POVERTY PACKED ITS BAGS

On the gentleman who learned that no one is ever evicted, no rebel is ever a hero, and no handout is ever the one you took yourself

There is a special providence in the Reporter’s studio, and last week it descended upon Ato Girma Seifu: Head of the Beautification and Green Development Bureau, sometime Investment Commissioner, and member in good standing of an opposition he assures us still exists, somewhere, in a drawer. He came to answer the only question the public has ever put to him — what, precisely, have you done? — and he answered it magnificently, by praying for our ignorance to be lifted.

The Eviction of an Abstraction

The prayer worked. I am enlightened. For years I laboured under the peasant superstition that when the bulldozers arrive at first light and a family carries its mattress into the road, a person has been displaced. Ato Girma has corrected the record. What was displaced was poverty — not the poor. And he has proof: bring me one, he says, one evicted soul with a title deed, and he will seat you on this very chair and resign on the spot. It is the boldest wager in Addis, and it cannot be lost, because the house always defines the stakes.

“What was displaced was poverty — not the poor.”

Observe how the lock is built, for he did not forge it alone. In Sheger, the city that rings the capital, the administration explained its demolitions with the same key: only illegal houses fall — the unlicensed, the unregistered, the ones the city never deigned to recognise. The renter, the man who bought his plot from a farmer and raised his walls a decade ago — these were never legal tenants of the city, and so, by the hour the wall comes down, there is no legal person standing before it to be wronged.

This is the engine beneath the Honourable’s dare. He invites you to produce a displaced soul knowing the camp he cleared was packed with the deedless, the Kebele tenants, the renters, the people whose only claim was that they were already there — every one defined out of existence before the machine arrived. It is not a wager. It is a tautology with a chair and a microphone. Bring him a victim and he will explain, gently, that what you have brought is not a victim but a paperwork irregularity, since resolved.

The One Clean Window

His proudest hour, he tells us, was refusing to sign a Prosperity contribution cheque and having it carried from his office. A decent act — and, read closely, a full confession. Because I am the one leading it, he explains; were another man in the chair, the party work would resume on Tuesdays. He has not described a separation of party and state. He has described himself as the single clean window in a house with no walls, and asked us to applaud the glazing.

And what is the labour of his opposition? We work when we are elected; we don’t work when we are not. There it is — an opposition that opposes only on payday. The public’s questions about his choices are, he rules, none of the public’s business, since the public did not elect him. On this he is entirely correct. Nobody elected him. He was appointed — to the Commission, to the Bureau — the largest unearned handout in a room he spends his afternoons accusing of begging.

The Mendicant-in-Chief

Consider the arithmetic of that contempt. By his own account, the lesser parties are mendicants, outfits that exist only to queue for the half-million birr the state dispenses through the Electoral Board to anyone with a letterhead and a list of names. He says it as a man of means, from a party rich enough to wave the cheque away. But the trough he sneers at is the one the law itself dug, and the Board pays by a formula that rewards the padding of rolls — so faithfully that in one recent round eleven of twenty-one parties, the ruling Prosperity Party among them, were caught inflating their numbers, some swearing to as many as nine hundred thousand women and disabled members who reside chiefly on paper. The system does not punish the begging. It subsidises the lie. His grievance is not that the parties beg; it is that they beg so cheaply.

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

But the finest moment comes when talk turns to rebellion. A politician, he now instructs us, cannot run a respectable party with one hand and clasp armed insurgents with the other; should anyone lift a weapon against a functioning government, it is the state’s absolute duty to arrest and try him; and neither the Fano nor Shene carries a cause worth the blood. A stirring doctrine. It is also, word for word, the one under which his own chairman was sentenced to death.

For the party Ato Girma serves was assembled in 2019 by folding in Patriotic Ginbot 7 — Professor Berhanu Nega’s armed, Asmara-quartered, formerly terror-listed movement: the very outfit that ran a mainstream face with one hand and an insurgency with the other, whose leader an Ethiopian court condemned to death in absentia for plotting precisely the overthrow Ato Girma now deplores. By the standard he recites so crisply in 2026, the founders of his own house were the criminals the state was bound to crush.

He has an answer, and it is the most honest thing he says. The old arrests, he says, were vendettas — personal scores settled by the regime’s enforcers, the hero whose only home was prison. But that was then. The hero’s prison belonged to the era of the wrong jailer; today’s detainees, held for the length of trials that never quite arrive, are merely meeting their constitutional desert. The line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, in the Honourable’s mature jurisprudence, turns out to be exquisitely simple: it is the cabinet post that comes afterward. Take up arms and lose, you are Shene. Take up arms, lose, withdraw to Eritrea, and return to a Ministry, you are a Professor. Same rifle, different epilogue.

So pray, by all means, for the lifting of our ignorance. We are nearly there. We have learned that eviction is a kindness to the evicted, that opposition is a salaried rest, that the unelected may scold the unfunded, and that the surest way to be remembered as a patriot rather than a criminal is to be on the winning side when the sentence is read. Poverty packed its bags. The Honourable saw it to the door himself.

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune