Week of 09/28/2008: To Boycott TPLF's Ethiopia or Not To Boycott? - Picture: A 1981 clip of newspaper reporting on a TPLF's call for boycott (TPLF was then a Marxist rebel group fighting against the socialist-military Ethiopian regime (Derg)) - 02/03/1981 - Daily Collegian, Penn State.

The Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the group of individuals that control the economic and political power of the Ethiopian empire, found itself on the other side of history when it seized power in 1991 from the ousted military regime, Derg. Even though a new era dawned in the Empire when a coalition of political groups, including the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), set up the Transitional Government in the summer of 1991, the promise for a brand-new Ethiopia crumbled when the TPLF group forced OLF out of the government in 1992.

Since then, the TPLF one-party government has managed to control all aspects of the economic and political power in the country. What used to be "public properties" during the Derg regime are now "party properties" of TPLF; TPLF has created business companies (collectively named EFFORT) that essentially took possession of the previous regime's "public properties" and turned them into "party properties." Today, in an economy where the TPLF-owned and TPLF-affiliated business companies control much of the wealth of the empire, the inflation rate is estimated to be more than 30%.

In the political front, the TPLF one-party government has set up "political subsidiaries" in order to make it seem that the government is of multi-party system. Collectively known as "EPRDF" (Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front), the TPLF-owned political groups include Oromo People's Democratic Organization (OPDO) and the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), created by TPLF to represent Ethiopia's two largest ethnic groups. Whenever there were opportunities for political change, TPLF has resorted to brute forces to squash opposition groups and its own dissents. Today, the TPLF government is involved in various conflicts in the Horn of Africa, including the war in Somalia, a bitter border confrontation with Eritrea, and self-defense armed resistances of OLF & ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front).

Just like TPLF called for a boycott against Derg in 1981, in 2008 there is an active grassroots-level call for boycott of products and services from TPLF-owned and TPLF-affiliated business companies, which are responsible for the price hikes in Ethiopia by the mere fact that they control almost all of the wealth of the country. Read about the boycott call here.