Mistaking Slogans for Solutions

Mistaking Slogans for Solutions

It looks like my sprightly friends have found a new way to excite Eritrosphere…every time I think of the frenzy being whipped around certain solutions to certain problems I wonder if it is the problems or the solutions that have changed to cause such stir! In fact it is neither… it feels like every year at around this time of year (give or take a month) we in the Eritrean Resistance happen to create a perfect storm:

Last year we discovered/rediscovered Mr Osman didn’t perceive Idriss Awate in quite the same way and we tantrumed as a two year old at a super market checkout.

The year before Mr Domenico fired my friend Danny and the gasp was audible all the way to Asmara!

Prior to that EPDP boycotted the waEla and were instantly christened pfdj

A year or so before the grey heads in EDA told us that they have irreconcilable differences and a year later the same differences were reconcilable and hence they can’t have been that irreconcilable to start off with…

A year or so before that ENA fell apart because… I really honestly can’t remember the ins and out of who walked out when who was nominated and how long they refused to talk to each other!

Got the picture? Every year we work so hard to make these annual feuds unforgettable!   It is like an annual tournament where you drag each other through the muddiest terrain and for good measure bloody every nose along the way… the tournament comes complete with cheerleaders (this year’s star cheerleader is meskerem.net… few years ago it was Eritrea daily)… drum beaters (the prize for passionate drum beating always goes to my paltalk friends!) and ultimately champion slogan mints! (I have a suspicion that the amazing Kiross Yohaness is going to steal the accolade from my dear uncle G this year! The judge for the contest is my Friend Aaron Berhane who has already declared his teams slogan the plumpest…I couldn't have made that one up even if I tried!)

…And in keeping with tradition this year  too we are mistaking an Eritrean slogan for an Eritrean solution…

But seriously … I think we are missing the biggest problem and hence a massive solution to Eritrea here. A while back pfdj made it illegal to question, impossible to demand and absolutely unthinkable to discuss things from a different perspectives… this has made it impossible for us to organise ourselves to fight back… if we were able to sit and discuss together, given our commitment pro change, our desperation for change and our determination for change we would have moved mightily mountains…

• To me the problem isn’t the sophistication of the enemy… nor the scheming of neighbouring countries (or the west as pfdj would have us think) but our own rigid and unyielding approach to our problems big and small…
• We have inexperienced leaders (particularly in our ‘youth organisations’)
• We have organisations (non ‘youth’ organisations) without focus, that can serve as case studies for chaos and disorder (and incompetence)
• And more importantly our elders and community leaders have lost all clout and hence as an exiled movement we are left without a legal or traditional means for resolving conflicts or the temerity to avoid them…

The current EYSC-G led (Meskerem.net propagated) discord should be renamed:  ‘Eritrean solutions for those who assume Ethiopia is the biggest problem!’

But even a cursory analysis of our problems over the last decade… including the time when only few of our opposition organisations had a foothold in Ethiopia, would show that our problems are a lot closer than Ethiopia and even closer than pfdj itself… our biggest problem is infact the fact that we haven’t been able to sit and talk to each other and build enough trust in each other to allow us to chart the next course of actions…

When the Eritrean alliance (ENA) failed they reconvened as the Democratic alliance (EDA)… with the same problems but a different name… when that failed it reconvened as the Commission for democratic changes (ENCDC) and now that has collapsed there is this new reconfiguration under the hospices of the slogan that my friends ill fittingly straddle… yet the problem remains…

The conclusion to the conferences in Akaki, Awasa and Bologna are identical (at least based on the meskerem.net report of the concluding remarks from Bologna)… we will reconvene and include those that haven’t been included this time round… yet there is no effort to understand why they were not included in the first place….

We need to learn to look each other in the eye… we need to be challenged to reconcile (really reconcile) our differences and we desperately need to stop practicing parallel movements and pull our struggle into a single coherent movement for change in Eritrea!

Step one: learning to work with those you wouldn't otherwise work with! So my dear friends at EYSC-G will have to talk to their friends at EYSC-NA before next year’s tournament if we are to call off next year’s event and that sure will move us an incy wincey bit closer to a solution to some of our Eritrean problems…

selam

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