 Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you for coming today. A belated happy new year, 2012. Welcome to all of you in person and to our online audience, both in the US and especially in Ethiopia, for joining us for our continuing series, A Changing Ethiopia, here at the US Institute of Peace. And as we might hear later from our speaker, a change in continuity as well in Ethiopia. My name is Ali Virji. I'm a senior advisor to the Africa program here. And the US Institute of Peace, I should mention, is a national, nonpartisan, independent institute founded by the US Congress in 1984 and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for US and global security. And we're delighted to have with us today the author of a fresh, hot-off-the-presses book entitled The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics, our speaker, Dr. Terrence Lyons, who is associate professor of, well, many things at the School of Conflict, Analysis, and Reconciliation at George Mason University, Politics, and History, and Development, and so on. And if I were to conventionally introduce you, that's how I would do it and say you're the author of numerous books and articles on Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa, and beyond as well, Liberia, and Ghana, and so on. But without making you feel too old, Terrence, I should also say for the benefit of our audience that this book is in some ways also a mirror of your professional life over the last 30 years since you were first in Ethiopia back in 1986. And when the military regime, the DERG, was still very much in power and have followed Ethiopia ever since. So this book is for the benefit of our audience also, something which is very much personally collected with your own life and development over the last three decades. And if we're to believe all those statistics about Ethiopian demography, then longer than most Ethiopians have been alive today, in fact. So not to make you feel old, as I say, but just for the relevance of context. I was very young when I first went to church. So if we can start, perhaps, Terrence, with the central theme of this book, the title of this book, you've entitled it the Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics, what is for you the puzzle of Ethiopian politics? And you speak a lot about the contradictions and the logics of how the state was ordered and organized, and we'll get to that. But can you explain for us what you see as the central puzzle of Ethiopian politics? Thank you very much for having me. And thanks, all of you, for coming and starting your week talking about Ethiopia, which is about the best way you can start your week, in fact. And I also want to say one thing about the way that you introduced me, the 30-year story. Because I say in the acknowledgments that I feel like I've been having a 30-year conversation about Ethiopia, and this is when I just decided it was finally time to write it down. And I'm not going to name names, but there's a number of people in the audience who've been talking about Ethiopia with me for almost that amount of time. And so I thank all of you, my Ethiopian friends, who I hope are able, at least some of them, to watch it online. Because it is a reflection of all of those endless, and to me, endlessly interesting, conversations that resulted in this book. The puzzle of Ethiopian politics is partly how did a small Marxist and Surgeon group from the topmost corner of Ethiopia, one of the poorest corners of Ethiopia, transform into one of the strongest political parties in Africa, and able to remain in power as the EPRDF from 1991 until today. That's part of my continuity story. And to me, there's two sides to that puzzle. I suppose the first way I tried to answer that puzzle was to look at the EPRDF as an authoritarian party. This is a party that won the war, that has a hierarchy, discipline, and in that way is an effective political party. As most victorious insurgent groups are, whether it's Uganda, Rwanda, some other insurgent groups, let me leave it that way. But then the second part of the puzzle is how did this group from Tigray transform itself into the EPRDF, multi-ethnic coalition, bringing in people from all around the country who didn't have that experience of the struggle, didn't have that process of the socialization, the ties from the hierarchical ties, the relationships between the insurgent movement and the people in the countryside. That was true for Tigray, but not at all true for the Conso, not at all true for Mostoromo, not at all true for large parts of the Amhara region. And so it became a party of very contradictory units. And so that, to me, is the puzzle, is how that contradiction remained in place from 1991 until either recently, or I would argue still. So this puzzle, which in what you've just described effectively begins in 1991, still has, of course, historical antecedents before that, so we'll talk about it in a moment. But I just want to interrogate this idea of the puzzle a bit further. Does it mean that for the TPLF and the EPRD, after this transformation, as you say, from a very small corner of Ethiopia to something much broader, was that the only way it could have been done? Does a puzzle imply that logic of there's only one way it fits together? I suppose you could entertain counterfactuals where it turned out differently. But I do think for the TPLF, the dilemma that the TPLF faced in 1991 or the late 80s as it was imagining, 1989, as it saw that it was going to move from McKellay down to Addis Ababa, I mean, that it was going to become a national, try to govern this very fractured and large state, is that they needed to have local partners. They needed to have intermediaries. They needed to have people who the Tigrayans couldn't rule in the South, and in Urumia, and even in the Amhar region, in the same way that they could in Aksum and Adwa and in Tigray. So they had to come up with a solution to that. Now they chose, I suppose, the solution of ethno-federalism and building on these ethnic wings into a coalition, the EPRDF coalition. And I do think that that was at least a logic that was kind of baked into how the TPLF thought, to go back to the old national question in Ethiopia, the subject of endless debates and conferences. And the alternatives would have been difficult. I mean, you describe in the book, this is a dramatic change in the national narrative, what the TPLF and the EPRDF brought to Ethiopian politics. And part of that drama, I think, is core to your argument, the two, as you contrast them, contradictory logics of how the state was ordered and what was pursued and on the one hand, you have this centralization and top-down level and hierarchical structure. On the other hand, you have this ethnic federal and regional autonomy or ethnic autonomy. Can you explain a bit more about why these logics, first of all, what are these logics? I mean, what, when you talk about a top-down hierarchical state, did the EPRDF do to affect that? And how did it then pursue ethnic federalism, which we hear a lot about and all Ethiopian conversations discuss, but how are these things pursued and then how are they in contradiction? Let me start by laying out, you've already given us a pretty good indication of how I present these two logics in the book. But let me say a couple of more words, is that the logic of the victorious insurgents of top-down, of democratic, centralism of a group that had a history of administering liberated territory in Tigray, which is not the same as being a government. It's military, you know, military administration that came to power with some degree of legitimacy because they won the war, because they had sacrificed so much. So that's one story and one logic and one explanation for why in a very powerful authoritarian regime would govern Ethiopia as it has. But then the second logic is that the TPLF was from a very, very small group and to come up with a solution to the war-to-peace transition, they had to come up with a way to broaden their, to become more inclusive, to bring in people who were Aromos and Sadama and Amhara and, you know, Garagay and all the rest of the peoples of Ethiopia. So they had ethno-federalism, which in the beginning, well, let me tell the story in this way. So the EPRDF, the ruling party in Ethiopia, is a coalition of four parties. One represents the Tigray people, notionally, it's the Tigray people's liberation front, one the Amhara, one the Aromo, and one a agglomeration of groups that are called the Southern Ethiopian peoples. And so when those started off, the TPLF was this battle-hardened party that had been in the field a long, long time, built relationships with the countryside and so on. The SCPDM, which is the southern wing of the ruling party, didn't exist in that time. These things were just created after or just before the transition, the Aromo people's democratic organization, the ruling party wing, was originally created out of prisoners of war that they had captured from the Derg's army because they said, we need somebody to be the Aromo wing of our new national front. Who can we get? Where there was another Aromo insurgent movement, the Aromo Liberation Front, that had a different perspective on politics. And so... I'd just like to say I'd come back to Aromo later as well in terms of where things are today, but I think the point also that you're making is simply that because the Aromo was so numerous and such an important for them to be absent from this EPRDF construction, that's why you need it to have some kind of affiliates. Exactly, the Aromo, the census is very controversial, but they are the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia. And so you can't govern Ethiopia without partners who can be your agents in the Aromo region. So in the beginning, the TPLF, there was a strong center in very weak regions because the TPLF had come out of the war, the Saddam is a bit, another story, but the Silk Day and the Hadea and all these other groups in the South had just become part of the coalition. And so that the TPLF could keep a balance between the center and the regions. But fast forward 25 years, fast forward most people, most Ethiopians' lifetime. And what you then have are these regional parties, non-TPLF parties, have developed roots in the countryside, have developed patron client networks, have developed the, became more like little states. Let me just give you an anecdote to illustrate that. In fact, this was one of the times when I really began to think this through. In 2011, I was in Bahadar, the capital of the Amhara state. And there's a couple of things to notice. First of all, when you went by the court, there was a long, long line of Amhara people, workers, peasants, a lot of women actually, who were trying to sort out property deals, trying to work out divorces, family law, and so on. The Ethiopian state, as it connected to them, was the Amhara state. Addis Ababa was a million miles away. If you needed to deal with the state, you went to Bahadar and you lined up to the Amhara court, but I can't remember its full name. And then the second piece of that, that same trip is I had a chance to meet the gentleman who was the head of the Bureau of Administration and Security, so the local security guy. And as we would, I was trying to understand the nature of the militias that were under his control or under his ministry or his bureau. And he said, yeah, I think I have about 100,000 people with underarms who report to me. It's basically an army. You're a regional state, and yet you have basically an army. You have your own courts, your own university, your own flag, your own football team, your own narrative as who you are as Amhara. That didn't exist in 1991. That took time to grow. They didn't have the wartime experience to build that. And so they built it between 1991 and today, or I'm saying it, at least back to 2011. So we'll come back to the present day or the more recent day in a moment, but I really want to get to part of what I found very interesting about even continuity at the time of the TPLF or EPRDF coming into power in 1991. And you point to both continuity with the DERG and with highly salacious regime, particularly on land. Can you explain why that's significant? And part of the reason I'm asking you that question is I think today when we talk about the transitions or this idea that there is a change, as you said and as I said in the introduction as well, a great deal of continuity and a great deal of things that maybe aren't changing as much as might be suggested or thought. But I think to understand that or to see the parallels, it's useful to think about what happened there prior to even the 1991 coming to power of the EPRDF. So can you explain that a little bit? That's a great question that I've never been asked in a policy forum. So I'm very much appreciative of somebody finally asking about the history. Because I do think it is so fundamental to understanding contemporary politics in Ethiopia. The first thing to say is that authoritarian top-down systems of power did not come in with the TPLF. That goes way, way back. Ethiopia is a very hierarchical, patriarchal society in which the Orthodox Church and Haile Selassie reinforced all of these mechanisms. And so in one sense, the TPLF and the EPRDF are building on very strong historical traditions and political cultures and people's understanding of where power comes from and how does one respond to power. With in terms of the DERG itself, the government that ruled up until 1991, they did two important things that you can still see in terms of Ethiopia today. One was the land reform. They nationalized all land. They completely ended in large parts of the country. The semi-feudal, quasi-feudal system in which many people, particularly in the South, were basically, the terms aren't exactly, but for the purposes of convenience, were basically serfs. And there was a land-owning class and official church. All that got smashed by the military regime by fiat from above. And the EPRDF has not changed that. I mean, this is the core of a largely agrarian state, and the state owns the land. So keeping that precedent, that transformation meant that they already started off in a pretty powerful place. The other thing, and this goes back to my very first times in Ethiopia under the DERG, one of the things that was noticeable was that even in what to me as an outsider looked like kind of very rough neighborhoods of what to me as an outsider looked like shacks, had numbers on the door. Somebody had written numbers on the doors all the way through. And these were the Kabelis. These were local units of government that were very, very powerful. The Kabelis continue to exist in Ethiopia of today, and are still both the source of government services, but also, and perhaps more importantly, at least for my story, a source of surveillance and control of the people in the countryside. And that was not an EPRDF invention. That was taking the innovation, the system of control that the DERG had put in, and using it to continue to govern in that way. Let me use another anecdote to illustrate a third aspect, I think, of the history of the Ethiopian state. And that the Ethiopian state has always, it's been a strong state, a state of deep poverty and the Civil War, but also a very strong state in the sense of a civil service, a thing that was there. There's a story about how there used to be a big statue of Lenin right in front of the ECA just down from the Hilton Hotel. He was marching off seriously into the future, although some people said he was marching off towards Bully Airport, which may have also been true. But in that kind of iconic moment that you saw in a lot of 1989 and Eastern Europe, the statue came down. But this was not a spontaneous mob of Ethiopians that did this. This was the Ethiopian Highway Administration. And one of the reporters asked the guy who was controlling the heavy machinery, what does it mean to him taking it down? He said, well, they told me to put it up 10 years ago. They told me to take it down now. That's the state. I show up and I do what the state tells me to do. And that didn't go away. The collapse of the Mingistu regime or the collapse of Haile Selassie didn't mean that people didn't show up at work, collect their paycheck, do what they were supposed to do in contrast to some other parts of Africa. So that there's a continuity of a strong state that the EPRDF has further strengthened but that predates 1991. But do you see that continuity as being different in different places? I mean, this is a story of artists, right? I mean, it is a story of where the central state has been and of course where the empire, at least the latter part of the empire was centered, where the derg was centered. The experience perhaps elsewhere was different. Is that also part of the story that there are, in some ways, contradictory logics or different logics depending on which part of Ethiopia or which region you're looking at? Absolutely. And I'm trying to see just how much I can do this quickly. But if the first cut, if all you wanted to do was to understand Ethiopia, to see it as a difference between Northern Highlands, which tend to be agriculturalist and tend to be Christians and Southern Lowlands, which are usually not, I'm hard of speaking, at least initially, and are often more pastor-list and more Muslim, although more complicated than that as well. And so for the people of the North, the state was something that they recognized. The state was something that gave them some measure of protection. The state was something that had a narrative that included them. But in the South, what the state was, was something that taxed them, something that sent soldiers to seize their crops, something that said being in a Romo or a Conso or Somali Afar was not to be really Ethiopian. You really needed to be Imhara, to be properly Ethiopian. Now the Imhara category was flexible enough that people could become Imhara, they could be Imharized. Many Aromos went and they joined the military, they worked their way up through the bureaucracy, they went to the university, they began to dress like an Imhara, they began to speak Imhara. Often they became Orthodox Christians, but they always had a different relationship to the state that the Aromo and the other Southern peoples' relationship to the state is very, very different than the relationships that many in the North had. But as you've described, the policy that the EPRDF and took to this issue of identity in Ethiopia was also a very different one. So yes, of course you had that centralizing tendency, but you also had this very different model in Ethiopia at least of what became known as ethnic federalism or ethno-federalism. And so in terms of how that actually then structured the state and you pointed out that in the beginning in 91, the affiliate parties of the EPRDF other than TPLF were much, much weaker. So today or 25 years on, they were much stronger or at least differently constituted in terms of no longer being just mere fronts, let's say, even if there was also much weakness within them. So this idea of ethnic federalism and how it's being structured and played out over the last 25 years, this brings us back to the original question of the puzzle, that out of this you said that part of what was needed for the TPLF was to build legitimacy and to offer something to other regions. And part of the way it did that was through this approach. Was that successful? I mean, if you were to evaluate how well that achieved their goals, do you think it did so? Did it provide enough of a logic for the state over the last 25 years or at least until 2011 if we stopped there for a moment? In terms of, did it work? There were an awful lot of people, myself included in the mid 1990s that worried that this wasn't going to work. That this was a mistake from the get-go. It was gonna undermine national unity. It was really TPLF under, with these faults. So success to the extent that, here they are, 25 years later, more than almost 30 years later, and here they are. So in that way, a success in terms of an authoritarian resiliency, an authoritarian way to remain in power when through a lot of crises, splits within the TPLF, war with Eritrea, all kinds of humanitarian emergencies, a real political crisis after 2005 elections, and so on. It kept coming back. But I do think that, well, but how did this ethno-federalism, how did the people in Ethiopia respond to that? In my view, and that may be challenged by others who were on the ground when I wasn't, in much of Southern Ethiopia, what's called the SNNPR, Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region, there were people who felt alienated from the state who all of a sudden had their own zone, if not region. All of a sudden could use their own language in schools and in courts. All of a sudden, their high school graduates were able to get positions in their bureaucracy that they never could before. And so for many people in the South, ethno-federalism meant that finally, they could have, they could behave in this way. They could become part of the state in ways that they hadn't before. In the Aromo region, the largest region, it was further complicated because there was a very deep Aromo narrative of resistance to the Ethiopian state. Resistance not through the wing of the EPRDF, but through the Aromo Liberation Front, which had fought continuously and had in its heart, many Ethiopians, many Aromos, in their heart saw the OLF as the representative of the nation. And so that ethno-federalism meant something different. And it was half, it was partly what they aspired