State Feudalism

If decades after decades farmers’ livelihoods are only marginally improving (except when the government counts all the trees in your neighbourhood and multiplies it by some money value to make you a millionaire), if through the course of time a country’s economy is still dependent on primitive agriculture, and if all land is still in the hands of the few (or the government, as is the case in Ethiopia), then what you have is feudalism.
 The Addis Abbaba-Oromia integrated master plan could be one example to highlight that.
 First of, though, it might have been a document that suffered from poor publicization and community involvement. That, too, may have given an opportunity for some who were waiting for good opportunities to initiate some kind of political and ethnic agenda. But what it eventually showed was that, if the government is getting the lesson, there are enough people with the fervour that revolution requires, if and when things get to that someday. And land is going to be pivotal to that.
 In what may be complicated circumstances, the Oromos stood up to it and enjoyed some victory, at the expense of scores of lives. That should be a reminder about what people feel of the overall development policy and practise promoted by the government and the general sense of lack of freedom in the country.
 Revision of land and economic development policies may be in order, as well as improving the political liberties of the citizens.
 The land issue should not be a simplistic privatization vs. state ownership. Such arguments are promoted by people with a power agenda on their minds. An outright privatization could lead to a catastrophe in rural Ethiopia, but that could also lead to a disruption of the status quo, which could fulfil the dreams of some people to seize power.
 From observation of ongoing practices, though, one might ask how much compensation is right for a farming household, when the government wants to give away “their” land for a millionaire who wants to build a factory or a commercial farm? Collectively, what benefit should the community be able to extract from investments taking place in their respective areas? 
 This is a thorny issue when the government is compensating a household at 10 Br per square metre and leases their land for 10,000 Br per square metre. Who makes the government so bossy that it got to make a thousand or 10,000 times more money than what it deemed is enough for the relocated farmer — even if the government is going to get that money over the course of some decades.
 Effectively, the occupants of land are simply watching it for the government until it sells it for a profit.
 What benefit should local communities get from national parks in their areas so that they will not drive their livestock in for grazing and they will not farm on some of the land reserved for wild animals the country counts as treasure?
 There was a few months ago a shoot out between some people among the Hammer in the Southern Regional State and the police. It all started with the death of an animal and the death of a human in different circumstances and different places but around the same time.
 Ethiopia has strict laws to protect wild animals, and a Hammer man who killed one was immediately sentenced and jailed. Before that happened, however, someone else, a local police officer, whom people said was Hammer man himself, according to the rumours at the time, was said to have killed a Hammer man and the case was still dragging in the investigation stage.
 For the tribal community that only meant one thing — the government treated animals better than it did humans. Their strongest men then went out with their guns and took measures, which led to a lot of effort to cool down.
 This is not about an angry confrontation, but rather a demand for fair treatment for the coherent implementation of policies. They did not demand to be intellectually convinced how the two circumstances were different. They wanted delivery.
 That some large investor such as Sheik Mohammed’s All Star or the Indian Karuturi are building schools, health centres and roads may not be enough for a community that has lived centuries without them and without demanding those services. It is all about ownership first and foremost, whether or not the local communities used those huge swathes of land for any kind of purpose.
 The government’s attitude is, “land belongs to the government, so forget about ownership.” And in Ethiopia, the people have never owned land in their history. That could be among the fundamental reason why they are not motivated to produce more, as they always depend on somebody’s land, somebody’s seeds and somebody’s fertilizer, all coming at a cost, and all three forever remaining in short supply, as if to maintain the dependency status of the majority. Some peasants in past years have been known to have lost their lands for political reasons.
 A while ago some kind of land certification was launched to assure farmers that they are owners of their plots of land. It is not clear how that has progressed, but it would not be enough. The majority of Ethiopia’s farmers are small holders, and they are not allowed access to extra lands which the government makes available for foreign investors. Because of that, shortage of land remains one reason for crimes such as homicide in rural areas. As the government has repeated attested, Ethiopia has ample arable land. So far, it has not wanted to make it available to the people in a convenient way.

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