Ethiopia: the Beginning or the End?

October 25, 2014

by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (The New York Times)

Last week’s events in Ethiopia were unbelievable, although we may not know for years or even decades what their final meaning is. What’s important, however, is that we focus on what this means on the street. The current administration seems too caught up in spinning the facts to pay attention to the important effects on daily life. Just call it missing the fields for the wheat.

When thinking about the recent troubles, it’s important to remember three things: One, people don’t behave like computer programs, so attempts to treat them as such are going to come across as foreign. Computer programs never suddenly set up a black market for Western DVDs. Two, Ethiopia has spent decades as a dictatorship closed to the world, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, freedom is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If corruption is Ethiopia’s glass ceiling, then freedom is certainly its flowerpot.

When I was in Ethiopia last June, I was amazed by the level of Westernization for such a closed society, and that tells me two things. It tells me that the citizens of Ethiopia have no shortage of potential entrepreneurs, and that is a good beginning to grow from. Second, it tells me that people in Ethiopia are just like people anywhere else on this flat earth of ours.

So what should we do about the chaos in Ethiopia? Well, it’s easier to start with what we should not do. We should not ignore the problem and pretend it will go away. Beyond that, we need to be careful to nurture the fragile foundations of peace. The opportunity is there, but I worry that the path to peace is so narrow that Ethiopia will have to move down it very slowly. And of course Addis Ababa needs to come to terms with its own history.

Speaking with a young student from the small Shiite community here, I asked him if there was any message that he wanted me to carry back home with me. He pondered for a second, and then smiled and said, nama es tubo, which is a local saying that means roughly, “A bad penny always turns up.”

I don’t know what Ethiopia will be like a few years from now, but I do know that it will remain true to its cultural heritage, even if it looks very different from the country we see now. I know this because, through all the disorder, the people still haven’t lost sight of their dreams.