Then I was young rockstars started to think that they were the people to save the world. They showed us pictures of starving children and sang us a Christmas song that pulled our heart strings to full extension.
The rockstars portrayed the famine as a only a natural caused disaster.
The song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" raised £72 million in 1985.

Over the years many more charity rockathons ensued many more millions were raised and for many years there was no negative side to this story, the western world pulled together and saved a bunch of starving people.
Well thirty years later the story of what the government in Ethiopia at the time did is too well known so that even the SJWs over at Slate have to admit that the efforts of Bob Geldof and the other rockstars probably did more harm than good.
Slate shows its true colours (many shades of red) when it lays the blame for the failure of relief efforts at the door of the neutrally termed "Autocracy" going through the entire article without once mentioning the politics of said government.
Slate airily speculates on what could be the cause of of famines and their association with "Autocracies" and comes up with the spurious notion that it has something to do with "Autocracy" not being responsive to the people it governed.
What they don't even mention is how the "Autocracy" requisitioned NGO vehicles and carried out a forced displacement on hundreds of thousands of people.

Massive Famine? Forced Displacement of Entire Populations?

I wonder what kind of government Ethiopia could have had?

Somehow nobody really knew what kind of government Ethiopia had at the time( us plebs anyways).

During that time period I didn't even know that Ethiopia was a communist dictatorship and this was during the height of the cold war as a matter of fact I never learned this very salient point until around 2010 when I was reading a book by Wilbur Smith.

This book detailed the revolution that overtook Ethiopia and was a real eye opener. Despite being around a lot of Marxists and reading lots of Marxist history this was the first I had heard of the Red Terror, I had of course heard of the Terror associated with the French Revolution but what I read was next level nastiness.
This was also the first I had heard of Bakunin and his writings on conducting an armed revolution.

Ethiopian Red Terror

Thousands of men and women were rounded up and executed in the following two years. Amnesty International estimates that the death toll could be as high as 500,000. Groups of people were herded into churches that were then burned down, and women were subjected to systematic rape by soldiers. The Save the Children Fund reported that the victims of the Red Terror included not only adults, but 1,000 or more children, mostly aged between eleven and thirteen, whose corpses were left in the streets of Addis Ababa.

So once again communism took over a country and what was the first thing they did? Well of course after the first round of purging was over.
If you guessed that they implemented the same agrarian reform that all Marxists love so much, with of course the same success, if you consider mass starvation an appropriate agrarian reform.
That's right the same collectivization of farmland that starved millions of people in the USSR and China.
Yes armed conflict and drought exacerbated this famine but the real cause that Slate conveniently glosses over is stupid Marxist economics that have failed every country that they have ever been applied to, more recent examples being Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
This shouldn't be a surprise considering Marx was just a wanker who had no expertise other than to convince people that his stupid poorly thought out system would be anything other than disastrous.
Even after it has after murdered hundreds of millions of people, starved hundreds of millions more and oppressed all its citizens.
People still try to pander to good people's empathy for other human beings by saying if you care for working people and the oppressed you would support socialism.
What a load of crap, more like if you hate pretty much everybody(even the supporters of marxist revolution get the bullet) and want to see them suffer immeasurably agony then support any kind of marxist sophistry.

In their intellectual dishonesty Slate asks the question...

Why does autocracy sometimes lead to famine?

A better question to ask is why do communist governments always cause mass starvation?

And their response...

The most fundamental reason is that autocrats often don’t care enough about the population to prevent famine.

Would have been more informative if they had mentioned that whenever Communists institute Collectivization of Farms their nations starve.

What happens when you embrace Marxism despite the feeble apologetics at the end of this wikipedia entry.

Embracing Marxism
In the 1970s, Mengistu embraced the philosophy of Marxism–Leninism, which was increasingly popular among many nationalists and revolutionaries throughout Africa and much of the Third World at the time.

In the mid-1970s, under Mengistu's leadership, the Derg regime began an aggressive program of changing Ethiopia's system from a mixed feudo-capitalist emergent economy to an Eastern Bloc-style command economy. Shortly after coming to power, all rural land was nationalized, stripping the Ethiopian Church, the Imperial family and the nobility of all their sizable estates and the bulk of their wealth. During this same period, all foreign-owned and locally owned companies were nationalized without compensation in an effort to redistribute the country's wealth. All undeveloped urban property and all rental property was also nationalized. Private businesses such as banks and insurance companies, large retail businesses, etc. were also taken over by the government. All this nationalized property was brought under the administration of large bureaucracies set up to administer them. Farmers who had once worked on land owned by absentee landlords were now compelled to join collective farms. All agricultural products were no longer to be offered on the free market, but were to be controlled and distributed by the government. Despite [Read "Because of"] progressive agricultural reforms, under the Derg, agricultural output suffered due to civil war, drought and misguided economic policies(Marxism). There was also a famine in 1984, which was the 10th anniversary of the Derg.

There, the famine was the product of three elements, only one of which could be described as natural - a two-year drought across the Sahel sub-region. The other two factors were entirely man-made. The first was the dislocation imposed by the wars waged by the government in Addis Ababa against both Eritrean guerrillas and the Tigrean People's Liberation Front. The second and more serious was the forced agricultural collectivization policy ruthlessly pursued by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his colleagues in the Dergue (committee), who had overthrown Haile Selassie in 1974 (and officially adopted communism as their creed in 1984). This collectivisation was every bit the equal in its radicalism of the policies Stalin pursued in Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.

The lengths to which the Dergue was prepared to go soon became apparent. Though even Mengistu's Soviet patrons advised against it, the Dergue, as François Jean of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) put it at the time, chose to employ "shock treatment in order radically to transform Ethiopian rural society". But one finds no mention of that in any official account of Live Aid, in the speeches of Bob Geldof or the Oxfam website. The Ethiopian terror famine was on a smaller scale than its Soviet and Chinese predecessors, and many in Ethiopia who died in the mid-1980s were not victims of the Dergue's campaign in a direct sense. But, as François Jean wrote, all three terror famines "proceeded from the same approach to reality ... the same vision of the future, the same extreme commitment to radical social transformation".

The most glaring fact that was omitted was how all NGO's transport was commandeered to aid in the largest internal displacement since Khmer Rouge worked their marxist skullduggery on that poor country.
Has anyone heard of these tremendous crimes?

Of all the NGOs, only the founding (French) section of MSF refused to go along with the pro-Dergue consensus. Once expelled from Ethiopia, however, MSF France was free to talk about what it knew of forced deportations. "We are witnessing the biggest deportation since the Khmer Rouge genocide," said MSF's president, Claude Malhuret, in late 1985. For MSF, the decision of aid agencies, UN institutions and donor governments to help a totalitarian project like the Ethiopian resettlement programme was an exercise in deadly compassion. As Claude Malhuret put it, Ethiopia demonstrated that it had become imperative to "clarify the complex relations that humanitarian action forms with a totalitarian regime; to mark out the indistinct but very real limit beyond which aid to victims was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners."

Referrences

A more honest Article

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief

Ethiopian Red Terror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qey_Shibir

Slate article

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/feed_the_world/2014/04/live_aid_band_aid_usa_for_africa_did_pop_stars_and_hit_songs_help_ethiopia.html

Evil Genocider supported by the feel good gang

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengistu_Haile_Mariam