Analysis

The Red Line That Moved

Abiy Ahmed says the ministers he dropped this week were under scrutiny for a year. The public record supports part of the case against them. What it does not yet show is a single referral to a prosecutor.

By E. Frashie ·October 2026

When Abiy Ahmed presented his first cabinet in April 2018, he drew a line. Graft and maladministration, he told lawmakers, were “a red line that has to be enforced.” Eight years and several reshuffles later, he returned to the House of Peoples’ Representatives on 8 October to begin his second full term with a new Council of Ministers, and with his own account of why some of the old one had gone.

The House approved the new cabinet unanimously: twenty-two ministers and a returning Deputy Prime Minister, Temesgen Tiruneh. Seven ministers kept their portfolios and ten newcomers joined. Among those who did not return were four whose departures now carry more than routine significance: Belete Molla at Innovation and Technology, Muferiat Kamil at Labour and Skills, Kassahun Gofe at Trade and Regional Integration, and Alemu Sime at Transport and Logistics.

The Prime Minister was unusually candid about how he had arrived at the list. “ሌብነትን በሚመለከት ሁሉም ሚኒስትሮች እና ሚኒስትር ዴኤታዎች ቢያንስ ላለፈው አንድ ዓመት ከፍተኛ ሚስጥራዊ ክትትል ሲደረግባቸው ነበር,” he told the House, according to the transcript published by Tikvah Ethiopia. On the matter of theft, every minister and state minister had been under top-secret surveillance for at least the past year. The monitoring, he said, was backed by intelligence and covered their activities at home and abroad, their children, their wives, their uncles and every wealthy person they dealt with. “The reshuffle,” he added, “was not done for nothing.”

Each minister was then made to defend himself against what was said about him, and the Prime Minister read the charges out as they had been put: you are suspected; you drink; you have improper ties with the rich; you scheme rather than support; you do not follow things up; you are never in the office. A minister need not be a thief himself, he said. Failing to control theft around him, ignoring tip-offs, or clinging to an attitude of “don’t come near me, don’t touch my area” had counted against him too.

Then came the most revealing passage of the session. Some of the complaints, he acknowledged, might have been nothing more than grievance or accusation, and in some cases sufficient evidence had not been found. “But those with any tendency of suspicion,” he said, “whether in themselves or around them, we did not make cabinet members.”

It was a remarkable admission, twice over. A head of government told Parliament that the state’s intelligence services had spent a year watching not only his ministers but their wives, their children and their uncles. On whose legal authority, under what oversight and with what safeguards that was done is a question in its own right, and one the House did not ask. And he conceded, in the same breath, that some of those left out were left out on suspicion where the evidence fell short.

He named none of the ministers who had failed. He did not need to. Within days, Meseret Media, citing government sources, had published a detailed account of the grounds for removing four of them, and it maps onto the Prime Minister’s own list almost point for point: improper ties to the rich, failure to police theft and, in one case, drinking.

The Tribune has tested Meseret’s claims against the public record. A consistent pattern emerges. In every case there is a documented failure that Parliament, the Auditor General or the press had already recorded. In every case, the alleged conduct that would turn a failure into a crime rests, for now, on unnamed sources. And in no case has any authority announced a charge.

The audit nobody prosecuted

The case against Belete Molla is the best documented. Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Expenditure Management and Control found a budget gap of more than half a billion birr at his ministry, together with unauthorised reallocations, payments outside legal provisions and inflated salaries, and gave the ministry fifteen days to account for them. Belete conceded before the committee that audit deficiencies had occurred. The Federal Auditor General separately found that the ministry had completed only eleven per cent of its planned projects.

The ministry also administered the World Bank’s $200 million Digital Foundations project, and it is there that Meseret Media’s government sources place the gravest charges. According to Meseret, money from the facility was used to pay high monthly advisory fees, in dollars, to individuals whose qualifications bore no relation to the sector. It cites a veterinary doctor retained on an annual salary as a digital consultant, and another adviser paid $120,000 a year who, Meseret says, spent most of his time in the United States.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the Digital Foundations fees (from 08:07)

Meseret further reports that the ministry awarded a contract worth 21 million birr, without a tender, to a company whose owner had drawn public attention for importing a Tesla Cybertruck free of duty. None of these specific allegations has been publicly confirmed by the ministry, the World Bank or any investigating body, and the Tribune has not independently verified them. The audit findings, by contrast, have been public for months.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the 21 million birr contract (from 08:58)

The brokers’ bill

Under Muferiat Kamil, the Ministry of Labour and Skills drafted an overseas employment bill that would have required recruitment agencies to lodge bonds of between $50,000 and $250,000 in blocked accounts, prompting open resistance from the agencies’ own federation. A separate ministry directive confining agencies to four named banks was challenged as straying into territory reserved by law for the National Bank. In Parliament, one MP told the minister plainly that overseas employment was in crisis.

