Mereja.Forum

[DefendTheTruth]

I think that it is not an exaguration to say that prof. Merera Gudina is one of the few individuals among ethiopian political actors who made the current political landscape in the country look like what it is today in comparison to what it was intended to be before 30 or 40 years.

He recently said that people of the OLF were name calling me "Gobena" back then, a code name among oromo extrimists for someone they consider a traitor. For them he was a traitor because he didn't readily embrace their political view, which considers essentially the Oromo people in Ethiopia a colonial subject and needed as such to be liberated from it. Those who didn't readily subscribe to such view were also regarded and maligned as traitors of their people's cause.

"Oromo's future is interwined with that of the rest in the country and can't be separated from it so readily and we can't say for sure on whose side the balance of historic injustices (percieved or real) of all kinds could lie and as such not easy to settle such historic imbalance on both sides today", he said back then, if you I remember some of his comments correctly.

No one wanted to listen to him back then, instead chose to name call him, but today many people consider him someone who deeply understands what he is talking about and turn to him to solicit his views about outstanding political issues of the Oromo people.

Here I am not to enlist some of his credits in trying to shape the current political landscape in the country. No, I am trying to remind all political actors in the country about one of the key calls he tries to convey to his compatriots in the political scene while discussing politics in the country. He says many things but one of them that always come up again and again is the call to "come to the center", from both sides. He says always "let's meet at the center" and like his view about the fate of the Oromo people in Ethiopia before 20 or so years, no one seems to care to lend him a listening ear today to such a call.

It may take some 10 or 20 more years before people may realise the meaning of this key call of this career politician. And the more we will delay to listen to this important message, the more it will cost us as the time goes on, I am afraid.

I read some where in the past about one key point a very successful former German politician in the name of Helmut Schmidt, who said the key to succeed in politics is "the readiness for compromise". I think it is about this readiness for compromise that the Ethiopian Professor Merera Gudina is talking about when he is calling for "meeting at the center", in my view at least.

But the main actors on the scene in our case today are investing heavily in building their muscles in different forms, like the so called "Liyu Hail" hoping to succeed through that instead of getting ready for a compromise. Still their maxim seems saying "my way or the high way". There will be a price to be paid for that, I fear.