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Ethiopia Civil Service
Upon assuming power in 1974, the Derg decided to undertake
extensive reforms of the central administration. Rather than
engage in immediate, wholesale reorganization, the Derg
concentrated on replacing career bureaucrats in the key
ministries of interior, community development, and justice.
If the Derg had purged the upper echelons of the entire
civil service after 1974, there would have been insufficient
numbers of educated, skilled, and experienced managers to
conduct the normal affairs of government.
In general, the Derg allowed most bureaucrats who had
served the emperor to remain at their posts and appointed
army officers to monitor their activities in every ministry.
At the same time, the Derg attempted to recruit into the
civil service former high school and college students who
were then serving in the zemecha. This group tended to be
committed to revolutionary change, but it often lacked the
bureaucratic skills to achieve this goal. Moreover, although
the campaigners generally favored the revolution, many
opposed military rule, and once in positions of authority
they undermined rather than promoted the regime's goals.
Eventually, the Derg required all civil servants and
political appointees to undergo reeducation to acquire the
proper socialist orientation. Many civil servants, as well
as military personnel, traveled to the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe, and Cuba for ideological training. After the
establishment in 1976 of the Yekatit '66 Ideological School
and after the creation of COPWE in 1979, hundreds more could
be taught Marxist-Leninist doctrine inside Ethiopia. Some
became party cadres and served in various parts of the
country to encourage and monitor the political education and
economic productivity of both government agencies and the
citizenry at large.
In the early days of the revolution, the central
bureaucracy was characterized by constant bickering among
the various ministries and a general lack of
interministerial coordination. This situation forced the
Derg to create the Ministry of National Resource Development
in 1975 to promote agricultural development as a possible
solution to interministerial coordination problems and to
address the problem of low productivity within society at
large. By 1976 this strategy had failed, and the functions
of the Ministry of National Resource Development were
distributed among several ministries and parastatal bodies.
The creation of the Central Planning Supreme Council in 1978
represented a more concerted attempt to coordinate
bureaucratic participation in development. This strategy
worked for a brief time, but by the late 1980s bureaucratic
inefficiency had returned.
Starting in 1978, the Mengistu regime systematically
attempted to enhance its ability to control the general
population, and to a certain extent it used the civil
service for this purpose. The state bureaucracy expanded
enormously in the first decade of the revolution, and
control by the military deepened and expanded in the
process. This bureaucratic expansion increased the coercive
capacity of the state and laid the groundwork for the
establishment of the all-embracing vanguard party. After the
creation of the WPE in 1984, the regime established a wide
array of government institutions that radiated from the
center out to the regional and local levels. Leadership
positions in these new institutions were used as patronage
by the regime to reward loyal supporters or to co-opt
potential adversaries in the military. Although patronage
had been employed by Haile Selassie, it was different under
the Mengistu regime in that it was not rooted in the
traditional social order but rather in the spoils accruing
to a transitional state that controlled access to wealth and
power.
The inauguration of the WPE resulted in a blurring of the
lines between party and state. As noted previously, party
operatives tended to interject themselves freely into the
areas of administration and government policy. For example,
party cadres had important political and intelligencegathering roles in the workplace. The Working People's
Control Committees (WPCCs), created in 1981, had come to
serve as a somewhat threatening "watchdog" over productive
activities. WPCCs were supposed to be involved in the
implementation, supervision, and follow-up of government
policies, regulations, and directives. WPCCs also could
audit the accounts of any government institution, mass
organization, or private individual. By 1984 the regime was
crediting WPCCs with having uncovered numerous incidents of
fraud, corruption, waste, and counterrevolution. For all its
authoritarianism, the Haile Selassie regime was never able
to achieve such tight surveillance. The Derg's capacity in
this area was an indication of the effectiveness of the
training provided by security advisers from the Soviet Union
and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) (see
Foreign Military Assistance, ch. 5).
Although it was difficult to calculate its actual size, the
central bureaucracy evidently grew tremendously after the
revolution. The dimensions of this growth can be deduced
from an analysis of consumption expenditures, which include
wages and salaries. Figures available in late 1989 indicated
that between 1974 and 1980 such expenditure grew from about
5 billion birr (for value of the
birr
--see Glossary) to
almost 8 billion birr, an increase of 60 percent. Central
administration and defense accounted for about 80 percent of
the 1980 figures. The growth of the public bureaucracy, even
when the party bureaucracy was excluded, represented a
tremendous drain on the resources available for development.
Moreover, it appeared that if the regional reforms announced
in 1987 were to be implemented fully, the civil service
would have to expand even further.
Data as of 1991
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