Ethiopian Tribune editor – Ethiopian Tribune

Ethiopia’s “Most Open Election” and the Architecture of Managed Democracy

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:38:10 +0000

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Ethiopia’s “Most Open Election” and the Architecture of Managed Democracy

By Sewasew Teklemariam
April 2026

When The Economist framed Ethiopia’s coming vote with the declaration, “Ethiopia’s prime minister says the next election will be the most open and democratic in the country’s history. In reality it will be a sham,” it captured a tension many Ethiopians already feel in their bones: the widening chasm between the language of reform and the material reality of repression.

This is not a semantic quibble. The fundamental question is whether the political order being constructed in Addis Ababa is genuinely democratic, or whether elections are becoming carefully choreographed rituals designed to legitimise state power rather than contest it. The distinction determines whether Ethiopia is building a constitutional democracy or consolidating a more sophisticated authoritarianism—one dressed in the language of “openness,” “reform,” and “inclusion.”

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The Promise: Reformist Language and the International Performance

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ascent to power in 2018 was narrated as a rupture with Ethiopia’s authoritarian past. For a nation exhausted by the EPRDF’s three-decade monopoly on power, the initial moves carried genuine promise. Political prisoners walked free. Exiled opposition figures were invited home. Previously proscribed parties were unbanned. The telecommunications monopoly was privatised. Most spectacularly, Abiy brokered a peace agreement with Eritrea that earned him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize—a gesture that cemented, in the Western imagination, his credentials as a reformer.

The narrative was seductive. Here was a leader willing to break with the machinery of oppression. The international community, particularly European donors and American strategists, invested heavily in this story. Budget support resumed. Diplomatic courtesies resumed. The premise became almost axiomatic: Abiy was different.

Within this framework, the promise of “the most open and democratic election in Ethiopia’s history” served multiple functions. Domestically, it signalled to war-weary Ethiopians that the era of one-party monopoly was genuinely over. Internationally, it reassured donors and strategic partners—the EU, the United States, the World Bank—that Ethiopia remained on a democratic trajectory and deserved renewed investment, budget support, and diplomatic engagement without uncomfortable conditionality.

On paper, this reads as transition. In the lived experience of Ethiopians who have seen this script performed before, it reads as repackaging.

The Reality: Repression Behind Electoral Optics

The gap between rhetoric and reality has become impossible to conceal. Human rights organisations, investigative journalists, and independent election observers describe an entirely different landscape from the one implied by “most open and democratic.”

Repression of Dissent

Independent media outlets have faced systematic harassment. Journalists have been arrested on spurious charges. Critical outlets have been pressured into self-censorship or closure. The pattern is familiar to anyone who lived through the EPRDF era: control information, fragment the public sphere, and ensure that challenges to official narratives cannot reach a mass audience. The government maintains the legal and constitutional facade of press freedom whilst the operational reality is suffocation.

Criminalisation of Protest

Peaceful assembly and free speech have been heavily curtailed. Youth have been detained for cultural and musical expressions perceived as critical of the government. Online dissent is monitored and prosecuted. The state treats democratic participation not as a constitutional right but as a security threat. A person can be arrested for a Facebook post, detained for attending an opposition rally, or harassed for organising civic education. The formal right to protest and speak exists; the enforcement machinery ensures that exercising it carries consequences.

Accountability Vacuum

Despite formal ceasefires in the north, there has been little meaningful accountability for atrocities committed during the Tigray conflict and subsequent violence in Amhara and Oromia. Transitional justice processes have stalled. The government has signalled, through both action and omission, that investigating war crimes is less important than political stability and elite power-sharing. This creates a permissive environment: security force commanders know that brutal suppression of dissent is unlikely to result in prosecution.

An election held in such an environment may be procedurally impressive—ballot boxes, transparent counting, televised debates—but substantively hollow. When opposition parties operate under threat, media cannot report freely, and citizens fear the consequences of speaking openly or organising politically, the “choice” on the ballot is already engineered. The voter may feel empowered by the act of voting, but the outcome is predetermined by structural constraints.

Structural Constraints: War, Fragmentation, and the Security Imperative

Understanding why elections risk becoming managed performances requires looking beyond the ballot to the broader security and political ecology. Three structural conditions fundamentally distort the electoral landscape.

The Persistence of War

The conflict in northern Ethiopia was officially declared resolved, but the operational reality is more complex. Displacement remains catastrophic. Territorial disputes linger. Militarised governance persists in Tigray, Amhara, and parts of Oromia. In such regions, normal political organising—public rallies, opposition party campaigning, grassroots mobilisation—remains functionally impossible. Opposition parties cannot reach voters. Independent observers cannot monitor balloting. The security apparatus, rather than state institutions, controls political space. An election held under occupation is not a democratic exercise; it is an administrative ritual conducted in a security framework.

Ethnic Federalism Fragmenting

Ethiopia’s federal structure, ostensibly designed to accommodate ethnic autonomy, has become a mechanism for regime control. Regional tensions, particularly in Amhara and Oromia, have produced cycles of rebellion and crackdown. In this context, the federal government increasingly treats regional opposition not as legitimate political competition but as separatism, insurgency, or ethnic nationalism. The result is a security response rather than a political one. Opposition parties are watched, monitored, and often prevented from operating freely in regions where their ethnic or political base challenges the federal government’s authority. Democracy requires, at minimum, that political competition is not criminalised as treason.

Power Centralisation and State Capture

Although the ruling Prosperity Party has been constitutionally separated from the state, the apparatus of coercion remains fundamentally aligned with the centre. Security services, local administrations, and patronage networks operate in the interest of incumbents. Opposition parties campaign in an environment where the police, intelligence services, and administrative machinery can be weaponised against them. An election is only democratic if the infrastructure of the state can be used equally by all competitors. In Ethiopia, that condition does not obtain.

International Complicity: When Geopolitics Trumps Principles

The Economist’s scepticism also implicitly indicts the international community. Western governments have increasingly prioritised stability, migration control, and geopolitical positioning in the Horn of Africa over consistent pressure on human rights and democratic standards.

The European Union’s decision to resume budget support to Ethiopia, despite ongoing documented abuses and the stalling of accountability processes, sends an unambiguous signal: strategic interests outweigh democratic benchmarks. The United States, while publicly advocating for human rights, has been cautious about imposing meaningful consequences. The multilateral development banks continue lending on the basis of economic projections whilst ignoring governance failures.

Geostrategic calculations explain this. Ethiopia’s size, population, and strategic position in the Horn of Africa make it indispensable to regional security architecture. Its potential as a economic market and a transit point for global trade gives it leverage. For Western powers, public criticism of democratic backsliding must be balanced against the risk of pushing the government toward rival powers—China, Russia, or the Gulf states. The result is a “quiet diplomacy” that softens public criticism in exchange for private access and influence.

A polished election—however structurally constrained—offers foreign partners a convenient narrative. Ethiopia is “on a democratic path.” Engagement can proceed without uncomfortable conditionality. The government can claim international validation. And international actors, by accepting the optics of an election, become co-authors of a managed democracy. They validate form over substance.

The Standard: What “Most Open and Democratic” Would Actually Require

If Prime Minister Abiy’s pledge is to be taken seriously—not as propaganda, but as a binding commitment—then a truly “most open and democratic” election would require at least five concrete structural shifts.

One: Unambiguous Protection of Media Freedom

End harassment, arbitrary detention, and intimidation of journalists. Allow independent outlets to operate without political interference, economic strangulation, or corporate pressure. Establish genuine editorial independence. This is not incremental reform; it requires dismantling the apparatus of media control.

