EPRDF wins every election because there is no real opposition in Ethiopia

Tigrai Online, May 26, 2015

EPRDF the ruling party in Ethiopia wins every election because there is no real opposition in the country

The current Ethiopian ruling party the EPRDF keep winning every election in the country most outsiders don’t understand the reason behind the overwhelming success of the EPRDF.  Ethiopia has had four elections before the current one which was on Sunday May 24, 2015.  Every election year the EPRDF won in a landslide while the opposition parties couldn’t even secure a few parliamentary seats. In the 2010 general election between hundreds of candidates from ten or eleven opposition parties run for an office, they only won one seat the rest 546 out of 547 seats were won by the EPRDF.

Some of the Ethiopian elections were observed by international observers. Even though, every election year the Ethiopian opposition parties claimed the ruling party rigged the elections, International observers didn’t find it to be factual.

When you hear a political party winning an election by 99%, it sounds unbelievable even credulous, but it is not. The elections in Ethiopia are not massively rigged like the election we see in other countries. Then question is how is the ruling Ethiopian party winning every election in an overwhelming way?

The fundamental reasons why the EPRDF is successful

Ethiopians never experienced a real election before the EPRDF came to power. Ethiopia was ruled by absolute monarchy for thousands of years. After the last Ethiopian king was removed in a military coup d'etat the replacement was a hybrid of fascist and communist military junta. In the reign of the king and the time of the military government Ethiopians suffered from gridding poverty, diseases, literacy and wars. The glorious Ethiopian people were a laughing stock of the world including their fellow Africans. The recent past Ethiopian leaders love to boast about the shining history of the Axumite Kingdom and the uninterrupted more than 3000 thousand years of splendid history, but they fail to achieve a fraction of that in their time. Ethiopians were reduced to waiting for handouts from western countries.

Then come the EPRDF backed by the most powerful Tigrai Peoples Liberation Front – TPLF, The EPRDF is a coalition of ethnic based political parties. The EPRDF brought a radical change in Ethiopia by reorganizing the country into regional states based on dominant ethnic groups in the region under a federal system. EPRDF also decentralized power from the central government to the regional states. These two changes in the political system empowered local people and partially answered the nationalist questions of many ethnic groups without going to resort to military conflict. Every ethnic group in Ethiopia was allowed to use, develop and practice it’s own language, culture, tradition and religion. The Ethiopian people were allowed to tell their own history by themselves in their own perspective.  For years the Ethiopian people were forced to follow a fake one language, one history, one ethnic and one religion story line and the story was not even based on the real deal it was a based in lie.

After stabilizing Ethiopia EPRDF started massive transformation programs to fight the chronic poverty that haunted Ethiopia for centuries. It built thousands of schools, millions of kilometers of roads, hundreds of universities, hospitals, factories, hydro electric dams, electric power generating wind farms, geothermal power stations, irrigation systems and countless public works projects.

The EPRDF government reduced the military budget to reasonable levels and used the money for development. Unlike the previous military junta spending every penny to buy weapons and use it against it’s own people and neighboring countries, the EPRDF used negotiation and diplomacy to avoid conflict. The fake military bravado on an empty stomach didn’t have any place in the new Ethiopia. If there were any need to use force they use military science to neutralize the enemy and they did it very effectively. EPRDF set an agenda of peace based on a mutual respect and prosperity in the Horn of Africa. All of the countries in the Horn of Africa welcomed the peaceful policy of the EPRDF. Ethiopia was very powerful country in the region, although it wasn’t feared, it was respected. Ethiopia was respected enough to be chosen by both North and South Sudanese governments to keep the peace between the two countries.

EPRDF saved Ethiopian from collapsing and certain disintegration using resourcefulness and wisdom. Over the past 24 years since the EPRDF assumed power they have achieved tremendous victory against poverty. Millions of people are out of abject poverty because of the government used the right policies. We don’t have the time or the space to list all of the accomplishments of the EPRDF, so we mentioned few to show why the Ethiopian people keep electing EPRDF.

What did the Ethiopian opposition achieve in the past 24 years?

Let us start by asking is there a real opposition which is dedicated to the Ethiopian people and working to bring  tangible change in Ethiopia? The answer is a resounding NO.

There is no real political opposition party in Ethiopia. What we have in Ethiopia is angry people left over from the previous governments. Resentful people who are upset because they are not or their ethnic group is not running every aspect of Ethiopian affairs. Some groups are made up of disgruntled former regime military officers who lost their jobs trying to bring back the old regime.

The above mentioned groups pretty much make up the Ethiopian opposition. What all the groups have in common is they are extremely mad at the TPLF for demolishing the rotten fascist regime and they are angry at the EPRDF for implementing a new political system in Ethiopia.

These collections of angry people call themselves the opposition without clear political agenda.  They don’t have any policy for land, education, health, economic, foreign, military, and developmental policy.

Every election year they repeat themselves pointing out what is wrong with EPRDF, but the Ethiopian people are not blind they can see what it wrong with EPRDF. What they need is for the opposition to come up with alternative policy and fix what EPRDF is not doing right. Unfortunately those who call themselves opposition are not capable of delivering such mature political solution, because their nature doesn’t allow them to do so. Their motivation to become an opposition is not to bring choice to the Ethiopian people. They didn’t get involved in politics to point out the weaknesses of the ruling party and come up with superior and better alternative to that. These people are in politics because they are angry at the TPLF and their whole political passion revolves on spreading hate.

That is the primary reason the Ethiopian opposition if we can call them that, can’t and will not bring change to Ethiopia. When one is blinded by hate, it will be very hard for them to come up with a bright answer to any problem, instead they become the problem.

So, the biggest accomplishment of the Ethiopian opposition is becoming destruction to the EPRDF which is working hard to change the Ethiopian society for the better.

The Ethiopian people are not lucky enough to have a strong, honest, and dedicated opposition party in Ethiopia. For now we are stuck with those clowns pretending to be politicians, journalists and bloggers, but in reality they are hate mongers disguised as opposition parties and political activists.

The most amazing thing is, the Ethiopian people can see through these wolfs in a sheep’s skin and they don’t want anything to do with them. That is why they reject them every election year.

A message to the EPRDF party:

Compared to the past regimes and the useless current opposition, you are doing very good job, but the Ethiopian people are not electing you because you are the ultimate political saviors of Ethiopia. You are not. EPRDF or it’s system of politics is not perfect not even close. Don’t fool yourselves that you will be elected every election year and you will rule Ethiopia forever. You will not.

EPRDF need to clean the rampant corruption, bribery, nepotism, and luck of justice in the grass roots of Ethiopia. EPRDF should stop being so secretive about everything. There should be open and transparent discussions and debate when it comes to matters of national interest. For example the Algiers agreement should be declared null and void without any ambiguity since the Eritrean government had broken the main two pillars of the document. 1, Eritrea invaded the demilitarized zone. 2. Eritrea forcefully deported the European ceasefire observers.

We know for sure, 100 million Ethiopians will not have those nonsense groups as opposition parties for a long time. Soon, somehow there will be a powerful opposition party as good as EPRDF or even better in Ethiopia, because Ethiopians deserve the best.

Finally the Ethiopian people should be congratulated for having a peaceful, free and fair election under the circumstances.