“Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests”
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Editor’s Foreword
The Ethiopian Tribune
The Ethiopian Tribune is pleased to publish “Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests,” by Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu (MGH). It is the capstone of a sustained series this masthead has carried across 2026 from the Adwa reflections and the four-part reading of the Abraham Accords through to the studies of chaotic equilibrium and the June election and it does what a capstone should: it gathers scattered threads into a single, load-bearing claim.
That claim is deceptively simple. For years MGH has set out Ethiopia’s needs as four singular interests arranged in three layers the Foundations of national unity and Red-Sea sovereignty; the Means of broad-based, democratically anchored development; and the Engine of the Renaissance Dam. Here he argues that these are not four problems but one, because a single machine lies beneath every failure, run for the benefit of a single elite. The essay’s instrument is the oldest question in political economy cui bono, to whose benefit and its central move is to take the “paradox of Ethiopianism” now circulating in our reconstruction discourse and carry it one step past where it halts. Where the paradox describes a tragedy that befalls the peoples, MGH insists it is a racket that profits someone, and asks the reader to name the machine rather than blame a people.
We publish it now because its subject is not academic. As it goes to press, the Pretoria settlement has effectively unravelled, the Tsimdo alignment gathers across the north, and the National Dialogue has announced a contested “consensus” on the status of Addis Ababa. This is precisely the terrain the essay maps, and it deserves a hearing on those terms.
Readers will recognise that the piece is in conversation with work beyond these pages Simeneh Zena’s “Paradox of Ethiopianism” and Abebe Woreta’s paper on Amhara unity chief among them and with contributors familiar to this masthead, including Professor Girma Berhanu, whose “Hardest Question” it engages directly, and the reporting on strangulation strategy our own bylines have pursued. It is, in the best sense, an argument built on ground others have cleared, and it credits them openly.
A word on temper. This is a polemic, and unapologetically so, but it is a disciplined one. Its gravest charges against named actors the atrocities catalogued in its ledger, the conduct of the state in Merawi, Arsi, and the drone campaign rest on the corroborating record of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and Ethiopia’s own human-rights commission, and MGH is scrupulous about symmetry: every colour’s hands are shown bloodied, and no people is spared. The author writes, as he says, as a nationalist and to no faction, and the sharpest of his claims about intent and beneficiary are offered as political-economy analysis, not settled fact. As always, the views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent an institutional position.
Read it, then, as it asks to be read not as a verdict on the Amhara, the Oromo, or the Tigrayan, but as an indictment of the machine that farms them all.
— Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune
The true line is not Amhara vs Oromo vs Tigray — it is the peoples against the racket.
Detailed Synopsis
“Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests”
Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu (MGH) · 16 August 2026 · 25 pp.
The argument in one line
Ethiopia’s four singular interests share a single enemy, and it is internal: a machine the ethnic-federal order run to pump fear, votes, land, and money upward operated by a four-estate elite according to one rule the author calls ethnic entrepreneurship. The essay’s task is to name that machine, decompose it, prove it, and set out what would break it.
The standpoint and the instrument (§§1–2)
MGH writes as a nationalist loyal to the whole nation and to no party, region, church, mosque, or office a stance he treats as licence to ask of every elite, his own group’s included, the question none of them wishes asked. He distinguishes his instrument, political economy, from moral philosophy: philosophy asks what a community needs, but a community is not an actor; its elites decide in its name, and their private interest is not its welfare. Switching to cui bono changes the shape of the predicament from a tragedy with no author into a business with beneficiaries.
He fixes three terms that recur throughout: the racket (also “the machine”) is the system; ethnic entrepreneurship is its operating rule a person’s claim to office, land, and protection resting on lineage rather than competence; and the elite of four estates (political cadre, economic oligarch, religious authority, and intellectual) are the operators who work the machine and divide its takings. Ethnic entrepreneurship is named as both the order’s deepest injustice and the engine of its incompetence: a system that rewards the shout over the skill will be led by its shoutiest men, not its ablest.
