Diplomacy, Drones, and Delicate Optics: Ethiopia’s Tightrope Between India, Turkey, and the Whispers of the Arab World

By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune columnist

 

Ethiopia’s political theatre, under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has become a masterclass in the management of appearances, whispers, and global expectations. The recent succession of high-profile international visits  the conspicuously warm hand-holding with India’s Prime Minister and the measured, almost surgical formality of Türkiye’s President Erdoğan revealed far more than diplomatic protocol. They exposed the entangled web of elite culture, public rumour, and the ordinary citizen’s bewildered gaze upon a country balancing precariously between internal fractures and external pressures.

Hovering above all of this is the rumour of the UAE president’s death  a story so vivid and so swiftly circulated across Turkish media, pan-Islamic channels, and social networks that it painted, for many, a portrait of secretive foreign influence, invisible hands, and the tantalising notion that Ethiopia’s leader might be quietly managing external chaos whilst projecting an image of unshakeable calm at home.

The contrast between India’s and Türkiye’s visits is, at its core, a study in how symbolism and substance collide. When India’s Prime Minister arrived, Abiy Ahmed received him with ceremonial grandeur  the public drive, the embraces, the hand-holding that delights both domestic media and diaspora audiences alike. Military bands performed. State dinners gleamed. The optics were unambiguous: India and Ethiopia, friends in both trade and spirit, bound by something warmer than treaty language. It was, in the most generous reading, diplomacy rendered as soft-focus emotional theatre  reassuring, photogenic, and carefully curated for international consumption.

Erdoğan’s February 2026 visit was an altogether different affair. There were no embraces, no personal driving tours, no gestures of playful camaraderie. Instead, the Turkish President delivered firm, layered statements about the Horn of Africa warning that the region must not become a battleground for foreign powers, rejecting Israeli recognition of Somaliland, and invoking shared historical and cultural ties through gestures such as the restoration of the Al-Nejashi mosque. The messaging operated on multiple frequencies simultaneously: cultural diplomacy through Islamic heritage, strategic caution against external interference, and economic signalling through Turkey’s legacy of railway investment and infrastructure ambition in the region. Abiy, for his part, navigated Erdoğan’s visit with chess-like restraint measured nods, careful phrasing, and the composure of a leader acutely aware that every gesture is being read by multiple audiences at once.

Perhaps nowhere was Ethiopia’s diplomatic complexity more visibly compressed than in the pageantry of state ceremony itself. Female Muslim ministers appeared in modest, conservative attire a calculated gesture of cultural respect towards Erdoğan’s perceived Islamic sensibility. Simultaneously, Ethiopia’s military band performed with unapologetic professionalism in ceremonial dress that bore no such concession to conservative norms. To the casual observer, it appeared a contradiction: secular and Islamic, deferential and assertive, all within the same state theatre and the same afternoon. To those inside the inner circle, it was a deliberate and nuanced display Ethiopia asserting its inclusivity, its sovereign authority, and its capacity to speak to multiple audiences without committing entirely to any one of them.

Yet even as these carefully managed ceremonies unfolded, a parallel and far more troubling drama was playing out just beyond the edges of the official frame  one that seasoned security professionals have begun to regard not merely as an embarrassment, but as a genuine and escalating threat. Wander through the corridors of any recent state function, stroll the perimeters of a parliamentary session, or position yourself anywhere near a visiting dignitary in Addis Ababa today, and you will encounter them: a new and rapidly proliferating breed of young Ethiopian digital content creators, gimbal-stabilised cameras strapped to their bodies, backpacks laden with equipment, telephoto lenses the length of a man’s forearm trained with startling intimacy upon the faces, movements, and immediate personal spaces of heads of state, senior ministers, and foreign dignitaries. They move through these environments with the breezy, unearned confidence of those who have confused a press badge  or sometimes the mere appearance of one,  with a security clearance. They possess, by all observable evidence, no formal training in the protocols, boundaries, or responsibilities that govern proximity to protected individuals. And they appear entirely unbothered by this fact.

The entitlement on display is, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with close-protection doctrine, quite breathtaking. These are not seasoned photojournalists who have spent years learning where the line is, why it exists, and what it costs when it is crossed. These are, in the main, young men intoxicated by the social currency of expensive equipment and the follower counts that footage of powerful people can generate. They materialise at parliament. They appear at state receptions. They insert themselves into the working perimeters of visiting foreign leaders with a casualness that would trigger immediate and forceful responses in virtually any other capital city in the world. In London, Washington, Ankara, or New Delhi, a man walking within arm’s reach of a head of state with a backpack, a gimbal, and a telephoto lens  without verified, screened, and closely supervised accreditation would find himself face-down on the floor within seconds, surrounded by individuals whose professional instincts had already calculated every possible implication of his presence. In Addis Ababa, he gets the shot, posts it to his channel, and collects the views.