to, autonomy, self-determination, but it was also seen as autonomy under the same Northern occupation that they'd seen before. Amhara, Tigray, it doesn't really matter. We Aromos still don't have our fair shot. And then in the Amhara region, a much more complicated relationship to ethno-federalism because I alluded to this briefly, the Amhara as an identity category is overlaps with Ethiopia as an identity category. And so it was hard for the Amhara regional officials to separate that. The Amhara opposition party similarly had a problem. Are we the all Amhara peoples organization or are we the all Ethiopian unity party? And lots of, very difficult to work that out. It's an interesting story when we get up to 2018 and 2019. But the, so ethno-federalism, as you sort of, you set up my prior question, ethno-federalism had different meanings for different places. So I guess that's... Yeah, I mean, you've got a quote, good quote from Mellis, which I think is insightful on this subject in the book. He was often insightful. Yeah, that's, you know, we tried a feudal monarchy and a repressive dictator couldn't hold Ethiopia together. And now we're trying another way. And that implies at least to me a degree of experimentism, you know, that there is, we're trying another way. Maybe we'll see what happens. Obviously he believed in it and argued that very forcefully. But as you just said, if you are an Amhara, then you wouldn't necessarily see the historic Ethiopian state as not holding Ethiopia together, right? Indeed. You would say that it had. If you were from Tigray, you would see it very differently. So to some extent though, this is a question of how mutable this ethnic identity is if you can be absorbed into the center or not. So why do you think it really became such a fervent project for the EPRDF and the TPLF? Was it simply, you know, as you said, that they're searching for a logic where they needed to gain that legitimacy. And this is something that could be extended to the regions. Obviously there was an ideological fervor amongst at least some of the members of the core party. I mean, it does seem like an experiment, if you use that term, which would be very difficult to control. I mean, maybe not for years to come, but it would seem like, you know, where does it end? And especially I think you describe the original definition of ethnicity that the EPRDF used as a very primordial one, a very, you know, essentialist basic one. So given what you know about the thinking of the party at the time and its intellectual leadership and so on, I mean, was it more than an experiment? I mean, did they see that there could be different manifestations of it? I mean, it's obviously difficult to fully address what they foresaw, but I'm just curious how you, given the legacy of how the Ethiopian state had been structured for centuries before, this dramatic change is more than just dramatic. It's such a fundamental reordering of the way the state had been constituted. The experiment comes out of a couple of different strains. There is an ideological strain. The student movement had long debates about what they called then the national question and how the revolution was going to play out often debates that seemed quite obscure today, but people were killing each other over these debates in the mid-1970s. And so the thinking of Melisandawi and the people around him about the national question was very deeply grounded, and so they were, I think, ideologically committed to this. On top of that, as I said before, I think it has this governing logic that helped solve some of the fundamental challenges that the APRDF faced in 1991. Now how has it lasted so long when it is a, maybe not the most obvious way to structure a state as complicated as Ethiopia? What I would say is that it, in part that's solved or answered by, they created political facts on the ground, that created political institutions and political interests to perpetuate the system that was first put down there. Let me mention a couple. The first thing they did is they created a new map of Ethiopia. They created new regions. They got rid of the old regions and they created new ones. So there was a region of Oromia, where the Oromo used to live, and I don't know, it's in the book, but six, seven, eight different regional states. They created a Tigray, which did have its own history actually, but an Amhara region where many of them people didn't see themselves as Amhara, they created a southern region where most people had, they didn't have a southern identity. Their identities were much more localized and much more parochial. But then, as the years go by and political parties begin to mobilize, they mobilize on those boundaries. If you're an Oromo politician, you don't campaign in the Amhara region or in the Garagay region or in any of the other regions because that is the political world that this system has created for you. If you're an ambitious bureaucrat and you start off in the Wurrida, which is lower than the regional state, you start off as a Wurrida dealing with agriculture. Your aspiration is often to get to Bahadar or to Hawassa. It's your bureaucratic life is very linked to the regional state that you're in. And so therefore the elite has interest in keeping this going. To go back, let's just say imaginary to the map before the 1980s map would mean that a whole class of politically powerful bureaucratically high level people would have their jobs at risk right then. And so you create these facts on the ground that then perpetuate themselves. I say in the book, they had, Ethiopia had local elections in 1992 within a year of taking over power that I had the ability, a privilege of observing. And after that, because that election really early on set in place that ethnic map, set in place those ethnic parties, and those facts on the ground then continue to this day that once those are put in place, it's very, very difficult to change them. I mean, one other thing that may be gonna get you more contemporary than you want to it right now, but one of the problems of that, we talked about the primordial nature of identity, but it also ties people to their place. If you were in a Romo, you should be living in Oromia. But this is a country that's rapidly urbanizing. This is a country that is building up an industrial base. This is a country where people are getting better educated. They have increased access to social media. And so to say you were born in Oromia, you are a Romo, you will vote for the Romo party, isn't the way people are living their lives anymore. They often are trying to get a job someplace else. They're often moving for school or marrying somebody who's used to be on their identity card, listed a different ethnicity on their identity card. I mean, I was gonna ask you about the 92 elections for that reason, for centralizing and sort of consolidating this model. Of course, those elections were followed by votes in 95, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015. With the exception of 2005, I mean, as you also point out in the book, given the way, for example, that the parliament's free constituencies are structured, that to win a majority in the parliament out of the 547 seats, which are all ethnically constituted seats, you need to also play that ethnic game, right? I mean, it's the facts on the ground or I think it's also as Loewe's Allen has called it, the ethnic entrepreneurship, that people have used this. And in some ways, that's what you're saying with the parties that they've also evolved and done that. I suppose the question then becomes, why was 2005, these elections, where there was contestation, there was violence, there was a degree of openness, it's still, according to various people, unclear what exactly happened in terms of the results. The observers were very concerned about what occurred. Why was that election different, one? And what is the legacy of that for today? I mean, the 95, 2000, every other election's basically been pretty uncompetitive. There is one exception there. There's a lot of talk about coming elections, we'll get to that a bit later, I think, but just for the purposes of setting the stage, why was that one different? I say one thing about the other elections, because I think it helps us understand better, both 2005 and what might happen in 2020, is that they were non-competitive, but they were very important for the EPRDF. They were important for the EPRDF, both as demonstrations of their power, as a way to sort out who was gonna get promoted, who was gonna be sidelined, who you're gonna bring into the center, who you're gonna, we know this guy's not, man or woman is either corrupt or a bad administrator, we're not gonna let him or her come to the center and be an MP as she or he wishes. And this is the way that we as a party are gonna sort out some party business. And so the 100% 2015 election, for example, was not about selecting the next government. That was never on the table, but it was a way for the EPRDF to say, don't you even think about challenging us? There is no other way but our way. And we have complete control, and that was important for the EPRDF. 2005 was different, I'd give a bit of the narrative, and then my not maybe quite satisfactory answer as to why I think it happened. In 2005, there was an opportunity for the opposition to mobilize, they very quickly mobilized to opposition coalitions that didn't really exist in January 2005, competed in most of the major populated areas, campaigned widely, had access to the media, televised debates, mass speeches, they had a huge rally rather in Mescal Square in very dramatic fashion. And by the official vote counts, they won something like 30% of the seats. The opposition disputes these results. But even just by that measure, it was extraordinarily different narrative about politics in Ethiopia after that election than before that election. 