The essay places itself in an ongoing conversation, honouring Woreta’s diagnostic paper on Amhara survival and Zena’s “Paradox of Ethiopianism” as the finest reconstruction blueprint the discourse has produced. It departs from both at the same threshold: each reasons about communities as unitary actors. Drop that fiction insist that within each people elite and mass have divergent interests and the security dilemma no longer looks like weather that falls on innocents. It is farmed. The paradox is thus real as an experience and false as a necessity.
The machine, anatomised (§3)
Four established ideas, assembled, produce the Ethiopian machine: it is a limited-access order (North, Wallis, Weingast) in which ethnicity is the instrument of restriction; the thin line between government and protection racket (Tilly), selling protection against a danger it manufactures; grievance as the wrapper and rent as the product (Collier–Hoeffler; Fanon on the native bourgeoisie); and decay through ethnic outbidding (Rabushka–Shepsle), which hollows the centre. Run in every group at once, the rival entrepreneurs become “rivals in the shop window and partners in the back room” a cartel bound not by conspiracy but by incentive. MGH then refines the cartel into a predatory hierarchy: the estates do not only collude, they devour one another, illustrated by the TPLF’s documented record of consuming its allies over fifty years.
The charter (§4)
The racket, he argues, is not a habit but the law. The 1995 constitution constitutes it: Article 8 vests sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” rather than the citizen; Article 46 draws internal borders by language; Article 39 grants unconditional secession; Article 49 writes one group’s “special interest” over the capital into the founding text. No reform survives while the charter stands, so he proposes six changes vest sovereignty in the citizen; remove unconditional secession; write sovereign access to the sea into the text; free the land and guard the dam and grid; open the ethnic map to lawful review; and break the upper house’s veto on amendment ratified by ballot pledge and referendum so that “the citizen, not the cartel, holds the pen.” The National Dialogue is dismissed as “the chair consulting itself”: a body that recommends while the incumbent revises, excluding the very armed movements a settlement must end, and possibly a vehicle for turning a parliamentary system toward a presidency that could re-set term limits.
The demand side and the captured mind (§§5–7)
Honesty requires the demand side: the racket “does not stand on thin air it stands on us.” Its market is less the starving farmer than the comfortable, the online, and the diaspora patriot who “purchase the thrill of ethnic triumph with other people’s blood.” The one lever ordinary people hold is to withdraw custom the vote, the dollar, the shelter, the cheer, the son including protecting one’s own honest critics from the mob of one’s own group.
The essay marshals comparative scholarship (Horowitz, Bunce, Roeder, Hale, Cornell, Brubaker, Snyder; and, on Ethiopia, Abbink and Habtu) to argue that organising a state around ethnicity breeds division, not peace treating the case against ethnic politics as social science rather than Amhara nostalgia, while fairly noting Anderson’s dissent and conceding the fronts predate 1995. It then turns to the capture of mind: of memory (curated grievance), of number (a captured census, and the roughly three million “missing” Amhara), of origins (the Oromo shown as an ancient indigenous people, with both the “Madagascar” slander and the maximalist keñña pageant rejected as the identical move), of faith, and of the myth of invincibility Adwa honoured as a true glory but refused as an anaesthetic: “one cannot eat Adwa.”
In every community, the people receive the graves; the elite receives the rent.
The flashpoints (§§8–11)
Religion is named as the one fire that could bury the nation outright a war with no map, running through every household. MGH catalogues atrocities against both faiths: the targeted killing of Orthodox Christians in East Arsi since 2025 and the state’s slow response; the 2022 Gondar mosque attack; the 2023 Sheger demolitions and killings of Muslim worshippers. Addis Ababa is the “keystone of the keystone,” where a booming economy that will not descend to the wage-earner meets an ownership question the Dialogue has inflamed rather than defused; he grants Oromia’s genuine interests in water, land, and displaced farmers while rejecting ethnic ownership of a city that belongs first to its residents, then to all Ethiopians, and as the AU seat to Africa. The Tsimdo is “the racket’s war”: a pact of former enemies (Eritrea senior, TPLF and Fano junior, Sudan the rear base, with Cairo’s money), doomed by the irreconcilable claim to the western lands, and “suicidal” for Fano. To refuse it is the first concrete act of the vertical solidarity the essay commends.
