Tsimido and the Red Sea of Ambitions

A satirical long-read by Sewasew Teklemariam — preceded by the arithmetic it is about. All characters in the satire are invented; the figures in the preamble are not.

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A fictional satire. All characters are invented; any resemblance to the buffering is entirely deliberate.

Let us begin with the enemy of the state, because every state requires one, and ours has been admirably thrifty. It has not gone to the expense of a real rebel. It has invented Tsimido. Tsimido is not a man. Tsimido is not a militia. Tsimido is not, on close inspection, anything you could arrest, although this has never once stopped anyone from trying. Tsimido is the official designation for a citizen who has noticed something. Ask where the water is: Tsimido. Ask where the electricity went: Tsimido. Ask, very quietly, why the broadband was present on the Tuesday and gone by the Wednesday: foreign-funded, cross-border, existential Tsimido.

In the classified threat assessment — which I have not read, because it was emailed to me and the server was down — Tsimido is defined as “a destabilising force caused by the public paying attention.” This makes it the only insurgency in recorded history that can be defeated by switching off the wi-fi. And so, periodically, it is. The nation goes dark, the citizens can no longer notice anything, and the government calls the silence stability. A blackout, it turns out, is not a failure of the grid. It is a national security operation with excellent uptime.

Into this darkness strides our protagonist, Colonel Abiyot, a visionary of elsewhere. He governs a landlocked reality but dreams exclusively in coastline. He has the rare gift of being able to see, with perfect clarity, a future in a country that has not invited him, while remaining entirely unable to see the pothole directly in front of the presidential motorcade. He addresses a crowd in the capital — the microphone fading in and out, because even his amplification has been afflicted by Tsimido — and he announces, to a people who queue three hours for a jerrycan, that they will henceforth celebrate Irreecha at the Red Sea.

There is a small logistical wrinkle, which is that Irreecha is a thanksgiving held beside water that actually exists, and the Red Sea in question belongs to somebody else, who has not been consulted and would, on the evidence, rather not be. A journalist raises a hand. “Sir, how will we get there?” The Colonel smiles the smile of a man who has never personally driven anywhere. “With ambition.” “Do we have permission?” “Permission is a colonial concept.” “Do we have roads?” “Roads are a state of mind.” “Do we have a coastline?” “Not with that attitude.”

It should be said, in fairness, that the Colonel is not a man wholly divorced from infrastructure. He has, in his time, presided over the construction of the largest dam on the continent — a genuinely colossal achievement, visible from space, and, on current form, from very little else, since the capital continues to dine by candlelight while the turbines export their surplus to the neighbours. We are the nation that gave the world coffee and cannot reliably boil a kettle. We generate enough electricity to light three countries, two of which are not ours. Somewhere a citizen sits in the dark, mobile-money app open, unable to complete the transaction because the phone died at nineteen per cent, and this too, I regret to report, is filed under Tsimido.

But the Colonel’s true passion is not water, nor power, nor the sea he keeps promising the diaspora he has already, in some spiritual sense, annexed. His passion is towers. Glass ones. He unveils them at every opportunity, rendered in a lavender dusk by an architect in Dubai, and the citizens ask the questions citizens ask. “Will the towers have water?” “Towers.” “Will they have electricity?” “Towers.” “Will they have broadband?” “Have you seen the glass?” Nobody is certain whether the towers will contain water, power or a functioning lift. But they will contain glass, in quantities visible from the moon, and each will crown itself with a rooftop pool that is, the planners hasten to clarify, not for swimming. It is for investors. There will be no water in the pool, obviously. The pool is aspirational. Like the sea.

To make room for all this aspiration, the old neighbourhoods must go. They are not demolished, you understand; they are corridored. Everything is a corridor now — a corridor to prosperity, a corridor to modernity, a corridor down which the residents of sixty years are politely walked, at eight in the morning, holding whatever they could carry. The brochure calls it renewal. The bulldozer calls it Tuesday. If this were one of those British panel shows, we would now play the Missing Words Round, in which the guests complete a genuine sentence from the development authority: “The corridor project will bring world-class blank to every resident.” The answer we were looking for was eviction notice. Nobody got it, because the studio lights had gone out.

The diaspora, meanwhile, is thriving. On a Zoom forum where every video is crisp and every background is curated — because their electricity, crucially, is somebody else’s — the questions arrive from the safety of three time zones away. From Washington: “We support the Red Sea plan! I don’t know what it is, but it sounds coastal.” From London: “Gentrification is good for development, I read it in a brochure.” From Dubai: “Luxury towers are the future. I live in one.” And from the capital, on a line that keeps dropping, a citizen who has waited forty minutes for his turn to speak manages three words before the connection fails: “We want water.” Buffering. Buffering. Reconnecting. The forum moves on to branding.

I have, in the public interest, conducted an investigation, and I can reveal the following. The national broadband map was drawn with a ruler rather than data, on the sound reasoning that a straight line is cheaper than a survey. The fibre-optic backbone, traced to its terminus, ends abruptly behind a café in a district the map insists is fully connected. The biometric digital-identity programme — a triumph — now assigns a unique verified number to every citizen the state is otherwise entirely unable to locate, feed or supply, so that when the water finally does not arrive, it will not arrive to a precisely identified individual. The server hosting all fifty million of these identities is powered by a diesel generator that coughs like a chain-smoker on the stairs. And the master plan for the Red Sea festival, requested under no freedom-of-information law because we have no such law, turns out to be a single PowerPoint slide. It is titled “Ambition.” It has no second slide.

There was, I should add for the record, a reconciliation lately — a great national dialogue, four thousand delegates, a month of healing — and it concluded, movingly, by reconciling the only two parties that had genuinely never got along: the office the Colonel already holds and the office he did not yet. They are to be fused into one grand chair, should it all proceed, and the whole exercise has left me strangely reassured. A government that cannot deliver a litre of water has just demonstrated it can, given a month and a marquee, deliver itself a throne. It is nice to know the machinery works. It was simply pointed at the wrong pipe.

So, no: digital penetration is not about megabytes, and never was. It is about priorities. A nation cannot livestream its future if it cannot charge its phone, and a leader who dreams of the Red Sea while a broken tap drips in the foreground has not confused ambition with incompetence — he has upgraded one into the other and called it a corridor. Perhaps one day the towers will rise. Perhaps one day the broadband will flow and the pool will hold water and Irreecha will be celebrated beside a sea with our name on the map. Perhaps one day, and I offer this as the only manifesto this country truly needs, the government will stop buffering.

Sewasew Teklemariam writes satire and sharp commentary for The Ethiopian Tribune. Colonel Abiyot and every quotation attributed to him are inventions of the columnist; the water, the power cuts and the buffering are not. The figures in the preamble are drawn from the sources listed above.