Socialism and Development in Ethiopia

Map 1

Administrative Regions of Ethiopia

Map 2

Regional Capital Towns, Major Industrial Towns, Roads, Railways, and Ports of Ethiopia

Chapter 1

Introduction

Purpose of the Study

It is impossible to learn from experience until experience is diagnosed and understood. The diagnosis is rarely self-evident. Policies and programs are undertaken for a variety of reasons, some explicit, some hidden even from the individuals making the choices. What is actually done and actually accomplished through a given policy effort may be radically different from what is generally perceived or advertised. Extraneous factors not obvious to participants and not envisioned ahead of time often play a critical role in determining success or failure of a policy. Until such factors are sorted out – What was done? What occurred? What was the connection between the two? – only self-delusion and propaganda can emerge from the experience of development.¹

After the Second World War, many countries in the Third World (TW), particularly in Africa, rejected capitalism and opted for one or another form of socialism as their development path. Ethiopia embarked on the socialist path of development towards the end of 1974, following the mass upheaval that broke out in February of the same year. It has been pursued there ever since. However, partly because of the short time interval, the Ethiopian socialist experience has not been subjected to a thorough and systematic study.

The pre-revolutionary Ethiopian Government had applied a development strategy for agriculture that sought to introduce large-scale commercial farms using modern technology. The Government envisioned that this ‘Green Revolution’ approach would help them attain rapid agricultural modernization and economic development. For the last 25 to 30 years of the pre-revolutionary period, the major development trends have been privatization of land and the capitalization (mechanization) of agriculture with increasing foreign investments and public participation.

The post-revolutionary government, however, considered this very ‘solution’ the basic cause of rural underdevelopment. They argued that the private ownership of land and its structural distortions were responsible for the persistent degradation and impoverishment of Ethiopian society. They held that any step towards basic social change would necessarily require the abolition of that destructive structure through changes in agrarian relations. They believed socialism would help them attain their goals.

The purpose of this study is two-fold. The primary purpose is to critically examine the content and implementation process of the socialist agricultural development policy adopted by the post-revolutionary Ethiopian Government. In identifying and analysing the various problems encountered in this process, we simply need to answer Johnston and Clark’s questions quoted above: What was done? What occurred? What was the connection between the two? In addition, this study asks: What can we learn from the ten-year socialist experience of Ethiopia?

The second purpose of this study is to use empirical findings and analysis to contribute to a general discussion of the expediency of socialism as a development vehicle in semi-feudal and semi-capitalist economies such as Ethiopia.

Methodology

The post-revolutionary agricultural development of Ethiopia up to 1984 is studied empirically. The focus is on agriculture, for obvious reasons: agriculture is the mainstay of the Ethiopian economy. About 80% to 85% of the population directly depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Agriculture provides about 50% of the GDP. Agriculture supplies raw materials to the industrial establishments, many of which are agro-processing in nature. About 90% of the foreign exchange earned by Ethiopia comes from agricultural exports.

Following a brief presentation of the pre-revolutionary agricultural situation, this study examines the content, implementation process, problems, and outcome of the post-revolutionary agricultural development programme. The Land Reform Legislation of March 1975, which is the most important decisive change in the transformation of Ethiopian agriculture, serves as the central theme. Other subsequent agriculture-related policies and measures are treated as secondary and complementary.

In identifying and analysing the constraints of socialism in Ethiopia, I have applied a social interaction approach. Throughout the study, the main focus is on people and their interactions with each other. According to Johnston and Clark, who apply this approach in their analysis of agricultural policy and development, these interactions are mediated through various economic, political, and social organizations. They assumed that the formulation and implementation of any development programme are social actions. The activities of isolated individuals are not the only ones involved, but also those of a wide range of people of different social positions interacting through various socio-economic activities, with conflicting interests. These conflicting interests give rise to different forms and degrees of social contradictions, which then affect the form and extent of each social member’s participation on the different micro and macro levels of the development process. The emerging hypothesis is this: the smoother the social interaction, the higher the rate of participation. Subsequently, a higher rate of participation is assumed to correlate with a higher rate of productivity.

The main social interaction this study will deal with is the state-peasant relationship. However, I applied a holistic approach to include various interactions pertaining to other inter- and intra-social interests. In other words, this study views development problems from multiple dimensions and seeks multi-causal explanations. The venues for these social interactions relate to specific interest organizations (local trade unions), cooperatives, and household units on the one hand and the national socio-economic structure on the other.