Two: Reversal of the Crackdown on Dissent

Lift restrictions on peaceful assembly and association. Stop treating dissent as a security threat and instead recognise it as essential to democracy. Release political prisoners detained on fabricated charges. Ensure that online speech and offline protest are protected rather than prosecuted.

Three: Level Playing Field for Opposition Parties

Ensure opposition parties can register, campaign, and organise nationwide without fear of arrest, harassment, or violence. Reform electoral institutions to be genuinely independent, not extensions of the ruling party. Provide equitable access to media. Establish independent election management bodies with real authority to investigate complaints and enforce rules.

Four: Credible Transitional Justice

Address atrocities committed during recent conflicts through transparent, inclusive, victim-centered processes. Signal that state and non-state actors alike are subject to the law. Remove the presumption that proximity to power confers immunity. This is essential because it reestablishes the principle that no group, however politically dominant, is above accountability.

Five: Demilitarisation of Political Space

Reduce the role of security forces in managing political disputes. Prioritise genuine dialogue with armed and unarmed opposition actors over coercive responses. Establish clear boundaries between the security state and the political sphere. Without this, elections will continue to be conducted in an environment where the threat of state violence shapes behaviour.

None of these conditions currently obtains. Until they do, any election will be managed, not free. The question is not whether Ethiopians will vote, but whether they will do so with genuine agency.

The Deeper Cost: When Democracy Becomes Performance

The Economist’s diagnosis is correct, but incomplete. The cost of a managed election extends beyond the immediate political outcome. It is fundamentally corrosive to democratic culture.

When elections are rituals rather than contests, when the outcome is predetermined by structural constraints, when citizens vote knowing their voice is unlikely to change power, a new form of political cynicism takes root. Younger generations who have no memory of genuine competitive elections may internalise the lesson that voting is performative. Opposition parties, prevented from building genuine constituencies, may themselves become instruments of elite management. The habits of democratic participation—debate, negotiation, compromise, accountability—atrophy.

This is perhaps more dangerous than outright authoritarianism. A dictatorship is recognisably a dictatorship. A managed democracy, dressed in the language of choice and representation, can conceal the absence of genuine contestation. It allows power to be consolidated without the political costs of open repression. It offers international partners a narrative of reform whilst nothing of substance changes.

Ethiopia has been here before. The EPRDF maintained the forms of democracy—a parliament, a constitution, periodic elections—whilst hollowing out substance. The question now is whether the Prosperity Party government has learned from that failure, or merely refined the technique.

The Path Forward: Words or Action?

For many Ethiopians, the coming months will be a test of whether the government’s democratic language is genuine or performative. The test is straightforward: does the government act to remove structural constraints on democratic competition, or does it merely manage the optics of elections?

So far, the evidence points toward performance. Opposition parties report continued harassment. Independent media outlets report pressure. Civil society organisations report restrictions. The security apparatus continues to be deployed against perceived political threats. These are not the actions of a government confident in its democratic credentials.

The intensity of the government’s democratic rhetoric, paradoxically, reveals something important: legitimacy still matters. The language of “openness,” “reform,” and “democracy” is being invoked because it carries moral and political weight. This creates an opening. If opposition forces, civil society, international partners, and ordinary Ethiopians insist that these words mean something concrete—that they cannot be emptied of meaning through performance—then the space for managed democracy might narrow.

The task is to refuse the offered bargain. Refuse to accept managed elections as progress. Refuse to confuse optics with substance. Refuse to allow the government to have it both ways: the legitimacy that comes with democratic language, without the constraints that come with democratic practice.

Conclusion: The Measure

The Economist’s judgment will ultimately be tested not in editorial columns but in the lived experience of Ethiopians. If the coming election allows citizens to speak, organise, and choose without fear—if opposition parties can campaign freely, if media can report critically, if the outcome is genuinely uncertain—then it will be a milestone in democratisation. If it does not, it will be another chapter in the long story of power consolidated in the language of reform.

For a nation exhausted by decades of authoritarianism, the question of whether elections are contests or choreography is not academic. It shapes whether Ethiopians can build a future of genuine self-determination, or whether they will continue to live under a more sophisticated version of the old order.

The clock is ticking. The moment to move from words to action is now.

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Gold Cannot Buy Time: Ethiopia’s Debt Crisis and the Collapse of the Official Narrative

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:39:09 +0000

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ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Democratic Accountability • Human Rights • Political Analysis

Gold Cannot Buy Time: Ethiopia’s Debt Crisis and the Collapse of the Official Narrative

On the contradiction between macroeconomic claims and the erosion of ordinary life

Ethiopia received formal notice in April 2026 that international bondholders intend to sue the government in English courts by May. The pre-action letter, a legal formality before litigation, arrived after negotiations for a USD 1 billion debt restructuring collapsed. Official creditors, principally China and Paris Club members, rejected the preliminary agreement on grounds of comparability of treatment: a euphemism meaning private creditors were offered softer terms than official lenders would accept. The government, characteristically silent, offered no public response. But the courtroom threat is merely the institutional manifestation of a deeper crisis: the widening chasm between the narratives that Ethiopia’s leadership broadcasts to the world and the economic reality experienced by ordinary citizens on the ground.

This gap is not accidental. It is engineered. Over the past eighteen months, the government has constructed an elaborate counter-narrative to obscure the severity of the macroeconomic crisis. Gold mining has become the centrepiece of this fiction. Official figures claim the sector generated USD 3.5 billion in export revenue over eight months, a stunning reversal that has displaced coffee as the nation’s primary export earner. The Ministry of Mines announced a 92 per cent increase in revenue compared to the prior year. Industrial projects like KEFI Gold’s Tulu Kapi venture and Zijin Mining’s acquisition of Allied Gold for USD 4 billion are paraded as proof of transformation. Ethiopian Airlines, the government’s flagship showcase, reported USD 4.4 billion in half-year revenue, a 14 per cent increase, with ambitious expansion plans including a new continental airport at USD 12.5 billion. Exports allegedly reached USD 5.9 billion in the current fiscal period. The narrative is seductive: Ethiopia is pivoting toward mining-led growth, diversifying away from agricultural vulnerability, attracting world-class investors, and positioning itself as Africa’s aviation hub.

The problem is that this narrative is constructed to obscure rather than illuminate. The gold figures themselves are compromised by a hidden economy. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged in July 2025 that 61 per cent of Ethiopia’s gold output—an estimated USD 3.2 billion annually—escapes to informal and illicit smuggling networks. The National Bank of Ethiopia’s monopoly on formal gold purchases fails to resolve this endemic leakage. Miners, facing chronic foreign exchange shortages and long delays in obtaining payments, turn instead to parallel markets that offer immediate cash settlement at rates supported by smuggling networks. This is not mere inefficiency. It is structural theft: billions in hard currency that should bolster macroeconomic reserves instead enrich corruption networks and finance the shadow economy that destabilises the formal banking system. The USD 3.5 billion figure, then, is not the triumph it claims to be. It is the remainder after massive haemorrhaging.

Meanwhile, at street level, inflation remains obstinate. The National Bank reported 9.7 per cent headline inflation in February 2026, sustaining what it terms a historic achievement: single-digit inflation sustained since December 2025. This is presented as proof of monetary discipline. But the composition of inflation tells a different story. Food inflation—the component that matters to households stretched thin by cost-of-living pressure—continues to accelerate. Prices for vegetables, meat, sugar, dairy, fruits and oils have climbed relentlessly. Rent and transport costs have surged. For public sector workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, whose salaries are anchored to the official wage structure, the effect is devastating. Incomes have not kept pace with the real cost of survival. A teacher earning a fixed salary in Birr watches each month as that income purchases less food, less fuel, less everything. The currency itself, the very medium of exchange, is rotting.

