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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.
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