A Letter From Rome

Sewasew Teklemariam

Exiled, and long silent, Lemma Megersa has written to Ethiopia again. This time the former Defence Minister is not pleading for unity in the abstract — he is naming the war he sees coming, and the men who could start it.

For most of six years, one of the most consequential politicians of Ethiopia’s reform era has said almost nothing. Lemma Megersa — the man whose popularity in Oromia made the 2018 transition possible, who stepped aside so that Abiy Ahmed could take the premiership, and who then served as the country’s Minister of Defence — has spent those years first sidelined, then confined, and finally in exile. His public interventions since can be counted on one hand; a letter last September, marking the completion of the Renaissance Dam, was the most recent. So when he writes at length, as he has now from Rome, the fact of the letter is itself the news, before a word of its content is weighed.

The breach that sent him abroad was neither sudden nor, for want of trying, unmediated. It opened in November 2019, when Lemma went on the VOA Afaan Oromo service and said plainly what much of the old guard was thinking: that he did not accept the dissolution of the EPRDF into a single Prosperity Party, and did not believe in the “Medemer” philosophy being built around it. The merger was being rushed, he said. It was not the time.

What followed was a long and ultimately futile effort to keep the two men in the same tent. Party elders and figures with patronage inside the old Oromo organisation worked, more than once and largely in back rooms, to contain the difference before it could break the reform apart. For a season they seemed to have succeeded. They had not. By August 2020 Lemma had been stripped of his place on the Prosperity Party’s executive — in a meeting chaired by Abiy himself — and dismissed as Defence Minister; his office was searched by federal police; and before the year was out he was under house arrest. In the years after, he left the country altogether, settling in Rome, where until recently he worked as a consultant for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. In February 2023 the Prime Minister went further still, accusing his exiled former ally, in public and without producing charges or evidence, of leading the Oromo Liberation Army — the very insurgency Lemma now writes to disarm.

That last fact is worth holding in mind, because it changes how one reads what he has written.

The man Abiy accused of leading the Oromo Liberation Army now writes to its commander as ‘brother.’

The letter is titled, with deliberate gentleness, a short call of hope. It opens not in the language of politics but of the pulpit — Lemma is an evangelical of long standing, a board member of the Assemblies of God — and its diagnosis is frankly theological: that the love and mutual regard which once defined Ethiopians, and the fear of God he counts as part of their inheritance, are being worn away until the nation’s cruelty competes, as he puts it, with the very factory of cruelty. A secular editor might reach to trim the Satan from the paragraph. To do so would miss the point that here is a man who has swapped a political vocabulary for a religious one, and means every word of it.

Beneath the scripture, the analysis is sharp, and in one respect startlingly current. Ethiopia’s deepest error, he argues, is that its factions would sooner conspire with outsiders than listen to one another — that they invite foreigners into quarrels they could settle among themselves, and mine the worst of a shared past for weapons to fire in the present. Written from abroad, this might read as a diaspora’s lament. Set against what is actually happening on Ethiopia’s borders, it reads as diagnosis. The proxy architecture that analysts now warn could tip the Horn into a general war — Eritrea accused of arming movements on several fronts at once, insurgent groups reportedly coordinating with Asmara and with one another — is precisely the entanglement with “outsiders” that his letter names. He is not describing a moral failing in the abstract; he is describing the mechanism of the coming war.

Then he does something a lesser letter would not have dared. He addresses the combatants by name, and as equals. To the Prime Minister and his party; to Jaal Marroo, commander of the Oromo Liberation Army; to Zemene Kassie of the Amhara Fano; to Debretsion Gebremichael of the TPLF — he writes to each as “brother,” and asks the same thing of all of them. The gesture is more radical than its warmth suggests. To address a head of government and the leaders of three armed movements in one breath, as parties owed the same appeal, is to treat them as equivalent claimants to a table that does not yet exist — a quiet insistence that this is a political conflict to be negotiated, not a law-and-order problem to be crushed. And for the man once accused of commanding one of those movements to call its commander “brother” in the open is neither the provocation nor the confession his enemies will read into it. In context it reads as something else: a man declining the frame that was built for him.

He goes on to redefine the words that matter most in a country at war. A hero, he writes, is not the one who fights but the one who chooses the road of peace and spares his people; the wise man is the one who abandons the old track and opens his heart to reconciliation, to dialogue, to the discipline of give and take. Coming from a former Minister of Defence, this is not the pacifism of a man who has never held a weapon. It is the settled judgement of one who once answered for all of them. And it closes on the line that has travelled the furthest on its own — the plainest sentence in the letter, and the one his career most entitles him to write: that neither by the Kalashnikov nor by the fighter jet, neither by weight of numbers nor by edge of technology, can peace be made, or made to hold.

It would be a sentimental reading that stopped there. Appeals of this kind carry no enforcement, and the men addressed have brushed aside graver warnings than a letter. Lemma’s own record is not spotless — the Oromia of his presidency was not a peaceful place, and the security failures of those years are partly his to answer for — and there is a fair question in why the clarity arrives only from exile, only once the office is gone. A letter from Rome costs its author less than the peace it asks of those still inside the fire.

But the discomfort of the messenger does not falsify the message, and the standing of this particular messenger is not easily waved away. Here is a man who sat at the summit of the security state, who was publicly accused of running the war he now begs to end, who has every grievance to wish his former partner ill — and what he has chosen to send, after years of silence, is not an indictment but a plea. In a country rehearsing its next catastrophe, the useful question is not whether Lemma Megersa has earned the right to warn. It is whether anyone still holding power has the humility to read the letter to the end, as he asked — before the guns make the reading academic.

The Ethiopian Tribune