Let us not pretend surprise. The headlines blare: “Ethiopia’s flawed election shatters democratic hopes, UK urges Commonwealth oversight.” As if anyone with a historical memory expected otherwise.
The grand experiment of exporting Westminster models to fractured, multi-ethnic states has failed again. From the ruins of the Soviet Union to the dusty highlands of the Horn of Africa, we have insisted that a ballot box can cure centuries of tribal grievance and autocratic tradition. It cannot.
Ethiopia’s election was not flawed by accident; it was flawed by design. The ruling Prosperity Party, like the EPRDF before it, knows that democracy is a luxury for societies that have already settled fundamental questions of national identity. Ethiopia has not.
The Tigray war, the Oromo protests, the Amhara irredentism: these are not glitches to be fixed by foreign observers with clipboards. They are the death throes of a nineteenth-century empire pretending to be a twentieth-century nation-state. The UK’s call for Commonwealth oversight is a classic piece of liberal theatre.
It reassures the metropolitan conscience without addressing the underlying rot. The Commonwealth, that curious relic of imperial afterthought, can dispatch all the monitors it likes. They will file reports.
They will tut. They will recommend “inclusive dialogue” and “capacity building.” And the next election will be just as farcical.
For we have mistaken the ritual for the substance. The real question is not how to hold a free election in a place like Ethiopia, but whether democracy is applicable to such a place at all. It is a question too uncomfortable for the bien-pensant commentariat, so they retreat into proceduralism.
I am no apologist for strongmen. But I refuse to weep over a failed election in a country where the very concept of a loyal opposition is alien. Until Ethiopians decide they want to be a single nation rather than a collection of warring tribes, no amount of Commonwealth supervision will save them.
The democratic hopes that shattered were not Ethiopia’s. They were ours: the naive hope that our political forms are universal. They are not.
And it is time we admitted it.
