Alemayehu Fentaw
Amb. David Shinn, in an interview with the Voice of America
regarding the government presser about Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's health,
said "You wouldn’t make a statement like that - that is so open-ended -
unless the problem is significant" Shinn said. He noted he has no
information about the prime minister's health.
He added that Meles is the kind of leader who plans ahead.
And if he is ill, he says the 57-year-old prime minister likely has a plan in
place.
"I'd be willing to bet very good money that he has been
planning some way to deal with this issue in order to ensure some kind of
reasonable succession of government in Ethiopia," said Shinn.
I for one think that only time will tell if there at all was
a plan of succession or PM Zenawi was an extraordinarily farsighted statesman
as Shinn claimed. If Zenawi had a succession plan for the time when he would be
gone out of the Ethiopian political scene for good, it couldn't be anything
different than, Hailemariam Desalegn, the current Deputy PM and Foreign
Minister might be appointed to serve as a de jure PM and Berhane Gebre-Kirstos
to run the apparatus, de facto, from behind the screen in a capacity as Deputy
PM and Foreign Minister in the place of Desalegn. But if he survives, the
original plan remains in tact, viz. for him to run the state apparatus from
behind the screen, which I might call the Putin Plan. I wish I had money to bet the good ambassador!
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