The ledger and the head (§§11–14)
MGH reads the account “symmetrically, across every camp,” anchoring each entry in Amnesty, HRW, the UN, or the state commission (Mai Kadra, Axum, Tole, Gida Kiremu, Merawi, the drone strikes, Arsi, and the northern war), then draws the ledger down its columns: in every community the people receive the graves and the elite the rent. He refuses false balance on power the state kills with the only army and in breach of its unique duty to protect, so “the reddest hands today are the ruling party’s.”
“Fish rots from the head” locates the driver precisely. The chair the seat of the state belongs to whichever elite holds it: the TPLF for twenty-seven years, now the Prosperity Party under Abiy Ahmed, with an unmistakable Oromummaa tilt. Crediting real achievements (the opened society, GERD’s completion, Ethiopian Airlines, telecoms liberalisation, the Gode fertiliser complex), he nonetheless withholds the developmental crown: contracts flow by proximity not performance, the bureaucracy is chosen for loyalty not competence, and “no developmental state was ever built in a burning house” (Evans’s predatory–developmental distinction). Here he steps out of the seminar room to testify personally a designer of high-technology weapon systems now building a peaceful family enterprise in Ethiopia, refusing the diaspora forex leash and describing the honest builder taxed his time, money, and hope at the loan officer’s desk. He also questions the tourism-first road, arguing no large, populous country ever developed on tourism, and warns against letting the manufacturing base Meles laid decay while the capital is gilded. The boom the people cannot eat (§13) sets 9.2 per cent growth beside nearly 42 per cent poverty: not a growth problem but a transmission problem, and beneath that, capture. Section 14 grants that the government preaches unity and non-zero-sum access to the sea as eloquently as anyone its own “Breaking the Walls” broadcasts restate the essay’s thesis but cannot say the one word ourselves.
The synthesis, the cure, and the sea (§§15–19)
The synthesis (§15) marries the argument to the whole series: one machine corrodes unity, forecloses the coast, starves development, hollows democracy, throttles the engine, and steals the freedom political, economic, religious beneath them all. Democracy is defended not as the price of development but as “the arrangement in which losing an election is survivable”; the racket makes defeat unsurvivable on purpose.
The remedy (§16) is seven movements: take the rent off the ethnic label; make citizenship travel with the person; restore the three freedoms and forbid domination; settle Addis as a city of its residents; free the mind through schooling and honest history; convene a Dialogue that seats the “costly column” rather than the racketeers; and heal memory through truth and reconciliation that crowns no single people’s account. On force (§17), MGH is explicit: against Ethiopia’s own peoples there is no just war, and the rifle turned inward only feeds the machine; force is justified for one cause alone, once peaceful means are spent the retrieval and defence of Red-Sea sovereignty as self-defence under Article 51.
The sea (§§18–19) is saved for last as the cause that could unite all the rest. He argues the claim stands on right, not need access preserved by UN Resolution 390(V) and never lawfully surrendered by an unelected transitional government and sets peaceful access (a portfolio, not one port) as the priority, while declining to vow never to defend against a Tsimdo aggression. To Eritrea he offers a future rather than a threat: the same sea that is Ethiopia’s survival could be Eritrea’s future. The essay closes with two messages to the peoples, to withhold the belief that the poor man across the river is the enemy; to the elites, that all rackets expire when the marks stop believing and a final insistence: it was never Amhara against Oromo against Tigrayan; it is the peoples against the racket that farms them.
Read Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s full essay, “Cui Bono? The Racket vs Ethiopia’s Four Singular Interests,” here:
