THE GREEN LEGACY OF MELES ZENAWI - PART I

Since Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, died on 20 August there has been an outpouring of opinion on his legacy.  On 21 August, Mark Tran wrote on the UK Guardian’s Global Development site, Poverty Matters blog: “Ethiopia's renaissance under Meles Zenawi tainted by authoritarianism.”  As a response I sent to the Comments section an edited version of my post below – The paradox of Meles Zenawi – where my main message was that 21 years years of Meles Zenawi has created foundations for Ethiopia to build a green renaissance. Jaz Cummins the community co-ordinator on the site replied: “Are you hopeful there is going to be a move towards this?" Here is my answer:

Three things need to happen for me to be hopeful that Ethiopia can bring about a Green Renaissance and become a global leader in the green economy:

First, Ethiopia’s new leadership can quickly reassure the country’s worried populations, neighbours and allies by “rethinking” development strategies, which Mr Meles advocated in 2009, particularly some of those envisaged in its 2011-2015 Growth and Transformation Plan. The multi-billion dollar mega dams, farms and sugar enterprises are out-of-date, they are carbon/capital/resource intensive and subject to huge hidden costs with built-in diminishing returns. Can Ethiopia have a 21st century Renaissance using so much 20th century technology and thinking? The new government could reassure everyone by creating an open forum where these ultra-high-risk investments are given a serious “rethink”. In the meantime, thanks to the positive aspects of Mr Meles’s legacy, Ethiopia is well-positioned and well-qualified to launch a series of integrated, “mega-green” projects to balance the disintegrating “mega-brown”.

Second, Ethiopia’s allies and partners – governments, donars, investors and NGOs – can play a huge role in assisting and encouraging the new leadership to consider the risks involved in some of the strategies of the GTP. It is in no one’s interest (except the arms industry) if the enemies of Ethiopia’s religion are joined by enemies of development strategies. Millions of people in and around Ethiopia who are already living on a knife-edge due to climate change could soon be permanently tipped over. The security costs of such a disruption can hardly be imagined. The outcome of Rio+20, though disappointing on some levels, holds many opportunities for Ethiopia and Africa to put forward green investment plans that could generate huge demand for green technologies, goods and services; create millions of green jobs, and deliver a invaluable peace dividend. The international community knows enough about this final frontier to help build and expand Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy.

Third, Item 24 of Africa’s Consensus Statement to Rio+20, calls on the international community “to put an international investment strategy into place to facilitate the transition towards a green economy.” This represents an opportunity for Africa and the new leaders of Ethiopia. Instead of waiting for the international community, preoccupied as it is with multiple crises, to deliver a meaningful green investment strategy on time Africa, led by Ethiopia, is in a strong position to propose a strategy of its own. Ethiopia’s current challenge is an historic opportunity to put forward green investment strategies that would appeal to other’s enlightened self-interest. Enough work has been done on Integrated River Basin Management and Biosphere Reserves (the best tools for the job) in Ethiopia for proposals to begin immediately. The tools, technologies, knowledge and skills are there. Investors are looking for stability with growth. Ethiopia can be a great re-balancer. Mr Meles once said that Africa “was a green field for investment because it is the least developed region on earth.” Ethiopia is one of Africa’s greenest fields. The challenge is to invest and keep the field green.

The Chinese government has recently seen the urgent need to build a “harmonious civilisation”. Ethiopia, the Cradle of Mankind where man’s genius for civilisation evolved, is the natural place for this to begin and succeed.

THE PARADOX OF MELES ZENAWI

This version was first published in openDemocracy on 22 August. A shorter version was published as a letter to the Financial Times 28 August.

                                                                                                                                  
He embodied the eternal paradox that is Ethiopia: a land of ‘great abundance’ where so much poverty exists; a Garden of Eden whose potential has never been fulfilled. 
                                                                                                                                

The death of Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, on 20 August raises immediate and grave concerns for security in an extremely complex, fragile and unpredictable part of the world. Ethiopia sits at the end of an arc of instability stretching from Kashmir to the Horn of Africa and is one of the world’s most dangerous flash-points. Ethiopia’s 85 million people, with millions more in surrounding countries, are at the frontline of rapid climate change - last year’s drought in the region affected 13 million people. And although Ethiopia is one of the fastest growing economies in the world on the verge of a historic Renaissance, it is also extremely vulnerable to global economic volatility. As “the voice of Africa” and a key player in “the war on terror”, Mr Meles’s death after 21 years in power comes at a critical time for Ethiopia, for Africa and the world at large.

While politics and security issues surrounding Mr Meles’s death understandably dominate the assessment of Ethiopia’s situation, it is also important to consider three other vital areas where the late prime minister had considerable national, regional and international influence: the economy, development and climate change. Whoever leads Ethiopia, the management of these three interconnected issues will determine levels of peace and stability achieved in the region. On these, Mr Meles embodied the eternal paradox that is Ethiopia: a land of ‘great abundance’ where so much poverty exists; a Garden of Eden whose potential has never been fulfilled. 

Since the June 1992 Lem (or Green) Meeting in Addis Ababa, held in conjunction with the UN’s first ‘Earth Summit’ in Brazil and only a year after he assumed responsibility for one of the most challenging countries on earth, Mr Meles championed sustainable development in Africa, fought for  Africa on climate change and was a leader in Africa’s green thinking. A major influence on US president Bill Clinton’s “New Africa”, for the past 20 years Ethiopia has played a pioneering role in environmental research, management and development, combined with historic experiments in ethnic federalism and democracy. In 2011 Ethiopia was the first African country to launch a Climate Resilient Green Economy Strategy.

Over the past two decades Mr Meles’s coalition, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Party has laid solid enough green foundations, based on commercial smallholder farming and ambitious environmental rehabilitation schemes, for Ethiopia to become a global leader in the green economy, the main theme of the UN’s Rio+20 ‘Earth Summit’ in June. Following this path, any new or reformed government in Addis Ababa stands a good chance of managing a 21^st century Green Ethiopian Renaissance that would be good for Africa and the world.

The paradox that threatens Ethiopia's current advantage resurfaced around 2003 when Mr Meles took a turn back to the 20^th century by embracing the 'China model' for development. There are many explanations for this return to the state-led model: the fallout from the 1998-2000 Ethio-Eritrea war; the slow progress of “bottom-up” green development; the 2002 drought and contraction in GDP; China’s big push into Africa, which coincided with the beginning of the biggest global economic boom in history. And like other African leaders Mr Meles often said, “Rapid and sustained growth in Africa is a matter of life and death...We have to run just to stand still.” Ethiopia, like China, also has a long history of central rule to overcome; change does not come easy in such ancient lands.

The 1980s model worked. The last 8 years have seen unprecedented advances in Ethiopia on many levels including double-digit annual economic growth with great growth prospects. Ethiopia has become “the China of Africa” with tremendous potential, poised to regain its place in the world.

But this has not been achieved without the hidden costs or externalities associated with such an outdated development model as China’s, whose “top-down” strategies Mr Meles said in 1992 were the cause of so much of Ethiopia’s suffering, hardship and senseless natural resource depletion. If the China model in China, as China’s leaders often remind us, is “unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable” these hidden costs in Ethiopia could be greatly magnified. Transforming the ecological, social and economic landscapes of the fragile Horn of Africa on the scales envisaged by Ethiopia’s 2011-2015 Growth and Transformation Plan - through a series of mega dams, farms and sugar enterprises - could result in unintended consequences on mega scales to match. 

In the 1770s Gibbon famously wrote: “Encompassed on all sides by enemies of their religion Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.” Those enemies are still there, there are more of them, they are well armed and their resources are disappearing. Depending on Ethiopia’s development path, brown or green, there is a great danger that they might be joined by enemies of Ethiopia’s growth and transformation strategies.

Whatever government emerges from the uncertainty in Ethiopia, the green route is the quickest, surest way to a balanced situation. Ethiopia’s green foundations, combined with its tremendous undeveloped natural resources and youthful population, puts this ancient land in an historic position to bring about a Green Renaissance focussed on the most fundamental issues of all for peace and security - food production and environmental management. For this challenge Ethiopians are well qualified.

In the 1960s agronomists saw Ethiopia as a paradise that could feed the whole of Africa. They thought the Awash, one of the smallest of the country’s 12 major river basins, could feed the whole of Ethiopia. The result, as in the rest of Africa, was a disaster. By 1990 most of Ethiopia’s large-scale development concentrated in the Awash Valley was failing or had failed. The planning, technologies and economics of the post-colonial brown development model were “unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable” in the very short term.

Twenty years later the tools, technologies, knowledge, skills and information networks have been sufficiently developed for Ethiopia to forge new development models and build a green economy from which we can all learn. In the wake of the successful World Economic Forum on Africa 2012 in Addis Ababa in May and the historic Rio+20 Summit in June, Ethiopia has never been in such an influential and advantageous position. It is hoped that under new leadership, with a careful balance of top-down and bottom-up management learned over the past two decades, Ethiopia’s legendary ‘great abundance’ can be fulfilled.  

In March 2009, when the third wave of the financial and economic crisis was hitting Africa and the threat of failed states loomed large, Mr Meles said that Africans would have to rethink all their development strategies and “learn to do well in a less permissive age.” The less permissive age looks likely to last for a while. Whoever leads Ethiopia in the 21^st century, this current challenge is a great opportunity to address the eternal Ethiopian paradox and redirect Mr Meles’s influence, energy and vision back to the greener, more democratic path on which he and Ethiopia embarked in 1992. If this is to be “Ethiopia’s moment”, the moment for a “rethink” of Ethiopia is now.

AFRICA, RIO+20 AND THE GREEN ROAD AHEAD

In many ways, the Rio Conference should not be interpreted as a single event that could be assessed in terms of success or failure - W.M. Adams, Green Development, 1995 - Chap 4. Sustainable development: the Rio machine

It is 7 weeks since the UN’s Rio+20 “Earth Summit” in Brazil and now that the dust kicked up by so much anger and disappointment has settled, it might be easier to see the way forward.

With so many conflicting interests and so much at stake, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon was careful to point out in his opening address on June 20 that summits were not an “end” but a “process”. This echoes the words of Maurice Strong, UN secretary-general to the first Rio summit which, today’s critics of Rio+20 forget, was also a great disappointment at the time and only became a ‘milestone’ when looking back on what was achieved after the summit through hard work, cooperation and careful negotiation.

What is clear is that the “Rio Process” must be accelerated rapidly if we are to avoid creating the perfect storm of converging crises in water, food and energy estimated to hit the planet by the time of Rio+40. There are a number of reasons why Africa can and must play a central role in this process.

Of the world’s habitable continents Africa contains the greatest underdeveloped ecological, mineral and human resources. Africa is also rising, the new growth engine with the potential to add an estimated $3 trillion to the global economy over the next decade. How Africa’s resources are developed, what Africans produce and what they consume during their rise will greatly influence the rate at which the Rio Process accelerates.

In the 20 years since the first Rio Summit, Africa has been building green foundations on the wreckage of the unsustainable, post-colonial development model. In the past 5 years these foundations, based on environmental, social and institutional reforms, have not only enabled Africa’s economies to take off but with tremendous green growth potential.

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, calls Africa “a green field for investment because it is the least developed region on earth.” With the rest of the world on unsustainable growth paths and also slowing down, Africa’s lack of high carbon, resource-intensive, ecologically degrading and socially divisive ‘brown’ development can now be Africa’s advantage.  What has been called the greatest imbalance on earth now has a pivotal role in the great rebalancing.

Africa’s “Least Developed” status combined with its green credentials and huge growth prospects makes it easier to work on the main achievements, agreements and innovations of Rio+20: the green economy, green accounting, sustainable development goals, institutional reform, private sector involvement and public-private partnerships. At the summit Africa was also the only continent speaking with one voice.

Africa’s Consensus Statement to Rio+20, the culmination of 20 years’ work but virtually ignored by non-Africans, is the document which says what Africa needs and what Africa can provide to accelerate the Rio Process. Item 24, for instance, calls on the international community, “to put an international investment strategy into place to facilitate the transition towards a green economy.” This call highlights an opportunity for Africa.

Instead of waiting for the international community, preoccupied as it is with multiple crises, to deliver a meaningful green investment strategy on time, Africa is well qualified and in a strong position to propose strategies and plans of its own that would reveal a wide range of green investment opportunities in: existing green economic success stories; greening the existing brown economy; reinventing and greening abandoned and forgotten projects; formalising and greening informal markets; redirecting brown investments towards the green economy; greening aid, and exploring green investment opportunities for the future. The Rio+20 summit has prepared the way for Africa to take the lead.

Since 1992 the tools and technologies to fulfill the aspirations of Agenda 21 in Africa have been developed. The knowledge, information and skills are there. The multi-disciplines are already active. The frameworks are taking shape. Business is ready to make it happen and governments are preparing the way. There are trillions of global dollars sitting idle looking for balance and growth. Investors are saying, “Where can I invest?” 

Critics of Rio+20 were also critical of the concurrent G20 summit in Mexico (18-19 June). Yet the G20 produced a Leaders Declaration which has similar aspirations to Rio’s outcome document - The Future We Want. In many places it uses the same language and has the same goals. Ultimately it is the same process. What is needed is for G20 economists and Rio+20 ecologists to work with global multidisciplines from public-private sectors on new systems to accelerate the journey towards a green economy. With the right understanding Africa is the place where the journey can be easier, cheaper and faster.   

If the benefits of stimulating the Rio Process in Africa are not yet clear, the costs of not doing so become clearer by the day. Despite Africa’s great promise, the world’s most challenging continent remains the world’s most vulnerable to a lengthening list of ‘hidden costs’ associated with the still-dominant brown economy, or business-as-usual, including global economic volatility, climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, inequality and insecurity. The perfect storm of converging crises is already hitting millions in Africa and threatens millions more.

If the green field of Africa is to be a sustainable engine for global growth the challenge is to keep it green. With food insecurity mounting year by year a stimulus to accelerate the Rio Process in Africa is not only essential and urgent but is in the best interests of us all. In the last 20 years Africa has come far enough on a very rocky road for the late Wangari Maathai, one of Africa’s great, green pioneers to say with confidence, “We know what to do: why don’t we do it?”