Abstract
Building an inclusively representative and equitable bureaucracies in a multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural polity is a challenging phenomenon. Being one of such polities, Ethiopia embarked upon multinational federal nation-building policy exactly two decades ago through a constitutional reform. Accordingly, nine regional states and two chartered cities bureaucracies were established besides the federal bureaucracy. It is obvious that in addition to professionalism, civil service jobs generally require knowledge of certain official working language. Regions have chosen their own official working languages for their respective civil service institutions which have been reiterated as the major opportunity brought by the multinational federal policy of the country. This paper emphasizes on the bureaucracies of the Federal Government where Amharic is retained as the sole working language. From the outset, we ask questions: How could it be possible to build representative civil service institutions in multilingual polities? What are the roles of federal restructuring and official working language? What are the challenges that Ethiopia is facing at the federal level in terms of building a representative bureaucracy? This piece uses government reports of five years (2003-2008) and other theoretical literature to lay out Ethiopia’s (re)quest for building equitable federal bureaucracies. Overall, the finding show that even though it may be different for political positions; the Amharic monolingual language policy of the federal government has ensured inequitable access to the federal civil service institutions thereby posing challenges to the constitutional vision of building equitable and multicultural bureaucracy. Key words: Federal bureaucracy, official working language, representation. 
Highlights
The paper suggests that the choice of Ethiopia’s federal working language and access to its bureaucracy is surrounded by politics of marginalization, not representation
This is apparent, especially, when the status of Afan Oromo at the federal level comes to the picture
Despite the fact that regional policies encourage the development of non-Amharic languages at the regional level, non-Amharic speakers remain subjected to discriminatory linguistic formula of the Federal Government of Ethiopia
Summary
The role of reasonable working language and representative civil service institutions in the management of ethno-national diversity has often been overlooked in the scholarly debates on Ethiopia’s federalism. Constitution, as compared to previous ones, is the inclusion of the provision that bestowed opportunity to Member States of the Federation to determine their respective official working languages. The subsequent evolution of the Ethiopian polity proved national domination and the independence of various ethnic groups including the largest ethnic group of the country, the Oromo, was forcefully taken away These vanquished ethnolinguistic groups were subjected to domination and exploitation; and their cultures and languages were suppressed and the dominating ethnic group’s culture and language-Amharic was imposed on the conquered peoples.
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