Dispatch from Addis Ababa

The progress Ethiopia has made in poverty and health indicators has been nothing less than extraordinary. Extreme poverty was halved from 61 percent to 31 percent between 1995 and 2011. Under-five mortality was reduced from 204 cases per 1,000 live births in 1990 to just 69 per 1,000 births in 2012. The agricultural sector is being modernized, and there are signs that Ethiopia may become a global manufacturing hub, too. From a nation whose famine nearly 30 years ago galvanized a worldwide outpouring of compassion and assistance, Ethiopia is now a prime example of the Africa that is on the move.

The proof is everywhere you look. Addis Ababa is one great construction site, with concrete dust clouding the air, cranes piercing the sky, half-built apartment blocks everywhere – long staves of eucalyptus forming their scaffolding (I’d never seen that before) – and the trench for a light-rail system gashing through the city. It reminded me of south-east Asia 20 years ago, when older patterns and forms of city life were being transformed at breakneck speed into something more modern.

I’m all for modernity. But for Ethiopia’s critics – and many of its admirers, too – there is a darker side to the boom. It includes tight restrictions on civil society organizations, especially if they get more than 10 percent of their funding from overseas, and a propensity to harass and even jail journalists who cross the government, a situation that has earned Ethiopia the opprobrium of highly-respected bodies such as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

I’ll confess to a personal interest. I’m a former journalist, and place a high value on freedom of expression. As I said from the floor at the African Media Leaders Forum held last week in Addis Ababa, “The right to a free press isn’t a northern right or a western right. It’s a human right – one which recognizes that we’re all endowed with the same potential, and deserve to live lives with equal dignity just because of who we are, not because of where we were born.”

But there’s more to the case for a vigorous civil society and a free press. At the heart of any national development process has to be the sense that it is built to last. In the long-run, I think, successful societies are those that are open to questioning, scrutiny and accountability from within, so that policies are constantly refined in the light of what works and what doesn’t.

That is where a free press and a vigorous civil society come in. Checks to keep governmental institutions honest are essential to the wellbeing of nations, regardless of their wealth. But they are particularly vital at times of rapid change; they help ensure that economic transformation is grounded in popular consent, the one way to ensure that it will last.

It’s because we value the role of civil society in making national development sustainable that ONE is proud to sponsor The ONE Africa Award, generously funded by our Board member Howard Buffett, which each year goes to an outstandingAfrican civil society organization. (You can read about this year’s winner here and here.)

At the ceremony awarding this year’s prize, Bono gave a terrific speech on the vital role that information and data can play in empowering civil society. He made the case  that clamping down on journalism is not just wrong in and of itself, but that it is impossible to roll back the tide of the information revolution. “I would encourage this government, which has done such incredible work on human development,” he said, “to surf these waves. Not to fear journalism, but to encourage it.”

Bono told the audience that he would be “respectfully raising” these issues when he met with Ethiopia’s leaders, and without breaching the terms of private meetings, I can attest that he certainly did, including in his meeting with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. More than half of it was taken up with a robust discussion of the importance of freedom of expression to a development strategy.

So what were my impressions of Ethiopian views on these issues? I’d make two general observations.

First, Ethiopians live in a rough neighborhood. To the northeast, Eritrea is a hostile nation from which refugees flee in droves and which fought a bitter war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s. Somalia remains unstable and its militants have shown themselves capable of taking their fight outside its borders. (The attack in September by al-Shabab on the Westgate mall in Nairobi plainly shook Ethiopia.) Sudan and South Sudan continue to be at loggerheads, while even Kenya, the region’s bastion of economic modernization, has seen its politics turn dangerous. Ethiopians have their own bitter memories – I visited the very moving Red Terror Martyrs Museum, detailing the horrors of the 1970s – which surely leads them to value stability and security.

In those circumstances, it is not surprising if the sheer unpredictable messiness of a free press and civil society provokes a certain suspicion. But I was encouraged – a second observation – by the sense I kept picking up that officials were particularly interested in the paths to development of South Korea and Taiwan.

That’s significant. When leaders in the developing world hold up “Asia” as a model, it’s easy to think that they mean China – a place of highly successful (so far) top down, state-directed policies, tight control of political and human rights, and little space for a free media or independent civil society.

But South Korea and Taiwan are not China. They are nations that went through a phase of autocratic control before taking a conscious decision to liberalize and encourage political and civic pluralism. Since then, they have made a step change in their economic profile, becoming centers of global innovation and creativity, boasting a noisy, active civil society, with free expression at its heart. If you think that combination of freedom and economic success is a coincidence – I don’t.

Countries have to figure out their path to development for themselves. No two situations are alike. Commentators need to put predetermined views to one side. Many Africans are understandably tired of being lectured from afar. Civil society will only take root if it is sustained by local support and interest. All this is true.

But it is also true – and has been true all over the world, for decades – that brave civil society activists and journalists often seek and deserve support from outside. The essential role of a free press, a free flow of information, and a free civil society in ensuring long-term national success is well-established. The Asian models that Ethiopians seem to be watching prove it. South Korea and Taiwan are about more than world-beating brands like Samsung and Acer; they’re also typified by global cultural memes like Gangnam Style, or the brilliant, hilarious, short animations of Taipei’s Next Media. There aren’t Ethiopian equivalents of such phenomena, yet. Don’t bet there never will be.

Sourced here:  http://www.one.org/international/blog/dispatch-from-addis-ababa/