As a response to the comprehensive Oromiya-wide resistance to the Master Plan, the officials of the Federal and the State governments have, rather inconsistently and half-heartedly, indicated that the implementation of the Master Plan is now stopped. The Prime Minister, the Speaker of the Federal Parliament, the Government Spokesperson, the Oromiya State President, and the Spokesperson of the Oromiya Government have all remarked that the Master Plan is not going to be implemented without the consent of the people.
In what seems to be the production of consent, the government has now engaged in a “discussion” with the public to condemn the protests, hunt down the active protestors, and force a vow of commitment to the government’s “development plans” (which implicitly includes the Master Plan as well). In the meantime, massive arrest of protestors, even shootings and killings are still continuing. The resistance is also continuing rather sporadically.
The Command Post chaired by the Prime Minister and the Joint Counter-Terror Task Force are taking what the Prime Minister and all the officials called a “definitive measure” on the protestors. In doing so, the federal governmenthas completely rendered the State Government superfluous. The federal government didn’t, in the first place, try to seek a formal Federal Intervention Order or Emergency Declaration as per the requirements of the Constitutions,nor considered the option to use the law as a mode of disavowal of responsibility and depersonalization of power, which makes it easy targets for those considering to takeits officials to account before various international tribunals.
While all this is going on, the otherwise invisible Government of Oromiya has issued a statement that they have established a task force to define the Constitutional Special Interest of Oromiya over Addis Abeba. This has redirected attention from the Master Plan to exactly what the task force is going to do in its attempt to enunciate the content of the Special interest. This is not surprising given the fact that one of the reasons for the resistance to the Master Plan was that it overwhelms and eliminates the Special Interest, thereby violating the clause in Article 49 of the FDRE constitution. But the question in the minds of the public and all interested observers remains: just what is this special interest?
In this piece, I consider this question from a legal point of view. In so doing, I will first try to offer the context within which this ‘Special Interest’ clause of the constitution came about.
I will then examine the provisions in art 49(5) of the constitution with a view to indicating, suggestively, what exactly the content could be. I will also try to trace the Special Interest in the Context of the Master Plan that rendered it invisible and/or irrelevant. Finally, I will reflect on the fear and the tragedy of the violence in relation to Addis Abeba by linking it to its genealogical antecedents rooted in its foundational moments, the moments of inaugural violence. Here, I will make few assertions about the burden of imperial history, the curse of illegitimacy that was never overcome, the irredeemable failure of state- and nation-building that keeps bleeding a people whose wounds never healed, whose hopes have always been deferred, and whose voice is being denied expression and a hearing. Throughout this piece, I argue that the move to articulate the special interest by the Task Force, while long overdue and therefore an appropriate political gesture in the right direction, might be just another move to align the contents of the ‘special interest’ clause with the objectives of the Master Plan and legally water it down or erase it altogether.
The context
The notion of Oromiya’s ‘Special Interest’ entered the Ethiopian legal universe in 1992 through the instrumentality of the Proclamation that established National/Regional Self Governments (Proclamation No. 7/ 1992). This is the proclamation that set the blue print for what came later to be the constituent units of the Ethiopian Federation. Adopted to give effect to the decentralization that was envisaged in the Transitional Charter—and to valorize the right of ethno-national groups to self-determination—it established 14 self-governing national regions. Accordingly, Oromia became one of the 14 self-governing States. Addis Abeba, like the City of Harar, was also a region in its own right. Oromiya’s‘special interest’ over both cities was first recognized in this piece of legislation (1).In Article 3 (4), it is provided that
The special interests and political right of the Oromo over Region Thirteen [Harari] and Region Fourteen [Addis Abeba] are reserved. These Regions shall be accountable to the Central Transitional Government and the relations of these Self-Governments with the Central Transitional Government shall be prescribed in detail by a special law.
Very much like the provision in Art 49 (5) of the Constitution that came later, it envisaged a ‘special law’ (meant to clarify the relation of accountability to the Central Government), but such a law was never promulgated. It is interesting to observe that, unlike in the constitution, in this transitional period law, the Oromo has not just a “special interest” but also a political right over the two self-government regions. It is also important to observe that there is no attempt to delimit the boundary of the city. As a result, it was not clear as to where exactly the jurisdiction of the government of Addis Ababa ends and that of Oromia commences.
While it looked like a city state in a federation, Addis Abeba was also seen as a city within a larger state, i.e., Oromia. In other words, administratively, it was an enclave falling outside of Oromia while also housing the Government of Oromia as its capital. In a sense, Addis Ababa is in Oromiya, but not of Oromiya. Oromiya was a State governing from Addis Abeba without, however, governing Addis Abeba itself. While the meaning of ‘special interest’ was understood to mean much more than having a seat for the Oromiya government in the city, for the entire period of the transitional times, this remained to be the only ‘interest’ Oromiyacould obtain.
The concept of Oromiya’s special interest was thus injected into the language of public law in the country accompanying the shift away from a formerly unitary state to what was subsequently to become a ‘multinational federation’. Acutely sensitive to the rights of sub-national groups (called ‘Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’) in Ethiopia, this ‘ethno-federalization’ was a reaction, and a push back, to the goings-on in history. We can thus see its immense historical import in its potency to speak both to the past and to the future. The ‘special’ in the ‘special interest’ phrase hails not only from the mere fact of geographic location of Addis Abeba in Oromiya but also from the implicit recognition of the essentially Oromo identity of the city. Historians have routinely described the fact that, until it was violently raided and occupied by the forces of the Shoan Kingdom in the 19th century, the city was inhabited by the Oromo.
