Business Daily (Nairobi)
Mammo Muchie
9 January 2008
opinion
There is a lesson that Kenya should learn from Ethiopian politics at the moment.
Ethiopia's accumulated historical memory-the good, the bad and the tasteless.
Problems unsolved or newly created ones, more often than not, can pile up to a mountain top and become additional burdens on the generations that come after previous generations.
In Ethiopia it seems the country has suffered from a syndrome that has subjected generations into an inter-generational tyranny over the ages. By the latter we mean that throughout history problems have a tendency to pile up rather than being solved.
What a generation inherits is not opportunities but compounded problems that have been left unsolved by successive generations. Unsolved problems naturally remain as problems yet to be solved being always transmitted from generation to generation throughout the ages.
Politicians seem to bring more new problems than solving old and transmitted problems from earlier generations.
For example, had Ethiopia had turned into a republic after World War II as some of the anti-fascist patriotic resistance fighters thought at the time, then the problems to solve today would have been different. Even when in 1974 a transition came from the monarchy to the military, the country moved from one problem to inherit a violent military turn.
And when in 1991 the transition to ethnic based government came, again a problem gave rise to another problem of ethnic division and the split of the country into two hostile states whose long term consequence is very hard to predict to the very existence of the country.
What clearly emerges is that those who leave and those who come- each in its own way leaves behind a hybrid combination of old and new problems for others to come to solve. That has been the pattern. There is not yet a new model of politics where such compounding of new problems on and with old problems is not recurrent.
This inter-generational tyranny is a reality that threatens to stay with us unless society and people learn to build social capital to know how to relate with each other to bring cooperative action in order to solve problems and not transmit them selfishly to the yet unborn generation to try to solve and pay for it in life, limb and resources.
Those who come to power to compound problems for this and next generations must be rejected.
Prof Muchie is Director of Development, Innovation and International Political Economy Research at Aalborg University, Denmark.
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I didn't get the idea behind this analogy. circumstances occur only when conditions are ripe for them to happen. Similarly, The solution to a crisis arises from the nature of the crisis itself. The situations in ethiopia are the cumulative effect of complex social interactions,Religieuse and ethnic diversity. No one has, Until recently, adressed them properly. The kenyan situation, on the other hand, is relatively simple and with solutions at hand.