When Global Scandals Reach Addis Ababa: Ethiopia and the Epstein Files

By Sewasew Tekelemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a political class when documents arrive that were never meant to be read. Not the silence of ignorance, but the silence of calculation the kind that buys time while the ground is still shifting. Earlier this year, when another tranche of emails, calendars, and scraps of correspondence tied to Jeffrey Epstein began circulating online, that silence spread quickly across multiple continents. Wall Street tightened. Westminster shifted uncomfortably. Reputations that had survived decades of quiet association were suddenly subjected to public dissection. The so-called Epstein files have proven to be less a single detonation than a slow and relentless fuse, and it is the nature of a fuse to travel until it finds something to ignite.

Ethiopia a country that has historically occupied a peripheral place in the narratives surrounding Epstein’s global web has now been drawn into that orbit. And the questions being raised are not trivial. They touch on the architecture of exile politics, the economics of foreign-funded opposition movements, and the uncomfortable degree to which African political struggles have long been narrated, financed, and sometimes instrumentalised by Western elites who rarely face consequences for doing so.

At the centre of this debate sits a brief but striking email exchange dated April 2009. In it, Jeffrey Epstein discusses Professor Berhanu Nega, then an exiled Ethiopian opposition figure, now Ethiopia’s Minister of Education in correspondence with the American psychiatrist and philanthropist Dr. Henry Jarecki. The email has been shared widely on the social media platform X, and the reaction has been swift, loud, and in many cases, deeply uninformed. What has emerged is not so much a scandal as a mirror, reflecting back to Ethiopia’s political class and to the international community that once championed its opposition figures a set of questions that neither side appears eager to answer.

The document itself is real. Its meaning, however, is far less settled than the loudest voices on either side would have us believe.

What the email actually contains is a forwarded message from Dr. Jarecki, titled “Article on Berhanu Nega + G7” the G7 here understood to refer to Ginbot 7, the Ethiopian opposition movement founded by Berhanu Nega and others in the aftermath of the disputed 2005 elections. In that forwarded note, Dr. Jarecki describes Berhanu Nega as “the Epstein scholar for 2008”, and adds that he had been elected mayor of Addis Ababa before being jailed two years prior. Epstein’s reply is immediate, and it is telling though not in the way many have assumed. He is dismissive of Berhanu Nega’s intellectual standing: “He is hardly a scholar if any note no new theories, no new economic ideas, in fact not one of the top 50,000 economists in the world.” But then the tone shifts. The email takes a sharper, more provocative turn: “However, if you want to fund rebellion without all the easily seen through grandiose facade of scholar rescue, I’m in.”

That is the full extent of what can be verified. There is no evidence in the document that money changed hands. There is no proof of operational planning or sustained contact. And there is no mention, explicit or implicit of intelligence agencies, including Mossad, despite the claims that have begun circulating online with the predictable speed of misinformation dressed as revelation.

To understand why this email matters at all why it has landed with such force in a country already exhausted by political uncertainty one must travel back to the atmosphere of late 2000s Ethiopia, a period that shaped everything that followed. The 2005 elections remain one of the most consequential and most contested events in modern Ethiopian history. They were, by most credible accounts, the most competitive elections the country had seen in decades. Voter turnout was extraordinary. The opposition, united under a coalition called the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), mounted a challenge that genuinely unsettled the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). And then came the aftermath. Opposition leaders were arrested. Protests were violently suppressed. Estimates suggest that at least 193 people were killed and over 763 were detained in the post-election crackdown, according to an Ethiopian government inquiry commission that was itself later suppressed. The political space that had briefly opened closed again, sharply and deliberately.

Berhanu Nega, an economics professor at Addis Ababa University and the mayor-elect of the capital, was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia before escaping into exile. He eventually settled in the United States, where he became one of the most visible and vocal critics of the Ethiopian government. Out of this exile, and out of the frustration that defined it, Ginbot 7 was born a movement that explicitly rejected the incremental reform path, arguing that armed resistance was justified in the face of state repression. By 2009, the Ethiopian government had designated Ginbot 7 a terrorist organisation. Western governments, characteristically, maintained a far more ambiguous stance one that oscillated between diplomatic caution and quiet sympathy.

It was also during this period that Ethiopian opposition groups fragmented, underfunded, and scattered across multiple countries began seeking financial and political support abroad. This is not a controversial claim. It is a structural feature of exile politics almost everywhere. What is less often acknowledged is how that search for external backing shaped the way these movements presented themselves to the outside world. When your survival depends on the generosity of foreign donors and the sympathy of Western think tanks, your narrative inevitably bends toward their expectations. Democratic dissidents play better than insurgents. Scholars play better than activists. The language of human rights and academic freedom travels further, and raises more money, than the language of armed struggle even when armed struggle is what is actually being contemplated.

This is the context in which Dr. Jarecki’s description of Berhanu Nega as “the Epstein scholar for 2008” must be read. The phrase is striking, and it has been treated by many commentators as proof of a direct financial or institutional relationship between Berhanu Nega and Epstein. But no publicly available record confirms that Berhanu Nega ever received funding directly from Epstein, held a fellowship under his name, or interacted with him personally. No institution has acknowledged such an affiliation. It is entirely possible and critics of the opposition have pointed this out that the phrase was rhetorical, inflated, or simply inaccurate, a piece of positioning designed to make the cause sound more prestigious to a wealthy Western patron than it actually was. Epstein’s own response, notably, suggests scepticism rather than admiration. He was not endorsing Berhanu Nega. He was, if anything, mocking the framing while entertaining the underlying proposition.

