An anonymous reader wrote recently,

�I share my Brother Dr Teodros� call for reconciliation and renewal in the politics of our country as urgent and vital.

I think it is particularly significant and heartening to hear when Dr.Teodros and others like him courageously speak truth to the regime whose top members, by accident of birth, happen to be their ethnic affiliates.

I believe that we need to be open and embrace ANDENET as our only way out of the current political impasse.

However, given the complexities of the problem i.e. the intransigence of the government, the ossified experiences and centrifugal tendencies of some significant opposition groups, the not so conducive international (security more than democracy) and regional (surrounded by authoritarian regimes save Kenya) context, the politics of ANDENET won�t be an easy one.

I, for one, don�t know how we can go about redeeming our country�s politics in more tangible and practical ways other than thinking that, perhaps, some crucial ideas to guide such practice can be garnered by organizing a group or groups of able minds (compatriots and expatriots.why not Kofi Anan, Desmond Tutu and others for us too?) or intellectuals who can enhance the cross-talk amongst the various groups in the country in a bid to ward off any impending disaster and bring about the much desired ANDENET of peaceful change.

In order to realize this, I am sure that you will concur with me when I say that one needs a lot of faith, hope and courage.� (Abugida, March 10, 2008).  I

I am heart warmed by this response; may God proliferate such well thought out responses among my readers, so that we Ethiopians could move forward, and in concert refine the complex politics of ANDENET.

ANDENET is an ideal. To convert it into a pragmatic idea which could take us to refine the politics of impasse, we must flesh out the content of ANDENET. That is my goal in this short piece, which I hope other able thinkers could polish, on the behalf of the Ethiopian people.

First and foremost, what we need to do is to found an organization under which we can subsume the nationwide interests of individuals, ethnics, and religious groups, under a single common good.  Prior to that goal, however, is the importance of each Ethiopian cleansing herself of hate, of suspicion, of revenge, and other prepolitical matters and come to the democratic arena guided by a single idea, the love of Ethiopia, and the commitment and passion that  cement that love on the ground of peace . This imperative can be done only by the Ethiopian individual. The common good must further be cemented by a General Will, the will of every Ethiopian, sufficiently general to serve as the Will of the entire nation, minus the disparate and antagonistic wills of atomized Ethiopians.

It is us Ethiopians who must forge a will that is common to all of us. I call that will the General Will of the Ethiopian nation.

ANDENET must be guided by the political imperative of the General Will.  That is the foundational imperative, and there are more.

As the perceptive anonymous reader put it, we must anchor our agenda on hope, faith and courage.  The second political imperative then is a blend of hope, of faith and courage, and of this three, courage, is a distinct political imperative, whereas hope and faith are moral imperatives. The General will requires a political imperative for it to serve as a strategic mediator between vision and action. Courage is precisely that political mediator that gives life and movement to the General Will of the Ethiopian people.

The third political imperative is the decision that the cleansed Ethiopian individual must make, when she decided to put away differences and bring similarities to the forefront as she launches a social movement propelled by Peaceful struggle as the struggle proper of political and moral individuals, who say no to unjust laws, who refuse to be docile, who put their lives on line for the sake of sculpting a new Ethiopia, as the blend of classical and modern Ethiopian personality, about which I have written extensively in my previous columns, and which I will revisit in future articles.