The national conference: half-full is still not full

…May you take roots in the land of your forefathers; this is a Tigrigna blessing uttered upon every child and young person who has done something to satisfy the expectations of their elders…Adi aboki teteKeli…I cried the last time I heard the saying because it just sounded impossible…I couldn’t have been farther away from the land of my forefathers at that precise moment (not physically…geographical proximity was just abut the only distance I had bridged…)

It was in 2007…I was in Aksum, on my way to Shimelba refugee camp and it was an elderly Tigrayan man… I was with people from the BBC world service and the gentleman was surprised to hear me speak to him in Tigrigna… he blessed me with the blessings that my own grandfather would have and it reminded me of the last time I saw my grandmother in 2001. There is a picture of me, my daughter, my mum and my granny taken then, fond memories of a time that would never comeback… my grandmother is gone… my daughter doesn’t remember a thing of the visit, all I have is a picture of four generations of women smiling away at a camera… and the possibility of taking roots in the land of my forefathers is even more unattainable today than it ever was… and I am followed by a whole generation of young men and women who are also not going to be rooted anywhere… much less in the land of their forefathers…

It is this that I would like to see at the heart of what our politicians, intellectuals and strategists, are addressing right now… the land that our forefathers blessed us to take roots upon… the land that our big brothers and sisters died dreaming about… the land that we eagerly sought to define, but is vomiting its very children out…wrenching its own heart and scattering it across the dessert and into the deep dark sea and to the cold shores of alien lands. It is a whole sale uprooting… roots, branch leaves and all… soon there will be nothing left to uphold the once proud nation that stood up for itself…against all odds…

Where once the corridors of power were made to accept the right of Eritreans to be… today the passages to almost every refugee camp in the African continent tell the tragic conclusion of that epic tale of a vision that created a nation out of an impossible dream. Today the vision has become the corrupted replica of every African failure. The visionaries have become the very embodiment of everything that wasn’t supposed to be and their offspring custodians of an unending nightmare that gets even more bloodcurdling with each recurrence.

Today an Eritrean mother celebrates her son getting as far away from Eritrea as his feet, an overpriced camel, a hapless dingy and any compartment of a lorry big enough to hold on to would take him. For her daughters she prays that pregnancy and the birth of a healthy but unwanted baby would be the worst fate that befalls them…for the alternative is unmentionable diseases and unimaginable trauma. Just whose curse are we reaping?

We have managed to become a nation of dispossessed urchins… who sing the accomplishment of our ‘ancestors’ as though it was but mere fairy tale from countless generations back. As if it wasn’t only yesteryear that countless young men and women determined to self determine… today young people twice as many, who are their mirror image have only got a choice between a hopeless death and a hapless life to determine between… and they do their determining with a sense of urgency that makes the sluggish reaction rate of the people who are determining a solution for all this completely unbearable to watch….

What is ironic is that; at the very moment when young Eritreans are risking everything in sinking boats that have no hope of taking anyone anywhere… their older compatriots have successfully launched their ‘sailing boats’ (what some have dabbed the National Conference) and are telling them to come aboard when they are ready… them on the ‘sailing’ boat have the luxury of determining whether they would fight the injustice against them in the sinking boats, by organizing themselves on minimum or maximum agendas… from fronts or parties… through ethnic, religious or ideological groupings… peaceably or forcefully … from Addis or Paris? Through pen names or passport names… the choice is endless and the cost is always shouldered by others… option one inconveniences them slightly more than option 2001 so the latter is preferable….there is no urgency… there is no need to make hefty sacrifices… there is no call to vacate cocoon land just to rescue the hapless boat people…

If they are threatening to send them back from Libya the UNHCR will have to do something about it, perhaps the civic organisations will alert them… if they are incarcerated in nameless prisons in Egypt… someone out there is better placed in raising the alarm over their plight… if they are being carved by knives in the quest to steal vital organs out of them… this hardly makes it into the agenda of those with lofty acronyms… whose endless meetings, conferences and festivals will culminate in loftier slogans…

… When are we going to raise our game above the parapet of those with the luxury of endless options and combinations of options all with similar results? When are we going to work out that ours is a one option game?… we do or we die… we rescue or we harm… we do right or do wrong… there is no margin of error there is no experiments and there are no rehearsals and dry runs…the message that our politicians in the opposition don’t seem to get is that there is no time to loose…. We either rescue Eritrea now or we become the generation that gained and lost the whole thing all in a series of bad gambles. The option of dipping your hand into the sea and either catching a fish or washing it clean is a lazy myth…if you dip your hand into this sea you either throttle the shark or it swallows you (sailing boat and all). A more fitting metaphor is that of the chira nebri … you should never tamper with a tiger’s tail but if you do… you should never contemplate loosening your grip…

…that is why an experimental National Conference where we make tentative moves at working together, and then celebrate our success, is not an option for us… neither is an alliance that is a marriage of convenience that is not expected to bear fruits worthy of the union… nor military options that bate on options that would make a confirmed gambler tremble… what we need is a resolute determination to set the goal and march straight at it… no gimmickry… no cheap propaganda… pure unadulterated resolve to be prepared to get to the bottom of things that continue to hamper us and reduce our matured politicians to name-calling each other in an endless display of mud slinging that leaves them too exhausted to do the real work.

The public should begin to call for higher stakes and not settle for the mini bars, that the politicians have relegated the whole struggle to… politicians should be measured in terms of their effectiveness as measured against the steep slope that we are all having to climb… it is not good enough to maintain acronyms… coin slogans and mint crests… a leader leads… they don’t postulate, suggest or hypothesise… they don’t experiment using an entire generation as a guinea pig… they don’t gamble with the plight of the people as a collateral… No it is no longer good enough to be content that you saved your organisation from disintegrating (by the skin of its teeth) and the Alliance from collapsing by reneging on the pledge to make strides to rescue Eritrea…

The half-full-half-empty argument and the ‘new and emerging’ excuse may have worked in previous years… half-full is still not full and the ‘new and emerging’ have to mature and materialise sooner or later… and now is the time to judge our trees by their fruit… beyond the empty slogans, the lofty acronyms and cheesy military communiqués are tattered organisations, with tiered leaders and disillusioned following… this is what is at the bottom of our organisations (without exception!) and if we mean business this is the root that needs healing.