Recognizing their political failures, some opposition leaders have retired lately. However, this is not enough. The opposition must retire also the ideas, values and practices that have transformed it into a machine that produces nothing more than political defeats. If the opposition is to become the agency of Ethiopian democracy, now is not the time for the usual interpassive activities that, though they may be psychologically satisfying, are utterly impotent to bring about change.
Rather, now is the time for the opposition to question everything it has done since 2005 before it starts thinking about alternatives. Without such questioning, qualitatively different options will not be visible. Let us remember that thinking, of which we have an ample supply since the 1960s, is not necessarily questioning. The latter requires, as history shows, more courage than the former. The major opposition party failed to offer Ethiopians a qualitatively different and credible alternative to the EPRDF, because it failed to question the adequacy of its ideas, values and practices to the task of evicting the Meles dictatorship. Yet, as I will argue below, the opposition has at its disposal the powerful weapon of Ethiopian history to achieve its democratic goal.

Universal Principles and Ethiopian History
The history of Ethiopia is, like the history of all nations, “simultaneously a document of barbarism and civilization”. Meles did not invent dictatorship and ethnic oppression in Ethiopia. They are part of our past as a people, elements of the barbaric dimension of our history.

However, our history has also a civilizational dimension: universalizing and emancipatory. Consider the idea of the rule of law. “The Abba Gado himself”, writes a specialist in Oromo institutions “is subject to the same punishment as all other Borana if he violates the law.” One finds a similar commitment to the rule of law in 15th century Ethiopia in the claim of Aba Estifanos and his followers that a ruler who rules outside the law is not a ruler. The 14th century mystic and leader, Amde Tsion, used to encourage people to speak their mind with the remark that “a dispute cannot be settled by silence.” We find the same idea—that people must express their views because a dispute cannot be settled by silence—in the Oromo institution of Gada. Moreover, Ethiopian history is replete with events wherein Ethiopians of all origins and faiths sacrificed their lives and limbs in defence of their dignity against foreign invaders and local oppressors. The point is, when we consider Ethiopians as a people, we discover a history that harbours pan-Ethiopian civilizational ideas, values and practices, from north to south, that transcend ethnicity and regional particularities.

Such pan-Ethiopian civilizational ideas, values and practices legitimate the creation of political parties and the development of policies and strategies based on universal principles that transcend ethnic identities. Yet, in the lead-up to the 2010 elections, the major opposition failed to use these resources for developing its policies and strategies and thus fell into Meles’s anti-historical trap.

History: The Nightmare of Dictators
Meles, like all right-wing dictators, loves ethnography, and shuns history like the plague. He is the latest, and probably not the last, politician who reduces history to ethnography and replaces historical with ethnic identity. The danger for the opposition, a danger it did not avoid in the 2010 elections, is following Meles down this slippery slope of ethnographic politics, closing the door indefinitely to democracy. Let me explain.

Substituting ethnography for history has profound anti-democratic consequences. Thus, in the 19030s and 40s, ethnic identity replaced historical identity in Germany, Italy, South Africa, and many European countries, giving birth to horrendous regimes. In Africa, every time ethnic identity evicts historical identity—as in Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, to name a few—the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride in.

One reason why right-wing politicians hate history and love ethnography is because the latter provides them with putatively ahistorical, homogeneous, closed political objects that they could manipulate in the name of an immutable ethnic identity. The only acceptable political community would then be one based on placental relations to one’s ethnicity; and the only acceptable political parties would then be ethnic parties. The organizational embodiment of this right-wing ideology in Ethiopia is the TPLF/EPRDF, and its theoretician is Meles Zenawi.

First, dictators such as Meles hate history, because the human subject of history is complex, dynamic and incomplete, and is therefore deeply resistant to oppression, manipulation, and identity-closure. We Ethiopians are, like all human beings, historically incomplete subjects; conversely, our history is incomplete at the point where it meets us. In other words, our past is an unfinished business—just consider all the unfulfilled hopes of emancipation we have inherited—and our future is an open horizon. As the subjects of history, then, we could envisage a future of our own making. Our history is, like all human history, the outcome of our labours and creativity and not of our ethnic identities. In other words, we are the subjects of freedom. When the opposition neglects these truths, imitates the EPRDF by substituting ethnography for history, and organizes itself as a coalition or a forum of ethnic parties, it cuts itself from the democratic aspirations of Ethiopians and commits political suicide.

Second, the opposition will forever be stuck in a political limbo if its ideas, values and practices are not premised on the recognition that history, and not ethnography, has given birth to democracy—the ideas and values of universal freedom, equality, solidarity, and social justice for all. History, unlike ethnography, is inherently and dynamically productive of universalizing ideas, values and practices. Therefore, a political party that is committed to the establishment of democracy in Ethiopia has to be rooted in the universalizing dynamics of our history and not be chained, as the TPLF/EPDRF is, to ethnography and its freedom-suffocating relations.

To avoid misunderstanding, one must make a distinction between ethnic provinces or states—ethnicstans, in short—and political parties at the national level. There is in principle nothing wrong in having ethnicstans that administer themselves as long as they do so by respecting the democratic rights of all their inhabitants. Whereas at the ethnicstan level, the logic of ethnic self-administration could play a role, as in Quebec in Canada, at the national level, the political logic of Ethiopians as a people—a historical subject whose identity cannot be reduced to ethnography—kicks in, requiring political parties based on universal principles rather than on ethnic identities.