Security analysts who have observed this phenomenon with growing alarm are not mincing their words. The convergence of several factors  the accessibility of high-resolution imaging equipment, the hunger for digital content, the culture of entitlement that pervades certain social circles in the capital, and the conspicuous gaps in how access to sensitive environments is controlled and enforced creates what one expert described, in terms that should give every responsible official pause, as a gathering storm. These young operators, operating today with apparent innocence and tomorrow with unknown motivations or under unknown influences, represent a vector of potential harm that Ethiopian security architecture has not yet adequately reckoned with. A telephoto lens that can capture the iris of a dignitary from forty metres can equally be used to gather intelligence on movement patterns, security formations, and personal vulnerabilities. A gimbal operator who has learnt, through repeated unchallenged access, exactly how close he can get before anyone reacts, has also learnt something that no hostile actor should ever be permitted to know. The question is not whether these individuals intend harm today. The question is what happens when someone who does intend harm observes that the door is open, the access is easy, and the consequences are nonexistent.

The scene at parliament is particularly instructive, and particularly galling to those who understand what they are looking at. Session after session, these self-appointed videographers wander into the sight lines of accredited international media, their enormous lenses jutting into carefully composed shots, their gimbal rigs swinging with cheerful obliviousness through spaces that ought to be controlled, their physical presence a constant, low-grade disruption to the professionals around them. To the accredited journalist trying to capture a considered, properly framed image from a respectful distance, they are an irritant the photographic equivalent of someone talking loudly on their telephone in a library. But to the security professional tasked with maintaining a protective envelope around the individuals in that room, they are something considerably more serious. They are unknowns. They are unvetted. They are close. And in the calculus of close-protection work, an unvetted unknown in close proximity to a principal is not an inconvenience it is a contingency that must be planned for, every single time, because the one time it is not will be the time it matters.

What makes this situation particularly pointed in the Ethiopian context is the class and entitlement dimension that runs through it like a fault line. These are not individuals who have fought their way into these spaces through years of professional credibility. Many have arrived there through social connections, through the reflected glamour of association with powerful figures, through the simple fact that nobody with the authority to stop them has yet chosen to do so consistently. They carry their equipment like a credential and their confidence like a clearance. They have absorbed, somewhere along the way, the lesson that in Ethiopia, if you look the part and move with sufficient assurance, the doors tend to open. It is the same lesson, expressed through a very different medium, that underlies the Feyisa Lilesa scandal the conviction, whether held consciously or simply lived unconsciously, that certain people in this country are simply not subject to the same rules as everyone else.

This same duality, so carefully choreographed on the ceremonial stage, finds a far less flattering mirror in the domain of elite accountability at home  and no case has crystallised public fury quite like that of Feyisa Lilesa. The celebrated Oromo long-distance runner, who once captured the world’s imagination and the conscience of a people with a single crossed-arm gesture on the Olympic podium in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, now finds himself at the centre of a scandal that has ignited a firestorm of outrage across Ethiopian society. According to reports circulating widely and discussed at length by Addis Mereja, Lilesa was involved in a serious road traffic collision in the Jemo Michael area of Addis Ababa  an incident that has since escalated from a tragic accident into a deeply charged political and moral reckoning.

The human cost of that collision is not abstract. A sixteen-year-old child is dead. Another individual sustained a broken bone and remains under medical treatment. These are not statistics  they are lives, and families, torn apart on an ordinary Addis Ababa street. Yet what has incensed the Ethiopian public beyond even the tragedy of the accident itself are the alleged circumstances that followed it. Reports claim that rather than submitting to police authority at the scene, Lilesa brandished a firearm and used it to intimidate officers, effectively preventing his own arrest. If accurate, this is not merely a legal violation  it is a declaration, however implicit, that certain individuals in Ethiopia exist beyond the ordinary reach of the law.

And then came the Facebook post. In the immediate aftermath of an accident that had killed a child and injured another person, Lilesa reportedly took to social media to describe the incident as a common accident, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone. The public reaction was swift and visceral. To many Ethiopians who had watched this unfold, the post read not as an expression of remorse but as a performance of nonchalance the casual deflection of a man confident that consequence would not find him. It was, to borrow the language of the streets, the message of someone who does not believe he will ever truly be held to account.