The degree of participation is assumed to depend on the nature of the social interactions, which are considered favourable or unfavourable depending on how much or how fairly the development programme meets the various economic, social, cultural, and political interests of the groups or individuals involved. If benefits are mutual, i.e., if participants realize that their gains meet their expectations, social interactions within and between group organizations and within the society at large will be more harmonious, leading to wider factor participation and, consequently, to a more successful and effective programme implementation. In other words, there is more participation where there are more gains and there is less or no participation where there are losses.

A similar approach has been applied by Hydén in his analysis of the Tanzanian development crises. However, Hydén finds the cause of non-participation in the ‘peasant mode of production’ characterized by the so-called ‘economy of affection’. The latter is a social network of mutual socio-economic rights and obligations between kinsmen, both at village and state levels. Hydén’s argument is that because the peasants rely on this system, they care little about government modernization efforts and thus remain ‘uncaptured’. They prefer to fight to defend their pre-capitalist social structures, which they use as a means of exercising an ‘exit option’, going from the cash economy back to subsistence production. Hydén argues against the peasant mode of production and its ‘economy of affection’ and coercive subordination of the ‘uncaptured’ peasants and sees its elimination as the solution to underdevelopment.²

Contrary to Hydén, this study holds that the cause of peasant departicipation is not their mode of production per se but the failure of the Government’s policy to gainfully attract peasant participation, i.e., to offer the relevant incentives capable of inducing more benefits to the peasants than what the economy of affection can provide. The analysis is derived from a bottom-up approach where policies are examined based on the peasants’ own conditions, including their resources, aspirations, and problems. Apart from my disagreement with his argument, which in my understanding is at odds with his analysis, the present study makes use of many elements contained in Hydén’s analysis regarding the State’s relationship with the peasants and other socio-economic actors and its effects on participation and development.

It must be noted, however, that the positive assumption about the relationship between participation and policy implementation does not by any means exclude the possibility of failure despite participation. As will be clear from the presentation of the conceptual framework in the next chapter, there is a distinction between genuine (active) and pseudo (formal) participation, or voluntary and involuntary participation.

Traditionally, participation is regarded as the involvement of people in formal decision-making regarding policies and measures pertaining to local affairs, including public works, community activities, and specific projects. In this study, participation is also used to denote people’s involvement and/or commitment in the attainment of macro development programmes as determined by the individual and collective benefits in the programme.

Having made the above assumptions, I have analysed how the participation of the different social actors involved in various fields of socio-economic activities has been affected by the socialist nature of the agricultural development program, and how this in turn has affected the specific as well as the aggregate outcome.

As will be noted, this study has relied more on theoretical analysis and information provided by primary and secondary sources than on hard empirical data collected through my own direct field research. Political factors precluded the latter.

This study is limited to the crop production part of agriculture. It does not directly deal with issues related to livestock, wildlife, and fishery activities. The database covers mainly the period up to 1982/83 since the bulk of the study material was written in 1983/84.

Structure of the Study

The remaining part of the study is composed of six chapters. Chapter Two is devoted to the presentation and elaboration of some relevant concepts and assumptions that are used in the different contexts of the dissertation.

Chapter Three presents the pre-revolutionary agricultural situation as a background for better appreciating the post-revolutionary changes. The pre-revolutionary agricultural structure is characterized as dualistic: a traditional sector with feudalistic patterns and a capitalist sector. The feudal mode of production predominated. The characterization of both modes is based on such variables as scale, ownership, production and marketing structures, services, and spatial dispersion of agricultural activities. The presentation delineates how the capitalist mode of production expanded at a rapid pace primarily under the direction of multinationals, foreign nationals residing in Ethiopia, and members of the nobility and the bureaucracy. At the same time, the feudal mode of production suffered constant disintegration. This chapter also treats the process of polarization and the subsequent differentiation of small peasant producers that took place at a rapid rate, particularly during the early 1970s. The pre-revolutionary agricultural development policy is also briefly treated. This facilitates the identification and subsequent comparison of the policy differences adopted by the pre- and post-revolutionary governments.

Chapter Four gives a brief outline of the post-revolutionary Land Reform Legislation (LRL) of March 1975 in a comparative perspective. Here I briefly review the content of the LRL by considering some of its basic tenets. With the comparisons outlined in Chapter Two and on the basis of the concrete conditions of the pre-revolutionary Ethiopian agriculture, the LRL is characterized as a radical and legitimate policy necessary not only for the improvement of agricultural development and rural well-being but also for the promotion of overall national development.

Chapter Five deals with the implementation process and results of the LRL and attempts to characterize the post-revolutionary agricultural development situation. This chapter also discusses the various measures adopted in the socialist agricultural policy of the post-revolutionary period and the manner in which they were implemented. Agriculture is divided into two major subsectors: peasant (private and cooperative) farms and state farms. The policies and measures applied to these farm organizations varied. The different measures are treated as means for development. Their progress in time and space is examined as well; changes over time and spatial differences and their causes are presented and described. The second part of this chapter discusses the various results achieved with respect to production, self-sufficiency (self-reliance), and equity, as well as other related policy objectives. Based on these findings and some official as well as private claims, this study finds the overall post-revolutionary agricultural performance to have been inadequate.

Chapter Six is devoted to the identification and analysis of the major constraints encountered in the application of the socialist agricultural program. Participation (as defined in Chapter Two) is treated as the key problem in the entire analysis of program implementation. The outlined constraints concern the factors that impaired effective and comprehensive participation. These constraints are identified as either endogenous or exogenous whenever necessary. As already mentioned, endogenous constraints include problems that are latent in the socialist policy itself. Here, the analysis goes beyond the agricultural policy, owing to the fact that the concept of participation in this study embraces not only the peasant producers, or the ‘rural poor’ as they are commonly called, but also other social actors and the respective socio-economic sectors they are attached to. The exogenous constraints relate to factors that exist independent of the policy adopted by the Government, such as inherited institutional framework, drought, international developments, etc.

Since the main problem of this study is the identification and analysis of the development constraints inherent in socialism in Ethiopia, there is greater emphasis given to the analysis of policy-generated factors. The main conclusion is that the application of socialism has brought limited socio-economic benefits to the various social actors operating at various levels and areas of social activity. As a result, these social actors have participated passively or negatively, causing agricultural development to be sluggish. However, the focus on policy-generated constraints does not mean that this study reduces the post-revolutionary development experience to a futile exercise. On the contrary, this study also recognizes many positive achievements of the various reforms.

With reference to the major findings of the study, Chapter Seven concludes with some general remarks on agricultural strategies and the feasibility of socialism as a development strategy in peasant economies such as Ethiopia.

A Note on the Sources

For the pre-revolutionary period, the most important primary sources relate to the three five-year development plans of 1957, 1962, and 1968 prepared by the Planning Commission, the Annual Statistical Abstracts, as well as the provincial agricultural surveys made during the period 1966-1969 by the Central Statistical Office.

For the post-revolutionary period, this study has relied on primary sources such as the annual plans of the Government issued during the period 1979/80-1983/84. These provide useful information about the Government’s periodical policies, goals, measures, means, results, and problems for each year. This has been possible since each annual plan has been a form of evaluative report on its predecessor. The annual budgets have also been useful for data on the origins and size of public revenues, expenditures, and resource allocations. Official statements were another useful primary source, particularly those made in September 1978, January 1983, and September 1983, in which assessments of more real socio-economic developments were made in speech form and reproduced in daily newspapers. With regard to long-term and comprehensive policy issues, most of the information was obtained from government decrees and proclamations.

I have also made use of unwritten sources. These include interviews and discussions with peasants and first-hand observations during my one-month and ten-month visits in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Particularly during the latter visit, I was able to travel to many regions (Arssi, Hararghe, Shoa, Tigre, Wollega, and Wollo) and attend peasant meetings where I could listen to and interview individual peasants. It has been useful to concretely observe the peasants’ conditions and hear their views on the overall development process. Moreover, during my brief service with the Ethiopian bureaucracy in 1978, I experienced many of the facilitator-peasant relationships. In these respects, I should also mention that my two-year experience working with the bureaucracy of Lesotho and international aid programs there has given me useful insights and analytical tools. The information obtained this way has been highly valuable, particularly for the analysis in Chapter Six.

Other unwritten sources are informal personal discussions that I have pursued with people of various groups visiting or coming from Ethiopia. The former include mainly SIDA personnel, journalists, and Ethiopians residing in Sweden who had travelled to Ethiopia for short-term tourist or business purposes. The latter include Ethiopians who came to Sweden as political refugees, delegates, or ordinary visitors. Expatriate development workers stationed in Ethiopia comprise another information source in this respect. I have also learned much from personal correspondence with friends and relatives residing in Ethiopia, who have kept me informed on different issues. Finally, I have collected important information from various seminars, of which the one given by Rahmato at the Africa Institute in Uppsala in June 1983 has been the most vital one. For a researcher like myself who for political reasons cannot personally undertake fieldwork, these information sources are vital indeed.