The opposition: Exceeding its Destiny through History
It is precisely to prevent the emergence of a historically informed, qualitatively different alternative—an opposition political party representing Ethiopians as a people—that Meles has used various stratagems to nurture the adoption by the opposition of the ethnographic approach to politics by disguising it as multi-party democracy. Instead of questioning this ethnographic approach to Ethiopian politics, the major opposition party swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The proof: a prominent member of the major opposition party claims in his comments on the outcome of the 2010 elections that “It’s unfortunate that we are going back to where we were 20 years ago after a 19 years experiment with multi-party democracy.” (voanews.com, 21 June, 2010 ). But is it not the fact that between 1991 and 2010, Meles and his TPLF dominated coalition of ethnic parties—the EPRDF—were lording it over the Ethiopian people? There was no “multi-party democracy” in Ethiopia. That an influential representative of the major opposition party could claim that multi-party democracy existed in Ethiopia between 1991 and 2010 demonstrates how deeply Meles’s ethnographic ideology of politics has penetrated the opposition.

On confronting an opposition political party constituted as a coalition of ethnic parties, Meles wins the contest before it even starts, for the opposition becomes captive of a political terrain he fully controls. It is precisely for this reason that the organization of the major opposition party as an ethnic coalition in the 2010 elections was a political defeat before even the voting started.

The statement that Ethiopia enjoyed “a 19 years experiment with multi-party democracy” before the 2010 election suggests that the EPRDF could be eventually democratized. But given its ethnographic premises, the EPRDF is no more an instrument for democracy than “the distribution of a restaurant menu in a famine camp is a solution for famine”. The EPRDF can never be an instrument for democratic change. The issue is not democratizing the EPRDF—this is an impossible task. Nor is the solution imitating the ethnographic organizing principle of the TPLF/EPRDF. Rather, the goal of the opposition must be to construct democracy otherwise. To achieve this successfully, the opposition must effect a tectonic change in the way it organizes itself and develops its policies and strategies. And it cannot accomplish such a qualitative change unless it avails itself of the universalizing ideas and values that Ethiopian history provides. Only history, and not ethnography, makes democracy immanent to the society being democratized. Only the recourse to our history’s pan-Ethiopian civilizational ideas, values and practices will enable the opposition to exceed its present destiny.

That Which in Us is more than Us
The civilizational dimension of Ethiopian history provides us with a democratic horizon that enables us to look beyond our ethnic particularities. Not in order to look away from our ethnic backgrounds, as some may think, but rather “to see them better within a larger whole and in truer proportion” so that we Ethiopians could recognize each other as a people constituted of “overlapping communities of fate”.

Whereas Meles’s ethnographic approach to politics generates symmetrical ignorance and enthusiastic misunderstandings among Ethiopian ethnies, the historical approach brings us together in a way that shows that ethnic diversity is not antithetical to universalism. It makes our ethnicity a historical dimension of the Ethiopian people and makes it partake in the historical process that makes democracy immanent to our existence as a people. This is why Ethiopian history is anathema to Meles.

In his infatuation with ethnographic politics, Meles purposely conflates two radically different concepts: people and population. A population is divisible in terms of ethnography and other criteria. It is a sociological construct and not a political category. A people is a political concept and is, unlike a population, indivisible. It transcends the diverse classifications that apply to a population and thus brings out “that which in us is more than us”—the capacity to go beyond our ethnic or other particularities and act and live as universal or free subjects. This is a capacity that gestates in the civilizational dimension of our history. The major opposition party in the 2010 elections committed the error of espousing Meles’s conflation of people with population and organized itself as a coalition of ethnic parties. It must now have the courage to question and overcome this error, and organize itself and its policies in terms of our history’s pan-Ethiopian civilizational ideas, values and practices.

Hewing Democracy from Our History
There is no self-sustaining democratic country in the world that is not rooted in the civilizational dimension of its own history. One cannot borrow democracy as one borrows a pen. Democracy is a “momentum concept”. It is progressive, dynamic and avoids polarizing and paralysing divisions precisely because it is rooted in the civilizational momentum of a people’s history. Since 1960, Ethiopia has seen many democratic flowers bloom, but they have all failed to bear any fruit, because we have failed to use our history as a weapon for democracy. If we Ethiopians are to “exceed our destiny” as a people, we need political parties that hew democracy from our own history as our ancestors hewed the cathedrals of Lalibella form the rocks of our own mountains.

The opposition should leave to Meles his patronizing, paternalistic and barbaric idea that Ethiopians cannot transcend their ethnic particularities and that only ethnic-based parties are suitable to them. Rather, the opposition should draw its inspiration from the civilizational dimension of Ethiopian history and create political parties, and develop policies and strategies that reflect our history’s universalizing and emancipatory stream.

If the opposition were to operate such a tectonic change in its orientation and operations, the Meles dictatorship may wither away before 2015. But if the opposition fails to question its past practices and continues to shun the emancipatory resources of Ethiopian history, the 2015 elections, assuming they take place, will be no more than a farcical repetition of the 2010 elections.