Meseret Media’s account goes considerably further. It reports that two senior officials serving under the minister, the chief executive of Foreign Employment, Ermias Tekle, and the head of the Labour Market Information System Project Office, Birhanu Adal, were arrested by security forces in connection with human trafficking. Meseret also describes the ministry’s draft proclamation as an attempt to make the ministry the sole registration body, reducing licensed agencies to brokers, and to double the mandatory agency bank guarantee from $100,000 to $200,000 under the ministry’s direct control. The Tribune has found no official confirmation of the arrests, and the published draft reported by Addis Fortune sets the bond on a sliding scale rather than at a single figure. If the arrests occurred, the public is entitled to know who was charged, with what, and in which court.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the proclamation (from 10:16) · the arrests (from 19:10)

A red line that ends at the door of the cabinet room is not a red line at all.

Plates from an unnamed supplier

Alemu Sime’s ministry oversaw the national switch to new vehicle licence plates. Motorists objected loudly to the price, with Addis Fortune reporting fees of around 56,000 birr at the capital’s licensing bureau. The ministry imported roughly four million plates from a Chinese manufacturer whose identity officials declined to disclose. According to Meseret Media, after the public outcry over the plates, intelligence services monitored possible direct ties between the minister and the foreign supplier. Meseret’s sources also accuse him of inappropriately close dealings with investors, alleging that he accepted holiday gifts of cattle from them and told them he expected a diplomatic posting to China. None of these claims has been confirmed, and the Tribune has not verified them. The refusal to name the supplier of four million state-mandated plates, by contrast, is a matter of record, and it should be answered whoever now holds the portfolio.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on the investor ties and the plate supplier (from 17:23)

Queues, and the 658

Kassahun Gofe presided over a fuel market in chronic disorder. In December 2024, as queues stretched through Adama and Hawassa, he insisted there was no actual shortage of supply. By March this year, with Middle Eastern imports disrupted, his ministry reported that 658 people, officials among them, had been detained over illegal fuel trading. Meseret Media links him directly to the disruption. According to its sources, rather than allocating market share among distributors by logistical capacity, he favoured a single, less experienced company for personal gain, and the dispute grew heated enough to play out in front of the Prime Minister’s macroeconomic adviser, Girma Birru. Meseret also links a mid-June accident in Addis Ababa involving an excavator to widespread rumours of drinking, a point it ties to the Prime Minister’s own remarks about officials who drink. These allegations are unproven, and the Tribune has not verified them. But the contrast it draws is already on the record: hundreds detained at the pump, and no minister so much as questioned in public.

▶ Watch Meseret Media’s report on fuel distribution (from 06:22)

Removal is not accountability

The Prime Minister closed with a warning to the new cabinet. Its members, he said, had come through a month and a half of training and repeated examinations, sleeping no more than two or three hours a night, and what awaited them was “an era of suffering” in which sleep and idle joking would not be permitted. “ሥልጣን ኮፊያ እንጂ ጭንቅላት አይደለም,” he said: power is a hat, not the head. And the rule was simple: “Work, and if we do not work, leave.” It was meant as a show of resolve. It also marked the limit of his ambition. A hat is taken off; it is not put on trial. The sanction he named for failure, and for theft, was departure. He did not mention prosecution.

None of this establishes guilt, and this newspaper does not assert it. That is precisely the point. If the government has spent a year assembling evidence of embezzlement, procurement abuse and links to trafficking, that evidence belongs before the Attorney General and the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, not in a parliamentary speech followed by briefings to friendly outlets. And where, as the Prime Minister himself conceded, the evidence fell short, a public account of misconduct by unmistakable implication is a verdict delivered without a trial.

Either way, due process is owed twice over: to the citizens whose money, fuel and livelihoods were at stake, and to the former ministers themselves, who are entitled to answer the case against them in a forum that can test it. A quiet reshuffle satisfies neither.

The Tribune is putting four questions to the Office of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Has any of the four former ministers been referred for investigation? Have the arrests at the Ministry of Labour and Skills been confirmed, and on what charges? Who manufactured the new licence plates, and under what contract? And what has become of the misspent sums identified at the Ministry of Innovation and Technology?

In 2018 the Prime Minister promised that corruption would not be tolerated. A promise of that kind is measured not by who leaves the cabinet, but by who is made to answer for what happened while they sat in it.

Right of reply: The Ethiopian Tribune invites Belete Molla, Muferiat Kamil, Kassahun Gofe and Alemu Sime to respond to the allegations reported by Meseret Media and referred to in this article. Any response received will be published in full and without editing.