The rumours that followed were, in some ways, the most damning development of all. Widespread reports began to circulate — unconfirmed as yet by any official authority — that Lilesa had fled Ethiopia entirely, with Dubai emerging as the most frequently named destination. The Ethiopian police have not, at the time of writing, issued any official confirmation or denial of these reports. That silence, in itself, speaks volumes to a public that has grown finely attuned to the language of institutional evasion. When the state says nothing, Ethiopians have long since learnt to interpret that nothing with considerable sophistication.

This is not the first time Lilesa’s conduct has drawn public censure, and the pattern is instructive. When previously accused of public intoxication and disputes with neighbours, his reported response was characteristically defiant: “If I drink, I drink with my own money.” It was the retort of a man who had confused personal achievement with personal impunity — who had, somewhere along the road from Rio to Addis Ababa, begun to believe that fame was a form of sovereignty. His dismissive remarks about Ethiopia’s rising fuel prices — a crisis felt acutely by millions of ordinary citizens — further alienated those who might otherwise have retained residual goodwill towards him. And his controversial comments regarding the use of the Amharic language in traditional Oromo Aba Gada justice proceedings struck many as wilfully divisive, a provocation dressed in the language of cultural assertion.

The political dimension of Lilesa’s trajectory adds yet another layer of complexity to an already tangled story. When he returned to Ethiopia in 2018 following his self-imposed exile after Rio, he did so as a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of the Abiy Ahmed government — a transformation that struck many of his former admirers as jarring, even bewildering. The man who had crossed his arms above his head on the world’s most watched sporting stage, in solidarity with an Oromo people then facing brutal state repression, had become, in the eyes of some, a symbol of the very political accommodation he once appeared to resist. Whether that shift reflected genuine conviction, pragmatic calculation, or something more complicated entirely is a question that only Lilesa can answer. What is beyond dispute is that it reconfigured his public identity in ways that continue to reverberate.

For ordinary Ethiopians watching all of this unfold, the Lilesa affair is not simply about one man. It is a referendum on the question that sits at the heart of every functioning society: does the law apply equally, or does it bend for those with fame, political proximity, and the means to board a flight before the consequences arrive? Citizens observe the contrast with bitter clarity — ministers in modest attire performing deference to foreign dignitaries, military women dancing in ceremonial dress for the cameras, and a celebrated athlete who allegedly pointed a firearm at police officers and may now be sipping coffee in Dubai whilst a sixteen-year-old lies in a grave in Addis Ababa. The cognitive dissonance is not lost on anyone. It feeds rumour. It deepens mistrust. And it makes even the most outlandish whispers about foreign power brokers and shadowy elite networks feel, to many, entirely plausible — because the architecture of privilege that surrounds them is demonstrably, visibly real.

It is worth pausing here to observe that the gimbal-toting content creator shouldering his way past protocol officers at a state function and the celebrated athlete allegedly brandishing a firearm at police officers in Jemo Michael are, at some fundamental level, expressions of the same cultural pathology. Both represent individuals who have concluded, through experience, through impunity, through the repeated failure of institutions to assert boundaries,  that the rules governing ordinary Ethiopians simply do not apply to them. The content creator has learnt that nobody will stop him from walking into sensitive spaces with a backpack full of equipment and a telephoto lens trained on a foreign head of state. Lilesa apparently learnt that a firearm and a certain quality of confidence could send police officers stepping backwards. The specific expressions differ enormously. The underlying logic is identical. And it is a logic that, left unaddressed, corrodes everything it touches,  from the credibility of state institutions to the physical safety of the nation’s most protected individuals.

Addis Mereja’s coverage of the Lilesa incident concludes with a call that is as simple as it is urgent: the police must provide a transparent and timely update to the Ethiopian public. It is a demand that ought not to require stating. That it does,  that citizens must actively petition their institutions for basic accountability in a case involving a dead child and a nationally known figure,  is itself a measure of how far public trust in those institutions has eroded. Justice, in this instance, is not a complicated philosophical concept. It is a sixteen-year-old who deserved to grow up, and a family that deserves to know that their loss was not simply absorbed into the great Ethiopian silence that tends to swallow inconvenient truths.

Ethiopia’s leadership is simultaneously juggling several weighty portfolios that seldom receive the coherent public narrative they demand. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones signal military cooperation and procurement ambition. Railway investments, stalled by conflict and entangled in international arbitration, symbolise both the country’s grand infrastructure vision and its fragility in executing it. Mosque restorations gesture towards humanitarian and religious legitimacy on the international stage. Each element is deployed strategically,  showing just enough to reassure partners whilst carefully concealing vulnerabilities that a more transparent posture might expose. Yet it is arguably the vulnerabilities closest to home,  the entitled photographer at the palace gate, the athlete on a flight to Dubai,  that pose the most immediate and corrosive risk to the project of building a credible, governed state.

The rumour mill, meanwhile, does not pause for diplomatic niceties. The widely circulated story of the UAE president’s death  amplified by Turkish media and pan-Arab channels became a proxy for a broader public anxiety about foreign influence in Ethiopian affairs. For elites, it was a whispered talking point, a potential leverage in shadow conversations. For the layperson, it was fuel for outrage, suspicion, and political imagination. For the Prime Minister, it represented an opportunity: demonstrate control through public calm, measured diplomacy, and the quiet redirection of attention. In Ethiopia, as in many states where official communication is limited and political opacity is the norm, rumour does not merely fill the gaps in understanding, it becomes the primary currency of political discourse.

The satirical image almost writes itself. The Ethiopian Prime Minister, immaculately composed, nods attentively as Erdoğan’s eyes sweep the room with the cool deliberation of a general reviewing a chessboard. Behind them, a military band plays with disciplined flair whilst ministers in conservative Islamic dress murmur protocol reminders to one another. And somewhere just off to the side, perhaps three steps closer than any security doctrine would permit, a young man in a branded hoodie swings a gimbal-mounted camera towards the Turkish President’s face, his enormous telephoto lens catching the light, his backpack brushing the elbow of a close-protection officer who glances sideways with visible unease but says nothing, because nobody has yet told him definitively what to do about this. Cameras flash. Social media erupts with speculation about Arab power brokers, athletes allegedly fled to Dubai, and railway arbiters counting their fees in distant capitals. The content creator posts his footage. The views pour in. And the Prime Minister smiles, pours the tea, and holds the room, master of ceremonies, tactician, and juggler of perceptions across a stage that is, in more ways than one, alarmingly unsecured.

What this theatre ultimately reveals is the extraordinary complexity of Ethiopia’s balancing act,  both internally and externally. Domestically, the government must speak to Christians and Muslims, to Oromo and non-Oromo communities, to elites and ordinary citizens whose lived realities could not be more divergent. Externally, it must manage relationships with the UAE, Türkiye, India, Israel, China, and Western donors, each with their own expectations, their own leverage, and their own interpretation of every gesture Ethiopia makes. Every decision, from a minister’s choice of attire to the selection of ceremonial music, from a drone procurement deal to a mosque restoration, carries multiple and often contradictory signals. The art lies not in eliminating that contradiction but in holding it together long enough to keep every audience sufficiently satisfied. What cannot be held together indefinitely, however, is a security culture in which entitlement substitutes for vetting, and a social culture in which impunity substitutes for accountability.

The lessons embedded in this complex choreography are not trivial ones. Opacity, wherever it persists, breeds narrative creation,  and not always the narratives that governments would choose. Perception, verified or otherwise, shapes legitimacy in ways that policy alone cannot correct. Optics matter as profoundly as action, because the theatre of governance is watched not only by foreign partners but by citizens who are drawing their own quiet conclusions about fairness, competence, and sovereignty. And satire, in such an environment, is sometimes the only honest lens available, the only tool capable of holding the absurdity and the seriousness of it all in the same frame without flinching. But satire has its limits. A security breach does not.

Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia is, in the final accounting, many things at once,  a secular state with a deeply religious population, a military state with a taste for flamboyant ceremony, a country navigating elite favouritism and foreign influence whilst performing confidence on a world stage. The Prime Minister’s particular genius lies not in controlling every rumour, some, like the story drifting in from the Arab world, are simply beyond any government’s reach, but in managing appearances with sufficient skill that the performance itself becomes a form of power. India’s warmth, Erdoğan’s formality, the whispers from the Gulf, the contradictions of the ceremony hall, the sight of a celebrated Olympian allegedly fleeing accountability on a flight to Dubai whilst a teenager’s family mourns in Addis Ababa, and the gimbal operator who has just walked, unchallenged, to within two metres of a visiting head of state all of it intersects within a single, breathtakingly intricate and increasingly fragile theatre of governance.

For the casual observer, it may read as chaos, even farce. For the political analyst, it is a study in survival, strategy, and the calculated management of perception. For the security professional, it is something closer to a slow-motion crisis waiting for its moment. And for Ethiopia itself, the lesson endures: in a world governed as much by optics as by facts, appearances, carefully choreographed, can be every bit as powerful as the truth. But a sixteen-year-old child is dead. A foreign dignitary’s movements are being filmed from arm’s reach by someone nobody has screened. And no amount of choreography, however immaculate, can indefinitely paper over the cracks in a state that has not yet decided, with full seriousness, that its rules apply to everyone equally including those holding the most expensive cameras in the room.