In Ethiopian Politics, Some Parties Are About Monetization, Not Representation

Africa has a busy election calendar in 2024, with at least twenty countries slated for different types of balloting, including national, local, and presidential elections. However, due to a variety of factors, roughly half of these elections are not expected to be truly competitive. Aside from the long legacy of political instability, a common obstacle to competitive democracy is the prevalence of weak and ineffectual opposition political parties. While not as obvious as structural impediments—such as the deficiency of trust in election management bodies, the presence of a highly uneven electoral playing field, and the lack of institutional guardrails against state infringement on freedom of association and expression—internal problems within opposition parties are a main reason for their weakness.

As an African country that has experienced one of the most precipitous declines in democratic governance since its last electoral cycle, Ethiopia’s case holds major regional significance. It exemplifies the state of multiparty democracy in the Greater Horn of Africa—with the exception of Kenya—where single-party dominance has become the norm. In the recent by-elections and reelections held in Ethiopia’s four regional states, the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) secured a landslide victory. According to results issued by the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE, the Board), PP emerged victorious in seven out of the nine contested seats in the federal House of Peoples’ Representatives—a parliament that already acts as a rubber stamp for the incumbent.

Attempts to make sense of this result inevitably lead us to ponder the contemporary state of opposition political parties in Ethiopia. As the renowned political expert Andreas Schedler rightly points out, “authoritarian incumbents can emerge victorious from (transitional) elections thanks not to their own cleverness but the ineptitude of their opponents.”

Prior to the reform of NEBE in early 2019, there were more than 100 opposition political parties in Ethiopia. With the implementation of Proclamation no. 1162/2019, the number of parties declined by almost half. Many political parties were deregistered as they failed to fulfill some of the new legal requirements imposed by the proclamation. However, the number of parties is rising again. Currently, there are 71 national and regional political parties registered by NEBE, with a few others in the process of registering.

This raises a number of questions. In the face of a rapidly shrinking civic space and an all-consuming violent conflict, is this number of political parties justified? Is each one offering voters a plan or vision for resolving the country’s societal, political, and economic policy issues? Or are their leaders taking advantage of the existing lenient registration and party financing system?

This article argues that many of these haphazardly incubated opposition parties fall well short of being legitimate competitors for the ruling Prosperity Party and are far from being sources of alternative public policies. Rather, they have become conduits for the monetization of politics and tapping of national resources under the guise of fighting for “their” society. Additionally, a close look at the legal and institutional frameworks shows that the spike in the number of docile, fragmented, and polarized opposition parties has its roots in Ethiopia’s party registration and financing system.

Factors that Render Ethiopian Opposition Parties Ineffectual

To say that political parties lie at the heart of competitive democracy is an understatement. Nonetheless, their mere existence or rapid multiplication by no means guarantee the effective delivery of their promised roles, nor do they imply the widening of political space and the presence of a level playing field. In Ethiopia, the full potential for opposition political parties is yet to be realized.

There are two major factors that contribute to party ineffectiveness. These factors can be attributed not only to small political parties with relatively brief histories but also to major parties with wider constituencies that have been operating in the country’s political sphere for a long time.

The first factor is the parties’ deep entrenchment in primordial and parochial political battles. As is well known, identity has remained the defining feature of Ethiopia’s local and national politics. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of its political parties have been formed along ethnic, tribal, or, in some cases, religious lines. Such an arrangement was supposed to enhance political pluralism by ensuring representation of marginalized ethno-linguistic groups and improving their ability to caucus and negotiate in the parliamentary setting. In practice, however, the reinforcement of identities can facilitate exclusionary politics, cement societal cleavages, and even exacerbate conflicts. Time and again, it has been observed that the increasing fragmentation of political parties creates difficult situations for them to coalesce around a shared national agenda. This is particularly evident in the lack of consensus among political parties on key national issues, such as the ongoing national dialogue and transitional justice processes.

The second factor is that leader-owned parties are really dynasties in disguise. Not only do these parties lack unity around issues or democratic processes, but parties often face factionalism when their leaders are in conflict, which creates a headache for the Board. By and large, Ethiopian political parties are effectively considered to be the private property of one or a few individuals who preside over the elections and position appointments within the party. As a result, Ethiopian opposition parties have long been marred, and citizens struggle to see them as viable options.

The Need for Transparency: The Role of Biometric Registration

There have long been questions around how these ineffectual political parties find the requisite minimum number of founding members specified by law (at least 10,000 individuals for national parties and 4,000 for regional parties), let alone win the trust of electorates.  Many of these parties struggle to achieve quorum in their first general meetings and frequently use copy-pasted programmatic documents.

