To get it right, you must know where it went wrong

 

• It was common in upcountry Ethiopia to run two duplicate classes. The modernists in the capital didn’t see why, so they abolished the practice. However, for poor families, it was a disaster.

The Chinese are talking up the forthcoming September G20 summit in Hangzhou, but as it approaches, Africa cannot have missed the fact that its issues are no longer a big priority at these gatherings.

There could be several reasons for this. The first is that, at home, in the African Union, leaders have in recent years been obsessed with passionate, but ultimately parochial, matters like ranting against the International Criminal Court.

However, the biggest reason for the lack of African voices in places like the G20 where we are invited to shout in from the sidelines, must still be the death of Ethiopia’s prime minister Meles Zenawi.

He was a tough leader Meles, with not a drop of liberal democratic blood in his veins. But he had a critical mind, and got things done.

Not too long ago, I talked to someone who dealt with Meles, following the violence there after the May 2005 elections. It was a brutal crackdown, in which nearly 200 opposition supporters were killed in protests, and 800 injured.

The events of that year surprised many. The ruling, totally dominant and overbearing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) is thought to have lost that election, and resorted to ballot theft to retain power.

No one saw it coming, but with hindsight Meles apparently had a very sophisticated view of the cause of the EPRDF’s problems, and it was most surprising.

Privately, he blamed Ethiopia’s push to attain the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, my confidant told me. He particularly zeroed in on MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education.

That was surprising, for how could achieving universal primary education be so politically costly?

Turns out that, as in other parts of Africa, it was common in the upcountry parts of Ethiopia to run two duplicate classes, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon.

The modernists in the capital didn’t fully appreciate why, so to achieve MDG 2 they abolished the practice and consolidated the classes, to create room so they could enrol more students.

However, for poor families, it was a disaster. That is because with the duplicate classes they could, for example, send their Grade 3 kids to class in the morning, while their siblings stayed at home to tend cattle, and when those who went to school returned home to do their share of the family chores, the ones who worked in the morning went off to school in the afternoon.

So abolishing double classes brought hard times for poorer families.

With Ethiopia, this happened at a time of growing government efficiency in tax collection, thus while parents lost child labour (controversial as it was), they came under greater pressure to pay taxes.

By 2009/10 the gross enrolment rate for primary schools (Grades 1-8) had reached 95.5 per cent, almost double what it had been a decade before.

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