The Birr has collapsed. In 2019, when the current government took power, the exchange rate stood at 30 Birr to one US dollar. By July 2024, it had depreciated to 57 Birr per dollar. But the official rate is theatre. On the parallel market, dollars trade at 110 to 118 Birr per unit, a doubling of the official rate. This dual exchange system is the visible manifestation of a chronic foreign currency shortage so acute that it constrains every sector of the economy. The National Bank’s attempt to address 445 billion Birr in unrealised forex losses represents an accounting reckoning with years of overvaluation, mismanagement, and external shocks. But accounting entries do not feed families or power clinics.

The fuel crisis crystallises this contradiction most starkly. Ethiopia imports nearly all of its fuel, leaving it acutely vulnerable to external shocks. When crude prices surged to nearly USD 110 per barrel following Middle East tensions, the government’s subsidy burden exploded. Authorities estimate total subsidy spending at 262 billion Birr, with monthly allocations ranging between 15 and 20 billion Birr. Yet supply has collapsed anyway. Daily diesel deliveries fell from 9.2 million litres to 4.5 million litres. More than 180,000 metric tonnes of fuel failed to arrive. The government implemented a rationing system, establishing a tiered priority list: large-scale producers bringing foreign currency, critical infrastructure, food transport, tractors, mass transit, high-capacity passenger vehicles. Ordinary citizens found themselves outside the priority hierarchy entirely. Small businesses, petty traders, private transport operators, the informal economic networks that actually employ the majority, were left to source fuel from black markets at multiples of the official subsidised price. Authorities arrested 658 individuals and seized over 720,000 litres in crackdowns against smuggling. But enforcement cannot resolve the underlying shortage. The informal economy, which the state cannot control and from which it extracts minimal revenue, has become more essential to survival even as it grows more expensive and more corrupt.

It is into this environment that Teddy Afro’s new album, Ethiorica, arrived on 16 April 2026. The musician, Ethiopia’s most acclaimed artist and a persistent thorn in the government’s side, released eighteen tracks that have become, quite literally, dangerous to listen to in public. Within the first 24 hours, the album accumulated 30 million views across YouTube. The track Jember set an Ethiopian music record by reaching 1.07 million views in three hours. But the government’s response was immediate. A planned press conference scheduled for 14 April was obstructed after the Ethiopian Media Authority pressured Arts Television to cancel the live broadcast. Officials summoned executives to explain their agreement with Afro. The press conference was suspended. Then, on 18 April, authorities arrested over 100 youths specifically for listening to and streaming the album in public, particularly the track Das Tal, widely understood as a metaphor for national grief.

Das Tal uses the image of a traditional mourning tent, the space where Ethiopians gather to grieve, as a metaphor for a lost country. Afro laments that he has become a stranger in his own village, a sentiment that resonates viscerally with millions displaced by conflict, economic collapse and state violence. The government’s response, banning the press conference and arresting listeners, is not a law-and-order reaction to criminal activity. It is the state’s acknowledgement that Afro’s artistic truth cuts too close to the reality the official narrative is designed to obscure. When the state arrests citizens for listening to music, it admits that the music speaks truths the state cannot tolerate. The irony is exquisite: whilst the government celebrates mining billions and aviation revenues, it simultaneously polices the emotional landscape so rigidly that even artistic expression becomes a prosecutable offence.

This is the environment in which elections are scheduled for 1 June 2026. Ethiopia has not held a competitive election since 2020, when the Prosperity Party consolidated power amid the pandemic and emerging ethnic conflict. In the intervening years, the security situation has deteriorated catastrophically. The Tigray War, formally concluded in 2022, killed hundreds of thousands. But peace has not arrived. Instead, Ethiopia faces simultaneous insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia. The Fano militia in Amhara, a grassroots armed movement embedded in rural communities, has waged active conflict since April 2023. The Oromo Liberation Army has conducted operations for over eight years. In Amhara alone, the United Nations Human Rights Office has documented at least 183 people killed in clashes since July 2025. Drone strikes have killed pregnant women, children, entire families. The state of emergency declared to contain Fano has expired, yet fighting continues. Entire zones remain insecure, ballot distribution logistically impossible, voter registration theoretical rather than functional.

The institutional mechanism intended to manage this fracture, the National Dialogue Commission, is itself moribund. Key political actors, including segments of the mainstream Oromo opposition and armed insurgencies, view the Commission as an extension of the Prosperity Party’s political machinery rather than a neutral arbiter. The process has been criticised as exclusionary, conducted whilst key participants remain imprisoned or actively engaged in armed struggle. Genuine dialogue conducted under such conditions is performative. Against this backdrop, the 2026 election functions not as a mechanism for democratic choice but as a potential trigger event. In an atmosphere of zero-sum competition, disputes over voter registration, campaigning rights, or electoral results could rapidly escalate from localised clashes into nationwide confrontation. Over 3.3 million people remain displaced across Amhara, Oromia and Tigray. Youth unemployment remains chronically high, driving recruitment into insurgencies. The state, lacking fiscal capacity to cushion social discontent or co-opt rivals, has increasingly relied on coercive tools to maintain control.

This is the texture of Ethiopian political economy in late April 2026. Gold is being smuggled rather than captured. Currency is depreciating faster than it is earned. Fuel is rationed by state fiat but distributed by corruption. Inflation is officially tamed but experientially devastating. Airlines are profitable whilst ordinary transport collapses. Elections are scheduled whilst entire regions are consumed by conflict. And when a musician sings truth, the state arrests the listeners.

The bondholder pre-action letter is merely the most formal symptom of a much deeper disease. International creditors are not wrong to prepare litigation. They are signalling that they no longer believe in Ethiopia’s capacity or willingness to honour its obligations. The government’s silence in response, no counter-offer, no negotiation, no public statement, suggests a state that has exhausted its arsenal of persuasion and has resorted instead to hoping the creditors will either relent or disappear.

They will not. By May, if negotiations do not yield a new restructuring agreement, bondholders will file suit in English courts. The government will be pursued through the same legal mechanisms that have cornered Argentina, Zambia, and Sri Lanka. It will take its place amongst the pantheon of distressed sovereigns, its name invoked not with sympathy but with suspicion. And meanwhile, teachers will continue to watch their salaries evaporate, fuel queues will lengthen, and Teddy Afro’s music will be downloaded on encrypted apps, shared in whispers, heard as an act of resistance. The official narrative of mining prosperity and aviation triumph will persist, spoken at conferences and written in ministerial communiqués. But on the streets of Addis Ababa, in the markets of Adama, in the rural kebeles of Amhara and Oromia where displaced families shelter in makeshift camps, the lived experience will tell a different story, one that no gold export figure or airline revenue announcement can obscure.

Ethiopia’s crisis is not one of resources. It is one of credibility. The government has lost the trust of international creditors, ordinary citizens, and itself. When a state arrests people for listening to music, it has exhausted its moral authority. When it celebrates gold exports whilst 61 per cent of them disappear into smuggling networks, it has abandoned the pretence of competence. When it broadcasts airline revenues whilst fuel cannot be distributed to ordinary citizens, it has revealed the fundamental hollowness of its claims to governance. The question now is not whether the bondholder lawsuit will succeed—it likely will. The question is what remains of Ethiopia itself when this moment passes.

Sources: This article draws on reporting from CNBC Africa, Reuters, The Reporter Ethiopia, Addis Standard, Birr Metrics, Borkena, and official government sources including the National Bank of Ethiopia, Ministry of Mines, Ministry of Trade and Regional Integration, and Ethiopian Airlines.

