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I am worried about the future of my Country
By Dr. Teodros Kiros (July 30, 2003) I am worried about my country, although I realize that worry is not enough. I know too that worry is not a revolutionary feeling. Indeed worry is the language of anxiety and of morality. This feeling always precedes existential crises. Determined revolutionaries do not waste their time worrying. They eliminate those who provoke worry. They kill them when they must. Surely worry is a necessary moral feeling, but it is not a necessary and sufficient condition for the resolution of a major problem. I am worried about the boarder issue, famine, the perennial food insecurity, and the menace of AIDS. I am principally worried about ethnic hostility and rivalry prominent in the recent literature of alternative parties that I have been keenly following. I have been lately consuming the manifestos of the new parties in the making, which I initially thought was a welcome sign of change and progress. I still do, but under a totally transformed moral and rational condition, which does not exist at the moment. The parties seem to be fueled by anger and resentment toward anything, which does not accommodate their prejudices. This state of mind must be seriously cleansed of internalized hate, before those who man these parties are to be looked at as genuine alternatives to what we have now. Otherwise, Ethiopia is going to enter a vicious cycle from which generations to come cannot extricate themselves. I am troubled however with the new directions that some of these parties are constructing. Some of these parties are already partioning themselves on ethnic lines, while simultaneously attacking the existing regime for crafting what I recently called “ The new Politics of Space”. This development is particularly troubling, because its invisible consequences are damaging to the country. While correctly attacking ethnicization, the parties themselves are masterfully developing a selected list of invitees for future positions from particular ethnic and language groups. Worse still is the undesirable requirement that the future power holders must attack anything Tigrean, if they are to qualify as brilliant dissenters with glamorous future in the corridors of the new Ethiopia. . The meritorious but silent intellectuals are already being overlooked long before the would be new regime is fully envisioned. Now I must ask how is this new Ethiopia different than what we have now, if it too is going to be guided by what I wish to call the politics of revenge and resentment? |