In March 2001, a faction within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) — the dominant party within the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) — attempted to unseat the party leader, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. At the time of writing, Meles has seen off the attack, but the incident shows just how vulnerable he is, and his current ascendance is still not guaranteed. A permanent solution to the dissension within the TPLF has yet to be found.

The split within the TPLF is not new, having first surfaced in the early 1990s, not long after the TPLF came to power. At heart, the split is ideological between the so-called ‘moderates’ and ‘hardliners’ within the party. During the long years of armed struggle against the Dergue regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the party was staunchly communist, and admired the political and economic policies of the Albanian model. By the time the TPLF over-threw the Dergue regime in 1991, how-ever, the international context had changed dramatically. Socialism was in retreat everywhere, free market economics had become the accepted orthodoxy, and the newly installed government in Addis Ababa had little choice but to accept the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank conditionalities of market liberalisation and privatisation.

Meles, who ascended to power within the TPLF, embraced such policies with alacrity, and implemented them with a vigour that won him praise from the Bretton Woods institutions. But he was unable to assert his authority fully within the party, and ideological differences remained. Meles’s solution in the early 1990s was to banish the hardliners to Tigray, the political base of the party. Once in Tigray, the party militants continued to organise around a programme of ‘Greater Tigray’, and were often publicly critical of what they saw as a ‘weakening’ of the party’s ideology. They were also opposed to the perceived closeness of the ruling élite in Addis Ababa and Asmara, and of what they saw as a ‘selling out’ of the TPLF leadership to Eritrean demands. It was the activities of the TPLF hardliners in Tigray (including the publication of a map that incorporated parts of Eritrea into a Greater Tigray) that were partly responsible for the series of skirmishes in 1998 and that culminated in the all-out war with Eritrea.

When the war broke out in early May 1998, Prime Minister Meles and some of the so-called ‘moderates’ around him (most notably Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin) appeared to prevaricate, and seemed reluctant to escalate to all-out war. It is also known that, at the time, Eritrean President Isayas Afewerki was trying desperately to contact Meles to resolve the crisis. President Isayas was certain that, given the high levels of trust that existed between the two leaders, a full-scale war could be warded off. It was thus that, at a TPLF central committee meeting held in May 1998, Meles came under vociferous criticism from members of his own party. A war council was established, and Meles disappeared from view for a number of days, with rumours abounding in Addis Ababa that he had been placed under arrest.

In May 1998, Meles managed to ward off the challenge to his leadership, but at a price: he was forced into accepting the position of the more militant factions, and declare all-out war against Eritrea. Since then, many have believed that Meles has merely been biding his time before once again asserting his authority and independence from this faction. By mid-March 2001, he calculated that the time had come.

The militants had become increasingly critical of the Ethiopian government’s economic policies. The war with Eritrea had placed severe strain on the Ethiopian economy, and this, combined with the drought and the withdrawal of donor assistance as a result of the war, revealed the Ethiopian economy’s continuing structural weaknesses. The government responded by increasing the pace of economic liberalisation and, as a result, Ethiopia has been able to negotiate a new aid package with the IMF, involving US $112 million over three years.

Meles calculated that the time was ripe at the Central Committee meeting held in March. When he had banished the militants back to Tigray in the mid-1990s, many of them used their control of the provincial political apparatus to enrich themselves, in some case awarding themselves and their families state contracts. The war with Eritrea also provided them with further opportunities at self-enrichment, as they tied up transport and provisioning contracts.

Thus, when the Central Committee meeting was opened, Meles had placed on the agenda the issues of corruption and undemocratic tendencies, a clear reference to the militants who had grouped themselves under the informal leadership of the former Defence Minister Siye Abraha (who had himself been named as a possible replacement leader for Meles in May 1998). The militant group objected, but Meles was able to retain the support of the majority of the Central Committee, though narrowly: 15 members of the committee supported Meles, while 12 members opposed him. Meles was able to prevail largely because he retained the support of key TPLF members such as Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, Internal Affairs Minister Kinfe Gebremedhin and Sebhat Nega, TPLF founding leader.