30% of the parties that didn't even exist hardly six months before beat what I have described as this incredibly powerful authoritarian government, the incumbent who controlled all the regional governments, controlled all the Kimberleys and so on. It really was quite a shock to the system. And then there was a crackdown and we can talk about that as well. But the first question is why on earth would the EPRDF do that? Why would they allow such an election? And my first answer is it's still something of a puzzle to me. I should have said the puzzles rather than the puzzle. There's a couple of different partial things that people point to. One is the pressure from the international community to have free and fair elections or competitive elections. Many people tell the story and they say, well, the international community put pressure on the EPRDF to hold elections. And so they held elections in order to please the international community. I'm not really persuaded by that. I'm not sure the international community cares all that much, frankly, as we saw in 2010 and 2015 and 2000. The international community has other interests that Trump interests in democracy and elections in Ethiopia. The other way of thinking about it is to go back into the history of the party. The TPLF, this core of the party split in 2001, a really serious split. I think the Central Committee split like 12 against 11 or 13 against 14. It was really right down the middle, a very near thing. And so this was the first election after that. And so this was an election that perhaps the leadership said, look, if we have a more competitive election that will help us get past that existential threat that we went through in 2001 and be able to say that, look, we were competitive. That I think probably has some merit. The third thing I would point to is I think the EPRDF was honestly surprised. I was honestly surprised. If you ever asked me to make predictions, ask me what I predicted in 2005. Because Ethiopia is at an extraordinarily rural state, 85% at that time rural. And I think the conventional wisdom, I think this is what I thought is that, well, okay, the opposition's gonna do well in Addis and maybe in Bahadur or Deirdawa, a couple of other cities. But in the countryside, it's still sewn up. The EPRDF still has its machinery, its cadres, its resources in the countryside in ways that nobody else even comes close to. And if you think, as I normally do, that strong political parties typically win elections, then the EPRDF had reasons to expect that this election would not threaten it in the way that it did. So I guess that's my answer. So I mean, how do you explain then, we have, as you said, a very strong party which has demonstrated fragility, right? Both in 2005, more recently, and yet, as you've pointed out, this is a party that originated with a very cohesive organizational structure with this shared legacy of fighting the conflict of everything it had achieved over the preceding years to both consolidate its power, its control of the state, and so on. What explains that fragility then? I mean, what is it simply the rebalancing, as you say, of the other constituent members of the coalition of the EPRDF that they got stronger and therefore, even if the lead party was still quite strong, it was not as much, the gap was not as significant between its strength and the next two, three, four in the coalition, or do you see other explanations for why, despite all of these advantages of incumbency, of resources, et cetera, the party has demonstrated that it is fundamentally fragile? I think that the party recognized its fragility in 2005, and the aftermath of 2005 demonstrates what they thought they needed to do in order to overcome that fragility. I think in 2005, again, it's in the book, they had something like 700,000 party members. They very quickly moved up to 8 million members. So they went on a massive recruit... This is the EPRDF as a whole. This is the EPRDF as a whole. They went on a massive recruitment. They realized that they did not have the control of the countryside that they thought. They needed to recruit people. They made the links between the party and the state much closer, and so you needed to be on the right side of the party in order to get access to fertilizer and get your kids into higher education and all kinds of other things. And so in that way, they strengthened the party in response to 2005. So in my best explanation, and I'm not, as I say, I'm not sure I fully get the question, but I don't get the answer to it, is that they thought they were stronger than they were. They thought that they were not gonna be challenged in the way that they were, because afterwards they immediately changed very significant things and made themselves, they were not gonna have that problem again in 2010. They were not gonna have that problem again in 2015. And they shattered civil society and they kept the opposition in court and in jail and forced them abroad and so on and so forth, made it virtually impossible for 2005 to be repeated. But then what explains the fragility of the party more recently than 2005, 2016? As you said, just pointed out, elections were also held in 2015, basically another 100% election or 100% minus one seat, I think it was. So what then explains how, again, the party became or demonstrated that it was so fragile? I mean, what are your explanations for that? First, I have to make fun of the Sky Lions who wrote in 2016, writing about the 100% elections along with my friend Leonardo Ariola. Elections in 2015 confirmed that authoritarian rule will persist in Africa's second most populous country for the foreseeable future. And then a year after that, it all began to fall apart. So it depends how far you can foresee, right? That's right, foreseeable, I don't see that well into the distance. So in 2016, a range of demonstrations broke out. There've been demonstrations regularly. The Ethiopian Muslims demonstrated, there were demonstrations in response to what was called the Addis Ababa master plan which many of us saw as threatening their interests. But in 2016, it was different. It was much more widespread. It was very, very young demonstrators. They were often in small towns that I didn't know existed. I mean, I would read in the media, you know, whatever. 150 people killed in such and such a town in Odomia. I mean, what the heck is that? I mean, Google that. I don't even know where it is. We've been working on Ethiopia for 30 years. So these were really not in the university towns which had been the past pattern, but lots of small little market crossroad kinds of towns. The Ethiopian government responded as it usually did. It said these were either narrow nationalists or working for the Eritreans or misguided, arrested large numbers of them, used the security services to clear the streets, and then they came back again. They did not work as it had in prior rounds of protest. And it spread further. At that moment, now let me park that explanation for a minute, at a similar time but for different reasons, there was a crisis within the EPRDF. Part of it is the story that you've related or recalled that the OPDO and the A&M, the non-TPLF parts of the ruling party were getting more self-confident. They began to increasingly say, hey, we are not just the step, the little brother of the TPLF. We're bigger than them. We have different interests than them. We're gonna step up on our own. The Aromo protests allowed particularly the Aromo wing of the ruling party to position itself, to straddle, with one foot being responsive to the anger on the Aromo Street, if you will, and another firmly within the party. And a kind of a hybrid populism incumbent which is a strange kind of positioning, but it was about that the old order has done you wrong and therefore you should support me. And so this group of Aromo reformists began to gain power. The EPRDF really was in a crisis, couldn't end the protests, had two states of emergency, de facto martial law, but something had to be done. The Prime Minister, Halle Mariam, resigned and there was a gap. There really was an interregnum of which it looked very, very worrisome. I mean, looking at Ethiopia in January, February, 2018 looked very, very serious that this was a government that couldn't sort itself out. And so it's a combination, it's again a dual crisis both on the streets, which is largely the political economy crisis. People didn't have jobs. Young people felt they deserved better than they could see in their foreseeable futures. And within the party that the old model of a strong center could not be recreated and therefore some other way of trying to govern was necessary, some other way for the party to change so that it could continue to govern. I mean, isn't there an additional explanation as well which you do point to in your book about the legitimacy of the TPLF and coming out of this armed struggle. And you make the point that 30 years after it had happened that memory is fading, what does it mean if you weren't in a conflict affected area to begin with, the knowledge, the sacrifices that were made is different. So I mean, I guess that's obviously true, right? Things fade with time, but why after 30 years and not after 25 or 20, I mean, even 2005 for a good number of people, I'm sure it was especially young people, not something that they had directly experienced or only for a brief period of time. So where does this question of diminishing legitimacy also fit into this? Yeah, so the story of 1991 was a long time ago and not only do sort of rank and file Ethiopians no longer remember it, the A and DM, for example, the Mahara wing of the party began to retell the story of their origins, began to talk about not how they, under the TPLF's leadership became part of the EPRDF, but hey, we struggled too. We have a history that's not a TPLF history and began to emphasize that, particularly on the anniversaries of the founding of the A and DM, what was an A and DM story, the Mahara party story. So that's part of it, there's another explanation that goes in a different direction and that is it became perceived, I'll say, widely, almost all non-Tigray and Ethiopians are convinced and for some good reasons that the TPLF is corrupt, that the advantages of the developmental state of 10% growth GDP for years and years of all of this massive development that made Ethiopia rising, this kind of narrative, that they say, I don't see that in my town, that must have all gone up to Tigray, so there was a perception that not only did they not have the legitimacy from having won the war, what have you done for me lately, but also that we are further being sort of a relative deprivation story, it's even worse because those guys are stealing what is legitimately mine and this came up particularly on questions of land leases, for example, as development began to go into the Aromo region, for example, Aromo farmers would be compelled to give their land to investors who were gonna set up floor culture or all kinds of other things, roads and schools and all kinds of other things and they'd be paid a thousand burr and the land would be leased out for 100,000 burr and not surprisingly the farmer said that doesn't seem fair and enlarge agro-industrial interest that were part of the development plan, part of why Ethiopia had this story of Ethiopia rising but if you look down like in the South Omo where the sugar plantations were just huge numbers of people were displaced, traditional dry land pastures were seized, the ability to do what do you call it, the flood, after the floods you plant along the river banks, the livelihoods in the South Omo were really shattered in order to allow commercial sugar without any compensation, without even any real compensation and so