There We Go Again!

It does not take much to send the headless and herd-like opposition to run with what it wants to hear. The big news for the New Year is, “OLF drops secession, embraces Ethiopian unity.” It could be the media agents were too eager to give us a scoop without checking its veracity or who might be dispensing it this time. The obvious question is three-fold: Did the Oromo Liberation Front [OLF] drop secession? Did it embrace unity? And what did it mean by unity? So far, the evidence is a 1-page communiqué by OLF National Council located in the state of Maryland [USA] and an ESAT interview with OLF defector General Hailu Gonfa residing [would you believe this] in Eritrea!

We may be back to a repeat of the flopped 2006 Alliance for Freedom and Democracy [AFD] initiated and promoted by the government of Eritrea and by Ethiopian Review. OLF spokesperson, Dr. Beyan Asoba, at the time called AFD “our hope” which in reality turned out to be no more than a hopeless point of dispute and distrust.

The Achilles heel for the opposition continues to be a piece-meal approach to complex issues. Each seems concerned about its own little agenda in disregard for the big picture and its synergistic value.

Three things have to be considered if one were to make sense of today’s  “big news.” First, none of the major Oromo websites [Gadaa.com, O-Pride.com, Oromoliberationfront.org] offered an explanation for or against the news at the time of our writing this post. Second, this just goes to show why Oromo leadership continues to be clueless about what it wants and hence is preyed on by Meles and Isaias [who we have contended are two-faces of the same coin]. In fact, we would go as far as making the statement that Oromo leaders are working against the interests of the Oromo! Imagine, if you will, a brief story of student Gamachis. Gamachis graduated from high school in Oromiyya region and came to Addis Ababa for his university education. Because Meles’s language policy was sold to Oromo leaders as establishing their identity Gamachis’s education was in English and in Latin alphabet. Nothing wrong so far. The problem is that Gamachis is unable to converse in or read/write in Amharic. You could say that is no big deal and you may well be right. But think again the implications of your judgment. Gamachis is now in university with students who hail from different regions and in an environment that will impact his future in a globalized world where to manage differences and get across civilly one’s own ideas is of paramount importance. Instead he finds himself locked up with Oromo students only, suspicious of others and wasting the opportunity to broaden his worldview. In other words, a young man with so many possibilities ends up being a victim of a policy that locks him up both physically and in his mental development. 

The third consideration about today’s “big news” is a tactical one. There is an Oromo group that is supported by Eritrean government [similar to Ginbot 7] and whose goal is to remove the government in Ethiopia by force and later negotiate power-sharing; the irony that the Eritrean government is not democratic and the partnership seeks to establish democracy is not lost on any one]! Another Oromo group wants to work within a federal frame with the assurance that ethnic identity for each is kept sacrosanct [the Seye group]. Finally, an Oromo group that will not recognize the present Ethiopia and whose goal is to either replace, respectively, Abyssinia and the Amharic language with Oromiyya and Afan Oromo or declare a nation similar to Somalia, Kenya, and Eritrea! 

Questions worth asking are as follows: Could the “big news” be a ruse by the combined forces of OLF? Could it be the recent coming together through democratic election of opposition groups in our homeland is worrying the Eritrean government? Why was it that a group supposedly opposed to the government in Eritrea met in Ethiopia just last month? Why did an Eritrean speaker use an Oromo proverb in Afan Oromo on one of those moveable inter-opposition conferences? Why is Dr. Bereket Habteselassie so eager to see Ethiopia and Eritrea come together before he died? Is it not interesting that the new developments all occurred before the year 2011 expired?