የሥነ ዜጋ መግቢያ ፈተና፣ 2005 ዓ.ም. (2013)

Development needs a setting where the same law binds the government and the citizen. Under the rule of law contracts hold, property is safe and an official who abuses office can be challenged, so people are willing to invest, trade and work. That is why it is treated as the base condition for political, social and economic progress. Periodic election is the tempting answer, but an election held where the law can be set aside returns a government that still rules by its own will, so the vote alone changes little.

A secular state keeps religion and government in separate spheres. It adopts no official religion and gives religious bodies no state power, while citizens stay free to worship as they choose. Theocratic is the tempting answer, but a theocracy is the opposite case: religious leaders and religious law run the state, so the two are joined instead of separated.

Article 61 of the FDRE Constitution says the members of the House of Federation are elected by the State Councils, and a State Council may also hold a direct election for them. So the body named in the Constitution is the regional state council. Presidents of the regional states is tempting because a president leads the state, but the president heads the executive, and sending members to the House of Federation is the council's work.

The State Council is the legislature of a regional state, and making law is what a legislature does. It passes the region's own laws inside the powers the Constitution leaves to the states. The state administration is the tempting answer, but that is the executive: it carries laws out and may propose drafts, while introducing and enacting them belongs to the council.

Traditional Ethiopian society ranked occupations, and the wandering minstrel, the azmari, sat near the bottom of that ranking even though everyone enjoyed the performance. Singers were treated as low in status and many communities avoided marriage with them. Farmers look like the tempting answer because farming is hard manual work, but the land holding farmer was the respected backbone of that society.

In the last years of Haile Selassie's reign the university and secondary school students led the open opposition, with demands such as land to the tiller and with questions about famine, poverty and inequality. Their strikes, pamphlets and demonstrations set the political mood that carried into 1974. Army officers are tempting because soldiers finally took power, but the army moved late, after the students and the educated elite had already put the questions in public.