The outgoing Caretaker Administration of Addis Abeba has its finance department working on a budget for the next fiscal year, a practice quite normal when looked at on the surface. A closer examination, however, reveals that the amount of money it proposes to allocate to run the city’s business - 3.8 billion Br - is not only almost half of what the city has for the current year but also contradictory to what the Revolutionary Democrats claim they are prepared to do in order to transform the city in every aspect.

In about a week, the political scale in the city will go up. This is not because there will be contests, disputes, partisan pushing and shoving, or inter-party negotiations for power sharing. Embarrassingly, the City Council will be all red democrats, with the exception of one candidate who had managed to sneak into it running under the platform of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), now under the leadership of Ayele Chamiso.

If it was not for the ruling party’s decision to pull back one of its candidates at the last minute, owing it to allegations by voters of inappropriate conduct by this candidate, it would have been very unlikely that Ayele’s CUD would get any seat. Alas, this candidate, who gave this party a seat in the city, died nearly a month before the elections were held a few weeks ago. Nothing is clear, at the moment, about whether the national electoral board will have the appetite to have a recall election to fill this vacant seat.

What is certain is, on May 19, the Board is expected to make the all too apparent results public: 137 seats at the Addis Abeba City Council will go to the ruling EPRDF. It will be from this Council that the city will get its brand new political leadership, with a nine-person cabinet to be chaired by a mayor. The ruling party has its political architects still busy putting a final touch to refining the making of their team that they hope will bring them a legitimate electoral win come the next round of national elections.

The man they will put in charge to do this is the 50-year old Kuma Demeksa, a father of seven. He was a veteran fighter in the struggle against the Derg, and has had hands on experience in running public office while serving as president of the Oromia Regional Government, Ethiopia’s largest and highly populated regional state.

His coronation next week to the helm of Africa’s diplomatic and political capital will make him its 29th mayor in 122 years; and the seventh during the rule of his party where the city saw people from an EPRDF-fighter in the name of Mulualem Abebe, who took over the municipality from the military government (sadly assassinated later in Bahir Dar) to Brehane Deressa, a man who is fond of describing himself as a “fire fighter” mayor.

In between were city bosses such as Ali Abdo, who had left behind him no legacy worth mentioning, to the bulldozing mayor, Arkebe Oqubay, whose fingerprints are all over in today’s Addis Abeba. Never mind that he was not properly credited for his personal passion in building two and three storeys school blocs all over the city, in his drive to stop learning in two shifts. Long after he departed the city government, these constructions began to get completed recently, although it was his accidental predecessor who had the privilege of inaugurating some of them.

Addis Abeba is now a bride waiting to tie knots with a new leadership. This signals yet another occasion where the city is hardly lucky when it comes to stability in governance. In recent years in particular, it has been governed by people who constituted unelected administrations, whether they are called provisional or caretaker. In all this, however, the city suffered from a lack of continuity, both on policy and implementations, due largely to the political upheavals in the past several decades.

Regrettably, too, Addis Abeba was denied one of its rare moments when three years ago, its residents elected, through unprecedented elections, people who refused to take the role they set out to assume. It is hard to claim that the uncertainty that followed this unfortunate incident, and the mass resignations it caused, has fully been dispelled now.  

Despite an all feel good attitude from the ruling party leaders about the results of the latest elections - a result many are reluctant to accept - Kuma will govern a city with residents that have deep suspicions about his party. It is a city where there still are bitter divisions among its residents, his party being one of the most divisive elements.

Restoring confidence and helping people to focus on what is most important to their lives will certainly be his immediate challenges. But this will depend on how much he will give residents the impression that his will not be an administration that will start all over again. Indeed, the ruling party promised to have continuity as its core policy: responding to the enormous demand for housing, generating business for small and medium sized companies, creating massive employment opportunities, as well as advancing with the public infrastructure works.

These are jobs that will require a huge amount of public funds. Obviously, the size of budget the city’s Finance Bureau is currently preparing will not be sufficient to undertake all these projects. The new cabinet will very likely be compelled to revise the draft budget and seek the blessing of the Council, one of its immediate priorities. It will not be a surprising move.

Nevertheless, the toughest battle Kuma will confront could be in restoring discipline within the municipal administration at Piazza and across all the districts. Beyond building schools, condos and roads as the crucial aspects of municipal services; the public rightfully deserves to have prompt and reliable services. Without an accountable and responsive bureaucracy from kebelle to district and city levels, residents could hardly claim there is an administration that is there to serve them. Unfortunately, that is the sort of administration Kuma will have to inherit from his predecessor; a bureaucracy that believes its role is to control and exercise power over its subjects, and is extremely frightened to make decisions when necessary.

To the frustration of those particularly in businesses, it is a bureaucracy largely keen to avoid responsibilities in making decisions but with an obsession to enforce what is deemed to be due for the government. It is an administration largely comprising an army of bureaucrats who are happy to assert citizens’ obligations to the state but very hesitant to recognize their rights. It borders between an administration that could serve as a test case for incompetence and one that demonstrates a visible absence on clarity of purpose.

Reforming such bureaucratic machinery over a century old, and degenerated to a horrific degree of land grabbing in recent years, will be a daunting task.

But for a mayor willing to stand taller in order to see farther than partisan interests, ensuring a sense of rule of law and equity, where residents do not feel they are subjected to discriminations on the basis of whatever identity they may have, should be a goal attainable, albeit difficult.

This indeed takes the realization that the city belongs to all who voted for or against the ruling party, and those who did not at all. Residents of Addis Abeba deserve to see a leadership that lives up to their aspirations of representing them equally and equitably.