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By Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu
Editor’s Foreword
A Nation at the Threshold of Choice
This week, the Ethiopian Tribune publishes a long-form analytical essay that will prove to be one of the most consequential interventions in Ethiopia’s pre-election conversation. Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu, trained at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and a consistently rigorous voice in our editorial pipeline, has produced a work that transcends the conventional rhythms of election commentary and asks, instead, a structural question about what elections are for.
The approach is neither partisan nor perfunctory. The article is forthright: it states, at the outset, that the outcome of the 1 June general election is not in real doubt. The Prosperity Party will return with the margins it will return with. This, paradoxically, is where the argument becomes serious. If the result is known, then the interesting question is not who will govern, it is what that government will do, and on what foundations, and with what integrity.
Four Interests That Cannot Be Traded
Dr. Hailu organises the analysis around four singular interests that he argues are non-negotiable to Ethiopia’s survival and prosperity: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as the engine of industrialisation and urbanisation; Red Sea sovereignty understood as a self-defence imperative before it is an economic one; broad-based economic development that reaches the rural poor and the urban unconnected, not merely the patronage networks at the apex; and internal unity, which has now passed, in his formulation, from rhetoric into an existential category. Each of these depends on a single prerequisite: a state that is institutionally credible at the bargaining table, in negotiations with neighbours, with international partners, and with its own citizens.
The June election will not, by itself, produce such a state. But the months and years following it can.
The Map That Tells the Truth
The article’s most powerful and sobering contribution is its use of a single artefact—the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Travel Advisory map, Edition 42 (February 2026) as an X-ray of Ethiopia’s actual security condition. Red zones, in which the FCDO advises against all travel, cover the entirety of Tigray and nearly all of Amhara; orange zones, recommending against all but essential travel, cover the Somali region and substantial portions of Afar and Oromia. The green zone in which Ethiopians can register voters, conduct campaigns, and contest a result freely encompasses less than a majority of the country by area though, as the article demonstrates, it contains a clear majority of the population.
This is not propaganda. It is an external assessment by an institution with no Ethiopian axe to grind, motivated only by consular duty to its nationals. It is therefore the most honest political document in circulation about the country’s condition. And it discloses something that the domestic conversation has largely avoided: that security, stability, and the possibility of democratic contestation are being distributed regionally rather than federally. A peace that obtains in one region because that region is the home base of the governing coalition, and that does not extend to other regions because the governing coalition has no comparable patron there, is a peace whose fragility the historical record does not hide. Ethiopia has watched this mechanism operate twice in living memory: in 1991 and in 2018. The third iteration, if it follows the pattern, will be more costly than the first two.
The Asian Mirror
The article reads the second mandate’s economic direction through a disciplined comparative lens: not against an abstract ideal but against real institutions and real outcomes. Its central comparison is between Singapore’s Temasek and Malaysia’s Khazanah two state holding companies established for similar developmental purposes, with divergent results. Temasek has delivered compounded annualised returns of 14% over fifty years through a combination of constitutional safeguards on its assets, board independence from the executive, and transparent subsidiary-level reporting. Khazanah has delivered subordinate returns and, at critical moments, has been deployed for political rather than commercial purposes, culminating in the 1MDB scandal and the diversion of billions in sovereign assets to political adventures.
Ethiopia’s new Investment Holdings entity, which chair roughly half of the country’s productive state capacity, currently replicates the Khazanah architecture rather than the Temasek one. This is not destiny; it is direction. The second mandate can still choose to import Temasek discipline constitutional safeguards, board independence, subsidiary-level transparency, published performance benchmarks—without abandoning the entrepreneurial-state doctrine. The choice, however, is narrowing with time.
On the Discipline of Dissent
The article includes a sustained and respectful engagement with the economist Yonas Biru’s important critique of the administration’s macroeconomic policy. Dr. Hailu’s point is not that Dr Biru is wrong on substance much of his analysis is correct and confirmed by World Bank and IMF data but that the rhetorical register in which the critique is often delivered tends to widen rather than narrow the gap between the contesting parties. There is an elder’s responsibility in the Ethiopian conversation that extends beyond being right; it extends to using one’s standing to reduce the temperature, to thread the needle of reconciliation, to make the case in a form that the constituencies most needing to hear it can actually hear. This is not a brief for silence. It is a brief for the form of criticism.
Unity as a Choice
The article’s final movement turns to what it calls the “cohesion mandate” a pledge that the prime minister could still make in the closing weeks before 1 June and enforce in the years following it. This pledge has a simple content: to govern as the executive of Ethiopia rather than as the patron of a faction; to offer the basic civic contract (personal safety, equality before the law, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom from arbitrary detention) to every Ethiopian in every region regardless of which armed formation has been claiming the right to extract from them; to reconstruct the armed forces on professional rather than political foundations.
This is not soft language. It is a concrete programme, traceable to real reform: depoliticising senior promotions, rotating regional commands, establishing a defence staff college with explicit doctrine on accountable professional forces, publishing a defence white paper, and permitting parliamentary scrutiny of senior military appointments. Dr Hailu argues that such a programme is in the prime minister’s own interest before it is in anyone else’s, because the patronage networks that benefit from the present architecture are ultimately more dangerous to the patron than to anyone else. The political cost would be real; the political dividend is also real.
A Federation Still Being Built
The article includes a historical section on the medieval Ethiopian state, the Eritrean democratic spring of 1941–1952, and the Oromo presence in the highlands. These are not antiquarian concerns; they have been weaponised in the contemporary moment by adversaries of the federal state. Dr Hailu’s contribution is to establish, with scholarly precision, the distinction between two questions that the ethnic-political conversation routinely conflates. The first question is whether the Oromo, or any other community, was present in medieval Ethiopia. The standard historiography suggests they were not in the highlands in 1340. The second question is whether the Oromo are today an equal Ethiopian people. The answer is determined not by the medieval chronicle but by five centuries of co-residence, intermarriage, joint state-building, and the constitutional order. To answer the second by reference to the first is a category error and a political programme this article categorically rejects.
What This Foreword Is Not
This foreword is not an endorsement of every analytical conclusion in the article. It is not a claim that Dr Hailu has resolved every question or that his assessments will not be contested by serious voices from across Ethiopia’s political landscape. It is rather a recognition that this is the kind of serious, sustained, intellectually rigorous engagement with the country’s predicament that the Tribune exists to publish and that the Ethiopian conversation, diaspora and domestic, desperately needs.
The article is long, densely argued, and unsparing in its assessments. It is written in formal English and addressed to an audience accustomed to technical policy analysis. It is not designed to comfort. It is designed to clarify.
Read the Full Article
The complete text of Dr Hailu’s essay “Election-2026: Ethiopia’s Direction of Travel?” is available online at the Ethiopian Tribune’s website, linked below. The article includes extensive annexes on demographic enumeration, sovereign wealth fund governance, and the security architecture mapped by the FCDO assessment.
Readers in the diaspora who have engaged with Dr Hailu’s prior work on the Red Sea, the Abraham Accords, and Ethiopia’s strategic interests will find this essay the synthesis he has been moving toward. Domestic readers navigating the election season will find a framework for thinking not about the ballot’s result but about what the result will be asked to produce.
The conversation belongs to all of us. We invite your engagement.
Find below link to full article on Ethiopian Tribune platform
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