The most important unpublished sources are various interim reports and memoranda produced by the World Bank and the IMF regarding the post-revolutionary economic development of Ethiopia: FAO, Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in Ethiopia: Review of Strategies and Policies, 1982; and Genberg, et al., Report on Peasant Associations and Agricultural Co-operatives in Ethiopia, 1982. These studies, although carried out in a relatively short span of time for purposes other than research per se, are the products of different interdisciplinary missions and consultants. They are (particularly those done by the World Bank) sectorally and spatially comprehensive, quantitative in nature and, in one way or another, critical of the Government’s policy. Having had access to both confidential and other official documents, discussions with relevant government authorities, and field visits, these studies bring together materials that are otherwise inaccessible for the ordinary researcher. Therefore, they are at present the best documentary material in the post-revolutionary agricultural development process.

The sources on which this study is based are, of course, diverse both in quality and quantity. I have endeavoured to carefully corroborate the data contained in them. However, I would like to say a few words of caution.

First, since the Ethiopian economy is predominantly non-monetized, the availability of quantified data is limited. Much data is oral in nature. This poses its own particular problem. Secondly, and most importantly, quantified data seems to suffer from a wide range of biases, both for political and technical reasons.

One technical reason I have in mind concerns the deficiencies of the whole system of data collection. This is in addition to the problems associated with the definition and application of basic concepts and variables. Due to the absence of a scientific census, population figures are estimates calculated based on sample surveys and guesswork. Given the predominant position of non-monetized activities in the economy and biased population figures, GNP/GDP and per capita income statistics are bound to be deficient.

The data may also suffer due to deficiencies in the manpower involved in data collection and processing. Data collection is often hazardous and is carried out by people with limited skills and experience. Informants are often suspicious and tend to tell only part of the truth or to give totally false information. Problems associated with differences in definitions and applications of concepts such as town, city, urbanization, unemployment, underemployment, employment, etc., are other sources of statistical biases that result in under- or overestimations.³

The political reason for biased data lies in the great significance the Derg and its bureaucrats attach to high statistical figures of performance (this was also the case in the pre-revolutionary period). The Derg needs such statistics to mobilize popularity and gain support, both locally and internationally. As a result, the career advancement of administrators and development officials has been linked to results attained in implementing policies. Since negative results have been associated with punishments including demotion, imprisonment, and at times, execution, there is a great likelihood that officials have been inclined to artificially inflate records and publish spurious figures in an attempt to impress their superiors and get the Derg’s approval.

For these and other reasons, the reliability of statistical data is questionable. This is a widely recognized problem. This problem has customarily alarmed those who have written on Ethiopia. However, as will be noted, this study draws more on qualitative than quantitative data. The latter are used in their capacity as indicative of qualitative phenomena rather than strictly in their absolute meaning per se. They, therefore, have limited repercussions on my findings.

There are two further special features that are worth mentioning, although they do not pose serious problems: the Ethiopian calendar and name systems. Although in certain respects the Gregorian calendar is used, Ethiopia has its own calendar system. The year starts on September 11 and consists of ‘13 months’, 12 of which are 30 days in length, and the ‘thirteenth’, 5 or 6 days. The Ethiopian calendar lags seven years behind the Gregorian from 11 September to 31 December and eight years during the rest of the year. In nearly all cases, I have applied the Gregorian calendar system. Whenever the Ethiopian calendar is used, it is accompanied by the symbol E.C. in parentheses.

It should also be noted that there is no fixed family name system in Ethiopia. In a typical Ethiopian family, there are three different family names; the father, the mother, and the children all have their respective fathers’ first names as their surnames and this changes with generation shifts. Each person is addressed by his or her first name. If the reverse order is applied, i.e., if a person is addressed by his or her surname (father’s first name) it will become a completely new name. My name is Makonen Getu, which means Makonen, the son of Getu. If someone addresses me as Mr Getu Makonen, as is the case in other cultures, it will be completely a different name/person. Here and there in the literature, both systems are used with some confusion. To minimize the latter, I have consistently used the European system, which implies that the Ethiopian authors are addressed by their fathers’ first names. Exceptions have been made in the case of Derg members, who are mainly known by their first names.

