Peasants endure rash to reform

Press, 19 December 1986, Page 20

Peasants endure rash to reform

By

JONATHON WRIGHT,

of Reuters, in Addis Ababa

From a plane flying over Ethiopia’s central highlands, the landscape below is dotted with isolated homesteads remote from the nearest road, school, or clinic.

Small groups of thatched huts stand on inaccessible hilltops, on the edge of precipitous ravines or deep in valleys cut off from the rest of the world by the rugged terrain. This pattern, though normal throughout vast areas of rural Africa, is an affront to Ethiopia’s socialist rulers in their revolutionary impatience to improve the lot of the common man.

A Government crash programme has already “villagised” some 5.6 million peasants — about 17 per cent of the rural population and there are plans to move another four million by September. The. process involves assembling up to 300 households in each of many new settlements, where at least in theory they would have clean water, education, and other Government services.

But like the Ethiopian Government’s parallel and related campaign to resettle people from the drought-prone north to underpopulated western and southern regions, villagisation has become caught up in ideological controversy.

To the puzzlement of officials in the Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, some Western relief and development agencies have expressed reservations about the need for, and especially the pace of, the programme. Mr Fikre-Selassie Wogderess, number two in the Ethiopian hierarchy and the man in charge of' the campaign, this month described the programme as one

of the greatest achievements of the 1974 revolution. He told officials in the campaign co-ordinating committee to do everything in their power, through "agitation”, to make peasants aware of the advantages. The advantages, according to the head of State, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, are that the village programme allows people to pool their manpower, their money, and their inventiveness and break away from the subsistence lifestyle of their ancestors.

“The programme has the aim of creating the conditions necessary for social and economic development ... it sets out to free the peasantry from a backward way of life and work. Living in communities is a fundamental aspect of human progress,” he said in a recent interview with “Time” magazine. Colonel Mengistu said foreign critics had interpreted the programme as a prelude to agricultural collectivisation in line with the government’s eventual aim of creating a socialist economy. “But this is totally mistaken. Villages exist in every country in the world, but I do not think it follows that where you have villages, you have socialism,” he said.

The reality so far supports Colonel Mengistu’s argument. Less than one per cent of Ethiopian agriculture is collectivised, though the Government aims to increase that to 50 per cent by 1994.

Western relief workers in Ethiopia say villagisation may have its merits but, as with resettlement, overzealous or insensitive officials had sometimes ignored local realities.