best efforts of the government to encourage diversity, more than one third of those present at the first congress in 1980 were either soldiers or Addis Ababa residents. The 1980 congress unveiled the membership of the COPWE's Central Committee and Secretariat. The Secretariat, which controlled the more day to day aspects of the Central Committee's business and was supervised by the top Derg leadership, was composed of mainly civilian ideologues. Regional branches of the Secretariat coordinated by army officers helped complement the COPWE's central leadership. The organisation became more powerful in 1981 with the creation of separate offices for administrator and COPWE representatives in each region. By 1983, there were about 50,000 COPWE members and approximately 6,500 party cells. Mengistu's earlier calls for ideological purity and "committed communists" soon became a simple façade for the Derg's efforts to eliminate its political opponents regardless of actual beliefs. Loyalty to the Derg was preferred over dedication to Marxism-Leninism or certain ideological ideals in considerations for party membership. By this time, the military and police had also become the majority in the membership of the Central Committee, with 79 of its 123 members being soldiers, twenty of whom were also Derg members. Formation The Workers' Party of Ethiopia (WPE) was finally established on 12 September 1984, to mark the tenth anniversary of the revolution in which the Derg came to power, replacing the COPWE which was dissolved. Mengistu became the party leader under the title general secretary. The WPE's Politburo replaced the COPWE's executive committee as Ethiopia's chief decision making body, featuring eleven members: seven of them were the surviving members of the Derg, while the other four were civilian ideologues and technocrats. The Central Committee was expanded to 183 members, with party congresses every five years. Generally, Mengistu's wishes prevailed over any opposition, and the nepotism involved in the selection of Politburo members meant that opposition was usually marginal anyway, leading the entire council to serve more as a mouthpiece for Mengistu's wishes than as a legitimate government body. At a national level, membership of the WPE was heavily slanted towards soldiers and members of certain ethnic groups that had, historically, endorsed the concept of a unified "Greater Ethiopia", such as the Tigray and Amhara. However, at regional and local levels, ethnicity and military service became less relevant, with large numbers of civilians and members of various ethnicities in positions of power.