Letter from Ethiopia, Diplomatic Capital, Displaced Citizens: The Contradictions of Addis Ababa
There is something peculiarly Ethiopian about the scene unfolding in Addis Ababa this February. The city presents itself with all the trappings of continental leadership summit halls filled with dignitaries, the hum of diplomatic motorcades, the unveiling of Africa’s first unmanned police station complete with biometric verification and artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed tweets invitations to experience “a new era of African-led tourism development,” whilst the International Monetary Fund nods approvingly at Ethiopia’s fiscal discipline and structural reforms. On paper, at least, this is a nation ascending.
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On the curious disjunction between a capital that hosts the continent and a nation that cannot quite hold itself together
There is something peculiarly Ethiopian about the scene unfolding in Addis Ababa this February. The city presents itself with all the trappings of continental leadership summit halls filled with dignitaries, the hum of diplomatic motorcades, the unveiling of Africa’s first unmanned police station complete with biometric verification and artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed tweets invitations to experience “a new era of African-led tourism development,” whilst the International Monetary Fund nods approvingly at Ethiopia’s fiscal discipline and structural reforms. On paper, at least, this is a nation ascending.
Yet step outside the carefully choreographed radius of official optimism and a rather different Ethiopia emerges, one that sits uneasily with the grand pronouncements. This is a country where peace agreements seem to function more as intervals between violence than as genuine settlements, where millions drift through displacement camps whilst their government courts foreign investors, where the language of modernisation coexists with the brutal arithmetic of malnutrition statistics. The dissonance is not merely awkward; it is fundamental, speaking to contradictions that run through the very sinews of the Ethiopian state.
Consider the timing. Whilst Addis hosts the thirty-ninth African Union Summit and welcomes Italian delegates for the Second Italy-Africa Summit, fresh clashes erupt between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the same TPLF that signed a peace deal in Pretoria scarcely three years ago, ending a war that killed hundreds of thousands. In Amhara, irregular Fano militias who once fought alongside federal forces now turn their guns against them, engaging in nearly a hundred battles within seven weeks. The government speaks darkly of Eritrean meddling and TPLF conspiracies; Eritrea dismisses the accusations as fabrications. Meanwhile, satellite imagery suggests Ethiopia has been training thousands of fighters for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces in a secret camp in Benishangul-Gumuz, drawing the country deeper into regional conflagrations it can ill afford.
This is the Ethiopia that doesn’t make it into the summit brochures—fractious, militarised, its peace provisional at best. The Pretoria agreement was meant to close a chapter; instead, it seems merely to have turned a page. Violence mutates rather than dissipates, shifting fronts and allegiances with a fluidity that defies easy resolution. What was once a war between federal forces and Tigrayan rebels now fragments into multiple insurgencies, ethnic mobilisations, and cross-border entanglements, each with its own logic and grievances.
The humanitarian toll of this unravelling is measured in the usual grim metrics. Displacement runs into the millions. In Afar, severe acute malnutrition cases rise year on year, exacerbated by drought and conflict. Children bear the heaviest burden—interrupted schooling, psychological trauma, the gnawing hunger that doesn’t respect political cycles or diplomatic calendars. For these Ethiopians, the smart police station in Addis, with its promise of reduced response times and automated reporting, exists in a different universe entirely. One suspects they would trade all the biometric verification in the world for a meal, a school, a home that hasn’t been burned.
What makes Ethiopia’s predicament particularly fascinating and tragic, is how it manifests in the competing narratives of the country’s intellectual class. Two retired scholars, one Oromo and a pairing of Amhara and Tigrayan observers, offer interpretations so divergent they might as well be describing different countries altogether.
The Oromo intellectual sees vindication, a long-deferred reckoning in which Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group finally claims its rightful place at the helm of national affairs. For him, the summits and economic reforms represent not vanity but strategic reassertion proof that Ethiopia is becoming, at last, a nation that belongs to all its peoples rather than a narrow elite. The friction and realignment are the inevitable costs of any genuine transition. When he speaks of Oromos “leading the country and changing it as they always dreamed,” there is both pride and warning in his voice, a suggestion that this shift is non-negotiable, that history is finally being corrected.
His Amhara and Tigrayan counterparts see something rather different: fragmentation masquerading as reform, ethnic mobilisation threatening to tear apart whatever tenuous cohesion remains. To them, the persistence of armed conflict across multiple fronts reveals the hollowness of official stability claims. Identity politics, when weaponised, doesn’t build nations; it dismantles them. The Tigrayan scholar, shaped by the trauma of recent war, argues that reconciliation remains unfinished, that peace agreements signed under international pressure cannot paper over wounds still fresh and grievances still festering. The renewed clashes in Tigray are not aberrations but symptoms of structural failures that no summit can address.
Both narratives contain truth; both are incomplete. This is the bind of contemporary Ethiopia a country where every political advance for one group registers as a setback for another, where federal restructuring amplifies centrifugal forces, where the very diversity that might be a source of strength becomes instead a fault line. The competing visions of these retired intellectuals matter because they shape policy and public discourse, but they also matter because they reveal how profoundly Ethiopians disagree about what their country is and what it ought to become.
And so we return to Addis Ababa, that curious capital where diplomacy and displacement coexist, where economic reform proceeds alongside humanitarian crisis, where smart police stations rise whilst millions go hungry. The government’s wager seems to be that international summits and IMF approvals will gradually translate into domestic stability, that economic growth will eventually trickle down, that the performance of statehood will somehow conjure its substance. It is not an unreasonable bet, nations have bluffed their way to legitimacy before, but it is a precarious one.
The risk is that the spectacle becomes an end in itself, that branding exercises mask rather than address the deeper fractures. When citizens encounter militarised checkpoints in ordinary neighbourhoods, when secret training camps for foreign fighters dot the countryside, when food insecurity spreads whilst officials tweet about tourism development, the gap between official narrative and lived experience becomes unbridgeable. Credibility, once lost, is devilishly hard to recover.
Ethiopia has always been a country of contradictions; ancient yet modern, unified yet fractured, proud yet vulnerable. What distinguishes the present moment is how these contradictions have sharpened, how the space for ambiguity has narrowed. The nation stands at an inflection point, though whether it tilts towards consolidation or fragmentation remains genuinely uncertain.
For all the summit diplomacy and economic indicators, Ethiopia’s true test lies not in Addis but in its peripheries in Tigray and Amhara and Afar, in displacement camps and drought-stricken villages, in the daily struggles of citizens for whom stability is not a diplomatic talking point but a matter of survival. Can a government project continental leadership whilst struggling to govern its own territory? Can economic reform proceed whilst conflict simmers and millions go hungry? Can diplomatic capital substitute for domestic legitimacy?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that will determine whether Ethiopia emerges from this crucible intact or whether the contradictions finally prove insurmountable. The smart police station gleams in Addis, delegates fill the summit halls, the IMF reviews proceed apace. But beyond the carefully managed spectacle, Ethiopia remains a country at war with itself, its future hanging in a balance that no amount of diplomatic theatre can resolve. Only genuine reconciliation, inclusive governance, and enduring peace can do that and those, alas, cannot be unveiled at press conferences or tweeted into existence.
