Is President Isaias Afwerki an able captain, patiently and calmly steering our ship of state to a safe harbor, while all around him people are losing their head? Or, is he more like Evel Knievel who treats Eritrea as his personal bike, jumping her from canyon to a river, while all around him there is nothing but fire, crashes and the howling of adoring fans?

Those with faith in the president have a message: follow the tortoise; in the end you won�t be disappointed. TiEgsti. Gobye. Etc. How long? Not too long, according to those who believe that the Ethiopian government is collapsing any time now. To others, time is infinite: wait for however long it takes. The EEBC ruling was delivered in April 2002 and Meles Zenawi has moved to qualified support of the ruling in November 2004. That is two years and 7 months for a maybe. Who knows, in seven years and two months, we could get definitely.

There are also some who are no big fans of the President but still believe that the demarcation should proceed precisely and in faithful implementation of the EEBC. They believe that absence of demarcation is the only thing preventing the people from rising up against the PFDJ. Thus, their argue, all those who are for positive change in Eritrea should push Ethiopia to move to immediate and unconditional implementation of the EEBC ruling. Then, change is inevitable. (In my immodest moments, I call this flawed strategy "TwgaHmo, Part II.")

Timing In War

I subscribe to the Evel Knievel theorem of Isaias Afwerki. More precisely, it is the Harry Houdini model: the president as an escape artist. To an escape artist, the thrill is in the challenge: the riskier the better. Handcuffs? Piece of cake. How about chains? How about chained and thrown over a bridge? How about a casket, under water?

It is a thrilling show: you pay your ticket, catch your breath, applause and go home. But when the magician is the head of state, well that is enough to give one a heart attack. Because the line between just in time and just missed it is so fine.

From the album of our summers of discontent, one of my least favorites is an image that appeared in May 25^th, 2000. It is an image of the cost of miscalculation. It is a picture of two presidents�Isaias and Bouteflika�at the Eritrean president�s office. The Algerian president is wearing a snappy suit; the Eritrean is wearing jeans and shidda�plastic sandals. The story accompanying the picture says that Algerian president just arrived with a message from Addis, that they would like Eritrea to withdraw from Bada and Bure. The story goes on: the Eritrean president says that while these two are indisputably Eritrean territories, he will withdraw his troops in the interest of peace. The next day, the Ethiopians took Senafe, another indisputably Eritrean territory. They explained their move as one driven by the interest of durable peace.

Here�s another: June 1, 2000. Eritrea says that, as a matter of principle, it cannot agree to a ceasefire until Ethiopia had withdrawn from all of Eritrea�s territories. On June 9, Eritrea accepted the ceasefire, damn the principle. A day later, Ethiopia re-occupied Tesseney, another undisputed territory.

Often, when one talks about the cost of time, one is reminded of our armed struggle: it took us 30 years, and an attitude of world defiance to bring about Eritrean independence. Therefore, we should have no time limit and a similar defiance attitude to safeguard its independence and sovereignty. But the two are not analogous: during the armed struggle, we had nothing to lose and everything to gain and could commit to a mission without a timeframe; now, we have little to gain and much to lose using the gobye model.

Here�s an alternative view: the world tries to operate on the basis of justice�justice as defined by the mighty�but that this wheel of justice is very slow. Any honest assessment of our two-year experiment shows that the world does try: Bouteflica�s visit to get a peace deal was preceded by UNSC special team of 7 ambassadors. Who were preceded by Ouyahiya. And Sahnoun. And Serri, and Moi, and Deniau, and Rice, and Smith, and the foreign ministers and heads of state of Zimbabwe, and Burkino Faso (before we insulted him as being an Ethiopian agent), and Salem (same accusation) and Lake (before we accused him of being a spy) and Rwanda (before it pulled out) and Djibouti (before we forced them out.)

But it is also undeniable that the world is slow: the Security Council imposed its arms embargo on May 17� a full two years after both Ethiopia and Eritrea were armed to their teeth and five days after the war started. A more accurate reading of the world would show that a nation will probably get a semblance of justice if it is willing to wait indefinitely for international justice; but it is more likely to get a speedier justice if it engages the party it has a dispute with.

Timing In Peace

Of course, if you are a rich nation, borders and border disputes can be left on automatic pilot to be resolved a generation or two later, when tempers have cooled off. In poorer nations whose immediate neighbors happen to be their largest trading partner, this gets to be difficult. In desperately poor nations, which are run by people with unusually high threshold for risk, this gets to be damn near impossible, because they decide to fight with their two largest trading partners, simultaenously.

It was 1999 and the Ethiopian media was awash with information that the Eritrean economy was a day away from collapsing. The Eritrean officials I spoke to were saying, "what economic collapse?" I remember calling a gentleman in Eritrea who was the USAID Director, the closest I could get to a neutral expert. His position was the Eritrean economy is obviously suffering, but it will be ok so long as Eritrea is able to replace Sudan for Ethiopia as its trading partner. A year later (August 26, 2000), the American economist authored an article in Eritrea Profile where he concluded: "Eritrea does not need the Ethiopian market if it can access the Sudanese and the Middle East markets."

Four years later, Eritrea�s border with Sudan is sealed. The results? Exactly what you would expect. I am not an economist but I find referral to authoritative documents and struggling to understand them to be helpful. Two good sources are the World Bank and the IMF, although their reports are, like all reports, trailing and you are always looking at two-year old data. You can combine this with the usual I-just-spoke-with-my-neighbor�s-aunt-who-just-came-back-from-Eritrea analysis to update your report.

Earlier this year, an economist for the IMF, Ayumu Yamauchi, published a Working Paper on Eritrea. You can read the entire report, which is entitled Fiscal Sustainability�The Case of Eritrea at the IMF website. Not being an economist, I cannot claim to have a thorough understanding of what is reported. I tend to read these reports from my field of study�financial analysis. When stumped you refer to those books you saved from college (Professor: "I know the price is steep, but it is a good reference book you will use your entire life." You: "Yeah, right.")

Cheat sheet: Fiscal policy: things the government does to enhance revenue and manage expenses and stimulate economic growth. Monetary policy: things the government does to manage the money supply.

The story of Eritrea, this time written in economese, is the same as that written in war time: that of an escape artist pushing the edge of the possible waiting for something, anything: a miracle.

Analysts who look at the financial statements of a publicly traded company often make distinctions in revenue and expenses between those that are ordinary and those that are extraordinary, or one-time charges. Similarly, with governments, there are ordinary and extraordinary revenues and expenses. The ordinary revenues are tax revenues, port/customs fees (which are sustainable); the extraordinary revenues come from privatization and government bonds (which are one-time.)

Yamauchi�s report includes a table of Key Fiscal Indicators that tracks Eritrea�s revenues and expenses as a % of GDP for each year between 1993 and 2002. Guess what: 1993 was our best year! Understandably, the war with Ethiopia denied Eritrea of a key source of revenue (port fees and charges) but things were already downhill since 1993. It paints a picture of, what Al Gore used to explain in layspeak: "everything that should go up is going down and everything that should go down is going up."

Another frightening ratio is the public debt to GDP. In 2002, reports Yamauchi, public debt (external and internal) was 200% of GDP. GDP per capita "remained basically unchanged over the last ten years."

When the fiscal policy is not working, nations have quasi-independent central banks that manipulate the monetary policy (the money supply) mainly through interest rates. Eritrea�s central bank is government controlled and because the interest rate is fixed at 2.5% and because there is no private sector to speak of, there is no other stimulant to the economy. The exchange rate is also fixed (largely to manage the expense of servicing the debt) giving a rise to what is euphemistically referred to as the "parallel" economy (black market)�

Or, a nation turns to its "development partners," as Ethiopia has, to increase its share of generous loans and grants. But here, too, the Eritrean government has hampered itself because it has failed standards of governance (constitutional government, free press, due process.)

The writer concludes by making a series of recommendations� (1)improving business climate, (2) "swift and full demobilization of combatants" and "move towards peace time economy," (3) implement changes that will attract foreign investment and "generous donor assistance."

These factors, and others itemized in the report as well as in the almost daily bad-news-bulletins, make up Eritrea�s blinking red light. A nation somewhere between insolvency and war. A responsible leader would exercise leadership and take whatever measures are prudent to place Eritrea on a path of peacetime economy, which begins with finding a swift resolution to our border crisis. But, if you have an escape artist for a president, as we do, a person who delights in juggling swords and bowling balls and axes, all of these challenges must be quite thrilling. And his fans are like horror movie fans, ridiculing those of us "Tulkuyat" for refusing to see and cheer the horror show.

If Eritrea were a company, the shareholders would have risen up to fire the CEO and the board of directors. In 2001, before re-entering politics, Herui T Bairou, who (in my opinion) is a better pundit than a politician, had proposed a solution: government-in-exile. Recently, Burhan Ali re-introduced the idea. I don't want to provide the opposition yet another idea to argue about, but I think it is definitely the right time to at least consider this idea. Better now, while the light is blinking than wait for the train to derail.

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