Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty

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From the Editor

The Solvent and the Shore

An editorial foreword to Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s “Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty: Is Abiy Making Ethiopia an Island of Enemies?”

On 5 October the Prime Minister’s Office announced that the administration sworn in that morning would be known as the “Medemer Government”. Our contributor had already finished asking what Medemer is for. The coincidence is not his doing, but it tells the reader why this instalment matters: the word that names the government is the word this essay sets out to examine.

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu warned us, in the note that accompanied the manuscript, that his argument kept being overtaken by the news it was trying to describe. He was not exaggerating. Between the first draft and the last, war resumed in the north on 23 September; on 1 October Addis Ababa closed its embassy in Asmara, declared ten Eritrean diplomats persona non grata and expelled an Egyptian diplomat, and Asmara severed relations; Mekelle changed hands again; and on 4 October the leaders of Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan met at New Alamein and declared the governance of the Red Sea the exclusive business of its littoral states. Every one of those events now sits inside the essay, and each strengthens the question in its title.

What distinguishes the piece is not its anger, which is considerable, but its method. Faced with the charge, now common across the opposition, that Medemer is the civic dress of an Oromummaa project, MGH does not chant it. He traces where the narrative came from, lays the case against the charge at full strength, insists that the political entrepreneurs who trade in Oromummaa are not the Oromo people, and concludes that the remedy is the same whichever reading is right. His sharpest pages are on how this government actually works: a cabinet assembled for dependence rather than competence, a decision-making circle that appears on no organigram, and a Prime Minister who tells Parliament his own ministers have been under surveillance. His prescription is institutions first, with democracy as their capstone, and he spells it out in six commitments that no election could deliver on its own.

Changing the ruler changes a stone. Judge every proposal by one question: does it change the ingredients and the process, or only who stands at the fire?

Readers will find the second pillar, on the sea, the most consequential and the most contested. MGH argues that Ethiopia’s claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio corridor rests on history and on a right never lawfully surrendered; that it expressly does not extend to Massawa; and that Eritrea’s continuing military presence on Ethiopian soil has already engaged Ethiopia’s right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. From that he draws a sequence that ends, failing a treaty, in securing and incorporating the corridor. Many readers, Eritrean readers above all, will reject that conclusion, and international lawyers will dispute its premises. We publish it because it is argued rather than asserted, because it is sourced and bounded, and because the author himself names the precondition Ethiopia does not meet: a settled house. A state that moves without one, he writes, opens a fifth front rather than recovering a corridor. As always, the views are the author’s own, and our pages are open to a reasoned reply.

MGH writes that he can find only three explanations for a nation that quotes, as its operating manual, a constitution designed to divide it: that we are lying to ourselves, that we are deluded, or that we are quite mad. He will return next week with the fifteenth and final instalment of this series, which promises to gather the parts and set out what is to be done. We are grateful, once again, that he has chosen these pages to discharge what he calls the obligation of a citizen to say what he sees.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Medemer, Oromummaa and Red-Sea Sovereignty

Is Abiy Making Ethiopia an Island of Enemies? — Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD), October 2026

The question

The preceding instalment documented what Abiy Ahmed’s government does. This one asks what it is for, and what it has done to Ethiopia’s place in the world. The argument stands on two pillars that the author holds to be inseparable: national unity, which he argues the government has dismantled at home, and Red-Sea sovereignty, a just claim he argues it has squandered abroad. Measured against the four interests this series has defended throughout — national unity, Red-Sea sovereignty, development anchored in democracy, and the GERD as the engine of industrialisation — he finds the government has damaged every one.

The first pillar: Medemer, Oromummaa and the soul of the state

MGH sets out the unionist charge that Medemer’s civic language conceals an ethno-national project, then traces the making of Oromummaa through three bodies of work: Asmarom Legesse’s anthropology of Gadaa, the historical record of the sixteenth-century expansion as documented by Oromo scholars themselves, and the popular narrative fixed by Tesfaye Gebreab’s fiction. He then states the opposite case with equal force: Asafa Jalata and other Oromo nationalists regard Abiy as an enemy of Oromummaa, and his army has fought the OLA and bombed Oromo farmers since 2018. Both readings cannot be literally true. The author’s verdict is that the common factor is personal power rather than an ethnic programme, and that it hardly matters which reading wins, because an ethnic-based Constitution will reward whoever captures the centre.

