In February 14, South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma resigned amid widespread corruption allegations, ceding power to his newly elected deputy, the business tycoon and onetime anti-apartheid activist Cyril Ramaphosa. Less than 24 hours later, Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, succumbing to the protests by the ethnic Oromo and Amhara communities that have rocked the country for nearly three years.
These are two of the continent’s most strategically significant countries, and Western commentators quickly perked up to hope that the “winds of change” were once again sweeping Africa. These two resignations, unlinked and distinct as they are, hardly presage the dawn of liberal democracy across the continent. But in a region where we often reduce politics either to caricatures of inscrutable tribal hostility or to unnuanced questions of alleviating poverty, they can help us understand the evolution of Africa’s liberation parties and the complex interplay between identity politics and economic development in nations that are still struggling to define themselves.
Both the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) are liberation parties that came to power in the 1990s with great international fanfare. Each has failed to live up to its promise—although in very different ways.
South Africa has suffered from a gradual erosion of its state institutions and subsequent economic stagnation under both of Nelson Mandela’s successors at the head of the ANC, Thabo Mbeki and Zuma. The country was hit much harder by the 2008 recession than most emerging markets, but it is corruption that has had the most adverse effect. In 2016, a former government ombudsman’s report stated that corruption was so rampant in South Africa as to amount to “state capture”—when corrupt parties are powerful enough to shape national policy for their own benefit. Zuma’s frequent squabbles with the finance ministry produced a toxic investment climate that saw the retreat of foreign capital. And while ANC rule has encouraged the rise of a coterie of empowered and well-connected black businessmen—including Ramaphosa—the average black South African has seen far less material improvement. Unemployment is at nearly 30 percent, and staggering economic inequality contributes to high rates of crime, exacerbated race relations, and xenophobic attacks by blacks against African migrants accused of taking jobs.
The ANC’s continued dominance of South African politics is only puzzling if you ignore the fact that while race is not the only issue in South Africa, it still frames the country’s discourse. It has barely been a full generation since apartheid ended, which is not very long to scrub such a violent and oppressive legacy from the nation’s psyche. Pervasive support for the party that liberated more than 80 percent of the country is understandable, especially when the majority of blacks are still impoverished compared to their white compatriots.
Whereas Mandela’s ANC came to power peacefully, eschewing the radicalism of its early years, the EPRDF entered Addis Ababa on the back of tanks in 1991, ousting the genocidal Marxist Mengistu Haile Mariam. And whereas the ANC has struggled to overcome the legacy of the old regime, the EPRDF, under first Meles Zenawi and then Desalegn, has eliminated almost all vestiges of Mengistu’s dictatorship with years of amazing economic performance. By scrapping central planning, modernizing agriculture, and attracting foreign investment, Ethiopia has boomed. In Addis Ababa, a modern light rail glides past the abandoned parade grounds where residents once listened to Mengistu lecture on scientific socialism. Ethiopia was the world’s third-fastest growing economy from 2000 to 2016—outpacing India. Economic development has been uneven across Ethiopia’s 100 million people, of course, but the macroeconomic outlook for the country is bright.
The EPRDF’s problems lie not in economics, but in a state model based on the contradictory ideas of development autocracy and ethnic federalism. The EPRDF is dominated by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the most effective fighting force of the Ethiopian civil war. The TPLF represents the interests of the Tigrayan people, who constitute a mere 6 percent of Ethiopia’s population. The Oromo and Amhara, who together constitute 61 percent of Ethiopians, are nominally represented in the EPRDF’s governing coalition, but most Ethiopians nevertheless see the EPRDF as a Tigrayan puppet and ethnic federalism as a vacuous expression.
Ethiopia’s protests began in 2015 with Oromo anger over expansion plans for Addis Ababa that would have seen unchecked urbanization and massive non-Oromo migration into the traditional Oromo breadbasket. The Amhara joined not out of any particular affinity for the Oromo (the two groups are historically antagonistic) but out of shared animosity towards the Tigrayan-dominated regime.
Despite the intensity of the protests (which have been met with a bloody crackdown and the declaration of a state of emergency), Desalegn’s resignation appears to be little more than window dressing. He was already slated to step down this year and had never been the preferred candidate of the hardline TPLF faction (he is himself not Tigrayan, but a member of the small Wolayta tribe). His departure does not change the TPLF’s domination of the government—or the security apparatus, where real power lies. Immediately after Desalegn’s resignation, the government implemented yet another state of emergency, squashing any hopes this would be a democratic transition.
If Desalegn’s departure was about ethnic politics, Zuma’s was about corruption. Many are portraying Zuma’s resignation as a victory of the technocratic, centrist wing of the ANC over the party’s more disgraceful elements. But Ramaphosa was only narrowly elected ANC head by party delegates (rather than ordinary voters), and his opponent, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife), is a populist who enjoys large support among the party base. His immediate challenge is building a sustainable coalition within a party whose elites benefited greatly during the Zuma years—and his cabinet reshuffle made it clear he doesn’t yet have the power to sideline some of the former president’s key allies. If he can manage this, he can then turn his attention to tackling government corruption, which if cleaned up could lead to a return of foreign capital and an upgrading of South African debt (which reached junk status last fall). Ramaphosa faces other challenges, too. Land reform, education, urban decay, and growing skepticism of previous reconciliation efforts are but a few of the issues he cannot long ignore.
Ethiopia’s prospects are even dimmer. No successor to Desalegn has yet been named, and the succession is complicated by the fact that most Oromo and Amhara officials within the EPRDF are viewed with suspicion by their own communities. Even appointing a respected Oromo could trigger backlash from the Amhara, and vice versa. Any new prime minister faces the test of reconciling the demands of over 80 distinct ethnic groups while keeping the country’s development on track.
Throughout its modern history, Ethiopian governments have attempted to hold the nation’s disparate communities together through a combination of strong security forces, ill-fated development schemes, and some powerful national idea (the Solomonic dynasty stretching back to the 13th century under emperors like Haile Selassie or an Ethiopian vanguard to spread Marxism-Leninism across Africa under Mengistu). The EPRDF has eschewed ideology in favor of maximizing economic growth, offering little more than a thinly veiled neoliberalism administered by security officials who publicly extol the virtues of ethnic pluralism while brutally suppressing the grievances of all but a slim minority. If Ethiopia’s rising tide has lifted all boats, it hasn’t negated the importance of identity in politics—just as the industrial revolution didn’t temper nationalist fervor in Europe (quite the contrary).
Complex and messy questions of history, culture, religion, and language are as integral to politics in Africa as they are everywhere else. It isn’t unreasonable that the ANC should remain popular despite its poor leadership, while the EPRDF, despite the impressive development it’s shepherded along, suffers a crisis of legitimacy. We should be hesitant then to put too much faith in market-centric approaches championed by international economists as one-size-fits-all solutions to Africa’s problems. Sound economic policy matters, but even in the ostensibly posthistorical West, competing visions of identity and nationhood pose a challenge to the technocratic consensus. These dynamics are global, and we will have to look beyond GDP figures as we judge new leaders in Pretoria and Addis Ababa.
James H. Barnett is a Public Interest fellow in Washington, D.C.