© Ethiopian Tribune, April 2026

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The Abraham Accords: The Force Re‑shaping the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn Energy & Geopolitical Architecture (Part II)

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:42:57 +0000

Read Time:6 Minute, 16 Second

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

Part 2 of Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part series on the Abraham Accords arrives at a geopolitical moment that demands neither theological certainty nor nationalist bombast, but rather cold strategic assessment. The article’s central proposition is deceptively simple: permissive disorder the condition in which great powers retreat and middle powers compete without constraint has transformed the Red Sea corridor into a contested zone where Ethiopia’s four survival interests (GERD, maritime sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity) are simultaneously elevated in strategic value and endangered by competitive forces beyond Addis Ababa’s control.

The analysis contained here is not a brief for any political faction, nor a rejoinder to another editorial position. It is an effort to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground: the movement of military infrastructure, the manipulation of recognition as a corridor instrument, the fracturing of the Saudi–UAE partnership, and the acceleration of Sudan and Yemen as transmission belts for Middle Eastern rivalry into Horn politics. The author assembles the evidence with a clarity that should trouble anyone whose primary concern is Ethiopian sovereignty and institutional coherence.

Most significantly, the work articulates what we have long argued in these pages: that Ethiopia’s maritime claim to the Doumeira–Beilul coastline is not an emotional or nationalist indulgence. It is a matter of self–defence. A nation of 130 million cannot afford to permit its most strategically sensitive frontier to remain under the control of a garrison state whose survival depends on external patrons. Eritrea’s weakness is not a reason for Ethiopian complacency; it is a launching pad that any hostile power, Egypt, any actor seeking a platform to threaten GERD, can exploit at will.

This is what institutional credibility looks like in a competitive geopolitical system. It is not negotiable with ethnic coalitions or factional bargaining. The Tribune publishes this work because it advances the conversation we must be having: how does a unified Ethiopia navigate a disorder not of its making?

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

The Abraham Accords, validated by Operation Epic Fury (the February 2026 US–Israeli campaign that degraded Iran’s military capacity), have produced a structural reordering of the Horn’s geopolitical landscape. This is not a settled hierarchy but a competitive system in which middle powers exploit great-power distraction to advance their positions through ports, recognition diplomacy, security outsourcing, and sub-state partnerships.

Permissive disorder operates as both opportunity and trap. It widens the menu of external partners and corridor options; it also raises the cost of miscalculation, because no great-power referee exists to mediate escalation. The United States has not abandoned the Horn; it has been restructured through the convergent alignment, producing a partisan presence that amplifies rather than moderates competition. Europe is absent, and Russia and China offer optionality without security guarantees. In this environment, institutional coherence becomes the premium asset.

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

The competitive structure is characterised as overlapping blocs: the convergent alignment (Israel–UAE–India–Ethiopia, operationalised through Somaliland) and the balancing coalition (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Somalia’s federal government, Eritrea). These are not fixed; they are transactional, mediated through commercial entities and security contractors rather than formal treaties.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland (December 2025) demonstrates that recognition has become a policy tool within this architecture—one that re-prices risk and re-ranks partners. For Ethiopia, this precedent is double-edged: it validates the principle of boundary revision in the Horn and creates a framework Ethiopia can invoke for its own maritime claim, while potentially internationalising disputes and deepening proxy alignment logic.

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

Sudan and Yemen are not peripheral. They function as transmission belts through which Middle Eastern competition propagates into Horn corridor politics. Sudan’s civil war demonstrates what happens when a state fragments under permissive disorder: each faction attracts a different external patron, corridor assets become prizes in a proxy war, and state capacity evaporates. Yemen’s Houthi campaign directly determines shipping economics and the strategic salience of African alternatives (Berbera, Assab, Lamu).

For Ethiopia, this is not theoretical. Higher insurance premiums, longer routing, and supply-chain delays compress fiscal space and raise the urgency of corridor diversification. The Berbera option (through the Somaliland MoU) and the Assab option (through sovereign coastline recovery) are not merely desirable; they are necessitated by a Red Sea security environment rendered structurally unstable.

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

Eritrea occupies a position analytically distinct from any other Horn actor. It is not a competitor; it is a vulnerability node—a weak state whose weakness makes it a threat to Ethiopian sovereignty. With a population below four million, an economy among the least productive in Africa, and a political system dependent entirely on the narrative of permanent threat from Ethiopia, Eritrea is a launching pad that any hostile power can lease, co-opt, or exploit.

Egypt’s reported interest in establishing military presence on the Eritrean coast illustrates the threat directly. An Egyptian naval or air facility at Assab, positioned within approximately 500 kilometres of GERD, would place precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles within striking range of Ethiopia’s most consequential infrastructure project. This is why sovereign sea access is, for Ethiopia, a matter of self-defence before it is a matter of economics.

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

Ethiopia’s four singular interests—GERD, Red Sea sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity—provide the analytical framework. GERD benefits from the alignment of winners, but it is not merely a foreign-policy asset; it is the engine of Ethiopia’s structural transformation. Red Sea sovereignty is the self-defence imperative: the 180–200 kilometres of coastline from Doumeira to Beilul must be recovered. Economic development requires converting the mutual economic dividend into tangible outcomes: agri-industrial processing, manufacturing, infrastructure, technology education.

Internal unity is the binding constraint on all three. Permissive disorder does not create Ethiopia’s ethnic fractures, but it amplifies them catastrophically. When external coalitions compete, they prefer counterparties who can deliver concessions quickly; this selects for elite bargaining and reinforces extraction unless institutions impose transparency. If Ethiopia cannot present a unified position at the bargaining table, it cannot protect GERD, cannot recover its coastline, and cannot absorb the investment that the alignment of winners offers.

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

The emerging geopolitical architecture does not mechanically determine Ethiopia’s fate; it raises the payoff to cohesion and the cost of fragmentation. If Ethiopia fragments, each successor entity inherits weaker corridor bargaining power, higher transaction costs, and higher susceptibility to patronage capture. Eritrea’s weakness becomes an invitation to hostile powers. GERD becomes a contested asset. The coastline remains lost. The alignment of winners becomes a patron–client trap rather than a partnership of equals. Conversely, a unified Ethiopia—governed through civic institutions rather than ethnic bargaining—can protect GERD, recover its coastline, absorb investment at scale, and function as the dominant power in the Horn–Red Sea region that its demography, geography, and economic trajectory destine it to become.

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

bArticle.pdf Download

Part 3 examines the internal dynamics that make institutional coherence possible or impossible.

Author: Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
Date: 19 April 2026
Series: The Abraham Accords — Part 2 of 4
Topic: Competition and Permissive Disorder in the Gulf–Red Sea–Hor

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The Abraham Accords: The Force Re‑shaping the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn Energy & Geopolitical Architecture (Part I)

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:51:53 +0000

Read Time:1 Minute, 46 Second

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

SYNOPSIS

This first instalment of MGH’s four‑part series argues that the Abraham Accords are not merely a diplomatic normalisation project but a transactional security platform through which the United States and Israel are restructuring the strategic order of the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn arc.

The article opens by revisiting Ethiopia’s internal vulnerabilities youth demographics, legitimacy crises, and the strategic weight of GERD emphasising that sovereignty is an “actively maintained condition” requiring institutional strength and national unity. As the author notes, “sovereignty is not merely a legal status but an actively maintained condition” (p.1).

MGH then reframes the Abraham Accords as the institutional scaffolding of Trump‑era transactional geopolitics, designed to align Gulf states behind Israeli strategic primacy while isolating Iran. The article highlights how the Accords evolved into a multi‑layered security, intelligence, and economic network one that has already extended into the Red Sea–Horn corridor through Israel’s recognition of Somaliland and the emerging Israel–UAE–India–Ethiopia axis.

A central argument is that Operation Epic Fury (Feb 2026) the devastating US‑Israeli strike on Iran served as the kinetic validation of the Accords’ logic. By rendering Iran “friendless” and strategically incapacitated, the operation reshaped Gulf calculations and increased the pressure on Saudi Arabia to formally join the Accords.