people were, the very development that the good news was the EPRDF was able to have this development story and it's real, I mean there's roads, there's regional universities, there's health clinics but at the same time that very success led to a kind of a relative deprivation story of, but the Tigray got twice as much as we get and in that way it built up grievances rather than providing the services did not provide legitimacy as the EPRDF thought and I think I would probably think there was more that yeah, they gave us a university but they have a better one, they're getting more money, their hospital is better than our hospital, they're getting rich, you go into Addis and there's big glass office buildings that are the EPRDF or TPLF owned endowment fund has built up banks and insurance companies and hotels and so on and people asking where that money come from, it won't get into that longer story, there's a MetTech as well, MetTech was this military engineering technology that was deeply involved in the sugar and also in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and as we now, at least as alleged now in court, huge amount of money was disappearing into that. But I think that in the bigger picture, the way you've described is in some sense, you could add it as another contradiction to this explanation of the state that on the one hand you have constitutionally, legally, this federal autonomy at a certain level, but when it comes to the fiscal dimension, the economic dimension, what you've just described in terms of investment and distribution and who gets what, a very different kind of model. I mean, the developmental state, which you also talk about in the book in some sense requires a degree of centralization and central control. So how does that reconcile with this move towards group rights and group identities and what you've offered as the explanation for how the EPRDF was able to maintain control or consolidate its control? I think what you saw was that the, so there's again sort of four different economic stories, I could say, and that again leads to this, let me take one step further back. What a lot of people who've heard me present bits of this or read earlier things that I've written say, you know, lions, you misunderstand it, the EPRDF is just the TPLF, full stop, that's all there is. Or furthermore, people would say, it was all mellus, it was a personal rule, it was just him, he died, the EPRDF doesn't matter. And I would argue, I think it does matter, it has eight million members, it has offices in every small town, it has these incredible endowment funds that controlled an awful lot of business in Ethiopia. Five to one, I mean, really controlled down to the lowest level, every five people had one person who was the EPRDF minder, there's probably a better word for it that somebody would tell me. So what the OPDO, for example, was doing was what the OPDO, the reformist leadership of the OPDO said, we should have what Tigray has in our state. So we need to find a way to get those investments, we need to find a way so that we, the OPDO, become the partners of international investment, become the owners of investments of manufacturing and so on and so forth. So it wasn't, it was trying to catch up with the TPLF rather than moving in a different direction. So you see, for example, some of the struggles in Hawassa and the Sadama area of the Southern region is because of a large industrial zone, an industrial park that was put down there, who's gonna control it? Who's gonna control the dams? Who's gonna control the sugar? Who's gonna control these different things? And so the party elites, the Southern parties, the Amharic parties, were involved in an awful lot of this economic business. They were usually the local partners, but as I said before, the perception, and I think for reasons, this perception was there for a reason, people regarded the TPLF as overwhelmingly getting more than its fair share. This story has popped in my head twice, so I might as well tell it. I was talking with somebody, he was actually a diaspora guy, who was very, very articulating the idea. It's all going to the TPLF, it's all going to Tigray, it's all going to Tigray, and this was early on in the 90s, and I said, well, but Tigray is actually really poor. It was really destroyed by the war, and so, you know, they had this airport there, it's like a brand new airport, and I said, well, I was there like a month ago, and it's a dirt strip. I said, ah, they put dirt on it so you couldn't see it. That's how tricky they are. Really, you know, so you get these kinds of stories that the TPLF was everywhere, when in fact, there were always plenty of OPDO and A&M and other groups that were involved in this developmental state business, a lot of it with big money being distributed on the basis of a political logic, and we put it that way. So in that sense, there was a limit to how decentralized or how much autonomy there is at a regional level, or perhaps more accurately at a sub-regional, whether we talk about the word or the zone or the cabele, would that be a fair way to think about it? Because part of the challenge, I think, is you still have this idea and argument that a decentralized model or an ethnically federal model makes sense for Ethiopia, or people who say, well, it's there now and it's being built on, and so, you know, as much as you might say it's got its flaws and its difficulties, it's here to stay. But when it comes to the economic dimension or the way the state is structured in terms of its participation in the economy, it doesn't seem to have been quite as extensive in terms of allowing that level of freedom for the states or the sub-state levels to have the ability to also be, if not economically self-sufficient, then at least largely self-sufficient. Yeah, no, that's a great point because another part of the center versus periphery, the hierarchical center and then the autonomous periphery contradiction was economically, that the center controlled the wealth, that controlled the money that then was sent out to the regions to pay for civil servants and for other things. And so it was very much, how did the center manage to balance the regions was in part because they were the ones writing the checks. The regions had the ability to tax but there was nothing really to tax. Huge percentage of the money came in a direct transfer from the federal government. It's changed a little bit but it's still largely the same. And so in the developmental state had this centralizing logic. So even as the EPRDF as a party began to be more decentralized in terms of fiscal centralization and in terms of the developmental state deciding that the dam is gonna go here and the road is going to go there and we're gonna fix this railroad before we give you a road. That was still all done, very, very centralized. I mean, this kind of brings us to the present day or close to the present day. And as we were talking before we started you said that's the original idea for the book was to end with the state of emergency that was imposed after the protest began a couple of years ago. Obviously there's been more to it since then and without giving too many spoilers to the audience we do carry on past the state of emergency and not quite to the present day but certainly to let's say the contemporary period after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed became leader of Ethiopia and the initial period of his premiership let's say. And to be fair, of course, nobody can predict exactly what will happen but what I wanted to ask you was if we start with that period after the protest began and contrast that with what you said about this idea you have these young people coming in who either don't have jobs or don't have sufficient jobs or they may have some opportunity but it doesn't match what their university education has offered them or as the examples you've just given well, we've got something but Tigray's got something better and whether that's true or not that perception existing in some quarters you have that logic and that sort of demand and we see that today whether it's in Sidama or South Omo in the Southern region where people have this idea well if we're a state and not just a war zone then we can somehow be more empowered or have more access to political power economic power, more recognition you have these sorts of narratives and logics going on where this is an unfolding of the constitution originalments that have been put in place since 1995 or since the EPRDF has been in power. On the other hand, and you point this out as well you have Appi Ahmed making claims to something which is more a pan-Ethiopian concept as well and certainly he's done that when he's come here you mentioned his address in Washington last year I guess it was 2018. How do you reconcile that? I mean on the one hand you're arguing and you argue that and we'll come to this in more detail in a moment that there is continuity with the present leadership given the EPRDF legacy that has come for it and that they are operating within the same framework. On the other hand you have Appi Ahmed as I just said calling to this pan-national identity at least in some cases. You have other Ethiopians trying to exercise their constitutional rights and how does this fit together today in terms of the logic of the state? Why, I'm gonna write a book on that. Well, let me get to start the continuity of the EPRDF piece and then I'll try to do some of the more developments over the last 18 months or so. Is that, I did a slide for a presentation in 2015 which I talked about the EPRDF 8 million members control of the endowment funds 100% in the regional and national parliament 100% of the judges. I mean it's an incredibly centralized thing and then I was gonna do an updated slide to describe the EPRDF post-Abi and it's still got six million members. It still controls every state and parliament and in the regions. It still controls and controls and controls and so on a structural level there's an awful lot of continuity. Now Abbi is not Melisanawe by a long shot and the symbolism, the political narrative around an aroma being head of state. He's younger. He's, let the Ethiopians make this claim but I've heard it said that he's charismatic in a way. He's certainly a media savvy TV kind of guy where Melis would yell at you when he talks about love. He's from the social media era. I mean, Melis wasn't there. He knows how to tweet or his folks do. So in that way very different. He has made overtures, made his official philosophy is this idea of Medimer which is sort of like addition, adding on. We're all together without losing our own individual pieces. So maybe you would say like a mosaic or something like that. All right. And that has, particularly initially reassured a lot of the sort of