of absolute destitution and poverty,
they will be swimming upstream against the current of illicit capital
leakage.”
When the late dictator Meles Zenawi was asked in July 2011 about his feelings concerning the use of the word “famine” synonymously
with Ethiopia by the Oxford Dictionary, he said, “… Like any citizen, I
am very sad. I am ashamed. It is degrading. A society that built the
Lalibela churches… Axum obelisks… some thousand years ago is unable to
cultivate the land and feed itself…. That is very sad. It is very
shameful. Of all the things, to go out begging for one’s daily bread, to
be a beggar nation is dehumanizing. Therefore, I feel great shame.” I too feel great shame that Ethiopia has become not only a “beggar nation” over the past 21 years,
but also that she has now become synonymous with the word “corruption”.
It is unbearable that the land of “13 months of sunshine” has become
the land of 13 months of the darkness of corruption.
Speaking the ugly truth to power
Given the icy silence of Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds”, it is my
humble duty and unenviable job to continue to speak the ugly truth about
corruption to the powers that be in Ethiopia. For years, I have written
numerous commentaries on corruption in Ethiopia as a serious human
rights violation. I agree with Peter Eigen, founder and chairman of
Transparency International (Corruption Index) that “corruption leads to a
violation of human rights in at least three respects: corruption
perpetuates discrimination, corruption prevents the full realisation of
economic, social, and cultural rights, and corruption leads to the
infringement of numerous civil and political rights.” I also believe
corruption undermines good governance, cripples the rule of law and
destroys citizens’ trust in political leaders, public officials and
political institutions.
In 2007 when Ethiopia’s auditor general, Lema Aregaw, reported that
Birr 600 million of state funds were missing from the regional
government coffers, Meles fired Lema and publicly defended the regional
administrations’ “right to burn money.” In my December 2008 commentary “The Bleeping Business of Corruption in Ethiopia,”
I argued that “corruption in Ethiopia is an evil with a thousand faces.
It is woven into the fabric of the political culture.” Corruption is
the modus operandi of the regime in power in Ethiopia today. Former
president Dr. Negasso Gidada clearly understood the gravity of the
situation when he declared in 2001 that “corruption has riddled state
enterprises to the core,” adding that the government would show “an iron
fist against corruption and graft as the illicit practices had now
become endemic”. In 2013, the business of corruption is the biggest
business in Ethiopia.
In my November 2009 commentary, “Africorruption, Inc.”,
I described the tip of the iceberg of the web of corruption in Ethiopia
by synthesizing some of the eye popping anecdotal evidence. Dr. Negasso documented corruption in the misuse and abuse of political power for partisan electoral advantage. Coincidentally,
in 2009, U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelley announced that the
U.S. is investigating allegations that “$850 million in food and
anti-poverty aid from the U.S. is being distributed on the basis of
political favoritism by the current prime minister’s party.” (For
reasons unknown, but not difficult to guess, the U.S. State Department
has never released the findings of its investigation.)
The ruling regime’s “Federal Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission”
(FEAC) in 2008 documented the fact that “USD$16 million dollars” worth
of gold bars simply walked out of the country’s principal bank. FEAC
described the heist as a “huge scandal that took place in the Country’s
National Bank and took many Ethiopians by surprise… The corruptors
dared to steal lots of pure gold bars that belonged to the Ethiopian
people replacing them with gilded irons… Some employees of the Bank,
business people, managers and other government employees were allegedly
involved in this disastrous and disgracing scandal.”
FEAC also reported that “there was another big corruption case at the
Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation that took many Ethiopians by
surprise” which involved the “competitive tendering for the supply of
telecommunication equipment.” FEAC “found out that nearly 200 million
USD has been lost to corruption through the entire fraudulent and
corrupt process…. In another case involving a telecommunications deal
with the Chinese, a high level regime official was secretly tape
recorded trying to extort kickbacks for himself and other regime
officials.” (Even though high level bank officials were fingered in the
gold heist, there is no evidence that any one of them has ever been
prosecuted.)