Meles may have prevailed for now, but the situation has not been resolved. Meles’s strategy in the early 1990s to deal with the problem of factionalism and ideological divergence within the party, was to banish the problem to Tigray, with ultimately disastrous consequences. The split has not only revealed Meles’s vulnerable position within the TPLF, it also threatens to weaken the overall status of the TPLF in the EPRDF. Already at a press conference to announce the expulsion of the dissident members from the party, Meles was seen flanked by non-TPLF members of the ERPDF. The question now is how even his supporters within the TPLF will react to the possibility of a weakening of the TPLF’s hegemony. If Meles is to secure his position in the EPRDF at the expense of the TPLF, he may still be vulnerable. But to deal with the militant elements in the TPLF will require ruthless action on his part, and it is not known whether he has the stomach for this. — FL

In 1989, Benin was being hailed as the prototype in Africa’s second wave of democratisation, and this tiny country has attracted a great deal of attention from political scientists. In 1991, two years into the transition, General Matthieu Kérékou, who had ruled Benin since taking power in a coup in 1972, was defeated by Nicephore Soglo, prime minister in the transitional government, in the second round of the presidential elections, and Kérékou became the first leader on mainland Africa to concede power after an electoral defeat.

In 1996 the tables were turned. Soglo, true to his word, had introduced structural reforms which, though they led to a recovery in the country’s macro-economic situation after 20 years of mismanagement, impacted adversely upon the urban population and brought him into direct confrontation with Benin’s powerful trade unions. The drastic devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 also hit the agricultural heart of the economy. Soglo was shortly to discover, to his own cost, the essential contradictions between the democratisation project and structural adjustment. His adoption of an increasingly authoritarian style, the favouritism accorded to prominent close family members and his personal flamboyant taste despite his advocacy of frugality for others served to seal his fate.By the time of the elections in 1996, the anti-Soglo mood was as strong as the anti-Kérékou sentiment had been five years previously. This time it was the former dictator’s turn to succeed, with the assistance in the second round of Adrien Houngbedji in Porto Novo. Kérékou’s adherence to Marxism-Leninism in his previous reign had always been eccentric and unconvincing — now the chameleon emerged from political retirement as a born-again Christian (unnerving for some of Benin’s voodooists) and the champion of the common man. Soglo’s attempts to intimidate the constitutional court failed and Kérékou was installed, to name Houngbedji as his prime minister.

The problems of managing a slender parliamentary majority and of building a coalition led to policy paralysis. Yet the country’s dependency on donor goodwill left Kérékou with little alternative but to follow the dangerous course plotted by his maligned predecessor. This eventually precipitated a split in the alliance with Houngbedji, and Beninois politics reverted to its traditional triangular configuration, pitting the north, represented by Kérékou, against the two southern rivals, Porto Novo and Cotonou, heartlands of support for Houngbedji and Soglo, respectively.

Shortly after Houngbedji and his Party for Democratic Renewal parted company with the cabinet in 1998, an anti-Kérékou alliance was achieved with Soglo’s Renaissance Party and the following year the anti-presidential forces secured a slender majority in the National Assembly. This did nothing to lighten the task of governing the country, and Kérékou managed to secure the passage of the 2000 budget only by taking recourse to presidential decree.

Donor pressures compelled the president to impose unpopular austerity policies, however reluctantly. It was unclear how successful the Houngbedji/Soglo front would cope given the former partner’s left-of-centre leanings, in the event of its victory in the presidential contest of 2001.

As it happened, the question remains unasked, for the results of the March elections ended in the return of the incumbent. Barring an unlikely alteration to the constitution, this must be the last such contest between Kérékou and Soglo, both of whom will be over 70 years of age in 2006, and therefore ineligible for the presidency. More interesting than the result itself is the manner in which the presidential campaign was run, and the farcical outcome of the anticipated second round.

