THE PARTY OF THE ACCUSED

EZEMA was built by men the terror law condemned to death and to life. Its highest serving official now recites the jailer’s catechism. A case, in dates.

Every political party keeps a founding myth, and EZEMA’s is unusually well documented, because the state wrote most of it down in court. The party was assembled in May 2019 out of men it had condemned. Its leader, Professor Berhanu Nega, had been sentenced to death in absentia in 2009 as the head of Ginbot 7, then a proscribed, Asmara-quartered, armed movement. Its deputy leader, Andualem Aragie, was serving a life sentence handed down in 2012 under the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation — arrested, as it happens, days after he stood at a press conference and denounced that very law as a machine for jailing opponents on fabricated charges. The party of the falsely accused. Hold on to the phrase; we will need it at the end.

The Founders’ Rap Sheet

Consider the dock from which EZEMA descends. Andualem Aragie spent more than two years in Kaliti after the 2005 vote, then helped found a party, then in September 2011 told a press conference that the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation was being used to cage critics on invented charges. Five days later he was caged on invented charges. The court that sentenced him to life declared that he and his co-defendants had set out to dismantle the constitution; the marquee evidence, by the accounts of those present, was a reel of nearly inaudible telephone recordings. Alongside him in that trial sat the journalist Eskinder Nega, handed eighteen years. Both refused to sign confessions admitting Ginbot 7 membership. In 2018 they walked out to crowds chanting hero, the death sentences and the life sentences dissolved by the same government that had written them.

This is not a smear retrieved from an enemy’s archive. It is EZEMA’s own pedigree, the thing the party once asked us to honour: that its leaders had suffered the machine, refused its lies, and emerged to build a citizenship politics above the ethnic fray. A noble story. It makes what followed harder to forgive, not easier.

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

For listen to the Honourable Girma Seifu now, in 2026, instructing the nation on rebellion. A politician, he says, cannot run a respectable party with one hand and clasp armed insurgents with the other; should anyone lift a weapon against a functioning government, it is the state’s absolute duty to arrest and try him; and neither the Fano nor the Shene carries a cause worth the blood. It is a crisp doctrine. It is also, almost to the syllable, the case the EPRDF made against Ginbot 7 — an outfit with a civil face and an armed wing, quartered in Eritrea, led by the man who is today EZEMA’s founder and the Republic’s Minister of Education. By the standard Girma recites so fluently, the founders of his own house were exactly the criminals the state was bound to crush.

And the wheel has not stopped turning. Eskinder Nega — who shared Andualem’s 2012 terrorism dock — now commands an Amhara Fano militia in the field. The doctrine Girma reads out points straight at his own party’s former co-accused. The line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, in this mature jurisprudence, turns out to be exquisitely simple, and it is not drawn at the rifle. Take up arms and lose, you are Shene. Take up arms, lose, withdraw to Eritrea, and return to a Ministry, you are a Professor. Same rifle, different epilogue.

The Hero’s Prison, Refurbished

He has a defence, and it is the most revealing thing he says. The old arrests, he allows, were vendettas — personal scores settled by the regime’s enforcers; he even reaches for the old line that in a tyrannical country the home of a hero is prison, and applies it, touchingly, to Andualem. So he concedes the machine was unjust. Then, without pausing for breath, he assures us that today’s detainees — held through trials that somehow never quite arrive — are merely meeting their constitutional desert. The machine did not change. Only the seat from which it is narrated changed.

The record is unkind to the distinction. Human Rights Watch warned that the authorities had not moved on from the old habit of arresting first and investigating later; seven members of one opposition party were held in defiance of repeated court orders to release them; the Amhara countryside has filled with mass detentions without due process, alongside the drone strikes and summary killings the monitors keep cataloguing. The hero’s prison is fully booked. Only the management has changed, and the new management used to be the tenants.

One man noticed before the rest of us. Andualem Aragie — the life-sentence survivor, EZEMA’s own deputy leader — walked out of the party in 2023, saying there was no longer any justification to remain under its roof, that its alignment and its image had drifted somewhere he could not follow. When the very man who embodied the hero’s prison can no longer share your house, the house is the story.

The Eviction of an Abstraction

The same talent for definition runs through his day job. For years I laboured under the superstition that when the bulldozers arrive at dawn and a family carries its mattress into the road, a person has been displaced. The Honourable has corrected the record: what was displaced was poverty — not the poor. And he has proof on offer: bring me one, he says, one evicted soul with a title deed, and he will seat you on this chair and resign. It is the boldest wager in Addis, and it cannot be lost, because the house defines the stakes.

“What was displaced was poverty — not the poor.”

He did not forge the lock alone. In Sheger, the city that rings the capital, the administration justified its demolitions with the same key: only illegal houses fall, the unlicensed, the unregistered, the ones the city never deigned to recognise. The renter, the man who bought his plot from a farmer and raised his walls a decade ago — these were never legal tenants, and so, by the hour the wall comes down, there is no legal person standing before it to be wronged. He invites you to produce a victim from a camp he had already defined out of existence. It is not a wager. It is a tautology with a chair and a microphone.

The Unelected Tribune

Now to the matter of the man’s own seat. Girma was made head of the Investment Commission, then of the Green Bureau; his chairman was made a Minister and, this spring, Chancellor of Addis Ababa University. Not one of these offices was conferred by a vote. The government’s own human-rights record notes drily that the opposition appointees took their posts although they were not elected. From that unelected chair, the Honourable rules that the public has no standing to question EZEMA’s choices — because, he explains, the public did not elect EZEMA. An opposition that campaigned for votes, lost, joined the winner, and then declared its own conduct a private family matter.

There is a tidy coda. In 2021 EZEMA decried the fairness of the process and withdrew from the second round of the very election whose result it now cites as the mandate it serves. You may keep the grievance or keep the cabinet post; the Honourable keeps both, in different sentences. His proudest hour, he tells us, was refusing to sign a Prosperity contribution cheque and having it carried from his office — a decent act, and a full confession, since he explains it was possible only because he is the one in the chair. He has not described a separation of party and state. He has described himself as the single clean window in a house with no walls.

The Mendicant-in-Chief

Observe, finally, the arithmetic of his contempt. The lesser parties, he sneers, are mendicants, outfits that exist only to queue for the half-million birr the state dispenses through the Electoral Board to anyone with a letterhead and a list of names; serious houses like his fund themselves. But the trough he scorns is the one the law itself dug, and the Board pays by a formula that rewards the padding of rolls — so faithfully that in one recent round eleven of twenty-one parties, the ruling Prosperity Party among them, were caught inflating their numbers, some swearing to as many as nine hundred thousand women and disabled members who reside chiefly on paper. The system does not punish the begging; it subsidises the lie. And the largest handout in the whole pantomime was never collected at the Board’s window. It was carried to his office, unelected and unbidden. The mendicant-in-chief is the man delivering the sermon.

The Ledger

So here is the case, in dates. A party born in the dock, its leader under a death sentence, its deputy under a life sentence, both condemned by a terror law they had publicly denounced — and then, within a decade, that same party governing beside the machine, its leader running the schools, its deputy walking away in protest, its highest serving official touring the studios to explain that eviction is mercy, that opposition is a salaried rest, that the unelected may scold the unfunded, and that the surest way to be remembered as a patriot rather than a terrorist is to be on the winning side when the sentence is read.

“The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell.”

The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell. It signs where the state points, and it has trained itself not to read the charge. Pray, by all means, for the lifting of our ignorance. We are nearly there.

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune