Politics by Numbers: Poverty Reduction Discourse, Contestations and Regime Legitimacy in Ethiopia

Despite the global focus on poverty reduction and sophistications in poverty measurements, there is still lack of consensus on how to measure poverty. Different ways measuring poverty continued to suggest different rates of poverty prevalence, sometimes with contradictory trend or very wide discrepancies. How do such uncertainties on trends of poverty decline affect national politics in context where regime tries to build its legitimacy on poverty reduction and economic performance? This study examined two contradictory discourses on the trend of poverty decline in Ethiopia in the last two decades; one depicting rapid fall and the other a high level of poverty declining marginally. The study examined who is arguing what? Based on what evidence? One group, which supports of the ruling regime, uses government’s consumption poverty statistics to argue that poverty has dropped significantly as a result of recent economic growth in the country. As its legitimacy based on normative values such democratization and rule of law is declining and is accused being authoritarian, the government tries to legitimatize itself on economic performance and aggressively promotes its statistics. This compels the other group, which the study found it to be usually very critical of the government, rejects the government’s data and instead uses the multidimensional poverty index form OPHI to argue that poverty has remained widespread and declined only marginally. They also draw on IMF statistics and argue that the economy has not been growing as fast as the government claims, (and there-fore could not have contributed to poverty reduction), and accuse the regime fabricating data. This way, the opposition group attempt to delegitimatize the regime. The study thus established that theses two discourses are being “done” by pre-established groups defined in relation to their view towards the regime. As such statistics is being used selectively to fit actor’s political interests and poverty numbers are used as means of conducting politics- politics by numbers.