The article also explores the post‑Iran strategic dividend, including the potential for Saudi–Israeli technological, agricultural, and energy integration. The author warns that an overland Saudi–Israel pipeline could dramatically reduce Egypt’s Suez Canal revenues, creating a two‑front strategic squeeze when combined with GERD’s upstream leverage. As the text notes, such a pipeline would “compress Egyptian revenues… and reduce its geopolitical leverage as a maritime gatekeeper” (p.7).

For Ethiopia, the question is whether this shifting architecture can be leveraged to secure development, stability, and sovereign maritime access—or whether it risks creating new dependencies. The author signals that Parts II–IV will examine these implications in depth.

Readers are encouraged to follow the link below to read the full article and engage with the unfolding series.

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WHEN TEWODROS SINGS, ETHIOPIA LISTENS AND THE PALACE TREMBLES

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:34:31 +0000

Read Time:7 Minute, 21 Second

WHEN TEWODROS SINGS, ETHIOPIA LISTENS — AND THE PALACE TREMBLES

By Endex — Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

There is a particular silence that descends over Addis Ababa before Teddy Afro releases music — a silence that is not passive but charged, like the air before a storm. It is the silence of a country holding its breath, waiting for something that feels less like entertainment and more like a national reckoning. On this Thursday, the 8th of Miyaziya 2018 E.C. (16 April 2026), that silence broke with the force of a cultural earthquake.

Within hours of release, Das Tal (Ansaw) — the opening track of
Ethiorica — crossed 1.1 million views on YouTube. A 13% like‑to‑view ratio. Retention rates that would make global streaming executives question their algorithms. Ethiopians were not scrolling; they were studying. They were reading the lyrics line by line, as if decoding a message addressed to them personally. Teddy Afro had released a lyrics video first — a deliberate editorial choice. He wanted the country to sit with the text before the spectacle. And the text, as always with him, carried weight.

The mourning tent has been set for the nation.
“Set the mourning tent” — Das Tal — is not metaphorical flourish. It is a cultural summons. In Ethiopian tradition, the
das is erected outside the home of the bereaved, a space where the community gathers to grieve, to remember, to confront loss. Teddy Afro opens his first album in nearly a decade by declaring that the nation itself is bereaved.

He invokes Lalibela and Sheger in the same breath, binding ancient sanctity to modern disarray. He sings of the Abay not as a river but as the sinew of civilisation, a reminder of sovereignty at a time when sovereignty feels fragile. He speaks of becoming a stranger — ባይተዋር — in one’s own land, a sentiment that resonates across regions fractured by conflict, displacement, and political exhaustion.

The refrain, Ansaw — “Lift it up” — is directed at the young. Lift the flag. Lift the dignity. Lift the identity that has been dropped, trampled, politicised, and weaponised. The song runs for seven minutes and nineteen seconds, but it feels longer — not because it drags, but because it demands contemplation. It is a mourning tent erected in sound.

The press conference that never happened spoke louder than any speech.
In the days leading up to the release, Teddy Afro was reportedly prevented from holding a press conference. He did not protest publicly. He did not issue a statement. He simply announced that the album would drop on YouTube at 2 p.m. The message was clear: if the physical stage is denied, the digital stage remains.

The political reaction was swift. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity condemned the obstruction, declaring that
“freedom of expression is not a gift but an inalienable right of man.” Commentators were more direct: if Teddy Afro can be silenced, no voice in Ethiopia is safe.

This is not unfamiliar terrain for him.
2005: four tracks from Yasteseryal were banned from state media.
2008: he was imprisoned for over a year.
2017: his album launch was disrupted and his New Year concert cancelled.

Three governments. Two generations of ruling coalitions. One consistent pattern: when Teddy Afro sings, power becomes anxious. His songs do not perform loyalty; they perform truth. And truth, in Ethiopia’s political landscape, is often treated as provocation.

I met him in Oslo, and he told me what confinement really meant.
A decade or so ago, shortly after his release from prison, I met Teddy Afro in Oslo, Norway. The city was cold, the air sharp, and he was thinner than the public remembered. But his eyes carried the same unyielding clarity — the clarity of someone who has seen the inside of a system designed to break him and has emerged unbroken.

He told me about the months he spent in a dark cell, seeing sunlight only through a small hole in the corrugated ceiling. The detail stayed with me — the image of a man whose music had filled stadiums reduced to measuring daylight through a puncture in metal.

I asked him whether he would abandon provocative lyrics — whether prison had changed his artistic direction. His answer was quiet, almost gentle, but devastating in its precision:

“I may have been kept in a confined space, but the whole population is in an open prison.”

He said he might shift toward traditional songs for a time. And he did. His music softened, turned inward, embraced heritage and melody. But when he returned with
Tikur Sew, he returned with purpose. The album became part of the cultural tide that helped energise Ethiopia’s so‑called colour revolution — the wave of public sentiment that contributed to the political transition of the late 2010s.

He was later banned from open‑air concerts in his own country. The physical stage was closed to him. But now, in 2026, he has re‑emerged in cyberspace — a realm no official can cordon off, no police can shut down, no permit can revoke.

The 33‑million‑birr rupture was an act of artistic sovereignty.
Behind the cultural drama lies a commercial story that is equally revealing. Teddy Afro bought himself out of his Sewasew Multimedia contract — repaying the 25 million birr advance plus 8 million birr interest. A 33‑million‑birr exit. In an industry where artists often surrender control for convenience, Teddy chose the opposite. He chose autonomy over infrastructure, legacy over convenience, and YouTube over gatekeepers.

Sewasew keeps its profit.
Teddy keeps everything else — the rights, the narrative, the independence, the ability to release his work without interference.

In an era when the global music industry has largely abandoned physical formats, Ethiopia remains an outlier. Nearly 700,000 physical pre‑orders — CDs and cassettes — were placed before the album even dropped. This is not nostalgia; it is cultural ownership. Ethiopians do not merely stream Teddy Afro. They keep him on their shelves.

The election season has found its most potent message in a song.
The Prosperity Party is preparing for a national election it frames as a democratic milestone. The public, however, greets the process with weary scepticism. Years of conflict, economic strain, and political volatility have eroded trust. Opposition parties are contesting, but the electorate’s enthusiasm is muted.

Into this landscape, Teddy Afro releases a song about national mourning, fractured unity, and the duty of a generation to lift what has fallen. He does not name the ruling party. He does not endorse an opposition ticket. He does something far more dangerous: he articulates what the electorate feels but cannot say aloud.

This is not new.
Abugida (2001) arrived as the EPRDF consolidated its grip.
Yasteseryal (2005) coincided with a disputed election.
Tikur Sew (2012) invoked Adwa at a moment of national introspection.
Ethiopia (2017) emerged during mass protest.
And now Ethiorica arrives at a moment of political fatigue.

Teddy Afro is not a politician. He is something more potent: a mirror the nation cannot avoid.

The diaspora has turned the release into a global referendum on the nation’s condition.
The digital surge is unmistakable. North America. Europe. The Gulf. The diaspora — often more vocal in its political commentary than those living under domestic constraints — has mobilised. For Ethiopians abroad, a Teddy Afro release is both cultural homecoming and political dispatch. It is a message from home, delivered by the one artist whose voice they trust to speak without fear.

TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube have turned the lyrics video into a civic text. Young Ethiopians abroad are translating lines, annotating references, debating interpretations. The album is not merely being consumed; it is being studied.

This is not entertainment.
This is national self‑examination.

The tent is set, and millions are entering.
By nightfall, millions will have visited the mourning tent of Das Tal. The question the song poses —
How can one be at peace while one’s country is in pain? — will echo from Lalibela to London, from Addis Ababa to Oslo.

Teddy Afro does not claim to have the answers. He is too honest an artist for that. What he offers instead is clarity — the clarity to name the condition without euphemism. Something has died here. Something essential. And yet, something can be lifted.

The refrain Ansaw is not a command. It is an invitation. Lift it up. Lift the dignity. Lift the unity. Lift the memory of what Ethiopia has been and the possibility of what it could be again.

For a government seeking another mandate from a population that has largely stopped listening, the most unsettling force of this election season may not be an opposition coalition or an international observer. It may be a seven‑minute song released on a Thursday in Miyaziya — a song that told the truth about what the tent is for.

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Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:42:59 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 20 Second

By Professor Girma Berhanu

Editorial Foreword

On Dehumanisation, Imagery, and the Long Shadow of Scientific Racism

The Editors • Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

There are moments when an act of casual cruelty illuminates, with terrible clarity, the architecture of a deeper malice. When the sitting president of the United States shares an image depicting a Black former president and his wife as primates, the instinct of many is to reach for the vocabulary of aberration: reckless, impulsive, beyond the pale. The Ethiopian Tribune does not share that comfort. What such an act reveals is not an anomaly but a continuity the latest expression of a visual and rhetorical tradition whose roots run through the slave ships, the colonial exhibitions, and the pseudoscientific lecture halls of the 19th century.

It is in that spirit that we publish this essay by Professor Girma Berhanu, a scholar whose career has been devoted to the intersection of education, identity, and political violence. Writing from Sweden, where a social services department recently deployed imagery of apes in hijabs as a pedagogical tool for marginalised youth, Professor Berhanu asks the question that polite discourse prefers to skirt: not merely that such representations are offensive, but why the ape, and why it retains its power to wound across centuries and continents.

The answer, as Professor Berhanu traces with care and rigour, lies in the particular violence done to Darwin’s theory of evolution by those who required a scientific patina for their politics of hierarchy. Evolution taught that humans and apes share common ancestry; Social Darwinism translated that into a ladder, with some peoples assigned rungs closer to the animal kingdom than others. The insult, in this reading, is not merely abusive, it is a claim about ontological status, about who belongs fully within the category of the human.

For readers of this publication, the stakes are not abstract. Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa have endured their own encounters with the racialising gaze of empire, their own experience of being rendered primitive and pre-modern in the visual and textual archives of colonialism. The dehumanising logic that Professor Berhanu analyses is the same logic that framed African sovereignty as inconceivable and African suffering as natural. To understand it is to understand something essential about how power legitimises itself.

Professor Berhanu closes with a challenge that is also an obligation: legal remedy is insufficient. What is required is a transformed pedagogy, one that equips young people, and particularly those most targeted by such imagery, to read the visual world critically. The Ethiopian Tribune endorses that challenge unreservedly. Journalism, at its most purposeful, is itself a form of that literacy: naming the structure behind the slur, refusing to let cruelty pass as comedy.

“The insult carries no scientific weight. Its power lies elsewhere: in centuries of conditioning, in the grammar of empire, in the persistent human will to construct a hierarchy of the human.”

— The Editors, Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

Synopsis

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu • 9 April 2026

This essay examines the historical and cultural origins of the “ape” insult as applied to racialised groups, tracing a line from the misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory through 19th-century scientific racism to the visual propaganda of the present day. The author’s inquiry is prompted by three concurrent incidents: a social media post by the US president deploying primate imagery against a Black former head of state and his wife; a legal complaint in Sweden over educational material depicting marginalised youth as apes; and the persistent reality of monkey chants directed at Black footballers in European stadiums.

Berhanu situates these incidents within a broader argument about visual culture and power. Drawing on bell hooks, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, he argues that the biological falsity of the insult is precisely the point: its force derives not from science but from centuries of cultural conditioning that deliberately confused the shared common ancestry of humans and apes with a racial hierarchy in which some peoples were placed “closer to the animal.”

The essay addresses the Swedish school curriculum’s emphasis on visual literacy, argues that images are neither neutral nor trivial particularly when directed at already marginalised communities and calls for an educational and institutional response that goes beyond legal prohibition. Berhanu’s conclusion is that dismantling the cultural infrastructure of dehumanising representation requires historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deepened public commitment to human dignity.

Key Themes

Scientific racism and the weaponisation of evolutionary theory • Visual culture and the politics of dehumanisation • Authoritarian language and the “us and them” binary • The responsibilities of educational and media institutions • Critical visual literacy as democratic pedagogy

Approx. 1,050 words • Academic essay / Op-ed • Author: Prof. Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg • Cleared for publication

Essay

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu • 9 April 2026

A few weeks ago, two boys who are enthusiastic about football asked me a difficult question: why are Black footballers insulted in stadiums with monkey chants, images of apes, or even by fans throwing bananas? Why apes of all animals? At the time, I struggled to respond. I tried to explain, in my own way, the role of history, human hierarchies, the theory of evolution, and scientific racism. Yet I felt inarticulate, as if I had not fully captured the depth and cruelty of the issue.

Since then, I have reflected more deeply. One recent incident involved a social media post by the president of the United States, who shared an image depicting a former president and his wife as apes or monkeys. After pressure from members of his own party, the post was deleted. But what was the intended message? That they look like apes, think like apes, or are somehow less evolved?

Public reaction followed a familiar pattern: initial shock, followed by quick dismissal. Many people brushed it aside as a childish or impulsive act, ignoring the deeper structural, institutional, and historical precedents behind such imagery. Yet we know that presidential communication is rarely accidental; it is often carefully crafted within inner political circles.

Around the same time, I revisited How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which examines how authoritarian politics divide societies into “us” and “them.” While I cannot explore his full argument here, his framework helps us understand how dehumanising language and imagery function politically.

A third incident occurred closer to home, Sweden. The newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reported that Lars Arrhenius was pursuing a legal case concerning educational material used by a social services department in north-east Gothenburg. The material, titled Angry Apes, was intended as a pedagogical tool for young people facing social challenges. It included images such as an ape wearing a hijab and other apes in a sweater labelled “Orten” (the neighbourhood).

The material was widely criticised and later withdrawn. A complainant argued that it “clearly contains racist and discriminatory images” and risks creating an exclusionary environment for children and youth. It is difficult to understand how associating already marginalised young people with apes could be considered educational. My purpose here is not to enter the legal debate, but to examine the cultural message embedded in such representations. Where does this deeply pejorative association between certain groups and apes originate?

We live in a visual culture. Images shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Yet many people lack the tools to critically interpret visual representations. As bell hooks observed, it is troubling that mass media increasingly uses powerful imagery for specific effects, whilst simultaneously encouraging us to believe that these images are insignificant.

Even the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 2011) emphasises that images play a crucial role in how people think, learn, and understand the world. Visual literacy is essential for democratic participation. Whilst powerful images can serve as effective pedagogical tools, degrading representations — particularly those targeting marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities — can reinforce harmful stereotypes and produce lasting damage.

To understand the enduring power of the “ape” insult, we must turn to history. Many of us learned about racism and colonialism in school, often alongside the ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin’s work in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man revolutionised biology, his ideas were widely misunderstood and misused.

Evolution does not claim that humans descended from modern apes. Rather, it posits that humans and apes share a common ancestor. However, this nuance was lost in public discourse. The simplified claim that “humans came from apes” made it easier to weaponise the comparison. Calling someone an “ape” came to imply that they are primitive, less intelligent, or less civilised.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these distortions merged with scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Thinkers misused evolutionary ideas to construct racial hierarchies, falsely claiming that some groups were “closer to apes” than others. As The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates, such pseudoscientific claims were used to justify colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the dehumanisation of non-European peoples.