pan-Ethiopian non-Ethiopia folks that he gets it. He can't be in a Roma or can't be OPDO. It has to be Ethiopia first. And, but on the other hand, an awful lot of people in Tigray and the Amhar region in the South Seimo, he's in a Roma and we know what that means. And he's has to be in some ways responsive to Oromia. The question, in the midst of this transition from an authoritarian system to where we are now, the state as a source of security, the state as a source of stability, the state where security forces did what the state told it to do has been, has retracted. And so there's an awful lot of security services now who aren't operating on behalf of the state. It's not quite the right way to put it. But they're much weaker. It's harder for the state to control things. They're less assertive. There's the people from Addis, you know, if Abby wanted to go to certain places, his security people would say, you don't want to go down there. Where that never, Mellis went wherever the heck he wanted to go whenever he wanted to go. And so in that way, it's different. There's also more non-state actors, some of whom maybe have weapons, maybe don't, maybe they're bandits, maybe they're criminals, maybe they're people who are score-settling. So there's an awful lot of violence. There's some three million people displaced, maybe slightly down now, but that it's worse. Three million people displaced in Ethiopia, which even for a country of 110 million people is a lot of people. And so this transition has led to a breakdown in security, which if you studied the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or lots of other places, not too big of a surprise that that would happen in this type of a transition. And you also have a process of ethnic outbidding. So when you have these ethnically defined states in a moment of uncertainty, the parties have gone back to first principles, which is to claim that you are better in Hara than the other guy, to claim that you're better Sadama than the other guy. And not only within the respective parties, let me give you the Imhara wing of the ruling party story, they're now facing a group called Nama, which is National Association, National Movement of Imhara, I think, which is articulating even a more categorical story of Imhara nationalism, about how they've been victims of the Tigray, they deserve reparations from the TPLF, they've been an Imhara genocide, they tell you. And so really tough nationalist logic in a way that makes it for the Imhara wing of the party, harder to find that space. And it's gonna be very challenging to the incumbent, this powerful party that doesn't change, I say, but it's gonna be hard for them to deal with that problem. Within the Oromo region, the OLF long in exile has returned, maybe unevenly demobilized, or at least there's allegations that violence in certain parts of Oromiya are in fact the Oromo Liberation Front, without doing the fieldwork out there, it's very hard to know. Youth gangs, mobilized youth in a place like Sadama in Hawassa, young Sadama guys who are attacking non-Sadamas in Hawassa as a way to make claims. The way Ethiopia's structured is that, who owns this? Well, whoever controls that and makes it their ethnic majority, controls the city, controls the resources, controls the members of parliament who come from that area. And so there's a lot of kind of zero-sum struggles that no, this should be Somali, not Oromo, or this should be Benishangu Gumus, not Oromo, where that part of Tigray is actually should be part of the Imhara, particularly around cities, Addis Ababa, the many Oromo will say that it should be called Finfinay and it's an Oromo city. Awful out of Addis Ababa and don't say that at all. They see it as a multi-ethnic city, cosmopolitan, it's the national capital, and so on. And those are really tough fights that are actively being engaged in in different ways. So let me press you a little bit on this continuity point because when we talk about Nama or the Sudama movements that have been there or indeed the other parties that are coming along, I mean, part of what has been argued and what you said for the past 25 years and prior to the more recent political turmoil is these parties playing by the rules of the game, right? That if you wanted to compete, you had to also use the same appeals to ethnic federalism and so on. And other parties outside the EPRDF were either unable to do that or chose not to for various reasons. And now you have these parties, these new movements or newish or let's say reinvigorated movements that are still playing by those same rules of the game in terms of ethnic federalism. So there's continuity in that sense that they aren't, there are also, of course, pan-Ethiopian movements that are either reemerging or coming out of, who reject the model entirely. So you have this element of change potentially where there is that call among some for something that isn't grounded in ethnicity. You've got, as you pointed out from your examples, those that are calling for it or saying, as you said, you know, I'm a better, I'm a horror, I'm a better or I'm or whatever it might be. Is that then just a continuation of that existing system? Does that mean that it's going to endure? Or is it possible or is it even conceivable that, you know, part of the reason why people like Abiy Ahmed, but not only him, outside the EPRDF as well, have made this broader call to this Ethiopian identity. And, you know, you pointed out earlier, urbanization has something to do with this as well. Perhaps the diaspora has something to do with this in terms of its involvement in politics. But does it mean that, you know, we have this strong party system aligned along ethnic regions? Does that logic, which would have been so obvious 10 years ago or 15 years ago, is it as obvious today? No, it's not as obvious today. And the EPRDF of today is not the EPRDF of 2015. It has, it's been challenged and it's been changed in important ways. The continuity is that structurally and in terms of this enduring contradiction, I think there's continuity. I also think this is, is Abiy a pan-Ethiopian or is there still an ethnic logic point? I think that this is a moment of hyper-identity politics in Ethiopia and that therefore, if we're gonna have an election in 2020, it's likely to be a hyper-ethnic election. And I don't think, my guess, I'm just, I don't predict the future particularly well, but that in that context, the EPRDF is best situated to do well. Now it's gonna have trouble with Nama in the Amhar region. The OLF has claims to the Romo nationalism that are very old and well respected, but then they have to face, so far as I can tell, the OLF does not have the political machine on the ground that the Romo wing of the ruling party has. And so, Wuradad or Wuradakabeli to Kabeli, there's a Romo ruling party guys and the OLF isn't organized that way. It just came back from Eritrea. It has some kind of a military capacity but not a mass mobilizing capacity. And it's, I think I alluded to this before, is that my starting point is that strong parties win elections and that the EPRDF is orders of magnitude stronger than any other party in Ethiopia and any likely coalition of parties in Ethiopia. Because Nama is not gonna make an alliance with the OLF or at least it would be a very difficult alliance because one is so ultra Amhara and wants to, doesn't see the Romo as a reasonable category of mobilization for example. And so a PN Ethiopian alliance that can get the, what's half of 548, that can get 270 some seats seems unlikely to me. Now, could they get 40% of the seats? Oh, I think that's possible. But, so that's my argument. Somebody was making, I'll give you a different argument that somebody made to me the other day and they look back to 2005 and said, well, as you would know from 2005 is that parties can come in very suddenly and do quite well. People are surprised. There's an emotional aspect to politics. There's a identity dimension of politics and it could be that these non-EPRDF parties do extremely well in this election. And I said, well, I think that my explanation is probably gonna be, is a 60% chance of coming through and yours is maybe a 40% chance of coming through. So it's not impossible. But what you, so therefore the question is, well, what would you look for? And what I would look for is what comes out of the Saddamah referendum. If that leads to a complete hyper-hyper-nationalist process, let's leave it at that, in the South, watch to see what happens to Nama in the Amhara region. If it really becomes able, because Nama is more organized in the countryside than the OLF. There's lots of Nama in smallish towns in the Amhara region to see how they will be able to, will they be able to gather votes as well? Because the more I saw that, the more I'd say, oops, I must be wrong and I will add another chapter to the second edition of the book, because I don't know, you know, who knows, who knows. And when we talk about Saddamah referendum, that's November, but there's also of course the possible second referendum in the Southern region as well. So, you know, and who knows where that, well, that will go as well. But I suppose we have these barometers of referendum to observe as they keep coming. I mean, one more point on the EPRDF. You are somewhat dismissive, I think, of the possibility that one of the four members of the coalition could stand alone. I don't know if you, I can't recall if you consider the possibility that it's more than one that leaves. As you already pointed out, the EPRDF is a different kind of thing, while at the same time, you know, as you also say, the structural power has perhaps shifted from the TPLF to the ODP member of the party, the new name for the ODPO. But is it possible to have, I mean, notwithstanding what you said and points well taken about any other political challenges, not being as well organized, not having as much ability to mobilize and so on. What if you have some kind of fracturing of the EPRDF, whether it's one or more members? Is that something which can be positive for political pluralism in Ethiopia, or is it something which actually then likely leaves whichever member that might be that defects from the coalition outside of the strong tent of the strong political party? It's another sort of fundamental question, and that I've struggled to try to figure out the language and the rhetoric between the different parts, the different constituent parties in the EPRDF is extraordinary, what they say about each other and how they accuse each other of all kinds of horrible deeds, yet they've not left yet. And the way that I try to think through it in terms of what the logic would be is that, so if the TPLF finally gets so fed up that it leaves, then it says, okay, we're gonna go to McKellay and all of those office buildings and banks