Surviving Is Not Governing

Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

Surviving Is Not Governing

On chaotic equilibrium, the four singular interests, and the constitutional reckoning Ethiopia cannot defer

By Endex, Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune

16 June 2026

 

There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes not from silence but from the opposite from having said, again and again, what is true and necessary, and watching the words dissolve into a political atmosphere too saturated with noise to absorb them. It is the fatigue of the serious analyst in a season that rewards the demagogue. Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu knows it well. In the note he sent us alongside this, his concluding instalment in a series of nine essays published in these pages over the past six months, he described the experience with a candour that struck this editor as the most honest thing written about Ethiopian public discourse in recent memory:

“I am gradually learning that our politics often generates more noise than traction. One writes and writes, hoping to be heard, yet too often the words disappear into the ether. In time, the process itself can become a kind of addiction, a relentless attempt to persuade, explain, and warn, even when the echoes seem to return unanswered.”

We publish those words here, in this foreword, because they deserve to be read as part of the record not as an admission of defeat, which they are not, but as a diagnosis, offered by the same disciplined mind that has spent half a year mapping Ethiopia’s converging crises with the tools of systems science, geopolitical analysis, and institutional economics. MGH writes as a nationalist, he tells us, but not a partisan; and that distinction has been the animating principle of everything this series has produced. The distinction is rarer than it should be. It has made his work essential.

This final essay, “Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?”, is the series at its most ambitious and, in places, its most sombre. It arrives in the immediate aftermath of the 1 June snap election an exercise conducted under telecommunications blackout in parts of the country, with scores of polling stations that never opened and it reads that domestic reality against a regional storm the analysts did not price in: the US–Israel war on Iran, launched on 28 February, that has refused to end cleanly and has now, as these words go to press, produced a Geneva settlement that enriches and validates Tehran while sidelining Jerusalem and overruling the very coalition on which Ethiopia’s most ambitious external bets were quietly staked.

The argument MGH assembles is, characteristically, not about the headline but about the structure beneath it. He draws on the mathematics of dynamical systems strange attractors, dissipative structures, Lorenz, Prigogine not as ornament but as analytical instrument, using the science to interrogate the fashionable claim that Abiy Ahmed’s method constitutes the “mastery” of chaotic equilibrium. His verdict is precise and unsparing: surviving is not governing; and a strange attractor not anchored to the nation’s constitutive interests does not hold a state together it merely postpones the moment it flies apart. The Middle East permacrisis, he argues, supplies the illustration at scale: two of the most powerful men alive tried to ride the chaos and lost control of it. The temptation being marketed to Addis Ababa is identical. The margin for error is far smaller.

“A detonator mistaken for a microphone.” On the public record, the Office of the Prime Minister folded the Arsi massacre into a statement dominated by the seventh national election—treating the dead as a footnote to a campaign. That is not analysis. It is denial wearing the costume of statesmanship.”

At the heart of the essay and, the Tribune believes, at the heart of the Ethiopian moment—is Arsi. The systematic attacks on Orthodox Christian communities in East Arsi Zone, escalating since October 2025 and surging around the election itself, are not, MGH argues, a regional incident to be managed by press line. They are what he calls the super-coupler: the violence that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one, assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single insurgency Ethiopia faces, and places before the state a test it cannot pass with a messaging strategy. A burned church cannot be split the difference of in a negotiation. And the institution most capable of unmaking a government the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, with its pan-ethnic reach and its centuries of accumulated moral authority is watching.

The essay does not confine itself to catastrophe. MGH opens a genuine developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed crediting the inheritance he kept from the Meles era, the agricultural programmes that earned international recognition, the completion of GERD, the private investment arriving at scale and he refuses the lazy comfort of imagining the opposition as the remedy. His assessment of the diaspora’s self-defeating fervour, of the ethnic entrepreneurship institutionalised by the 1995 constitution, of the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build, and of the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies these are the most searching pages of the series, and they demand the kind of re-reading that our noisy public square is least equipped to offer.

The prescription is the same one this series has returned to with the discipline of a compass: the four singular interests Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine legislated and made invariant, anchored not in the operator’s survival but in the survival of the state. And beneath that, the founding text itself. You cannot fix the basin around civic unity, MGH writes, while operating under a constitution that makes ethnicity, not citizenship, the fundamental unit of the state. It is the constitution, stupid and has been, all along.

A WORD OF APPRECIATION

The Ethiopian Tribune owes Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu a debt that a foreword can only begin to acknowledge. Since January 2026 he has contributed to these pages nine major essays spanning the Abraham Accords and the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn security architecture, the June election and the developmental state question, national unity and Red Sea sovereignty, and now this concluding synthesis. Each piece arrived rigorously sourced, analytically independent, and written with the kind of moral seriousness that is the rarest commodity in Ethiopian public life. He wrote not to be agreed with, but to be useful. That, in this political season, is an act of considerable courage.

He writes now that his sabbatical is drawing to a close, and that other pressing responsibilities will soon demand his attention. He takes comfort, he says, in knowing he has said what he felt compelled to say. We take comfort, for our part, in knowing that these essays exist that they are on the record, available to the patient reader who returns to them when the noise has subsided, as noise always does, and the questions MGH has been asking remain exactly as unresolved as they are today. History will adjudicate his analysis; we do not doubt the judgement will be generous.

He closes his note to us with a wish: that we were more reflective, more strategic, more clear-eyed in our judgements, and above all—kinder to one another. It is a wish this Tribune shares, and one we commend to every reader. MGH continues to pray for healing, understanding, and reconciliation. So do we. We are grateful to have had him in our pages, and we shall remain so.

ABOUT THIS ESSAY: A SUMMARY FOR THE READER

“Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?” is the ninth and concluding instalment in MGH’s series for the Ethiopian Tribune, and it operates on three simultaneous registers: the geopolitical, the systemic, and the constitutional.

Geopolitically, the essay reads Ethiopia’s domestic crisis against the US–Israel war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 and, after months of a resilient Iranian resistance that held the Strait of Hormuz shut and weaponised what MGH calls “linkage” binding the Lebanese and Gulf theatres so that neither could be settled alone ended in a Geneva deal signed on 19 June that enriched Iran, sidelined Israel, and overruled the latent coalition of Israeli technology, Emirati capital, and American security cover on which Ethiopia’s Red Sea ambitions had been quietly staked. The lesson MGH draws is not one of misfortune but of method: sovereignty cannot be outsourced, and a bet placed on other people’s coalitions is clientage with better branding.

Systemically, the essay subjects to forensic examination the fashionable claim that Abiy’s method constitutes the mastery of chaotic equilibrium. Using the mathematics of dynamical systems—strange attractors, bifurcation thresholds, Lorenz’s butterfly, Prigogine’s dissipative structures—MGH identifies three things true of strange attractors that the flattering version omits: the basin is set by the system’s parameters, not chosen by the operator; sensitive dependence cuts both ways; and an attractor is not a goal, merely a description of where a system goes when no one is choosing where it should go. A state can orbit a basin of permanent low-grade civil war indefinitely. That, too, is a chaotic equilibrium. It is also a catastrophe.

Constitutionally, the essay returns, as the whole series has returned, to the founding text. The 1995 constitution does not merely permit ethnic mobilisation; it rewards it, vesting sovereignty in “nations, nationalities and peoples” and inscribing secession into the first principles of the state. Under those equations, the attractor the system is mathematically drawn toward is ethnic entrepreneurship—the monkey-habit that produces Fano, sustains the TPLF, gives the OLA its grammar, and hands Asmara its proxies. The four singular interests—Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine—are the invariants that could anchor a different attractor. But they must be legislated, not improvised. It is, as MGH has said from the beginning, the constitution, stupid.

Along the way, the essay examines: the convergence of three insurgencies (Fano, OLA, TPLF) with a sovereign default still unresolved two and a half years on; the role of Turkey as the straddler who profits from managed disorder; Eritrea as the patient spoiler whose bargaining position improves with every month the regional storm continues; the Arsi massacres as the super-coupler that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one and assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single armed movement Ethiopia faces; the developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed—credits and debits both; the formal logic of divide-and-rule as modelled by Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier; the historical engineering of ethnicity under the TPLF-led EPRDF; the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build; the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies; the weakness of an opposition that embodies rather than transcends the fracture; and the self-defeating fervour of a diaspora that holds a financial lever over an exchange-rate-starved state and never picks it up.

It is dense work, and it is important work. The Tribune commends it to every Ethiopian who believes the country can still choose the other dish.

READ THE FULL PUBLICATION

The complete essay including all footnotes, the full bibliography of sixty sources, and the extended analysis of the four singular interests as a controlling invariant, is available for download at the link below. Readers are encouraged to share it widely.

↓  Download the Full Publication.   ↓

ethiopiantribune.com/publications/chaotic-equilibrium

 

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