This history helps explain why the “ape” insult persists today. Biologically, humans are primates; the insult has no scientific basis. Its power lies instead in centuries of cultural conditioning, visual propaganda, and racial hierarchy. The question, then, is not only why the insult exists, but how we confront it. How can we protect new generations — especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialised communities — from such deeply dehumanising representations? What role should schools play? What responsibilities do media and political institutions carry?

Legal measures alone are not enough. What is required is a broader transformative agenda: one that promotes historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deeper understanding of human dignity. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cultural foundations that allow such insults to persist.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

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The Oldest Trick in the World

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:44:50 +0000

Read Time:12 Minute, 4 Second

How Ponzi schemes have evolved from Wall Street to Addis Ababa and why Ethiopia is their latest frontier.

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune columnist

It always begins with a promise. The details vary electric vehicles in Addis Ababa, cryptocurrency tokens in Dubai, certificates of deposit in the Caribbean but the underlying architecture is identical. You give someone your money. They give it, quietly, to the person before you. They pay you from someone else’s deposit. And for a while, sometimes a long while, everyone appears to be getting rich.

This is the Ponzi scheme: the most durable financial fraud in human history, named after Charles Ponzi, a Boston-based Italian immigrant who in 1920 raised $15 million in eight months by promising 50 per cent returns in 45 days. The promise was impossible. The returns were paid entirely from incoming investors’ capital. When the flow of new money slowed, the structure collapsed overnight, ruining thousands. Ponzi went to prison. His name entered the dictionary.

More than a century later, the fraud he popularised, though did not invent, continues to devastate ordinary people on every continent. Its latest Ethiopian incarnation, the case of Fintech Investment PLC and its chief executive Daniel Yohannes, who now faces 19 counts before the Federal High Court’s Lideta Branch, is in many respects a textbook example. The vehicle, the promise, and the medium have been modernised. The logic has not changed at all.

WHAT A PONZI SCHEME ACTUALLY IS

The mechanics deserve plain statement, because they are simpler than the marketing around them. A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud in which existing investors are paid using funds collected from new investors, rather than from genuine business profit or productive activity. There are no trades, no returns, no underlying assets generating value. There is only the movement of money from later investors to earlier ones, with the operator extracting a portion at each stage.

Four structural elements are required for the scheme to function. First, a credible promise: returns attractive enough to recruit but not so fantastic as to immediately trigger suspicion. Second, early payouts: a critical phase in which the first cohort genuinely receives money, generating word-of-mouth and social proof. Third, a legitimacy facade: branding, documentation, offices, media presence, and endorsements that simulate the appearance of a functioning enterprise. Fourth, a recruitment engine: the scheme must continuously attract new capital to service existing obligations, whether through social networks, community groups, professional associations, or digital platforms.

The outcome is always the same. When recruitment slows, through market saturation, regulatory pressure, or loss of confidence incoming funds can no longer cover outgoing obligations. The operator withdraws what capital remains. The most recent investors lose everything. This conclusion is not a risk; it is a mathematical certainty. The only variable is timing.

“There is no investment that can sustainably pay more than it earns. When someone tells you otherwise, the only question is who will pay for your credulity and how long before they run out of new people to ask.”

What makes Ponzi schemes so persistent is not their sophistication but their adaptability. Every era of financial innovation and every new communications technology has produced a fresh variant. The digital age, and the age of cryptocurrency in particular, has not eliminated this form of fraud. It has industrialised it.

THE GLOBAL RECORD

The modern history of large-scale Ponzi fraud begins, definitionally, with Bernie Madoff. For nearly four decades, Madoff operated what investigators concluded was a $20 billion scheme concealed behind the respectable façade of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC on Wall Street. He fabricated every trade, every statement, and every declared return. He was arrested in December 2008 when the financial crisis triggered redemption requests he could not honour. Sentenced to 150 years in prison, he died incarcerated in 2021. His case established the template: the longer a scheme runs without detection, the larger the losses at collapse, because the pyramid of obligation grows with every passing month.

Allen Stanford operated a Caribbean variant that devastated ordinary investors across Latin America. Stanford International Bank, based in Antigua, raised $7 billion from more than 30,000 investors, many of them in Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, through fraudulent certificates of deposit bearing implausibly high interest rates. The offshore setting lent the scheme an air of sophistication. Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in federal prison in 2012.

MMM Global, the Russian pyramid scheme revived by Sergei Mavrodi and relaunched internationally in 2011, proved devastatingly effective across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Crucially, Mavrodi did not call it an investment. He rebranded it as a mutual aid network, telling participants they were simply helping each other a framing that disarmed financial scepticism by appealing instead to community solidarity. In Nigeria alone, more than three million subscribers registered. When the scheme froze accounts in December 2016, losses were estimated at $50 million in that country alone. Similar collapses followed in Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and China. The human cost extended beyond money: some investors, confronted with frozen accounts and demands for additional deposits before release of funds, took their own lives. The collapse did not deter imitation; it accelerated it. Loom, Twinkas, and MBA Forex followed in rapid succession.

OneCoin, founded by the Bulgarian national Ruja Ignatova, is the most geographically dispersed cryptocurrency fraud in history. Marketed across 175 countries as a superior alternative to Bitcoin the so-called “Cryptoqueen” promoted it with the slogan “Bitcoin Killer” OneCoin raised an estimated $5.8 billion between 2014 and 2019. There was no blockchain. Every coin sold was worthless. Ignatova disappeared before prosecution, was placed on both the Europol and FBI most-wanted lists with a €5 million reward, and has not been found. Her co-founder Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in a United States federal prison in 2023.

Bitconnect demonstrated that a Ponzi scheme need not have a fixed headquarters or a traceable founder. Entirely digital, it operated through an international network of YouTube promoters, WhatsApp groups, and social media communities stretching from the United States to India, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa. It promised monthly returns of 40 per cent. At its peak its market capitalisation reached $2.6 billion. When it collapsed in early 2018, the token fell from $500 to effectively zero within days.

Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the defining financial fraud of the current decade, operated not as a marginal platform but as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, a fixture of congressional testimony and mainstream financial media. Prosecutors established that Bankman-Fried had diverted customer funds from FTX to Alameda Research, his private hedge fund, to finance speculative trades, political donations, and luxury properties. The exchange presented itself publicly as a model of responsible crypto management. When confidence broke in November 2022, the entire structure collapsed in under a week. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years in prison, with a forfeiture of $11 billion. He was, as one prosecutor put it, running “a house of cards on a foundation of deceit.”

The pattern across all these cases is striking in its consistency: an implausible but not outrageous promise; early payouts that generated credibility through genuine recipients; a coordinated legitimacy campaign through media and professional endorsements; and the systematic weaponisation of trust networks, whether family groups, religious communities, or social media followings, to sustain recruitment.

ETHIOPIA’S EXPANDING VULNERABILITY AND THE FINTECH INVESTMENT CASE

Ethiopia is not an isolated case, but the specific conditions of this moment make it a particularly hospitable environment for this type of fraud. Rapid digital adoption, ambitious government-backed financial inclusion programmes, a young and aspirational urban population, limited public financial literacy, and a regulatory framework that has not kept pace with the speed of fintech expansion these are precisely the conditions that Ponzi operators seek. They did not create these conditions; they exploit them.

On 27 March 2026, federal prosecutors charged Daniel Yohannes, manager of Fintech Investment PLC, with 19 counts before the Federal High Court’s Lideta Branch. The charges include fraud, conspiracy, and violations of Ethiopia’s computer crime laws. The alleged scheme drew more than 600 million birr from investors through promises to supply electric vehicles that were, in the main, never delivered.

