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Meles Zenawi Q and A |
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 August
9-10,2008
- Hunger is a political issue in Ethiopia. Famine helped
bring down the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1974 and the
1984-5 famine, in which one million people died, fatally undermined
the Derg regime of Haile Miriam Mengistu, who was eventually overthrown
in 1991. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was leader of the rebel movement
that toppled Mengistu. He spoke to TIME's Africa bureau chief Alex
Perry about Ethiopia's latest food emergency and the value of aid
at his offices in Addis Ababa.
TIME: There has been some dispute over how big this emergency
is. What is your assessment?
Meles: We have pockets of severe malnutrition in some districts in
the south and an emergency situation in the Somali region. It's not
small to those who are suffering, but it is a manageable problem.
Why the dispute with Unicef [which announced 6 million people at risk
and 125,000 children with severe acute malnutrition, a figure it revised
to 4.6 million and 75,000 after the government protested] over the
scale of the problem?
Because their assessment was patently false. I do not think there
was ill intention on their part. But every country is competing for
emergency resources, and the more gruesome the picture [you present],
the better chance you have of receiving a large share of those resources.
What's your view of emergency aid?
It's a mixed bag. When you have an emergency, there is the urge to
do whatever it takes to see people get assistance. [But that can mean]the
name of the game is [to] include a bit of hyperbole, and that can
convey the message that the situation is hopeless when in fact it
is not, and that might do some lasting damage, given the fact that
all investors take their information and make their assessments on
the basis of the 24-hour news cycle. Famine has wreaked havoc in Ethiopia
for so long , it would be stupid not to be sensitive to the risk of
such things occurring. But there has not been a famine on our watch
- emergencies, but no famines.
SF Switzerland just pulled out of the Somali region, saying the [Ethiopian]
security services there [who are fighting an ethnic Somali insurgency]
were placing too many restrictions on it. Are you placing security
and politics above humanitarian concerns in that area?
That's not true. Most of the humanitarian agencies are operating there.
Only those who find it difficult to distinguish between political
interference and humanitarian assistance are restricted. I can give
my assurance that the Ogaden is receiving the same level of care as
other affected parts of the country.
Do you think donors and receiving governments strike the
right balance between food aid and development aid?
Some humanitarian assistance is clearly required and we very much
welcome it. But clearly a large percentage of this goes through all
sorts of NGOs, and I am not sure whether the money is being spent
in a manner that adequately promotes development. There are excellent
NGOs, good ones, mediocre ones and good for nothing ones. [Then again],
development is not going to happen on the basis of external assistance.
[A lack of foreign assistance] does not mean that development has
to be abandoned.
What about the idea that assistance undermines enterprise
and self-reliance?
An expression of human solidarity between the rich and the poor should
not automatically be demeaning to the beneficiaries. There has been
a transformation of Western thinking [on that score]. [Most Western
countries] no longer believe that aid implies the unfortunate are
in that position because they are inadequate, that Africans have brought
this on themselves - although that has not been completely eliminated.
Some people think African states cannot be trusted with the cookie
jar.
But there are absolutely good NGOs who have this feeling of human
solidarity and who also recognize that their work can only be supplementary
to the government.
What efforts are you making to reform agriculture?
It's primarily focused on the commercialization of small scale farms
so that they supply the market rather than just the farmers' own consumption:
improving seed varieties, irrigation, the whole gamut of agrarian
reform and transformation, and increasing private investment in more
large scale operations. We promote agriculturally-led industrialization.
Farmers grow crops like coffee and sesame, and that strategy is reflected
in our exports, which have gone up 25% for each of the last five years.
Incomes in rural areas have improved very dramatically; we have double
digit agricultural growth. That's still not enough to get us out of
the hole, however. So we have a safety net program, which is very
similar to the social welfare programs in the US. We cannot afford
it ourselves as yet, and it is not funded by our own resources, but
I am not particularly ashamed or worried about that. I suspect we
will always have pockets of hunger.
The big question is whether we have enough in our own economy to be
able to finance the safety net program. We have not reached that stage
yet. |
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