THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Conclusion — A Mirror to the Nation

Past, Present and the Future

Unite and Reclaim the Sea, Secure the Dam, Fight Poverty Not Each Other

Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) · Final article of the series

Editor’s Foreword

In March, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu opened his series in these pages with “The Spirit of Adwa” and a premise that has run through every article since: when a new generation speaks, a nation must listen. Seven months and fourteen articles later, he closes it with the longest and most ambitious piece we have published from him.

The length is deliberate. A conclusion has to gather fourteen arguments into one and answer the questions they left open. Readers who followed only part of the series will find the whole of it here: the Abraham Accords and the “permissive disorder” of the Red Sea, the June election, the racket of four estates, the drones over Amhara, the Oromummaa debate and the case for Assab. Each is set against what has happened since. Readers who followed all of it will find the author testing his own forecasts against the record, and changing his view where eight years of evidence have changed it.

When the powers of the region redraw the map around us, will Ethiopia be a party to the drawing or a line on someone else’s page?

Dr Hailu does not ask to be agreed with. He sets out what would prove him wrong and invites his critics to show it. Many will disagree, some fiercely. His inbox through this series is testimony enough to that. We publish him because the questions he asks are the ones Ethiopia cannot avoid: what holds a nation together, what the sea is worth, and what kind of constitution 130 million citizens deserve.

As with every contribution, the views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Ethiopian Tribune. Replies are welcome, and we will publish the serious ones.

We thank Dr Hailu for the series, for his patience with our edits, and for the reminder in his covering letter that the time to mature as a nation is now.

— The Editor

Synopsis

The final article of the series asks one question: how does a nation of 130 million, at war with itself and cut off from the sea, stop fighting its past and start building its future? It answers in five parts.

Part I — The Fourteen Articles as a Mirror

The author restates the series as a single architecture: national unity and Red-Sea sovereignty as the foundations, broad-based development anchored in democracy as the means, and GERD as the engine. He checks the series’ spring forecasts against the autumn’s events — the Houthi hold on the Bab al-Mandeb, the rupture with Asmara, the seven-party Alliance for Survival and the New Alamein declaration on Red-Sea governance. He sets out the documented record of the Abiy years, traces how a narrative casting the Amhara as the nation’s offender passed from Cairo and the liberation fronts into the 1995 Constitution and has since turned on its authors, and examines FANO’s place inside the new alliance, proposing six commitments any coalition must meet before victory, not after.

Part II — Red-Sea Sovereignty and the Constitution

He reconstructs the legal chain by which Ethiopia lost its coast between 1991 and 2018, weighs the case for and against the claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio Corridor, and states plainly where it is strong and where it is not. He sets out four courses open to the nation and their price. He then turns to the 1995 Constitution: why Article 39 cannot be amended away, three routes to a replacement, the guarantees a citizens’ constitution must offer every community, and eleven safeguards against a new tyranny of unity.

Part III — Democracy and Development

Sovereignty is not prosperity. Using a binding-constraints method, the author follows Ethiopia’s productive chain and identifies where it actually breaks: land tenure, the industrial parks, a dam with too little grid behind it, a tax take of around seven per cent, and a school system that enrols almost every child but teaches too few of them. Each is given a target, a timetable and a measure.

Part IV — The Obligation to Our Citizens

Thirteen obligations, and the order in which they must be met: peace at home and a new constitution first, the sea claim reserved and codified at once, and its recovery last.

Part V — The Responsibility of the Intellectuals

Drawing on Zera Yacob, Benda, Said, Sen and Locke, he calls Ethiopia’s educated class to peace, the rule of law and development, names the only two wars he believes an intellectual may defend, and closes with an appeal to the young Ethiopians who will inherit the outcome.