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ABSTRACT
During its 28 years of rule, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) had built a strong system for controlling the Ethiopian state and civil society. This article looks at how the party first managed to keep control over the civil service. It analyses the functioning of civil servants’ evaluations called gimgema. Such evaluations comprise the filling of evaluation forms and sessions of criticisms and self-criticisms during which bureaus’ employees have to publicly acknowledge their mistakes and accuse colleagues. Bureau heads who are also party officials then decide on the employee’s future. The article describes the functioning of gimgema, its political efficiency, and some resistance strategies put in force by state agents. Born in a Marxist-Leninist ideological framework, gimgema is an Ethiopian variation on the global socialist evaluation theme, now fitting perfectly with neoliberal injunctions to ‘good governance’, ‘commitment’ and ‘transparency’. As a symbol of the EPRDF’s ideological evolution, gimgema exemplifies the ideological indeterminacy of government techniques.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 All translations from Amharic are made by the author. Plural forms are respected, but the transliteration system differs from linguistic academic norms, as they do not help non-Amharic speakers.
2 Million, Gimgema in Controlling the Conduct of Government Officials, 39.
3 Medhane, “The Tigray People’s Liberation Front”; Meheret, “Decentralization in Ethiopia”, Abbink, “Democracy Deferred”.
4 Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers, 314.
5 Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution, 66.
6 From up to bottom, the Ethiopian institutional hierarchy is as follows: Federal state > region or killil > zone > wereda > qebelé.
7 Lefort, “Powers – Mengist – and Peasants in rural Ethiopia,” 446.
8 Hagmann, “Beyond Clannishness and Colonialism,” 528.
9 Tefera, “Ideology and Power in TPLF’s Ethiopia”.
10 James et al., Remapping Ethiopia.
11 Tronvoll and Hagmann, Contested power in Ethiopia; Hagmann and Abbink, “Twenty Years of Revolutionary Democratic Ethiopia”.
12 Di Nunzio, “Do Not Cross the Red Line”; Mains, Hope is Cut.
13 Teferi, “The Local Politics of Ethiopia’s Green Revolution”; Emmenegger, Sibilo, and Hagmann, “Decentralization to the Household”.
14 Bach, “Abyotawi Democracy”.
15 Fisher and Meressa, “‘Game Over?’”.
16 De Waal, “The Theory and Practice of Meles Zenawi”; Meles, Ethiopia: The Renaissance Travel [In Amharic].
17 Although reliable data is scarce, calculation from figures taken from the Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency suggests a share of 43% of public service in total employment in 2013. Estimations are 1,867,853 employees in government administrations and government development organization, out of the estimated 4,252,601 paid employees. See Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Statistical Report on the 2013 National Labour Force Survey, 231.
18 Mains, “Blackouts and Progress”.
19 Harrison, Neoliberal Africa; Ferguson, Global Shadows.
20 James, Donham, Kurimoto and Triulzi, Remapping Ethiopia, 14.
21 Pennetier and Pudal, Autobiographies, Autocritiques, Aveux.
22 Ferguson and Gupta, “Spatializing States”.
23 Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, States at Work.
24 Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers.
25 Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, States at Work.
26 Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracies, 48–49.
27 Karila-Cohen and Le Bihan, “La valeur du fonctionnaire”.
28 Vincent, “Les questionnaires d’évaluation des fonctionnaires allemands”.
29 Weber, La Domination, 173–81.
30 Pennetier and Pudal, Autobiographies, Autocritiques, Aveux, 10; Studer, Unfried, and Herrmann, Parler de soi sous Staline, 1–30.
31 Unfried, “Parler de soi au Parti”; Escudié, “Le fonctionnaire et la machine bureaucratique”.
32 Wu, “Speaking bitterness”.
33 Ibid.
34 Grojean, “Comment gérer une crise politique interne?”.
35 Bealu, Oromay, 47–8.
36 Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 113.
37 Bruno and Didier, Benchmarking.
38 Toegel and Conger, “360-Degree Assessment”.
39 Bruno and Didier, Benchmarking.
40 Ibid., 22.
41 Lefort, “Powers – Mengist – and Peasants in Rural Ethiopia”.
42 Groups of five civil servants who gather around one-party member in charge of teaching them the latest points of developmental doctrine. They were used and perceived as another monitoring device.
