The theory and practice of Meles Zenawi: A response to Alex de Waal

Abstract

In a recent review of Meles Zenawi's policies, and ‘the transformational paradigm on which they were based’, Alex de Waal concludes that ‘Meles was a truly original thinker’.1 For others, the late Prime Minister was simply ‘a superb purveyor of borrowed ideas, not a generator’.2 We will leave this debate to the historians. de Waal's article is a tribute to the late Ethiopian Prime Minister and is based on private discussions. This response suggests that it is time to open a debate about Meles's theory and even more his practice, with the benefit of hindsight and from wider sources. There are two entirely valid starting points to Meles's thought. First, that ‘Ethiopia lacked any comparative advantage’ and that therefore the economy was ‘dominated by patronage and rent seeking’. Second, that both the ‘“predatory state” of Africa's first post-colonial decades’, or simply ‘allowing the market to rule’ (the ‘Washington consensus’) were ‘dead ends’. Given this, he argued that only a ‘strong’ and ‘activist’ state, independent of the private sector, could ‘unlock’ development by taking on two principal missions. First, to centralize ‘state rents’ and ‘allocate them in a productive manner’ for long-term development goals. Second, ‘to guide’ the private sector away from its natural tendency to concentrate on ‘rent-seeking activities’ and redirect it to ‘value creation’.3 Meles also added one condition: ‘building a consensus on the rules of the political game’.4 This included ‘the hegemony of developmental discourse, in the Gramscian sense that it is an internalized set of assumptions, not an imposed order’.5