When it was ‘founded’ as the capital of the modern Ethiopian Empire in 1888, it was set as a launching pad for the campaigns of imperial conquest on the peoples of the Southern, South-Eastern, and South-Western peripheries. With a violent beginning marked by conquest and occupation of the land; raid, massacre, and displacement of the population; and transformation of the cultural and environmental terrain by the soldiers, it started as a garrison town(2).A cursory glance atwritings by William Harris(3), Alexander Bulatovich(4), and even Evelyn Waugh(5), indicates that the State operated in Addis Abeba as an occupying force of settler colonialists bent on pushing out and displacing the indigenous Oromo peoples.Because the settlers generally spoke Amharic and confessed the Ethiopian Orthodox faith and because of the disproportionate concentration of modern urban facilities in Addis Abeba, it became increasingly different culturally fromits surroundings. Consequently, it projected a cultural life that is different from that of the Oromo. The culture, identity, and language of the Oromo became the constitutive outside of the cultural life in the city. In time, the Oromo were effectively marginalized and otherized. For most of the 20th century, the Oromo, although historically the host, was forced to live like the alien and the guest in what was their own homeland. Informed by this memory and propelled by years of national liberation struggles, the politicians that negotiated the Transitional Charter (Proc. 1/1991) and made the law (Proc. 7/1992) sought to emphasize the need to acknowledge the Oromo presence in the city’s affair through the ‘special interest’. The ‘special interest’package was thus a way of making up for the artificial (created or intentionally produced) absence of the Oromo. In other words, it was a method of presenting the absent, a way of bringing back the Oromo to its own.
The law
When the constitution of FDRE was finally adopted in 1995, the ‘special interest’ clause was more or less carried over into art 49(5). To understand the full textual context of the special interest package in art 49 (5), it is important for us to reproduce the entirety of article 49 in full. Accordingly, the provision in art 49 reads as follows:
49(1) Addis Abeba shall be the capital city of the Federal State.
49(2) The residents of Addis Abeba shall have a full measure of self-government. Particulars shall be determined by law.
49(3) The Administration of Addis Abeba shall be responsible for the Federal Government.
49 (4) Residents of Addis Abeba shall in accordance with the provisions of this constitution, be represented in the House of Peoples’ Representatives.
49(5) The special Interest of the State of Oromiya in Addis Abeba, regarding the provision of social services or the utilization of natural resources and other similar matters, as well as joint administrative matters arising from the location of Addis Abeba within the State of Oromia, shall be respected. Particulars shall be determined by law.
Space won’t allow a full length analysis of the first four sub-articles. Consequently, I will concentrate only on art 49(5) in this piece. Owing to the unclarity of the clause in art 49 (5), coupled with the lack, to date, of the law constitutionally envisaged to enunciate the content, it became imperative for people to ask “just what is the ‘special interest’?” In this section, we make a close reading of the provision to explore what could be in the package.
Let me make a couple of preliminary points before I go into the content of the ‘special interests.’ First off, it is important to underscore that Addis Abeba is a Federal capital city within a State.In this it is more like Berne (of Switzerland) or Ottawa (of Canada)[7]. Once that is admitted, i.e., that Addis Abeba is a city in Oromiya, one should have an explicit discussion and mutual understanding about what it means to be a federal capital because that automatically indicates that the Federal Government doesn’t have a ‘natural’ right to be in the city. That discussion didn’t happen. That is a historical blunder about a city mired in several historical misdeeds and mistakes. That it was made accountable solely to the Federal Government was the second big blunder at the time of adopting the constitution. Given the fact that the city is in Oromiya and that it is also a ‘natural’ capital of the government of Oromiya, it should have been made accountable to Oromiya. Or at the very least, it should have dual accountability to both the Federal and Oromiya Government. That didn’t happen. Commanding exclusive say on the administration of the city (in the name of ultimate accountability), the federal government ‘banished’ the Oromiya government at will in 2003 and allowed it back in the city in 2005. In this, the federal government expanded and re-enacted the original violence of dispossession and displacement of Oromos from the city thereby perpetrating a new wound before the historical wounds could heal. Had it not been for this constitutive mistake, this ‘original sin’ of constitutional drafting in 1995, there wouldn’t have been anything special about the special interest of Oromia. If there would be ‘special interest’, it would have been that of the Federal Government or the non-Oromo residents of the city. These twin mistakes of recent history led to events of dire consequence that claim lives and limbs to date.
Having made a guest out of the host through the legal fiction of excision, i.e., by excising the city out of the political and administrative jurisdiction of Oromiya,it became necessary for Ethiopia, almost as an afterthought, to ‘concede’ a lame ‘special interest’ to Oromiya in Art 49(5). Over the years, the government of Oromiya and Oromos in general hung on this provision more as a symbolic rallying point to interrogate Ethiopia for what is actually beyond the interest in the city. To the Oromo public, the city became the metaphor for what Ethiopia has made of the Oromo in general: an invisible, non-speaking, non-acting other who inhabits the interior of the territory but the exterior of the polity. It became the concentrated expression of the ‘life’ and the agony of the Oromo in the Ethiopian polity: the present-absence and the absent presence at a time. Today, the Federal State presided over the coalition of four parties that make up the EPRDF became the new empire in a federal form, and the leaders became the new emperors in a democratic-republican garb. This forced the quip ‘plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’ (‘the more it changes, the more it remains the same’) from many an Oromo politician.
