Some Ethiopians are fiercely campaigning against
Tedros Adhanom, Ethiopia’s candidate to replace
Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, as director general
of World Health Organization, just a few weeks before
member states are set to vote on the final three candidates.
Tedros, a former Ethiopian foreign and health minister,
along with Pakistan’s Sania Nishtar and the UK’s David Nabarro
are the three director-general nominees who made the cut from
a larger pool of candidates in January.
Tedros, who is running a well-funded campaign, is considered
as a prime contender in the race. His candidacy was endorsed
by the African Union, and just last week he picked up an
endorsement of Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s former international
development secretary.
However, he is facing unrelenting opposition from his
own citizens.
Ethiopians who feel marginalized by their country’s
government are campaigning hard against him online,
arguing he should not be elected because he represents
the interests of Ethiopia’s autocratic ruling elites and
not the people.
They have set up online petition pages against Tedros
and produced a documentary film detailing what they
consider to be his failures and his alleged mismanagement
of funds while he was Ethiopia’s health minister.
They have organized Twitter campaigns under a hashtag
#NoTedros4WHO to organize conversations surrounding
the topic. To make his Ethiopian government profile at the
top of the public’s consciousness, his opponents have
share detailed research that accuses Tedros of inefficiencies,
misreporting, and exaggerations of his achievements when
he used to serve in Ethiopia.
One of the images that have circulated against Tedros,
showing his face with an X over it next to the two other
candidates. Shared by Twitter user @DahlaKib
However, amid fears that the campaign might diminish
his chances, government groups are also running a
parallel campaign supporting his candidacy. They have
downplayed the opposition as unpatriotic, mean-spirited
and trivial jealousy.
Since April 2014, a popular protest movement in Ethiopia
has challenged the government, which has responded
brutally. According to Human Rights Watch, at least
800 people have died, and thousands of political opponents
and hundreds of dissidents have been imprisoned and
tortured. Since October 2016, authorities have imposed
some of the world’s toughest censorship laws after it
declared a state of emergency.
The role of ethnic politics
Some of Tedros’ detractors say they oppose his
candidacy because of his alleged incompetence. But a
big part of what drives the fierce opposition to Tedros
is the logic of ethnic politics.
Tedros holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham
in community health. He studied biology at Asmera
University before he completed a master’s degree in
immunology of infectious diseases in London.
When people hear his name, as qualified as he may
be, his opponents associate him with a repressive
Ethiopian government that has killed people, jailed
thousands of political opponents, and imprisoned
and tortured dissidents.
His meteoric rise to power started soon after he finished
his Ph.D. in 1999 when he was tasked to lead the Tigray
region’s health department. After two short years in Tigray,
he was promoted to Ethiopia’s minister for health by the
late prime minister Meles Zenawi, a Tigrayan himself.
In 2012 when Meles Zenawi died, Tedros became Ethiopia’s
foreign minister.
Tigray is one of the nine regional states that are
federated based on ethnolinguistic compositions.
Over the past 26 years, the Tigrayan elites have taken
center stage in Ethiopia’s political affairs, largely due
to their control of the military, security and the economy
of Ethiopia. Though accounting for only 6% of Ethiopia’s
population, all senior positions of country’s military and
security and the most meaningful positions in state institutions
are packed by Tigrayan elites. This has always been a sore
point with the elites of the Oromo and Amhara ethnicities,
who together comprise 65% of Ethiopia’s population.
Ethiopia’s government has used authoritarian tactics against
its people and the country’s politic space is a closed one;
however, it enjoys the support of powerful countries such
as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Domestic disputes on a global platform
The vigorous opposition to the Tedros candidacy suggests
that Ethiopians political struggle has spilled over into the
international arena. In some sense, it also suggests that
these global platforms have become a substitute for a repressed
domestic political space.
Since Ethiopia’s local political institutions and communications infrastructure are controlled by the government, diaspora
groups, however sporadic and uncoordinated their efforts
may be, have used the opportunity to shed light on the
human rights violations using Twitter campaigns.
SOURCE – GLOBAL VOICES
