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The Government of “Sibsebas” and “Gemgemas” By Y. Mesfin July 18, 2003 Do you remember the old Derg days of Kebele “Sibsebas?” One of the unanswered prayers of the Ethiopian people until now is their wish to be relived from those types of agonizing and endless meetings. With a change of government in 1991, some may have hoped (rather naively) the new administration will not be typical of its communist predecessor at least in its style. (forget its content). To the horror and disappointment of the Ethiopian people however, another Marxist Leninist regime with an insatiable appetite for endless meetings and Gimgemas came to power and have brought back those dreadful “Sibsebas” again. Without any exaggeration one can say that the TPLF/EPRDF government eats “Sibsebas”, breaths “Sibsebas” and dreams “Sibsebas”. It has no life without “Sibsebas.” With no apparent result in the improvement of the standard of living of the people during the last 12 years, all federal and provincial officials west a lot of time and scarce resources indulging in meaningless communist type criticism and self-criticism. They measure success and achievement not by the improvement of social services for the people but by the number of “Sibsebas” and “Gimgemas” they held over a certain period of time. You go everywhere at government offices in working hours (specially in the provinces as this writer once observed), the main decision makers of the government are in “Sibsebas”or “Gimgemas” and no body cares for the people’s daily business. This is a curse of a nation. The TPLF/EPRDF government has never read the feelings of the Ethiopian people on this issue (as it didn’t on other many national issues) and didn’t learn a single lesson from the mistakes of its twin communist brother- “Derg”. We need not confuse here efficient and scientific performance evaluation techniques with these communist derogatory “Sibsebas”. These endless meetings of government and party officials have nothing to do with improving the standard of living of the people, and are a far cry from what are known to be performance evaluation techniques that are practiced in most civilized nations. The main propose of EPRDF’s “Sibsebas” is to ensure party loyalty among members, which quite often is producing the opposite result by creating more fractures in the ruling party. There is also a hidden motive to engage the general public in constant bickering in useless “Sibsebas” so that the focus of attention is away from what the government is doing (at least for the time being). The government also uses these “Gemegemas” to attack a certain section of the society that it presumes is sympathizing with the opposition. The recent shuffling and purging of civil servants and the apparent displacement of workers of the capital is a case in point. In its indiscriminate and vengeful act, the government has even fired medical professionals from their jobs in the name of “Gemegema”. Other countries try to attract medical people while EPRDF leaders have the will to fire them. Can Ethiopia really afford to loose one medical professional while the ratio of doctors to patients ran approximately 1 doctor to 100,000 people? The top EPRDF leaders are not bothered by the cost of these useless Gimgemas in terms of salaries and wages paid for the political cadres and lost production for the public. The poor Ethiopian people will somehow foot the bill with higher taxes and denied social services. These useless meetings are also sometimes seen as a sanctuary to run away from national problems. About 99% of the time however, the leaders of the government don’t touch the main national issues in their discussions and come out from the meetings without solving those problems. For the most part they don’t understand that all social evils in the country, like unemployment, homelessness and crime are the result of their misguided economic policies that weaken the private sector, which was supposed to be the source of job creation and wealth (the infamous land policy and random corruption charges are two examples that are discouraging local and foreign investment). The highest-ranking officials of the government have also tried to implement these types of communist “Gimgemas” in Universities with a very narrow and selfish interest of creating divisions and tension between students and instructors. While in almost all Universities of the world evaluations of instructors by students is done on paper, in a civilized manner and secret environment, the TPLF/EPRDF leaders want University students to confront their lecturers face to face and criticize them in open public meetings. While it is clear that this type of confrontational evaluation is susceptible for bias and doesn’t produce the right results in improving the learning and teaching process, the Marxist leaders of the government have no qualms in imposing this criteria on the country’s Universities. In other words they don’t have a clue as to what academic freedom is all about. Even the Derg didn’t attempt to impose such type of primitive regulations on the academic community. (Imagine 1000 freshman students packed in a whole, criticizing their Econ-101 instructor face-to-face, waiting for their turn to speak! Do you think one day and one night is enough for this terrible job to be completed? Add on top of this the other 1000 or 2000 students of higher years, for each subject, and for each instructor and you may have an idea how gruesome and wasteful the task of this “Gimgemas will be in Universities. Believe it or not, these are the kind of people who lead Ethiopia now, and only God knows how some of them earned their MBAs from foreign countries with no apparent understanding of what Universities are all about! ). One may wonder what brought about this primitive mode of thinking by EPRDF leaders, but the whole thing about these “Gimgemas” is the mixed result of Leninist mind and selfish interest to remain in power. This strategy may look attractive for a while and it may even give a false impression that it is working. It however will manifest itself in poor social services for the public, lost production for the country, poor quality of education, narrow tax base and a weak government in the long run. Everything has a price. A mind probing question that perhaps needs to be asked here is thus: will this government bring about the much desired economic development for the people of the country (as some people would like to argue) given sufficient period of time? The answer is unambiguous NO. Even if you give it 100 more years from now, this government can’t impact positive change in the improvement of life for the Ethiopian people, given the attitude and political disposition of the leaders. It has arrested itself in outdated ideology, and can never go forward. With the deliberate weakening of the private sector, the natural growth of population and the absence of synchronized planning to accommodate its enormous demands, this government is set about to fall by itself. The preoccupation of the leaders is how to stay in power at all costs. It doesn’t occur to them however, that any political party can also have a chance to stay in government by doing good things that the people of the country would like to see happening. It doesn’t come to their mind that improving the standard of living of the people is the only way to win the trust of the people. Coercion and aberration is their style of governance. Perhaps their predisposition that the people of the country have already identified them with “Eritrianism” may have made them to act erratically and find other desperate methods of staying in power. “Gimgema” is one of the wrong instruments they chose to accomplish this Machiavellian objective, but it may in fact be working against their own interest and bring the opposite result faster than they have anticipated. |