He is emphatic that the elites are not the people: anyone who moves from “this machine governs through an Oromo network” to “the Oromo are the problem” has, he writes, joined the racket. He criticises the state’s sponsorship of one people’s symbols while the national flag is treated as a provocation, argues that history including its uncomfortable chapters belongs to scholarship rather than the ministry, and proposes that forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing be made crimes whoever commits them.

The most original section examines how the government works. The Prime Minister’s statement to Parliament that his ministers were under classified surveillance is read not as a quirk but as the signature of a structure: a cabinet that represents rather than governs, a shadow chain of command first built by the TPLF, and a ruler who must watch ministries that answer to someone else. The cabinet purge since 2019, he argues, selected for dependence rather than ethnicity or faith, removing everyone with a base from which to refuse. Hence his prescription: not “remove the man”, not “hold an election”, but institutions first, and he offers six commitments — a cabinet that is the government, a merit civil service, intelligence under statute, courts that can rule against the state, secure property, and independent numbers.

You cannot beat a man you have not studied.

An island of enemies

A table lists nine fronts open simultaneously as the article went to press, five of them armed and three turned into diplomatic ruptures within a week. MGH revisits his earlier essay on “chaotic equilibrium” and concludes that September and October 2026 have settled the question: the method did not master chaos, it manufactured it. A credible sea strategy, he argues, would have begun with a settlement at home and a published legal case; what exists instead is rhetoric that has turned a legitimate interest into a regional alarm. He offers, explicitly as inference rather than proof, the observation that this government has profited politically from every war it has fought while the nation has lost by each.

The second pillar: the legitimacy of Red-Sea sovereignty

The longest part of the essay sets out the historical record from Aksum to 1890 in two tables, and argues that the coast was lost in 1991–93 without the consent of the Ethiopian nation. It takes the Eritrean counter-case from its most serious authors, conceding Massawa outright and confining the claim to the Doumeira–Rehyto–Beilul–Tio corridor, with Assab at its centre. It then turns to security: the former Emirati base at Assab, the 2024 Asmara summit, and the El Alamein Joint Declaration of 4 October, which MGH calls the most important sentence written about the Red Sea in a decade because it defines Ethiopia out of the sea without ever naming it.

On the law, he argues that Eritrea’s continuing military presence on Ethiopian soil is an armed attack that has already engaged Article 51, that the proxy case must be argued second and proved with a published dossier, and that, failing a treaty, Ethiopia would be entitled to secure, hold and incorporate the corridor. He is equally clear that force confers no title, that Massawa is not claimed, and that one of six preconditions is unmet: a settled house. “Five of six is not a plan,” he writes; “it is a temptation.”

Resistance, objections and the conclusion

Invoking Adwa, MGH calls for resistance to the constitutional order rather than to any people, under three rules: national not ethnic, lawful and evidential, and siding with none of the ethnic entrepreneurs — a category in which he places Abiy, Zemene Kassie, Debretsion Gebremichael and Jal Marro alike. Arms, he insists, are reserved for the defence of the nation and its outlet to the sea, never against fellow Ethiopians. He then states seven objections at full strength — that the Oromummaa charge is slander, that Eritrean independence closed the matter, that this is Amhara nationalism in citizen’s clothing, among others — concedes what is true in each, and answers the rest.

The conclusion meets the government’s economic defence on its own ground. The reform is real — the float, IMF and World Bank support, falling inflation — but the development is theatre: a birr that has lost three-fifths of its value, rising poverty, debt service more than three times the education budget, and corridor projects that evict without compensation. The deepest cost, he argues, appears on no ledger: the belief that an Ethiopian is an Ethiopian before he is anything else.