In my November 2011 commentary “To Catch Africa’s Biggest Thieves Hiding in America!”, I called attention to a Wikileaks cablegram which
confirmed long held suspicions about massive corruption in the current
ruling party in Ethiopia, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF):
“Upon taking power in 1991… [the TPLF] liquidated non-military assets
to found a series of companies whose profits would be used as venture
capital to rehabilitate the war-torn Tigray region’s economy…[with]
roughly US $100 million… Throughout the 1990s…, no new
EFFORT [Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray owned and
operated by TPLF] ventures have been established despite significant
profits, lending credibility to the popular perception that the
ruling party and its members are drawing on endowment resources to fund
their own interests or for personal gain.” According to the World Bank,
“roughly half of the Ethiopian national economy is accounted for by
companies held by an EPRDF-affiliated business group called the
Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT)… EFFORT’s
freight transport, construction, pharmaceutical, and cement firms
receive lucrative foreign aid contracts and highly favorable terms on
loans from government banks.”
When 10,000 tons of coffee earmarked for exports had simply vanished
(not unlike the gold bars that walked out of the National Bank) from the
warehouses in 2011, Meles Zenawi called a meeting of commodities
traders and threatened to “cut off their hands” if they should steal
coffee in the future. In a videotaped statement, Meles told the traders he will forgive them this time because “we all have our hands in the disappearance of the coffee”.
In my December 2011 commentary “The Art of Bleeding a Country Dry”,
I argued, “No one knows corruption — the economics of kleptocracy —
better than [Meles] Zenawi. The facts of Zenawi’s corruptonomics are
plain for all to see: The [Ethiopian] economy is in the stranglehold of
businesses owned or dominated by Zenawi family members, cronies,
supporters or hangers-on.”
“Diagnosing Corruption in (in the land of) Ethiopia”
Transparency International (Corruption Index) broadly defines
corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”.
Corruption manifests itself in grand and petty ways. “Grand corruption
consists of acts committed at a high level of government that distort
policies or the central functioning of the state, enabling leaders to
benefit at the expense of the public good.” Grand corruption often
involves political corruption in which political decision makers
manipulate “policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the
allocation of resources and financing by political decision makers, who
abuse their position to sustain their power, status and wealth.” Petty
corruption often occurs when the law enforcement officials or
bureaucratic functionaries exact payments from “ordinary citizens, who
often are trying to access basic goods or services in places like
hospitals, schools, police departments and other agencies” .
Corruption in Ethiopia is no longer a question of disparate anecdotal
evidence or an issue of intellectual debate. Corruption has become the
loathsome disease of the Ethiopian body politic. That is why the World
Bank carefully titled its report, “Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia”. Diagnosis
refers to the clinical process of identifying a disease. The 448-page
World Bank report has diagnosed corruption as the metastasizing cancer
of the Ethiopian body politic.
Corruption in land is the root of all corruption in
Ethiopia! Grand corruption in land originates from the upper circles of
power in the public and private sector. The powerful political and
economic elites in Ethiopia exploit the anarchic, arbitrary, secretive,
unaccountable and confused governance of the ruling regime to weave
their tangled webs of corruption. The World Bank report states that “the
land sector [in Ethiopia] is particularly susceptible to corruption and
rent seeking [using social or political institutions to redistribute
wealth among different groups without creating new wealth (profit
seeking)].” Corruption in land in Ethiopia is inherent (as
the old communist ideologues used to say, “part and parcel of”) in “the
way policy and legislation are formulated and enforced.”
The World Bank report explains that corruption in the land sector in
Ethiopia occurs in several ways. First and foremost, “elite and senior
officials” snatch the most desirable lands in the country for
themselves. These fat cats manipulate the “weak policy and legal
framework and poor systems to implement existing policies and laws” to
their advantage. They engage in “fraudulent actions to allocate land to
themselves in both urban and rural areas and to housing associations and
developers in urban areas.” These “influential and well-connected
individuals are able to have land allocated to them often in violation
of existing laws and regulations.”
In the capital Addis Ababa, it is “nearly impossible to a get a plot
of land without bribing city administration officials.” These officials
not only demand huge bribes but have also “conspired with land
speculators” and facilitated bogus “housing cooperatives [to become]
vehicles for a massive land grab. It is estimated that about 15,000
forged titles have been issued in Addis Ababa in the past five years.”
Management of rural land is similarly deeply infected with
corruption. “In rural areas, officials have distorted the definition of
‘public land’ to mean ‘government land’”. Officials define “public
purpose” in applying expropriation which is believed to be a leading
cause of “landlessness”. Officials have also “engaged in land grabbing
to grant land to functionaries” and this is “happening at the woreda
(district) level and is being copied by the elected committee members at
kebele (subdistrict) level.” According to the World Bank report,
“Almost all transactions involving land most often incorporate
corruption because there is no clear policy or transparent regulation
concerning land.”
It is stunning to learn from the report that the ruling regime does
not even have the most elementary system of land management in place.
“Rural areas have no maps of registered holdings… In urban areas, there
is little mapping of registered property. Encumbrances and restrictions
are not recorded in the registers, and the encumbrances, if registered,
are listed in a separate document. Land use restrictions are not
recorded in the register. There is no inventory of public land, which
affects the efficient management of public land and creates
opportunities for the illegal allocation of public land to private
parties.” Because existing institutions and laws are evaded, ignored and
manipulated for private gain, the system of land management is a total
failure making it impossible to hold officials in power legally
accountable for their corrupt practices.
A variety of methods are used to perpetuate corruption in land in
Ethiopia. One “key method” of land corruption involves the illegal
allocation of municipal land “to housing cooperatives controlled by
developers who then sell off the land informally.” Often “buyers were
unaware of the legal status of the land they were buying” and end up in
court before judges who are “aligned (in cahoots) with the corrupt
officials”. Another “method” is official falsification of documents.
“With limited systems in place to record rights, particularly in urban
areas, and limited oversight, officials have plenty of opportunities to
falsify documents. It is not uncommon for parcels of land to be
allocated to many different parties, sometimes to as many as different
parties, from whom officials and intermediaries collect multiple
transaction and service fees.” Blatant conflict of interest of board
members who oversee the lease award process, the absence of a compliance
monitoring process for lease allocations and payments and the absence
of land use regulations have served to accelerate the metastasizing
corruption in land in Ethiopia.
State ownership of all land in Ethiopia is the fountainhead of land
corruption. Wealthy elites and influential groups seize the land of the
poor and marginalized through forced, but “legal” evictions and eminent
domain actions. Nowhere is this type of land grab corruption more
conspicuous than in the regime’s land giveaways to foreign “investors”.
The World Bank report states that “a substantial proportion of
expropriated land is transferred to private interests”, but not to
smallholders. “The expropriation and relocation of smallholders has been
to the advantage of extensive commercial farming, including flower
farms, biofuel, and other commodities.” It is also documented that the
Ethiopian “government
is forcing the Indigenous Peoples of the southwest off their ancestral
lands and leasing these lands to foreign companies.” This
expropriation has been achieved through a bogus program of
“villagization” in which 1.5 million people have been “resettled” from
the regions of Gambella, Benishangul-Gumuz, Somali, and Afar and their
ancestral lands handed over to domestic and international “investors”.
As I documented in my March 2011 commentary, “Ethiopia: Country for Sale”,
the Indian agribusiness giant Karuturi Global today owns a 1,000 sq.
miles, “an area the size of Dorset, England”, of virgin Ethiopian land
for “£150 a week (USD$245)” for “50 years”. As Karuturi Project Manager
in Ethiopia Karmjeet Sekhon euphorically explained to Guardian reporter
John Vidal, “We never saw the land. They gave it to us and we took
it. Seriously, we did. We did not even see the land. They offered it.
That’s all.” The Karuturi guys would like us to believe they got
something for nothing. The regime wheeler-dealers would like us to
believe they gave a 1,000 square miles of virgin land to one of the
richest agribusinesses in the world for nothing. Suffice it to say that they may also believe we were born yesterday; but surely, we were not born last night!
Prognosis on corruption in Ethiopia
Corruption in Ethiopia is the principal business of the State.
Corruption has metastasized in the Ethiopian body politic because the
political and economic elites that have total control over the country’s
land resources benefit enormously. They use tailor-made legislative
opportunities to secure, sell and speculate in land rights. Because the
state is the sole owner of land, those who own the state alone have the
power to privatize land, expropriate, lease, zone or approve
construction plans or negotiate large-scale land giveaways. Those who
control the land in Ethiopia control not only the political and economic
process but also the digestive process (stomachs) of 90 million
Ethiopians!
The culture of corruption must be changed before the tangled webs of
corruption spun by the political and economic elites in Ethiopia are
shattered. The major problem with changing the culture of political
corruption is, as Peter Eigen observed, “in many parts of the world, the
local people are resigned to the fact that there is corruption. They
think there is nothing they can do about it. Therefore they more or less
try to accommodate themselves, pay bribes themselves.”
Most Ethiopians are unaware of the regime’s “anti-corruption” efforts
and those who are aware view the whole effort with a jaded eye. The
simple fact of the matter is that having the “anti-corruption” agency
(FEAC) to oversee, monitor, investigate and prosecute the architects and
beneficiaries of corruption in Ethiopia is like having Tweedle Dee
monitor, investigate and prosecute Tweedle Dum. To invoke an old
Ethiopian saying, “It is difficult to get a conviction when the son is
the robber and the father is the judge.”
Effective anti-corruption efforts require an active democratic culture based on the rule of law and a vigilant citizenry empowered to confront and fight corruption in daily life. Genuine anti-corruption efforts must necessarily begin by empowering ordinary people to fight back, not by creating a make-believe anti-corruption bureaucracy.
There have been some successful experiments in grassroots anti-corruption efforts where ordinary people have been given the tools to fight back corruption.
In India, for instance, they have successfully organized local
“vigilance commissions” in many towns and brought together the
vulnerable and interested groups to probe into corruption. These
commissions have put a significant dent in corruption. In Bangalore,
“hub for India’s information technology sector”, residents have been
involved in rating the quality of all major service providers in the
city. The results were used to put pressure on government officials and
service providers to become more accountable to citizens. The Central Vigilance Commission of India also runs Project VIGEYE (Vigilance Eye)
which is “a citizen-centric initiative” in which “citizens join hands
with the Central Vigilance Commission in fighting corruption in India.”
VIGEYE provides citizens given multiple channels of engagement in the
fight against corruption. In parts of Brazil, citizens are empowered to
fight corruption through “participatory budgeting.” By including
citizens from various backgrounds in the process of budget allocation,
Brazil has been able to decrease levels of corruption and
clientelism (exchange of goods and services for political support).
Ethiopia can learn much from Botswana, regarded to be the least
corrupt country in Africa. The “Botswana Model” uses the strategy of
“name and shame” to educate and accentuate public awareness of
corruption. Using the free press as a tool, Botswanans name and shame
corrupt officials by publishing their photographs on the front pages
with the headline: “Is this man corrupt?” Botswana’s top political
leaders are said to maintain high levels of public integrity and teach
by example. Peter Eigen credits Botswana’s success to the “Directorate
on Corruption and Economic Crime in Botswana [which] has processed
thousands of [corruption] cases since 1994 and has made great strides
against corruption.” In 2012, Botswana ranked an extraordinary 30/174
countries on the Corruption Index. These examples point to the fact that
citizen involvement and monitoring are very effective in reducing
corruption and increasing public integrity. Creating a bloated,
toothless and self-perpetuating anti-corruption bureaucracy such as
FEAC is mere window dressing for international donors and loaners.
The other remedy for corruption lies in vigorous and well-publicized
criminal prosecutions of corrupt officials, asset forfeitures
(divestment of corruptly obtained wealth) and imposition of tough prison
sentences on convicted corrupt officials. FEAC’s own data show that
corruption prosecutions and convictions in Ethiopia are negligible.
Absent some dramatic treatment for the cancer of corruption in
Ethiopia’s land sector, there is no doubt that Ethiopia will be
bankrupted in the foreseeable future. This is a country whose foreign reserve today could barely cover two months of its import bills,
has accumulated over USD$12 billion in foreign debt; and over the past
decade Ethiopia has lost USD$11.7 billion dollars in illicit financial
flows. Ethiopia’s “beautiful minds” and the opposition elements need
to do a better job of addressing the issue of corruption. Passing
references to “corruption” that “plagues the infrastructure sector”,
“corruption that has never been seen before in the history of” Ethiopia
and pleas to “arrest corruption that is rampant in the country” are
simply not adequate.
I like to ask naïve questions. When it comes to governance, I ask not
why Ethiopia’s rulers have chosen the “China Model” but rather why they
have not chosen the “Ghanaian Model?” When it comes to corruption
control, I simply ask why Ethiopia’s rulers have chosen not to follow
the “Botswana Model”?
At the end of the day, “if Ethiopia is to be corruption free and
become a nation of beautiful minds,” its “beautifully minded” scholars,
professors, researchers, policy analysts, lawyers and other members of
the learned professions must renounce their vows of silence and loudly
speak truth to black-hearted dictators! Silence may be golden but when
we see the gold walking out of the National Bank in broad daylight, we
had better scream, shout and holler like hell!!!
Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam teaches political science at California
State University, San Bernardino and is a practicing defense lawyer.
Previous commentaries by the author are available at:
http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/
www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/
Amharic translations of recent commentaries by the author may be found at:
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