And this brings us to the question of what Epstein actually was not as a symbol, but as an actor. There is a powerful and persistent temptation to treat Jeffrey Epstein as a master puppeteer, a hidden hand pulling strings across continents. The court documents and email archives that have emerged over the years do not support this caricature. What they reveal instead is a man who was extraordinarily skilled at inserting himself into elite conversations, scientific, political, philanthropic often by exaggerating his own influence and the depth of his relationships. He spoke expansively. He promised much. He followed through unevenly, if at all. His statement “I’m in” does not constitute proof of action. It reflects willingness, or posturing, or perhaps a kind of provocation designed to keep a conversation alive. In dozens of other documented exchanges, Epstein expressed similar enthusiasm about projects and causes that never materialised into anything concrete.

This does not absolve him of anything. It contextualises him. And that contextualisation matters enormously when we are trying to understand what this email actually tells us about Ethiopian politics, as opposed to what it tells us about the self-mythologising tendencies of a disgraced financier.

The most sensitive dimension of this episode, however, is not the past. It is the present. Berhanu Nega is no longer an exiled opposition figure. Since returning to Ethiopia following the 2018 political opening under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, he has undergone a transformation that is either inspiring or deeply troubling, depending on where one stands. Ginbot 7 was formally dissolved. Armed struggle was publicly renounced. Reconciliation became the operative word. Berhanu Nega was appointed to the cabinet first as a minister, and now holds the portfolio of Education, one of the most consequential positions in government, responsible for shaping the intellectual and civic formation of an entire generation.

For those who supported the 2018 transition, this arc represents exactly the kind of political maturity that reconciliation is supposed to produce. Former adversaries come in from the cold. Movements evolve. Nations heal. For critics — and there are many, both within Ethiopia and among the diaspora the same arc raises uncomfortable questions. How does a man who once led an organisation designated as terrorist by his own government, and who appears in correspondence with one of the most reviled figures in recent Western history, arrive at the helm of the education ministry without any public accounting of the networks he built while in exile? What due diligence was performed? And what, exactly, was the nature of the international support that sustained Ginbot 7 during its most active years?

These are not questions that imply guilt. They are questions that a functioning political culture asks of its public figures questions that Ethiopia’s political discourse has, for structural and historical reasons, been remarkably reluctant to pose.

The Epstein email does not answer them. But it does make them harder to ignore.

There are those who will read this episode as evidence of a grand conspiracy Western elites secretly financing African rebellion, intelligence agencies pulling strings behind the scenes, a shadow government operating through philanthropic fronts. That reading is not supported by the evidence. The 2018 transition in Ethiopia was driven primarily by internal elite fractures, popular protest movements, particularly among the Oromo and Amhara populations and a recalibration within the military and security apparatus, not by the machinations of diaspora donors or foreign financiers. To suggest otherwise is to deny Ethiopian agency in shaping its own political trajectory, which is itself a form of the very Western paternalism that this episode should be prompting us to examine.

But there is a quieter, more productive reading available one that does not require conspiracy to be uncomfortable. It is simply this: that opposition movements, when they depend on external validation for their survival, inevitably absorb the biases, the blind spots, and the self-serving narratives of the systems that fund them. Berhanu Nega and Ginbot 7 were not unique in this regard. Ethiopian opposition groups across the political spectrum sought backing from abroad during the 2005–2018 period, and in doing so, they presented versions of Ethiopia’s story that were shaped as much by what Western audiences wanted to hear as by what was actually happening on the ground. The email dated April 2009 is, in this sense, less a revelation about Ethiopia than an exposure of a dynamic that has long operated quietly across the continent the way African political struggles are filtered, funded, and sometimes flattened by the networks of wealth and influence that surround them.

What remains, then, is not a scandal demanding arrests or resignations, but a silence demanding to be broken. For Professor Berhanu Nega, now entrusted with shaping Ethiopia’s educational future, the email represents not necessarily a moment of guilt but a moment of clarification. Silence, in this instance, does not protect him. It feeds speculation, hardens suspicion, and — perhaps most damagingly — allows the narrative to be written entirely by others. A direct, honest engagement with what the email contains, what it does not contain, and what the relationship if any between himself and Epstein’s network actually amounted to, would do more to resolve this episode than any amount of political deflection.

For Ginbot 7’s former leadership, the questions run deeper. How did the movement represent itself abroad? To whom? And did the desire to secure funding and sympathy lead to claims, about scholarly credentials, about Western institutional backing, about the nature of the cause itself, that were not entirely accurate? These are not questions that can be answered by the email alone. They require a broader reckoning with how exile politics functioned during that era a reckoning that Ethiopia has not yet undertaken, and that the current political environment makes deeply uncomfortable for all involved.

And for Ethiopia’s political class as a whole for the government that once designated Ginbot 7 as terrorist, and for the same government that later welcomed its leader into the cabinet the episode is a reminder of something that political systems everywhere prefer to forget: that today’s alliances, however pragmatic, however necessary, may resurface in unexpected places, in unexpected documents, at unexpected times. The Epstein files have become, in effect, a global Rorschach test. Observers see in them what they already suspected. The danger is not in what the documents reveal, but in the certainty with which people claim to have read them.

The truth, in Ethiopia’s case, sits somewhere between scandal and exaggeration. The email is real. Its implications are limited. The danger lies in overreach in mistaking insinuation for evidence, and curiosity for conviction. But scrutiny itself is not the enemy of democracy. Silence is. And the question that will define how this episode is ultimately remembered is not whether the email exists, but whether those it implicates, directly or indirectly, will find the courage to engage with it honestly, and whether Ethiopia’s political conversation can absorb an uncomfortable document without collapsing into the conspiracy theories that would, ultimately, serve no one’s interests least of all the nation’s.

That capacity to look at difficult truths without flinching, and to demand accountability without descending into paranoia would perhaps be the most meaningful break from Ethiopia’s past that any of us could hope for.