The Closing of ዿግሜ  Puagmay : Ethiopia’s Theatre of Dreams and Nightmares

 

By The Ethiopian Tribune  columnist Sewasew Teklemariam

A reflection on the final days of Ethiopian Calendar 2017

As the thirteen-month Ethiopian calendar draws its peculiar curtain on 2017, one might pause to reflect on whether this has been a year of progress or simply an extended exercise in national theatre. The closing days of Puagmey ዿግሜ have served up a particularly rich feast of absurdity that would make even the most seasoned satirist weep with gratitude.

Consider the exquisite timing: whilst Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sits beside his concrete monument to ambition—the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, declaring Ethiopia’s landlocked status a “historic mistake” that must be corrected “tomorrow”, the same dam stands revealed as a tomb for 15,000 unnamed souls. The irony is so thick one could build another dam with it. Here is a leader gazing wistfully at the Red Sea, speaking of existential crises and historic corrections, all whilst presiding over what amounts to the largest unmarked grave in the Horn of Africa.

The mathematics are rather stark, aren’t they? Fifteen thousand dead over fourteen years of construction. That’s roughly three deaths per day, every day, for over a decade. Yet Minister Habtamu Itefa speaks of “collective achievement” with the casual air of a man discussing crop yields. One wonders if the families of these unnamed drivers, engineers, and security personnel feel particularly collective about their losses, or if they’ve simply been relegated to the footnotes of Ethiopia’s grand narrative.

Meanwhile, the machinery of information control grinds on with clockwork precision. Sheger FM’s Tigist Zerihun and Mintamir Tsegaw discovered that reporting on healthcare worker protests constitutes “incitement to violence and bias”—a fascinating interpretation of journalism that would leave even Orwell scratching his head. The Ethiopian Media Authority’s swift action in ordering the deletion of their report demonstrates a refreshing commitment to protecting the public from the dangerous virus of information. After all, why should Ethiopians know about healthcare protests when they could simply rely on the government’s assurance that all is well?

The Red Sea nostalgia presents perhaps the most entertaining subplot in this national drama. Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions collide spectacularly with the reality that Eritrea rather fancies keeping its coastline, thank you very much. Asmara’s dismissal of Ethiopia’s “toxic agenda” carries the weary tone of a neighbour tired of being asked to lend the lawnmower. Egypt’s deployment of troops to Somalia under the AUSSOM mission adds another layer to this geopolitical sandwich, creating a situation where everyone wants something from everyone else, and nobody seems particularly inclined to give.

The launch of Aeroabay, Ethiopia’s domestic drone manufacturer, provides a delicious counterpoint to these maritime dreams. Why bother with ports when you can build flying machines? The symbolism is almost too perfect: a landlocked nation that cannot access the sea but can manufacture surveillance equipment. One can almost hear the strategic planners: if we cannot reach the world, we shall watch it instead. The drones, marketed as tools of sovereignty, might prove rather more useful for keeping an eye on troublesome journalists than monitoring distant borders.

Across the Atlantic, the Ethiopian diaspora confronts a different but equally insidious form of systemic violence. The brutal murders of Feven and Eden Adugna and their friend Bemnet Deresse in Cincinnati have exposed the racist architecture of American policing with devastating clarity. The sisters, who had escaped Ethiopia at ages seven and nine after witnessing their father murder their mother before their eyes, found safety in America only to be gunned down by a spurned suitor whose identity the police deliberately concealed.

The killer, an MBA graduate whose romantic advances had been rejected by one of the Adugna sisters, managed what Ethiopian state violence could not, the destruction of two young women who had survived childhood trauma to become pharmacy technicians with dreams of medical careers. Yet Cincinnati police treated their deaths with the casual indifference reserved for Black and immigrant victims. Only sustained community pressure forced authorities to reveal the killer’s identity, and even then, only after his convenient death from a failed suicide attempt whilst hospitalised.

The police narrative became a masterclass in racist deflection. Mental illness, they insisted, not misogyny or racial hatred. The killer’s MBA and calculated stalking behaviour disappeared behind convenient psychiatric explanations. The sisters’ extraordinary journey from Ethiopian orphans to American professionals was reduced to a footnote, their trauma erased in favour of their killer’s supposed psychological complexity. This is American racism refined to its most elegant form, the systematic devaluation of immigrant lives through institutional indifference disguised as procedural neutrality.

The asylum debate in Britain reveals perhaps the most exquisite hypocrisy of our age. The very Labour politicians who, merely two years ago, accused Prime Minister Abiy of weaponising rape and presiding over systematic atrocities, now find themselves rather inconveniently hosting the refugees their foreign policy helped create. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking: condemn a leader for human rights abuses, then act surprised when his citizens flee to your shores seeking asylum.

Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Tony Blair continues his peculiar mentorship of Abiy and his Prosperity Party, apparently undeterred by those pesky allegations of genocide and war crimes. One can only admire Blair’s consistency, having perfected the art of humanitarian intervention in Iraq, he now applies his expertise to the Horn of Africa with characteristic results. The irony writes itself: the architect of “humanitarian intervention” providing guidance to a leader accused of the very crimes such interventions supposedly prevent.

The current Labour government’s response to Ethiopian asylum seekers has been nothing short of masterful political theatre. These same politicians who once thundered about Abiy’s crimes now criminalise the due process that might grant safety to his victims. The asylum system becomes a convenient scapegoat for domestic failures, blame the refugees, not the policies that created them. It’s rather like an arsonist complaining about the fire brigade’s response times.

What we witness is European foreign policy coming full circle with devastating precision. Western politicians cultivate relationships with authoritarian leaders, provide them with legitimacy and support, then feign shock when these very leaders produce industrial-scale displacement. The resulting refugee flows are treated not as consequences of policy choices, but as natural disasters requiring ever-harsher responses. Ethiopian asylum seekers become convenient props in domestic political theatre, their trauma repackaged as threats to British living standards.

The historical echoes are deafening. Four decades ago, a certain Irish pop star orchestrated perhaps the most successful charity single in history, mobilising the British public to “feed the world” whilst simultaneously feeding his own declining fame. The 1984 famine became a stage for Western theatrical benevolence, with Ethiopia cast as the grateful recipient of musical philanthropy. Critics have long argued that the humanitarian crisis was weaponised not just by the Mengistu regime, but by the very aid apparatus that claimed to combat it.

The parallels to today’s manufactured migration crisis are striking. Then, as now, British politicians and celebrities positioned themselves as saviours whilst the machinery of oppression ground on, often lubricated by the very funds raised in Ethiopia’s name. The aid industry became a parallel economy, creating armies of international workers whose comfortable expatriate lifestyles depended on the perpetuation of the crises they ostensibly sought to solve. Humanitarian assistance morphed into humanitarian dependency, with dictatorial regimes learning to monetise suffering with exquisite precision.

What emerged was a grotesque symbiosis: Western donors could feel virtuous whilst enabling the very systems that created the need for their charity. The Derg regime understood this dynamic perfectly, weaponising hunger whilst aid organisations provided convenient cover for political failures. Ethiopian suffering became a West End theatrical production, complete with celebrity cameos and middle-class British audiences weeping into their charitable donations.

The template established in the 1980s endures with remarkable consistency. Today’s migration flows serve a similar function, allowing European politicians to perform humanitarian concern whilst maintaining the relationships and policies that perpetuate displacement. The Irish pop star’s legacy lives on, not in solved crises, but in perfected methods of turning African tragedy into Western virtue signalling. They spoon-feed authoritarian leaders with diplomatic support and economic partnerships whilst simultaneously lamenting the “migration crisis” these very relationships perpetuate. Ethiopian asylum seekers are not products of natural disaster or inevitable conflict they are the manufactured exports of a political system that Western governments have helped sustain.

This elaborate shell game serves multiple purposes. Domestically, it allows failing European governments to deflect from their own economic malaise and declining global influence by creating convenient scapegoats. Internationally, it maintains profitable relationships with authoritarian partners whilst providing moral cover through performative outrage. The asylum seekers themselves become pawns in a game where their trauma is alternately weaponised and dismissed depending on political convenience.

The symmetry is almost poetic: Ethiopia manufactures drones for surveillance and boats full of migrants for European shores, whilst European politicians manufacture justifications for both supporting the regime that creates these conditions and punishing its victims. It’s foreign policy as farce, where the same actors play both humanitarian champions and border fortress commanders, often in the same parliamentary session. This has been a year of grand gestures built on silent graves, of sovereignty proclaimed whilst journalists are silenced, of maritime dreams whilst the diaspora drowns in violence abroad. The government speaks of collective achievements whilst individual voices disappear into detention centres.

Perhaps most tellingly, this has been a year when asking questions became dangerous. The detained journalists, the deleted reports, the unnamed dead at GERD, all point to a nation where curiosity has become subversive and accountability a luxury the state cannot afford.

As Ethiopia enters a new year, one might ask what lessons ዿግሜ  Puagmay has taught us. The answer seems depressingly simple: in the theatre of modern Ethiopia, the audience is not permitted to review the performance. They are merely expected to applaud on cue, whilst the real drama unfolds in holding cells and hospital morgues, in the Red Sea dreams of landlocked leaders and the nightmares of a diaspora that fled home only to find violence waiting in supposedly safe harbours.

The thirteenth month ends not with resolution but with questions that dare not be asked aloud. And perhaps that, more than any dam or drone factory, is the true measure of where Ethiopia finds itself as the calendar turns toward 2018.