- Bulcha advises not to overburden the current government with too much expectation
Opposition leader Bulcha Demeksa, 89, has declared his intention to run for a parliament seat, as the country builds up to an election scheduled for next year.
He will run as an independent candidate after standing down as a parliamentarian in 2010, he told BBC Amharic.
“I have many things to say. It is at a parliament where the fate of the country is decided, whether for better or worse. Thus I would like to contribute something by joining the parliament,” he was quoted as saying.
Bulcha Demeksa, a founding chairman of the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), has been a vocal member of the Ethiopian parliamentary from 2005 until 2010.
He described the parliament system before the arrival of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as a rubber stamp for the ruling party policies and decisions. “From the very start, I joined parliament not because I believed in the trustworthiness of the system but wondering how things were done. First thing, as is the case in other countries, number of members was not in accordance with the number of constituents. For example, I was the only representative of my district in Wollega. Had it been it genuine, my district should have been represented by three people,” he said.
He says he hopes things would improve in this new era of politics and it is not going to be business as usual. “Overall, the reform that has come about is encouraging,” he said. “But we should not overburden the current government with too much expectation. Otherwise, the government may come to crumble under the weight of this expectation. We only stand to lose should such an eventuality happen. What we now have a promise of good things to come and nothing more. But if such state of affairs goes on indefinitely, say for seven or eight years, people might rise in revolt in frustration.”
“You can’t think of Ethiopia without the Oromo, but not just the Oromo, it takes Amhara, Gurage and others to make up Ethiopia.
Asked how he views being Oromo and being Ethiopian by the interviewer, Bulcha responded by saying: “You can’t think of Ethiopia without the Oromo, but not just the Oromo, it takes Amhara, Gurage and others to make up Ethiopia. I’m not one who wishes to glorify Oromoness at the expense of Ethiopianess. In terms of the sheer number and the swath of land it occupies, Oromo is the firstborn of Ethiopia. The contribution of Oromo to the nation is huge. Most of the media in Addis Ababa cater to the Amharic speaking population while those in Oromo are few. While we are the ones with the greater population and resource, we have been made not to develop ourselves and grow,”
Bulcha Demeksa’s career in government stretches back to Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime and he has served as Vice-minister of Finance for almost ten years then.
He has gained his master’s degree from Syracuse University in the United States and he has served as a member of the Board of the World Bank (1970-75) and policy analyst of the United Nations in New York for seventeen years. After he returned home, he cofounded in 1993 Awash Bank SC and served as its president until 2000.
Image: BBC Amharic
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