There were some 17 candidates in all, though only the three named above had any real chance of success on a national scale. The first round of voting was held on 4 March and the turnout was large. There were massive discrepancies between the results issued by the independent electoral commission and the constitutional court, though both agreed that Kérékou enjoyed a majority. More worrying still, there were large differences between the electoral rolls used by the two bodies. In the first round, the constitutional court announced that Kérékou had secured 47% of the vote; Soglo 29%; Houngbedji 13.5% and Bruno Amoussou, state minister for government co-ordination, planning and employment, 8%. The second round would therefore be between Kérékou and Soglo, again. Amoussou, virtually prime minister, though the post had been scrapped in 1998, threw his weight behind Kérékou, while Houngbedji’s support went to Soglo. At this juncture, however, Soglo demanded the annulment of the first round results, on the grounds of fraud and irregularities. This being refused, he withdrew his candidacy, and the mantle of opposition candidate was offered to Houngbedji who, after some prevarication, also declined. In the meantime, nine of the 25 electoral commissioners had resigned in protest at the conduct of the elections.

A delayed second round was eventually held on 22 March, pitting Kérékou against Amoussou in what some disparaged as a ‘friendly’. This was won handsomely by the incumbent, by 84% to 15%. The poll was boycotted by most of the electors in Porto Novo and Cotonou.

All in all, this was a most disappointing development in a country where hopes of democratic consolidation were high. Though the principal donors have declared themselves by and large satisfied, and West Africa’s heads of state showed their solidarity by turning up in numbers for the presidential inauguration, the next months will show whether the internal bitterness and rancour are temporary, or whether they betoken a deeper and more fundamental malaise in the Beninois body politic. — RC

In October 2000, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, warned the Security Council that the Angolan conflict could spread across the borders of Zambia and Namibia and threaten the stability of Southern Africa. In part, his warning was already too late as the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) were already using Namibian territory since December 1999 for operations against UNITA. In May 2000, the Namibian Defence Force established bases in southern Angola to conduct follow-up operations in support of the FAA. Zambia, although under pressure to follow Namibia’s example, has thus far avoided involvement in its neighbour’s war, limiting its activities to the hosting of refugees, including both UNITA and FAA soldiers.

The internal security situation in Angola recently seems to be more or less under control. The rainy season has bogged down the FAA in defensive positions since October 2000 and has led to a lull in conventional military operations. UNITA, on the other hand, has continued with its irregular guerrilla activities.

However, signs are appearing that yet another dry season offensive will start in Angola, probably late in April or early in May 2001. President José Eduardo dos Santos replaced the Chief of Staff of the FAA, General João do Matos, with the former Deputy Minister of Defence, General Armando da Cruz Neto; the Army Chief, General Luis Faceira, with General Mateus Miguel Angelo; and the Chief of Military Security Services, General Mario Cirilo de Sá, with General Antonio José Maria. The new Chief of Staff has also completed a visit to all the military fronts. Indications are that the offensive will be launched on several fronts.

The possibility of a military offensive was further underlined by a statement made by the MPLA Secretary-General, João Lourenco, on 1 March 2001: "the Angolan Government does not change its strategy, either Savimbi surrenders or the Armed Forces will continue the manhunt."

Moreover, UNITA is also planning to increase its military activities by continuing to use its guerrilla tactics of stand-off bombardments, ambushes, raids on convoys, villages and FAA positions, as well as mine-laying.

The best case scenario for the outcome of the offensive would be if the FAA catch Savimbi, breaking the resistance of UNITA to such an extent that the organisation cannot recover and that senior rebels will surrender. The worst case scenario would be if the FAA were weakened so much by logistic and moral problems that they lose control over major diamond-producing areas, as well as Soyo and the areas close to Luanda. A realistic scenario is probably some successes by the FAA and continued guerrilla activities by UNITA — just another chapter in the ongoing war. The irony is that, as far as the local population is concerned, it does not matter which scenario comes true, as they will bear the brunt of the fighting and the never-ending instability between the two forces in the country. — HdB

	Zambia: To be or not to be? — no longer the question