Relevance of the Study

Many of the post-revolutionary studies covering the period up to 1984, seem to have concentrated their analyses of the problems faced with the implementation of the socialist agricultural development strategy to giving explanations that are mainly based on a combination of external (non-policy-generated) factors such as weather, wars, physical conditions, and economic shortages. Dwelling more on factors independent of the post-revolutionary policy, the studies tend to be less critical of the policy applied with little consideration given to policy-generated constraints (i.e., constraints inherent in the socialist policy). This implies that they only partially deal with problems encountered in connection with the socialist development process. There is therefore a great need for a critical examination of the socialist experience from a historical perspective to identify and analyse policy-generated problems. Without a serious investigation of these factors and their effects on implementation and development, the problem analysis will remain deficient, leading to incomplete and dubious knowledge of the socialist experience in Ethiopia.

The present study concentrates on identifying and analysing development constraints inherent in the socialist policy itself. The role of political factors, which most studies seem to have ignored, is of particular importance. Therefore, I have focused on built-in or endogenous variables. Although I recognize that it is difficult to measure the relative importance of different variables, it is my conviction that endogenous factors play a more decisive role than external ones. The findings of this study largely confirm this hypothesis.

This study also contributes to reducing the above noted research gap and aims to facilitate a better understanding of the problems of socialist development in Ethiopia. Since it strives to give a holistic picture of the problems pertaining to the content and implementation of the socialist agricultural policy in Ethiopia, I also hope that this study will provide insight to development practitioners and serve as a stimulus for further critical investigations.

Last but not least, most general pre- and post-revolutionary research has been conducted by foreign scholars. The majority are university lecturers or international civil servants working in government or international agencies operating in Ethiopia. Different bilateral and multilateral organizations are also actively engaged. Research by national scholars and institutions is far less significant. This lag of local research carried out by nationals may be caused by the following important underlying reasons:⁴

(1) Undeveloped research tradition. This is primarily due to the fact that higher education was first provided only in the 1950s. The country’s first and, for a long time, only university was established in 1961 by merging the few colleges that had been set up in the 1950s.

(2) Inadequate supply of research manpower. In most cases, higher education has been limited to a BA degree program without any special research component attached to it. University students have not been exposed to proper research work. Consequently, research skills, i.e., research qualifications of the national manpower taught at a university, have been negligible. Still worse, those who have acquired such skills at universities abroad have either been absorbed into the administrative system, constrained by an unfavourable research environment, or forced to flee the country for political reasons.

(3) Inadequate research infrastructure. There have been meagre financial resources allotted to research activities and inadequate transport facilities available for field studies. The lack of proper bureaucratic collaboration, a national archive system, and equipment have made data collection and processing difficult. Libraries are poorly equipped with books, scientific journals, and the necessary documentation for conducting research. Salaries are low and constitute another component of disincentives. Consequently, many academics use their extra time for extramural teaching or consultancy work as a means of earning extra income. Research per se has been considered unattractive.

¹ B.F. Johnston and W.C. Clark, Redesigning Rural Development: A Strategic Perspective (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 29.

² There are a number of problems with Hydén's study worth mentioning here. First of all, his characterization of the peasants as autonomous vis-à-vis the State and as exercising power over the latter does not seem to comply with reality, which is, in most cases, to the contrary. Secondly, it is not clear whether peasants remain ‘uncaptured’ because they prefer their traditional socio-economic structures under all circumstances or because the government does not offer them sufficient incentives to participate. He argues for the former, although his analysis is in line with the latter explanation since he makes a persuasive account of how post-Arusha ujamaa village formation and cooperative movements as well as marketing policies or practices brought great losses to the peasants. Thirdly, his identification of the causes of underdevelopment in the ‘peasant mode of production’ as an argument against the dependency theorists, who put the blame on world capitalism, appears simplistic and one-sided.

³ This term by which the Military Government is popularly known is the Amharic version of the military’s national organization, the Coordination Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army, officially established on 28 June 1974. It was composed of 120 members who came from 40 different units of the military. Each unit sent three representatives, who were ‘democratically’ elected based on ‘their proven ability, progressive ideas, and loyalty to the welfare of the people and the country’, pledging ‘to serve the cause of the Ethiopian people’ and ‘to adhere to the aims and objectives of Ethiopia First—the motto of the Committee’. The ranks of the members ranged from privates to majors. Provisional Military Administrative Council, The Ethiopian Revolution: First Anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution (Addis Ababa, 1975), 8-9.

⁴ This brief survey