Due to the lack of a cost-effective, rigorous way to verify names, it is possible for a loosely organized group of individuals to fake the names of founding members to fulfill the legal and procedural requirements to establish a new political party. In contrast, Kenya and Uganda—which have party registration processes similar to Ethiopia—have set up effective verification mechanisms to detect such fraudulent activities. After both countries deployed a biometric voter registration system, detailed information about founding members became easily accessible by their electoral management bodies. It became almost impossible for aspiring parties to create a fabricated list of founding members. While there are downsides to deploying biometric registration systems, especially in countries like Ethiopia with underdeveloped information technology (IT) infrastructure and low levels of digital literacy, the benefits in terms of accuracy, security, and fraud prevention far exceed the potential drawbacks.

The Board does not have the technological capacity to screen out fraudulent registrations; instead, it manually checks that the full name, sex, age, residence area, and signature of each founder are in the submitted document. Groups of individuals with little or no intention of trying to influence politics can easily use fictitious names and signatures to secure full registration as a political party and, knowingly or unknowingly, expose themselves to the risk of facing criminal and administrative measures as provided in Article 64 (4) and (5) of Proclamation no. 1162/2019.

If a loosely knit group is not in it for politics, a strong motive for creating a party lies in Ethiopia’s relaxed party financing and monitoring scheme. There is financial gain for those who are taking such an initiative and who will, more often than not, go on to be leaders of the party at a later stage. In a quite entrepreneurial way, founders realize that creating a political party with a party apparatus means that they will have avenues for capital accumulation and personal enrichment.

Older parties, including the ruling PP, are not immune from such fraudulent activities. With the likely aim of grabbing a bigger slice of state subsidies and relying on NEBE’s inability to verify member numbers, political parties often provide exaggerated membership figures. Last month, the Board asked the country’s twenty-one registered national parties to resubmit their membership lists after many were suspected of highly exaggerating figures regarding women and persons with disabilities, with some parties claiming up to 900,000 such members. Eleven of the parties, including the PP, failed to verify their membership without any repercussions.

Ethiopia’s Party Financing Regime: Finding the Fraud

Once a political party is registered and has acquired legal personality, it is eligible to receive state subsidies allocated by NEBE. For newly registered parties, there is no precondition apart from providing the required information to get access to government funding. For older parties, however, it is mandatory to submit an annual audit report that is certified by an auditor or accountant and specifies the amount granted by the government in the budget year and what activities the money has been used for. Before granting the funds, the Board is legally mandated to examine the audit report of the previous year and ascertain that no irregularities are reported.

However, parties have discretion over which auditor or accountant prepares their audit report, leaving the process vulnerable to political or commercial influence. How then does the Board verify the accuracy and completeness of the audit reports? Except for a cursory arithmetic review, it does not have a statutory duty to look into the details, which means that parties can get away with spending government-allotted money for whatever purpose they choose—so long as they can convince their auditor or accountant not to report any irregularity or deficit to the Board.

In what appears to be an epidemic, the Office of the Federal Auditor General (OFAG) reported many irregularities, deficits, and other findings in all the cases referred to it by the Board over the past three years. Since it is only when an embezzlement complaint is logged that the Board refers audit reports to the OFAG, one can assume that many instances go unreported. Adding to the equation a failure of political parties to prepare and submit an annual operational plan, it becomes clear that there is no reliable mechanism through which NEBE can properly monitor activities and spendings of political parties.

The fact that parties know that their audit report isn’t being properly checked incentivizes parties to report only for the sake of reporting without much regard for accuracy nor fear of repercussions for the mismanagement of party resources. The absence of proper financial scrutiny not only disincentivizes honest reporting but has also created an easy way to access government funds.

While no academic research has been done on the extent of the fraudulent activity in Ethiopia, certain factors push us toward viewing the issue less as one of insufficient capacity. These include the simplicity of the requirements, the failure of most new parties to meet even the most basic ones, and the clear emphasis that party leaders place on financial gain over genuine societal representation. Their limited involvement in elections, almost non-existent interactions with electorates, poorly-designed (and often plagiarized) programmatic documents, and a lack of understanding of the country’s political context, combined with party leaders’ visible willingness to exploit gaps in NEBE’s operation, make it reasonable to infer an intent to defraud.

Rather than filtering out dysfunctional political parties, Ethiopia’s party financing system encourages people to think about establishing a political party as a lucrative business idea. Proper auditing is a powerful tool for detecting malpractices and enforcing regulations on what political parties and candidates are and are not allowed to do with their finances. An effort towards setting up a more effective monitoring system could start by establishing an ad-hoc or standing structure within the NEBE that is separate from the internal audit unit with the mandate to annually scrutinize the audit reports of all political parties.

Temelso Gashaw is a Human Rights Lawyer. Previously, he served as an Inter-Party Dialogue Coordination Expert at the National Election Board of Ethiopia. Gashaw holds two LLM degrees in Human Rights and Public Law from Central European University and Dokuz Eylül University.