and insurance companies and hotels we own and Addis, we'll let the Yamaha and the Aromo watch over that for us. Maybe our fight at the table to get a share of the federal funds to come to Tigray, we don't need to be in those discussions, it's better for us to be here angry in McKellay. It could happen that way, but that would surprise me. But you know, parties miscalculate, they get escalation spirals and end up in places that they didn't mean to. There are people such as this general supposedly in the Yamaha region who think blowing it up and assassinating the regional president is the way to unleash the kind of purifying fire of chaos that will allow some better a day to emerge. It might not be inaccurate. It sounds like, it sounds more like John Brown perhaps, but you know, this idea that is through these kinds of acts that you get the justice that you need, possible, absolutely possible. But there's also some really smart guys in all of these parties, and there's really, these guys have been at it for a long time. So I see it as four parties who don't like each other at all, but will be weaker if they leave the party than if they stay in the party. If you see one of the parties leave, you'll say, Lyons, you need to update your book. But that's the logic that I see in this. So one other word on that because it comes up all the time, the EPRDF for a long, long time has talked about transforming from being a coalition to being a party where individual members enter. Right now you join the Aroma Wing, which is then part of the coalition. Join the Amharer Wing, which is then part of the coalition. You would turn itself into a party that you would join directly. You'd be a member of the EPRDF. We'd get rid of all these ethnically based parties. If you were a Somali, or if you were a Bertha, or you are far, you could join the party then. They're not in, all these people in the peripheral regions are not part of the EPRDF coalition. There's a lot to be said for that. It would take care of the urbanization problem. It would take care of the problem of people being mobile. And I think they might do that. I don't think they do that between now and the 2020 election. I think it's too big of a bite. Some very smart person told me a couple of months ago that you get the right 20 people in the room and you cut the deal. It's not that hard. If I saw that, we're in a different logic. And how would that logic sit upon ethnically defined regions? So you'd have EPRDF, a multinational EPRDF governing in a Romo state. There you again would have to work through a calculation. So maybe you need to change the constitution. Well, and the map and go back to 1990, or whatever it is, very, very difficult. I would, there's very smart people in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a land of 1,000 seminars right now. People trying to think through the political implications of this or that or how will we get democracy or how will we get a market economy or how can we preserve revolutionary democracy and so on. And very smart people trying to figure out how you can, Ethiopia can move from what it is now into something that has kind of a different constitutional order, a different political party structure. The reaction I hear to a lot of that from my Romo friends is great. We finally get in the front seat and you're gonna change the rules of the game. Thank you. For all these millennia or these centuries we've been marginalized. We finally move into the front seat and now you say the rules are all wrong and we wanna do it some other way. So you can have a lot of pushback from a lot of people who see this, the last couple of years in positive terms. Now, does that get managed somehow or is there a way to, it's a political bargain. A new kind of pact possibly, but it'll be hard and I don't think it'll be done in the short run. Okay. Well, thank you so much for a fascinating, compelling book and narrative. Not quite done yet, because we're gonna take some questions from the audience. But I mean, it's a, I think part of what the value of your work here is just to show how these threads, I mean, obviously you're a historian so you do have that, you don't need to be convinced of the importance of history. But I think for many of us who may not be as familiar with the history or may not see, even if we understand that it's important, how it's significant and how it plays through today in terms of the expressions of these legacies, both in terms of the water piece transition, but also in terms of how the party came to be and continues to be. So just to add to your unanswered questions, let's hope that we can answer some more of them. We have microphones on the left and the right. Just raise your hand. Please tell us who you are and please ask a question. Hi, Zach, is that working? Yeah, Zach Burton from Brookings. Congrats, Terence, on the new book. That's great to hear about it. Two questions. One is related to the continuity and change discussion you've been having. I asked you this in April, I think, but I wonder if your opinion has changed. Given that need to straddle continuity and change, how does Abhi present himself in this election? What is the narrative to sort of straddle that? You started on that conversation already. But secondly, with regard to US-Ethiopian relations or relations with the West more broadly, it seemed particularly interesting that a pretty significant chunk of the US foreign policy establishment had ties to the old guard and ties to the old guard for a very long time. And thus, a lot of the narratives, I think, coming out of Ethiopia in the first year post Abhi, very often reflected that view, right? Reflected the view of the guys that were now out of power and were remarkably ill-informed about what was actually going on. I wonder if you've experienced that or your comment on the kind of changing of external facing narratives. Thanks, Zach. We'll take two more, if there are. Yes, gentlemen there. Thank you. APRDF's a beautifully resourced party financially, not just with the endowments, but also because of its enormous membership. If they're paying dues of a dollar a year, they've got $8 million right away. Actually, they're paying dues much more than that. How will that play out in the 2020 election, the impact of money and who has it and who doesn't, how that will play out? Who controls the allocation of those resources? Is it at the regional party level? Is it at the executive committee of the overall APRDF? And would you expect that Ethiopia's neighbors will also have some money in this election or certainly they will have some horses that they want to bet on. So just curious about external interest in the upcoming election. All right, thank you. Anyone on this side of the room wants to ask a question? No, that's a short list of questions, but just in case there is someone else there. Okay, the lady there, please. My name is Dunea Tageng. I'm here representing Amnesty USA. My question relates to your reflection on the human rights condition in Ethiopia throughout this transition from 1991 to today. How did you see the ruling party did and what can be done better in Ethiopia? Thank you very much. Thanks very much. So maybe we can start with Zach's first question here about how Abby presents himself in the 2020 elections. I mean, to date Abby has framed himself as a reformer, as somebody who can bring, can do the things that the APRDF had stopped doing in 2018. He plays more, his rhetoric is more towards the Ethiopia unity side than it is to the Romo side. But he needs to win his seat. And the ODP, the Romo wing of the ruling party has renamed itself, it's now the ODP. The ODP needs to carry seats. That's what the party does. It's in their DNA to win, right? That's what parties do, they compete for power. And he's a member of the party. I mean, I think to see him as a party stalwart rather than as an anti-EPRDF force is important. I think what Abby's been doing, and I've never met Abby, so I don't have any great insights into his inner thoughts, but that he acts as if for his reform to continue, he can't be distracted by all these little brush fires all across the country. There's a conflict here one week, there's a conflict here the other week, and so on. That if he goes that way, his focus is in 100 places and he can't keep going forward and that he's just gonna try to keep going forward, kind of keep his head down. I think there's some wisdom in that. I'm not sure three million displaced allows you to do that. I think that you do need to deal with some of these issues, so I don't know how he positions himself or what his narrative is if there's still a huge amount of violence in Ethiopia coming into a May 2020 election. Furthermore, how does he build the stability if he could he would? And it's extremely, extremely difficult, but maybe that's a kind of a fractured or not very satisfactory answer to that. In terms of the international community's relationship with Ethiopia, I think a lot of people breathed a huge sigh of relief in between January 2018 and April 2018, when it looked like in January, this thing is going off the cliff and maybe it's already too late to turn it around to when Abby came in, has this sort of charismatic love fest, Abby Mania breaks out. People compare him to, well, various people, not all of them from this world, some from the spiritual world. In other words, some people say, you must be the elect of God, not to be too obscure. My, now you are indeed correct that there's a lot of people who had deep relationships with the old order. There's no doubt about that. But what I would say is kind of in the opposite direction of that is what worries me about US policy in particular towards Ethiopia is how personalized it gets, how quickly. That it's the US wants to support Abby, which I think is a very dangerous way to frame any relationship, rather than the Ethiopian people wish to work with, the US people wish to work with the Ethiopian people to bring democracy and development. I think that's a big problem and the US government also has a tendency to equate access with influence. Well, I can get in to see Abby whenever I want to, so I'm influential in this town. That happened with Melis as well. I could get to see him and so therefore I'm doing it right when I think that's deeply, deeply problematic. But the donors, I know this from the election sphere about preparing for 2020 elections, that the donors are all in to support the elections. They're bringing in lots and lots of money. The Europeans, the Americans, to the UNDP, to various US-based groups like NDI, IRI, IFIS, and so on. Because the plan B is a big worry. Let me switch to the second question from my friend Jerry Jones, who I think might've started that 30-year conversation with Jerry many, many, many years ago. And some of it actually at