The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Comment

The Mourning Cloth and the Down-Payment

On Anchor Media, Abebe Akalu — teacher, author, and a politician now outside every party he once served — arrived dressed in another people’s grief. What he alleges about the Zayse, and what he says about the Prime Minister’s airport, indicts government and opposition in a single breath.

By Leeshan Kuratey  ·  Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

First broadcast by Anchor Media, 25 June 2026.

A Witness in Borrowed Cloth

He arrived dressed for a festival no one was celebrating. When Abebe Akalu sat with Anchor Media’s host — whom he greets as Mesay, in one of his now-regular appearances, and who introduces him as ever as teacher, author and politician — he wore the ceremonial dress of the Zayse, a small community in the Gamo Zone of Ethiopia’s south. He had not come to mark their new year. He had come, he said, to grieve.

“From today,” he told the programme, “I too am Zayse.” The cloth was an act of mourning and of enlistment at once: he asked viewers, at home and in the diaspora, to join what he called a campaign of solidarity with a people most of them, he suspected, had never been asked to think about. It is a deliberately theatrical gesture, and Akalu is a deliberate man. The costume was the argument — that a community can be erased not only by violence but by the plain fact that no one outside it is watching.

What He Alleges in Gamo

The substance beneath the symbolism is grave, and it should be read as what it is: a set of serious allegations, made by one man on a single programme and not yet independently verified. Akalu alleged that since the eleventh of Sené in the Ethiopian calendar — in mid-June — roughly seventeen people had been killed in and around the Zayse area of Gamo Zuria woreda. He described corpses left unattended for as long as a week, citizens still unburied. He alleged that the dead included a youth of sixteen, and that women were raped — among them, he said, a woman of sixty-eight. The perpetrators, in his account, were government-armed forces; he named the southern regional special police.

These are claims that demand corroboration before any newspaper treats them as fact, and the Tribune does not treat them as fact here. What can be said is narrower, and still significant: that a prominent former opposition official went on air to accuse state security forces of mass killing and sexual violence in a small southern community, and that, by his own account, the allegation had barely surfaced in the national press. The host conceded the point, noting that reports at “this level” had not reached the media.

The Zayse are a small Omotic-speaking community of the Gamo highlands and the Rift Valley lowlands — a people with, as Akalu put it, their own calendar, their own elders, their own faith and festivals. In a federation organised around large ethnic blocs, communities of this size are precisely the ones whose names rarely reach the capital’s bulletins. That structural invisibility is part of Akalu’s point, and it is why the cloth mattered to him as much as the casualty figure.

The Vote That Was a Protest

Akalu set the violence against an electoral backdrop that will be familiar to readers of this paper. In the Zayse constituency, he recounted, voters had returned an EZEMA candidate, Abraham Amoshe, to parliament rather than the Prosperity Party’s nominee. But he was unsparing about what that vote did and did not mean. The Zayse, he argued, had not chosen EZEMA out of love for EZEMA; they had reached for the only alternative within reach in order to register their rejection of Prosperity.

It is a remarkable thing to hear from a man who once served as EZEMA’s secretary general. In the same breath he allowed that his former party “is not seen as separate from Prosperity” — the very charge that drove seven of the party’s founders to resign in 2023. Coming from Akalu, the protest-vote thesis is not the opposition flattering itself; it is a former insider conceding that the opposition has become, in the public mind, a vessel for a grievance rather than a destination for a hope. For a paper that has argued the 2026 turnout measured rejection more than endorsement, his testimony is a primary source where there was previously only inference.

“The Problem Is Not the Election”

From the local, Akalu moved to the systemic, and here his argument sharpened into a thesis. “The election is not the problem,” he said. “The problem is the government’s administration; it is the problem of the system.” The crisis, in his telling, did not subside after the vote, as elections are meant to let crises subside; it intensified. He pointed beyond Gamo — to Dera, to central Ethiopia, where, he said, abductions from public buses had become a daily occurrence and roads were periodically closed by conflict.

His framing is worth stating precisely, because it is more than a complaint. An election, he argued, is something the system stages to consolidate itself — to persuade itself it is planting roots and extending its own lifespan — when the questions the public is actually asking are not electoral at all. “The question is a question of justice,” he said: “a question of peace, a question of bread, a question of the economy” — and, most elemental of all, a question of going out in the morning and coming home at night. A country, he said, now shredded “like a child’s tunic, like a torn rag.” It is a rhetoric of fundamentals: not the franchise, but the conditions under which a franchise could mean anything.

A Deposit on the Next Election

The interview’s most pointed passage came at its close, and it was aimed squarely at the Prime Minister. Akalu recounted a ceremony at the new Bishoftu airport project at which, as he tells it, Abiy Ahmed tied the next general election — the country’s eighth — to the completion of that megaproject, in effect asking the public to return him so that the work might be finished. Akalu’s reaction was not anger but something closer to embarrassment. “I was very ashamed,” he said. “I was very saddened.”

His objection repays unpacking, because it is sharper than ordinary grumbling. A government, he reasoned, builds great works as a matter of course; that is simply what holding power is for. He reached, pointedly, for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam — carried, he noted, across the efforts of three prime ministers — as the model of a national undertaking that needs no electoral bribe attached to it. To dangle an unfinished airport as a qebd, a down-payment, on a future mandate was, to Akalu, to mistake the ordinary duty of office for a personal favour the public should be grateful to repay. You do not, in his logic, take a deposit on an election you have not yet won.

What gives the passage its charge is the posture Akalu adopts. He cast himself, only half in jest, as an elder brother to the Prime Minister — a man whose place is to counsel rather than to oppose. He quoted a farmer’s proverb, that a horse you throttle and drag and tie down will go nowhere, as a parable of coercion: a leader can compel motion and still produce no genuine movement, no true consent. His prescription, accordingly, was not the fall of the government but the opening of its ears. Listen, he urged, to the shout the public is shouting. It is the counsel of a critic who would still rather be heard by power than triumph over it.

The Uses and Limits of a Lone Witness

What makes Akalu an unusually useful witness is also what makes him a difficult one. He is a man who has now stood outside every party he served — from the Unity for Democracy and Justice, through the Blue Party, to EZEMA — and who turns his fire, in a single sitting, on the ruling party, on the opposition that was once his own, and on the security institutions of the state. That breadth is his credibility and his complication at once. A critic with no remaining party has no obvious axe of ambition to grind; he also has no organisation to corroborate his claims, no caucus to share the burden of proof.

So the honest reading is twofold. His structural arguments — that the 2026 vote registered protest rather than consent, that the country’s crisis is one of governance rather than electoral procedure, that development cannot be offered as a substitute for safety — are coherent, serious, and consistent with much that is independently observable. His specific allegations from Gamo — the killings, the rapes, the unburied dead — are grave enough that they must be reported as allegations and pursued as questions, not received as findings. The Tribune will treat them as the former until they can be made the latter.

A word, finally, about the record itself. This column rests on the opening and closing portions of a long conversation; the long middle was not available to us, and we have not reconstructed what we could not hear. What the bookends establish is clear enough — a serial dissident, dressed in another community’s grief, indicting a system he says no election can repair, and asking, with the strange tenderness of a man who still hopes to be useful, only that those in power should listen before the path runs out. “Their journey,” he said of Prosperity, “is short, if it continues like this.” Whether that is prophecy or wish, he has at least made it harder to say that no one was watching the Zayse.

Source: Abebe Akalu in conversation with Anchor Media (broadcast 25 June 2026). Quotations are translated from the Amharic. Allegations described are attributed to Mr Akalu and have not been independently verified by the Tribune.