Hardly anyone matches the intellectual repository and experience of constitution making in Ethiopia as Fasil Nahum (PhD). He was involved in the drafting of three constitutions since the Imperial days but under radically different regimes. Never entangling himself in party membership, he always cherished his distance from power politics and remained determined to contribute professionally.

“I purposely decided not to belong to any party,” he told our OP-ED Editor, Tibebu Bekele. “It`s not a party line that I talk about. I thought that I could be useful as a professional if I thought independently.”

The 77-year-old lawyer and scholar is in great physical shape and has a sharp memory. He has a calm manner as he sat down to reflect in his serene home, perhaps in nostalgia, on the historical context, the political process and - yes - some of the regrets he may have in hindsight of the making of Ethiopia’s current Constitution, which is now a source of passion and fury.

Fortune: It is over two decades since the ratification of the Ethiopian Constitution. You were one of the few experts involved in the crafting process and authored a book on the subject, "Constitution for a Nation of Nations: The Ethiopian Perspective". Is it not fitting to say that you can put the historical records in context?

You take me back nostalgically. Ethiopia then was a post-conflict, traumatised society. For several years, there was a war taking place. When the EPRDF finally controlled Addis Abeba, we had something like 17 armed groups roaming around the country, fighting one another and the government. Ethiopia was a war arena, free for all types of war.

There were two major pieces of homework. One was to pacify the country and normalise life immediately. I am sure you remember the plastic shelters that were all over Addis Abeba and other towns; for the previous two years or so a lot of people had been coming to Addis Abeba from the countryside. In about six months, the population of Addis would have increased by at least one million people.

It was an unsettled time and a wholly traumatised society. People did not know what tomorrow would bring. It was complete confusion.

The economy was in shambles. Not only that. The central government did not have foreign currency, and business was not running. A whole set of things conspired against regular life. The country was coming out of many years of war and decades of massive human rights violations.

The second homework was the long-term aspect. How is this society going to be governed? Then you need a constitution, but that gives you some time. If you cannot solve the immediate solution that people have enough food to eat, that we have proper shelter, that they can see that tomorrow is going to be better than today, and they are going to work, it is a big problem.

Remember, this was a society awash with weapons.

Q: What was the Constitution drafting process like?

The EPRDF called for a conference at the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in the first week of July. The leading players were the liberation movements. It was their representatives that were sitting there, and there were others as well. One of them was the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). They said they were not part of Ethiopia but came as observers.

The main discussion was the need to have the charter to run Ethiopia. A transitional charter was finally prepared and the transitional government established. This interim government was supposed to be for two and a half years. The charter was a kind of constitution for the transitional government, and once it was established, then it was up to it to prepare a constitution.

Q: At this summit in Addis Abeba, elite-led political groups and entities that came out of the student movement and were influential in the political scene were excluded. Don't you think that exclusion later became a wedge in the broader acceptance of the Constitution? Don’t you think it stopped it short of becoming a negotiated settlement?

The ruling party officially excluded the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE). Nobody else was officially excluded except for the WPE. And the reason for that we may go into, but basically, this was the former ruling party.

Q: But groups like the EPRP and AESM as well as a coalition led by Goshu Woldie (Col.) were excluded, weren't they?

Many of the EPRP leadership were part of the EPRDF in their various sub-groups. They were also inside many other organisations, and many of them joined EPRDF later on. There was no official exclusion of anybody, except for the WPE. There were also people from the university sitting in the summit. All issues were openly discussed, and the transitional charter established the interim parliament, which appointed a committee to draft a constitution.

The committee took some time, a long time actually. It was supposed to be for two and a half years, but it took four years. It started by inviting various people from within the country and from outside to consult on what the constitution should look like.

A whole set of constitutional issues that came up were discussed widely. In some cases, people had open public lectures on what they thought the Ethiopian constitution should look like. One issue, for instance, was the land regime. Should it be public or privately owned? Questions such as what to do with the military and how it was going to be a part of the system were important, because the army was the government early on.

Finally, we came up with a document.

Ethiopia was divided into 547 electoral units, and a candidate was elected from each electoral unit. The document was presented to them, and they went through it article by article and made changes. Finally, there was a document that was presented to the transitional parliament, which did not add or subtract anything. They just accepted it by acclamation, and it was promulgated into law.

Q: The dominating presence and intimate involvement of the victorious political force in the consultation process, the EPRDF, has left a strong footprint of its worldview on the final document. Its leaders left no room for a negotiated settlement. Didn't this facet of the process impact the way people perceive the constitution-making process in the decades following, hence a popular sense of exclusion?

You are completely correct. But this is always the case for any constitution. When the Communist Party takes over in countries like Russia, East Germany, Romania, Vietnam, and Cuba, it is their worldview in their respective constitutions. When Social Democrats in Europe took over, it was their worldview that was in their constitutions. It is the same in Norway and Sweden.

Liberals dominated in the making of the constitution in the United States. But slavery was part of their worldview, and they had it intact, because it was slave owners writing the constitution. And for 100 years, the constitutional system accepted slavery and enforced it in the United States until Abraham Lincoln’s time.

Yes, any ruling system would want to have its worldview included, because it thinks that it is the correct one.

Q: Does this justify the EPRDF's choice, which was not willing to compromise with the demands of others?

It is not surprising that we have a worldview of that sort. One of the issues that people speak about is that it is heavily based on the concept of nationality. It is interesting, because this was an issue that was taken up by university students again and again. When I was a student in the United States, for instance, in the North American charter of the Ethiopian students' union, one of the main issues was that the question of nationality should be dealt with in Ethiopia. It is not something that the EPRDF created. It comes as a worldview, later on, that nationality should be taken into account. We are a multinational state.

Q: For instance, the inclusion of land ownership in the Constitution has handicapped the government by depriving it of policy options to respond to current realities of economic development. Was it wise to enshrine a policy option of one party in the Constitution?

Twenty-five years ago, the argument about whether land should be publicly owned or private property was hotly debated. I saw the problems, and I was swayed over to making it public property. We were dealing with a traumatised post-conflict society, and the population was 85pc agrarian. If we were to privatise land, what it would mean was that the farmers would sell their farms for cheap and flock to towns.

With no skills, in any case, and very few jobs in towns, we would have been left with a lot of people that Karl Marx would call lumpenproletariat. This could have been a major problem both for the farmers, and it would turn into not only an economic issue for the country, but it would turn into a political crisis as well. The alternative was to keep farmers where they were. In spite of them being in subsistence farming, it was still better than uprooting them. Public ownership of rural land was the preferred solution at the time.

When it comes to towns, it was another thing. Perhaps, one could have thought it was easier to think of private ownership of town land.

Q: The argument on land was based on economic rights to own private property, if not questioning the political intentions of the dominant political force at the time. Is this a fair depiction of the other side?

The other side of the argument, in many ways, was internationalised. I am not sure that it helped us much. We were emerging out of the communism of the Dergue. We were expected to look westward; and therefore, since they have a private property model, we should also look like them and make land private property.

But in Africa, you do not own the land as an individual. It belongs to your parents, as it will belong to your children. You are just holding it, passing it on in the process. You do not sell it, for it was your parent's land. Although now it is yours, it is going to be your children’s.