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Ethiopia The Politics of Development
During the 1980s, the government attempted to consolidate
the revolution both structurally and ideologically. When it
assumed power in 1974, the Derg pledged immediate attention
to the social injustices that had been perpetrated by the
imperial regime. In the revolution's earliest stages, the
Derg's commitment to this pledge was manifested in
particular by policies such as the nationalization of rural
and urban property. The first year and a half of the new
order could be described as a "phase of redistribution." In
the name of the "people," the "toiling masses," and the
"oppressed tillers of the soil," the government confiscated
property previously owned by the nobility and other persons
of wealth and redistributed it to peasants, tenants, and
renters.
Peasants and workers expected that the new order would
bring about a fundamental change in their circumstances, and
to a certain extent this did happen. They also expected to
be involved in determining their own fate; this, however,
did not occur. The Derg quickly declared its own preeminent
role as the vanguard of the revolution, causing concern
among urban workers that their role was being minimized.
When labor tried to become more instrumental in the changes
that were beginning to take place, the government suppressed
the workers' movement. The Derg condemned the Confederation
of Ethiopian Labor Unions (CELU) as reactionary and
disbanded it in late 1975. In its place, in 1977 the regime
created the All-Ethiopia Trade Union (AETU), a confederation
of 1,700 unions whose rank and file numbered more than
300,000 in 1984 (see
Labor Unions, ch. 3). The regime thus
co-opted the labor movement, and after 1976 the government
seemed free to devise its own social development strategy
without much input from the groups that would be most
affected.
The Derg tried to develop a social policy strategy to
enhance its power and legitimacy. To this end, the
government achieved progress in fields such as education and
health care. In 1979, for example, Ethiopia launched a
massive rural literacy campaign; the government also
established hundreds of health stations to provide minimal
health care to the citizenry. However, it proved unable to
effect dramatic improvements in the quality of life among
broad segments of the population. In part, this was because
Ethiopia had long been one of the world's poorest countries.
At the same time, two additional factors greatly affected
the performance of the Mengistu regime: the interaction of
natural catastrophes and civil unrest, and misguided
development policies such as resettlement and villagization.
Data as of 1991
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