USIP in the old days where it used to be by Dupont Circle. The EPRDF is a very wealthy party and that, again, is part of the continuity and given up that money. It's still there. Nobody else has money like that, although NAMA is not poor. NAMA's getting resources. I have no idea why, but they have offices and people who are staffing those offices in the countryside of the Amhara region. The membership dues, I believe, stay in the four regional parties. What is also organized in the four regional parties are the endowment funds. Each of the four parties has an endowment fund, but the Tigray Endowment Fund effort is orders of magnitude bigger. It's been around longer. It's had the advantages of having the opportunity to make some very good investments, often linked to the need to have government support for trade and access to credit and things like that. And so in that way, while the party is wealthy, it's not evenly wealthy. So that might play out in 2020. Figuring out the neighbors is difficult. I mean, you always hear from certain circles in Ethiopia that the Eritreans are behind one thing or another. And the Eritreans will be doing something to support one side or another in the coming elections. They might, but I'm not sure how much they have. I mean, what the resource base or ability to shape these things actually is. Of larger concern would probably be golf money. There's a lot of money from the golf you've been involved in some of these other projects here at USIP. Off a lot of golf money going to all across the Horn for all kinds of different reasons. And would, you know, if UAE, well, if what we saw in Somalia, where the UAE and the gutter division ended up with funding different political tendencies or streams, if that were to play out in Ethiopia, it would be extremely problematic. I don't see evidence of that. I think if the money has come in, it's to support the state. If it was perceived as Muslims coming in to shape Ethiopia's political future, that would be a very big deal. The Orthodox Christians see themselves under siege and they can point to things on why they feel that way. And so that would be a concern. On the human rights conditions, Ethiopia had a really, really very bad record on human rights up until recently. A lot of political prisoners, a lot of people were arrested. Abbey himself talks about torture in the prisons, how they mistreated so many people for so many years. And so I think there's been a sea change on that. The political prisoners have been released. They've trying to reinvigorate the human rights. Is it the council or commission? The commission with Daniel Becquale, who's a very reputable guy under resourced and so on and so forth has a huge lift. But I think they are trying that. Ethiopia remains the Ethiopian justice sector very under resourced. The prisons are terrible and so on. So there's a long, long way to go, but that's not a continuity story. That's a change story and what has happened in the last two years. Now, let me darken that very sunny moment for a second. In the aftermath of the assassination of the president of the Amhara region in Bahrain in June, was it? The government used the anti-terrorism proclamation to arrest people, battle days. They declared basically a state of emergency, the battle days. They turned off the internet and they arrested like 1200 people overnight. So the state still has that capacity. It has not lost coercive capacity when it feels that it can, I suppose, but must use it. And so that is to say that this change of Ethiopia, particularly on the question of human rights, the pendulum is decidedly in a different place. But if you take my pendulum analogy, pendulums can swing back and there's reasons to be continually vigilant and to keep your eye on it and to call them out if you see early signs of things like why do you turn off the internet? And what happened in the Somali region last year might be another example of that, right? So let's take another round of questions. I think Eric had his hand up just here. Eric Robbins. Eric Robbins, a national endowment for democracy. You said that the struggle started for some very remote areas on the periphery and now I'm also hearing people say that some very connected people that it's about elite consensus. We need to have elite consensus if anything's gonna go forward. How do you square that with the power of social media, the age of the population, the people who cracked open the space? Is this elite consensus conversation about falling back in the same old patterns of the people atop controlling things and how is that gonna fit, sit with the youth movements? Thank you, I see the gentleman here, yes. Phil Schrafer, retired international healthcare consultant. China, could you comment on China's role politically and economically in terms of quality and production that they've achieved? Thank you, anyone else? Yes, Pierre. I'm Hank Cohen. I have a question about the TPLF and the economics. I believe at the beginning, TPLF companies were created, trucking, fertilizer and that sort of thing and they were getting government contracts. Does that system still exist? Okay, thanks. And was there anyone else over here? Did I see a hand? Yes. My name is Johannes from the Eritrean community. How do you see the relationship of Eritrean, Ethiopia and the future? Thank you. So we have Eritrean and China and the TPLF. Where do you wanna start? I'll try to do them in order and that's like four more books but let me try to say something about it. Eric's point about do you need elite consensus or do you have to see this transition as initiated by kind of rank and file young kids in the streets of various eromo cities and that there needs to be some way to capture that energy? I think you need both. My expectation would be that the elite are likely to do better than the kids in the street in this transition just because unfortunately that's what often happens. Control of, so then the next question is well what happens to the angry kids in the street? I mean if you could get 25 million good jobs in Ethiopia a lot of these problems would take care of themselves but you can't. It's very, very hard. It's very, very slow and the frustrations are as we saw in 2016 are very close to the surface. And there needs to be at least a narrative, let me put it that way, where young folks who've got their degree, a doubt can't find a job and so on can imagine themselves in an Ethiopia where they would have a place, a place where they could be respected and have economic security and be able to get married and start a family and all of these things that now they're kind of hanging out trying to figure out how do I do this? And an elite consensus by itself isn't going to solve that problem. The 2016 demonstrations in my view came out of a very particular political economy of joblessness and lack of hope about the future that has not changed. That remains the same. There was a lot of kind of giddy optimism at the beginning of Abby because it was such a fresh approach but that's worn out and well at least it's fading. And so the possibility that there'd be instability again is very real. China and Ethiopia, China is everywhere in Africa, in Ethiopia in particular ways, particularly in some of the infrastructure investments, the roads, the railroad, the urban railroad, airports, I mean they've done a lot of the big construction, the big office buildings is Chinese construction. There were those who follow macroeconomics more closely than I who were worried about the debt burden of Ethiopia that they've borrowed too much and it's not clear where the rise of productivity is going to come to pay back these debts. So China is a very big player but it's largely economic player. It's come in and offered its services, particularly for construction and its capital for investments and has been welcomed. On the T-Pale of contracts, you were correct in how the initial endowment funds effort but also other Red Sea Trading Company, other things that the T-Pale of had created during the time of the armed struggle then moved into this relationship with the ruling party in ways that they had access to resources and markets that competitors could not gain. I don't know if since the, Abbey has come to power if those contracts have been broken. As you know that some of them, particularly Mettec has been under investigation and a lot of people arrested and charges of corruption. Some of the other party affiliated businesses have similarly been accused I'll say of corruption. I just don't know what the extent to that is but that's another part, well another way of this narrative, a lot of non-tugray and say but you haven't brought them all in yet. There's still all these corrupt people who stole our money and why aren't you doing more to do it where the TPLF says this is targeting. They're targeting the TPLF what they call corruption, anti-corruption campaigns. It's just a TPLF campaign and so it gets very contentious and as the way Ethiopia is structured very quickly ethnicized and political because it's hard to separate that. It's not, it's hard to say I have a problem with the TPLF but not with the Tigray people because the way the thing is formed it's so close. Air trade at Ethiopia. Again, I was surprised in my predictive abilities to have expected a normalization of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea as the prime minister, Abby built a bridge of love as he called it to connect with Eritrea in a very, very dramatic way and very emotional way. A lot of people could go back and see their families. The border was open for a time and that was all encouraging. That was all looking hopeful. More recently, the implements, the nuts and bolts of how are you gonna establish trade relations? What's gonna be the currency exchange? Who's gonna give visas to whom? And so on and so on. Seemingly have stalled the process which isn't too surprising but it's also worrying that if it gets locked in this pattern of using kind of technical problems as we know from 1998, those technical problems can be used, well, can be triggers or used as triggers for larger escalations. I mean, the Ethiopia Eritrea divide since 1998 has been enormously damaging to both countries. The amount of a generation of development lost as both sides, Eritrea in particularly have spent inordinate percentages of their national wealth on military defense and so forth and so if that relationship can get even incrementally better then that would be very good for both countries, I believe. Well, thank you Terrence Lyons for coming to talk to us about your book and for reflecting on both the past and the present and ruminating a little bit on the future of where Ethiopia may be headed. Please join me in thanking Dr. Terrence Lyons. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Ali. Thank you.