43 Villanucci and Fantini, “Santé publique, participation communautaire et mobilisation politique en Éthiopie”.
44 If Sarah Vaughan and Kjetil Tronvoll wrote in the early 2000s that party officials were no longer involved in gimgema, observation of evaluations shows they still play a central role. Vaughan and Tronvoll, The Culture of Power in Contemporary Ethiopian Political Life, 17.
45 Million, Gimgema in Controlling the Conduct of Government Officials.
46 Interview with a land administration expert, 19 February 2013.
47 Field notes, 18 March 2014.
48 Lefort, “Free Market Economy, ‘Developmental State’ and Party-State Hegemony in Ethiopia”.
49 Andenet ledémokrasina lefitih, Unity for Democracy and Justice, one of the main opposition parties at that time.
50 Field notes, 24 February 2014.
51 Pennetier and Pudal, “Écrire son autobiographie”.
52 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
53 Planel, “A View of a Bureaucratic Developmental State”.
54 Mueller-Hirth, “If You Don’t Count, You Don’t Count”.
55 Enten, “Du bon usage des systèmes d’alerte précoce en régime autoritaire”.
56 Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, 112–13.
57 Bruno and Didier, Benchmarking, 11.
58 Bayart, “La cité bureaucratique en Afrique subsaharienne”, 309.
59 The ‘land bank’ is a theoretical pool where land administration agents should register parcels that can be allocated to private investors. See Dessalegn, “Land to Investors”.
60 Field notes, 3 March 2014.
61 “Let’s build our implementation capacity by strengthening our tradition of criticism and self-criticism”, [in Amharic] Renaissance Bégu, 1st year, Number 2, September 2015.
62 Field notes, 29 July 2014.
63 Million, Gimgema in Controlling the Conduct of Government Officials, 66.
64 In the Amhara region, Sarah Howard noted how disappointing could be for a young agent to be assigned to the lowlands: Howard, “Coffee and the State in Rural Ethiopia”.
65 Million, Gimgema in Controlling the Conduct of Government Officials.
66 Field notes, 7 August 2014.
67 Field notes, 4 November 2015.
68 Interview, 27 February 2013.
69 Field notes, 12 February 2016.
70 Alem Beqa, ‘the end of the world’, was the nickname of one of Addis Abeba’s most known central prisons, now used to refer to the prison complex located in Qality.
71 Field notes, 20 March 2013.
72 Aregawi, A Political History of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, 96.
73 Gebru Asrat, Sovereignty and Democracy in Ethiopia [In Amharic], 67.
74 Ibid, 132
75 Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia, 143, 203.
76 Bahru, The Quest for Socialist Utopia; Balsvik, Haile Selassie’s Students.
77 Bahru, Documenting the Ethiopian Student Movement.
78 Donham, Marxist Modern, 45; Kiflu, The Generation, 44.
79 Pool, From Guerillas to Government; Lefort, Ethiopia: A Heretical Revolution?, 49.
80 Bach, “‘Abyotawi Democracy’”.
81 Vaughan, Ethnicity and Power in Ethiopia, 91–3, 140–41.
82 Smidt, “Die traditionelle Dorfgesellschaft in modernen Tigray”.
83 Ibid., 237.
84 Smidt, “Die traditionelle Dorfgesellschaft in modernen Tigray”.
85 Vaughan, “Revolutionary Democratic State-Building,” 625–6; Aregawi, A Political History of the TPLF, 230.
86 Bassi, “The Complexity of a Pastoral African Polity”; Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy.
87 Solomon, “Civil Service Reform in Ethiopia”.
88 Hermet, Kazancigil, and Prud’homme, La gouvernance.
89 Field notes, 9 February 2016.
90 Struggle for the Building of a Democratic System and Revolutionary Democracy, [in Amharic], 2012, 105–7. Authorship of the document was not clear, but many civil servants believed it was Meles himself.
91 Field notes, 4 November 2015.