After Ethiopia peace deal, go on and dismantle ethnic aristocracies

Ethiopia is edging closer to sustainable peace. On November 2, 2022, Ethiopia’s federal government and the rival Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa.

Sealed on the eve of the second anniversary of Ethiopia’s second civil war, one of the world’s bloodiest contemporary conflicts, which started on November 4, 2020, the Pretoria deal heralds a new dawn for Ethiopia.

In a nutshell, parties to the Ethiopian conflict formally agreed to cease hostilities, lay down their arms, stop disseminating “hostile propaganda”, expedite the flow of humanitarian supplies into Tigray, while the government agreed to restore “essential services” to the Tigray region (which has remained cut off from electricity, water, telecommunications and banking during the war) and “facilitate the lifting of the terrorist designation” of the TPLF.

Expectedly, the peace deal has not materially changed the structure of power relations that, in the first place, brought Ethiopia to the tipping point.

Upon coming to power on April 2, 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised reforms and liberty, but Ethiopia’s warring ethnic aristocracies soon plunged the country into its second – and most brutal – civil war that has pitted the TPLF against the federal army and its allies, who include fighters from other regions and neighbouring Eritrea government.

This revealed the failure by the power elite to manage diversity. Ethiopia’s second civil war did not fundamentally differ from the first, which was fought between Ethio-Eritrean anti-government rebels and Mengistu Haile Mariam’s communist junta from September 1974 to June 1991. At least 1.4 million people were killed.

From the outset, Ethiopia’s recent civil war was a lose-lose scenario. It spawned one of contemporary Africa’s worst human rights and humanitarian crises, with some 20 million people requiring assistance and protection, nearly three-quarters of them women and children.

The war also exacted a heavy toll on human life, with thousands of Ethiopians killed, millions displaced and hundreds of thousands left on the brink of famine.

Failed state

Once on the cusp of an economic take-off, the conflict pushed Ethiopia closer to a failed state. The war undermined the unity of Ethiopia’s diverse ethnic groups, battered its fast-growing economy and eroded its regional standing in the Horn of Africa.

From a praetorian guard of peace in the Horn, Ethiopia has become a classic case of ‘hegemonic instability’ or the inability of a regional power to maintain peace within its territory.

Ethiopia’s civil war has had effects beyond its borders. It undercut the regional consensus that backed the African Mission in Somalia (Amisom), its successor, the African Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), and eroded the influence of Igad as the pivot of the regional peace and security architecture in the horn.

Parties have agreed on the departure of Eritrean forces, whose government was not part of the negotiations.

The deal sets the stage for the return and reintegration of internally displaced people and refugees, which calls for robust partnerships between parties to the agreement and humanitarian agencies. Although members of Ethiopia’s Amhara region, who have been fighting on the side of the Ethiopian government in the war, were not involved directly in the talks, their border dispute with Tigray should be addressed during the transition.

Notably, the Pretoria deal suggests that the theory of ‘regional hegemons’ as bastions of peace in Africa is valid. The peace was achieved through the mediation efforts of two ‘pivotal states’ – South Africa and Kenya – and the African Union.

The deal is also a case of effective deployment of retired presidents, Kenya’s former President, Uhuru Kenyatta, as the facilitator of the talks and Nigeria’s former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, as head of the African Union mediation team.

Manifestly, the peace deal heralds a new dawn for Ethiopia. When fully implemented, the agreement should put Ethiopia firmly on the path of comprehensive reforms and sustainable peace.

Parties to the agreement should ensure that the agreement is faithfully implemented and Ethiopia’s ordinary citizens do not continue to be vulnerable to mass atrocity crimes.

Brutal aristocracy

But what kind of state should emerge from the Pretoria deal? It is worth noting that the deal alone cannot transform Ethiopia from a brutal autocracy where successive ethnic aristocracies have fought, won and lost power in endless cycles of violence to a responsible democracy.

An inclusive process of dialogue involving all parties offers a lasting solution to the crisis of state formation. After the peace deal, the next steps will require intense political engagement to forge a united Ethiopia where the individual citizen replaces ethnic aristocracies as the basic unit of power and legitimacy.

In this regard, the peace deal sets the stage for further negotiations to pave the way for broader political talks, hopefully leading to a new social contract.

Ethiopia’s second civil war has pitted the ‘centrists’ determined to dismantle the country’s ethnic federal system and centralise power in Addis Ababa against the ‘federalists’ clamouring for the rights and autonomy of more than 80 ethnic groups. Dialogue should seek to not only end conflicts between the government and the TPLF elite, but also address other fault lines.

In recent months, a wave of deadly interethnic attacks rocked the Oromia and Somali regions, areas also devastated by drought and outbreak of diseases. Besides ending active conflict, the peace deal must address the root causes of conflict, negotiate a new social contract based on a new constitution that redefine citizenship and nationhood.

In a sense, the Pretoria deal exposes the limit of liberal peace. A victor’s order or a ‘ceasefire’ leading to elite power-sharing are both bad options for Ethiopia. Dialogue should seek to dismantle the old order based on competing ethnic aristocracies and create a new citizen as the sovereign.

Ethiopia needs an inclusive Constitutional Convention perhaps along the Boma’s of Kenya process to agree on a new government and a new order based on a post-bellum constitution as the basis of a new social contract.

Dialogue should lead to the dismantling of the political relics of the ‘ancient regime’ based on the “mythical Solomonic state” and the militarism of its challengers—rival monarchists, communist crusaders and insurgents. It should unite Ethiopia’s 80-plus ethnic groups. After going full circle through a monarchy, a communism junta, insurgency and militarism, Ethiopia is now ripe for a democracy.

Prof Kagwanja is former Government Adviser (2007-2013) and currently the President & Chief Executive at the Africa Policy Institute and Adjunct Scholar at the University of Nairobi and the National Defence University (Kenya).