In many ways, the EPRDF is a model party for the rest of Africa. Since reaching power more than 15 years ago, the ruling party became a kind of modern benchmark on how to remain a sovereign power and party, but at the same time satisfy the needs and requests of the ever important donor nations and organisations that provide not only a substantial chunk of the national budget, but crucial infrastructure and development work, too.

This is by no means an easy feat. Donor nations can be a fickle bunch. Development aid is very much a trend-ridden enterprise. One newly fangled aid scheme seems of absolute importance to aid organisations one year, but is not even brought up in a meeting the next. It takes a very skilled and enterprising governing party to play along with these changing concerns and in every way, the EPRDF has been successful in riding the unpredictable train.
 

How has this been achieved? Primarily, the close symbiosis between the Ruling Party and donor nations has been successful for two reasons.
 

The first, of course, is stability. Fifteen years is a long time in the donor business and that is how long the leadership in Ethiopia and the aid organisations of the West have been wining and dining each other, negotiating from one aid package to the next. How many times have Ministry staffers and UN employees crossed each other in the hallways of the ECA or the Hilton Hotel for some event or another? Too many to count probably and over the course of time (time that few other least developed countries have had the luxury to enjoy) these relationships build just by sheer habit of proximity. Projects and policies slowly build and ties eventually bind.
 

The second reason for the symbiotic success has been the Ruling Party’s willingness to play ball. It is very common knowledge that when the top leaders of the EPRDF first came out of the mountains as the nation’s new rulers, many were dyed-in-the-wool Marxists with little patience for free markets. But sensing the tide of history, the Ruling Party, led by the Prime Minister himself, has very diligently listened to and played along with the concerns (and trends) of donor nations. Concepts like democracy, transparency and globalised markets have very much become part of the EPRDF project as it presented itself to the donor world since those heady days back in 1991. For once, many Western leaders would say, sub-Saharan Africa had rulers that “got it”.
 

It can nearly go without saying that this hopeful arrangement took a serious blow after the May 2005 election and the ensuing crisis that peaked almost a year ago with gunshots and the arrest of opposition figures. To the donor powers, the Revolutionary Democrats no longer resembled the image they had projected of themselves for so long. With the severity of the crackdown, aid organisations from the West suddenly demurred. What was the best way to proceed?
 

Part of the great difficulty (and embarrassment) faced by donor nations and organisations was due to the very success of the Ruling Party in bringing the international aid agencies deep into their governing enterprise. Aid agencies, whether backed by the UN or their home governments, carry out their work with the intimate involvement of the government both on a federal and regional level (a situation that makes more independent minded aid agencies often uncomfortable.)
 

When the situation turned for the far worse, these organisations suddenly found themselves close to a Ruling Party they were no longer so sure about. This disquiet quickly turned into changes in policies; the World Bank came up with its new PBS system that funnels direct aid to the local level. The European Union temporarily closed off its aid as previously presented.
 

And, in many ways, it is at this crossroads that the EPRDF found itself on the way to Mekele, for its great party gathering. Here was a party that had for so long been the darling of the aid community, but had suddenly found itself in its less than good graces. Many observers, not only international ones, wondered how exactly the Ruling Party would proceed.
 

The answer, it seems, is a heavy helping of more of the same; or, to be more precise, to carefully ignore (erase even) the sorry events of last year and to proceed as if 2005 never happened. It is indeed a new year for the Ruling Party if there ever was one.

Government critics are already waving their hands in revulsion at the lack of any change of consciousness emanating from the Ruling Party conference, but at some level, the outcome could have been worse.
 

By continuing in the more of the same continuum, the Ruling Party, it appears, has decided to continue playing the same game it has for the last 15 years. In other words, it intends to continue its close cooperation with Western governments and, as far as it thinks it can without endangering its own survival, participate in the Western style, globalisation project.
 

How else to interpret the conference’s final statements to proceed with “good governance” and opening further of democracy? These are catch phrases (call them trends) that are very important to the donor nations right now, probably best exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative World Bank chief, who is not afraid, he claims, to turn off the aid to countries he finds guilty of “corruption”. All of a sudden, the gossip in donor hallways is that misbehaving may have its consequences.
 

If this is true, if the Wolfowitz’s of the world really mean what they say, then the EPRDF’s even nominal commitment to push through with its pledge to ‘good governance’ or democracy will have to be credible in implementation. If it is not, then there could be expensive consequences.
 

Indeed, the latest aid trend is in every way about accountability. And when the relationship between the aid organisations and the ruling government is as close as it is here in Ethiopia, once organisations are ordered to account on activities by their own overseers in Washington or Brussels, the organisations are – to say the least - uniquely placed to do so.
 

And so the good news of Mekele, albeit indirectly, is that the Ruling Party is still willing to be held in some form accountable to its friends internationally who feed on claims of democracy and transparency. The Prime Minster still wants to be in the good graces of these donor nations. And since these donor nations are allegedly more committed to results than before, the lack of anything new out of Mekele can be strangely interpreted as not necessarily as depressing as it seems.
 

Maybe last year’s parliamentary code of conduct debate was an early version of this. In the days surrounding the elections, the Ruling Party had come up with Parliamentary rules that were hardly to the satisfaction to outside observers of any kind. Responding to pressure to obey its own stated pledge to democracy, the Ruling Party turned around and hammered out deals with parliamentary opposition parties, deals that satisfied and even surprised many.

And even though the World Trade Organisation negotiations in Geneva may be in breakdown mode, the government’s continued commitment to join the WTO is another step in the same direction. Ascendance to the trade group demands certain legal upheavals locally that will modernise business practices in the country. This is the road that the Ruling Party has claimed to be on since being in power. The events surrounding 2005 were a staggering anomaly to this stated conviction, but now the government says it is back on the same road.

This may be true (and entering the WTO will be an excellent way to prove it). But only this time, the observers, local or international, are all the wiser. The Revolutionary Democrats will be expected to deliver more than ever before.