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Most parties are set up to make money for their leaders, not make a difference to society
The ruling Prosperity Party (PP) once again secured a landslide victory in the recent by-elections and re- elections held in the Afar, Somali, Benishangul-Gumuz, and Central Ethiopia regional states. According to the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE), out of the nine contested seats in the federal House of People’s Representatives, PP won seven.
From whichever angle we look, an attempt to make sense of this result forces us to ponder over the state of opposition parties in Ethiopia. Because, as the renowned political expert Andreas Schedler rightly pointed out, “authoritarian incumbents can emerge victorious from [transitional] elections thanks not to their own cleverness but the ineptitude of their opponents.”
Prior to the reform of NEBE in early 2019, there were more than 100 opposition parties in Ethiopia. After the coming into effect of a new election law that year, the number of parties reduced almost by half. Fifty-four were deregistered as they failed to fulfil some of the legal requirements introduced by the new proclamation and its implementation directive.
However, in a relatively short period of time, their number is rising again. Currently, there are 71 national and regional registered parties, with a few more in the pipeline to acquire legal personality.
The question that arises is, how could—in the face of rapidly shrinking civic space and while the country continues to suffer widespread violent conflict—the burgeoning numbers of political parties be justified? Are they being established to try and resolve the country’s social, political, and economic policy issues? or to achieve ulterior economic objectives of their leaders, perhaps taking advantage of the existing lenient registration and party financing system?
In reality, the opposition parties fall well short of being genuine competitors to the Prosperity Party and sources of alternative policies. Instead, many of these haphazardly incubated opposition groups have become conduits for the monetization of politics and tapping of public resources under the guise of fighting for their vision for Ethiopian society.
Besides other systemic and structural issues, a closer glance at the legal and institutional framework reveals that the spike in the number of docile, weak, fringe opposition parties has its roots in Ethiopia’s party registration and financing system.
Party Time
The emergence of political parties is a relatively recent phenomenon in Ethiopia. Despite establishing a bi-cameral parliament and allowing universal suffrage in the 1955 revised constitution, the monarchical regime appeared to have never envisioned a role for opposition parties. As a result, no organization existed that could describe itself as a party prior to the 1974 overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie.
The All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) were the first parties to surface in the aftermath of the Ethiopian student movement. Subsequently, ethno-nationalist movements such as the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF), the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) came to prominence.
Fast forward to 1989, the Dergue constitution created a mono-party system, under which only the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE) was constitutionally permitted to function. Contrary to its predecessors, the current constitution of Ethiopia allows for a multiparty system.
Inefficient Opposition
Parties, in theory, lie at the heart of competitive democracy. Nonetheless, their mere existence or rapid multiplication by no means guarantees that they will adequately fulfil their purpose. Nor does it imply the widening of political space or the presence of a level playing field. In Ethiopia, the full potential of opposition parties is yet to be realized. This is for two main reasons:
- Deep entrenchment in parochial political battles
As is well known, identity remains the defining feature of our local and national politics. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of parties continue to be formed along ethnic, or even, in some cases, religious lines.
On the surface, such an arrangement was supposed to enhance pluralism by ensuring representation of marginalized ethno-linguistic groups and improving their ability to caucus and negotiate in the parliamentary setting.
Practice, however, shows that reinforcement of identities can facilitate exclusionary politics, serve to cement societal cleavages, and exacerbate conflicts.
The increasing fragmentation of political parties has also made it difficult for them to coalesce around a shared broad national agenda.
2. Parties as leaders’ property
By and large, Ethiopian parties are effectively considered to be the private property of their leaders. Often when party leaders are in conflict, the party faces factionalism, creating a headache for the electoral board. This trend exhibits that parties are merely convenient alliances of individuals, often with little or no institutionalization and weak internal democracy.
This has harmed the public reputation of Ethiopian opposition parties, with citizens hardly seeing them as viable options.
Phantom Members
Seen in the above light, it’s unclear how these political parties managed to get the requisite minimum number of founding members specified in the law—at least 10,000 and 4,000 individuals for national and regional parties, respectively—let alone win the trust of electorates.
Judging by their struggle to fill the quorum for their first general meetings and the lamentable frequency of encountering copy-pasted political and policy programs, it is not a stretch to assume that loosely affiliated leaders produce fake lists of founding members to fulfil legal requirements.
Experiences from other African countries such as Kenya and Uganda demonstrate the necessity of setting up effective verification mechanisms to detect this kind of fraudulent activities. In those countries, too, parties with provisional registration certificates are required to submit a list of a certain number of registered voters as their founding members.
Since both countries deployed a biometric voter registration system, the existence and detailed information about founding members can be accessed by the electoral bodies quite easily. Thus, there is no chance that aspiring parties present a fabricated list of founding members.
Ethiopia, however, does not have a biometric registration system through which NEBE can verify the existence of founding members. Apart from manually scrutinizing the submissions, the board does not have the required technological capacity to identify fraudulent registrations.
Group of individuals with little intention of trying to influence politics have therefore learned that it is easy to secure registration as a political party with fictitious names and signatures.
Ulterior Motives
But why, given the possibility of criminal or administrative liability, would founders take these risks? The real motive lies in the incentive structure created by a relaxed party financing and monitoring scheme. It is assumed that creating a party also creates avenues for personal enrichment.
Older parties are not immune from such activity. With the aim of grabbing a bigger slice of the subsidy pie, and relying on NEBE’s inability to verify, parties often provide exaggerated membership figures.
For example, last month, the Bord revealed that 11 of the country’s 21 registered parties have failed to verify membership lists after submitting inflated figures regarding women and persons with disabilities–categories that boost the amount of subsidy they are eligible for—with some parties claiming up to 900,000 such members.
Financing Flaws
Once a political party is registered, it becomes eligible to receive state subsidies allocated by NEBE. For new parties, there is no precondition, apart from providing the required information to access government funding. For older ones, however, it is mandatory to submit to NEBE an annual audit report specifying what the previous funds were used for.
Here it’s crucial to note that parties select their own auditor, and that the firms’ professional standards may be questionable. How then does the electoral board verify the accuracy of the audit reports? Save for a cursory arithmetic review, the board doesn’t have a statutory duty to look into the details. Put differently, parties can get away with spending government money for whatever purpose they choose, so long as they manage to convince their auditor not to report any irregularities to NEBE.
It is only when an embezzlement complaint is logged that the board refers the parties’ audit reports to the Office of the Federal Auditor General (OFAG). The OFAG reported many irregularities, deficits and other findings in all the cases referred to it by the board so far. One can only wonder what would happen if the audit reports of all parties get cross-checked by the federal auditor.
If we add the failure of political parties to submit an annual operational plan into the equation, it becomes clear that there is no reliable mechanism through which NEBE can properly monitor parties’ activities and spending.
This gap is well-known by opposition leaders. The absence of proper financial scrutiny means there is no incentives for parties to be honest in their disclosures, and also perpetuates the notion that simply by founding a party, it is possible to get access to largely uncontrolled government funds.
This lenient party financing and monitoring mechanism is paving the way for parties to be little more than sources of revenue for their leaders. Instead of filtering out dysfunctional parties, Ethiopia’s party financing system encourages people to think that establishing a party is a lucrative business idea. An effective auditing system is sorely needed to detect malpractice and enforce regulations.
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This is the author’s viewpoint. However, Ethiopia Insight will correct clear factual errors.
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