The framing was astute. Electric vehicles are a genuine policy priority in Ethiopia, and presenting the investment as participation in the modernisation of the country’s transport sector conferred an air of national purpose. Investors were told they could acquire vehicles on favourable credit terms, with the company claiming partnerships with international manufacturers and local insurers. The entry cost was substantial: a 50 per cent deposit on vehicles priced at approximately 1.9 million birr, plus tax and licensing charges, bringing the total per-participant commitment to over 1.36 million birr.

To sustain credibility during the recruitment phase, prosecutors allege that the defendants circulated images and videos of vehicle handovers at prominent locations across Addis Ababa, and claimed that hundreds of cars had already been delivered with further shipments imminent. Investigators found that approximately 100 vehicles were in fact distributed the majority to individuals connected to the scheme itself. This is a standard technique: a small number of genuine deliveries generates the testimonial evidence that powers the next wave of recruitment.

The current operation was not Fintech Investment PLC’s first venture of this kind. Prosecutors draw a direct line to Hello Taxi and Hello Car, an earlier programme launched in 2021 that similarly promised vehicles on credit. More than 5,000 people registered. Significant funds were collected. Almost no vehicles were delivered before the programme ceased operations.

“More than 5,000 families registered with Hello Taxi. Many were teachers, civil servants, small traders people who committed years of careful savings to a promise that was never going to be kept.”

What distinguishes this case from older-generation Ethiopian fraud is its digital architecture. The prosecution has described the operation as a form of organised white-collar crime adapted to digital platforms, one that made systematic use of computer systems to disseminate misleading information and conceal the identities of its operators. The recruitment engine relied heavily on social media promotion and, critically, on endorsements by public figures. PR companies, influencers, and individuals in or near public office have all been drawn into the investigation.

This is not accidental. The professionalisation of the legitimacy-building phase the period in which a scheme must persuade potential investors that the opportunity is real before the weight of recruitment tips the structure into collapse, is one of the most significant evolutions in Ponzi design over the past decade. In an earlier era this required printed prospectuses and in-person seminars. Digital platforms have reduced the cost of manufactured credibility to near zero. A series of well-produced testimonial videos, a social media account with substantial follower counts, and an endorsement from a recognisable face can unlock access to populations that would have been unreachable a generation ago. The investors who watched footage of a car being handed over at a prominent Addis Ababa location and concluded that something real was happening were not naive; they were deceived by a deliberately constructed fiction.

Public figures who endorse financial products bear a particular responsibility, whether or not they are legally complicit in what follows. Regulatory bodies in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have begun issuing formal guidance on influencer liability in financial promotions. Ethiopia’s relevant authorities should move in the same direction, and without delay.

WHAT MUST FOLLOW

The arrest and charging of Daniel Yohannes is a necessary step. It is emphatically not a sufficient one. For this prosecution to serve as genuine deterrence, rather than a singular event in an unbroken pattern of impunity, several things must follow.

The charge sheet references accomplices, coordinated networks, and individuals previously implicated in fraud. All participants in the scheme, lawyers, accountants, marketing professionals, influencers, and any regulatory contacts who may have facilitated or ignored warning signs must face commensurate scrutiny. Ponzi schemes do not operate in isolation. Prosecuting only their public face leaves the infrastructure intact for the next iteration.

More than 5,000 families registered under the Hello Taxi and Hello Car programmes alone. Their claims must be assessed systematically and restitution pursued wherever assets can be traced and recovered. Ethiopia’s financial regulators must also develop enforceable frameworks for digital investment platforms: mandatory registration, disclosure requirements, and clear liability provisions for promoters and endorsers. The present environment allows fraudsters to exploit the gap between the pace of fintech innovation and the pace of regulatory response — a gap that will widen unless deliberate action is taken to close it.

And finally: public financial education. The most durable protection against this class of fraud is an investing public that can recognise its warning signs guaranteed high returns, opaque business models, heavy reliance on recruitment, and a reluctance to provide clear documentation. That education cannot arrive after the schemes do. It must be embedded in schools, in community institutions, and in the public discourse now.

Charles Ponzi died in poverty in Brazil in 1949, deported and forgotten. Bernie Madoff died in a federal prison medical centre in 2021. Allen Stanford is serving 110 years. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving 25. The perpetrators of these schemes, when caught, tend to be caught thoroughly.

The problem has never been that the fraudsters escape indefinitely. The problem is the interval, the months or years during which ordinary people hand over ordinary savings in exchange for extraordinary promises, and the machinery of false credibility keeps turning. The problem is the 5,000 families who registered with Hello Taxi. The problem is the three million Nigerians who trusted MMM. The problem is every investor who watched a social media video and reasonably concluded that something real was being delivered.

The Ethiopian Tribune will continue to report on the Fintech Investment case as it proceeds through the Federal High Court. We will cover the evidence presented, the witnesses called, the defendants still at large, and the regulatory response or lack of one. The public interest in this case extends far beyond any single courtroom.

The promise of effortless returns is as old as money itself. What changes is the medium. What never changes is the mathematics.

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Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:19:52 +0000

Read Time:5 Minute, 52 Second

By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

A Warning Ethiopia Cannot Afford to Ignore

There are moments in a nation’s life when silence becomes complicity. Ethiopia stands at such a moment. The Ethiopian Tribune has long held that the duty of independent journalism is not merely to inform but to name what is happening with clarity, courage, and moral seriousness even, and especially, when what must be named is deeply uncomfortable.

The article we present in this edition “Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia” is one of the most consequential pieces of political analysis we have published. Its author, Professor Girma Berhanu of the University of Gothenburg, brings to bear rigorous comparative political theory alongside meticulous documentation of on-the-ground realities. The result is a work that demands not merely reading, but reckoning.

Professor Berhanu builds his analysis on Jason Stanley’s framework in How Fascism Works, applying it with unflinching precision to Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. He identifies, one by one, the hallmarks of fascist political practice: the fabrication of mythic history, the systematic destruction of truth, the vilification of intellectuals, the weaponization of identity, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions. His conclusion is not offered tentatively: these are not tendencies that might emerge; they are already defining features of the Ethiopian political order.

We recognise that strong analysis provokes strong responses. We welcome rigorous engagement, challenge, and debate. What we will not accept is the erasure of the evidence or the silencing of those who speak it. The Tribune publishes this work in the conviction that Ethiopia’s future depends on honest diagnosis of its present however painful that diagnosis may be.

We urge every Ethiopian at home and in the diaspora every diplomat, every human rights advocate, every African Union official, and every international observer to read this article in full. The moment for polite understatement has passed.

The Editors

The Ethiopian Tribune Editorial Board

SYNOPSIS

Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia

By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Overview

This paper offers a comprehensive and urgent analysis of Ethiopia’s contemporary political crisis through the analytical lens of Jason Stanley’s landmark work How Fascism Works. Professor Berhanu argues, without equivocation, that the tactics Stanley identifies as the hallmarks of fascist political practice are not theoretical abstractions in Ethiopia, they are operational realities, increasingly defining the political order under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the ideology of Oromummaa.

Key Arguments

The paper identifies nine structural features of fascist politics all of which the author argues are present in contemporary Ethiopia. These are: the fabrication of a glorified mythic past to legitimize present domination; pervasive and unapologetic propaganda that actively replaces truth with politically convenient falsehood; the structural suppression of intellectuals and critical voices; the cultivation of conspiracy thinking and manufactured paranoia to justify repression; the normalization of ethnic hierarchy and “natural order”; the weaponization of a victimhood narrative by dominant groups; the deployment of law-and-order politics as a mechanism of control; the exclusionary redefinition of national identity; and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions, leaving only a hollowed-out façade.

The Finfinnee Reclamation Framework

A central focus of the paper is the so-called “Finfinnee Reclamation Framework” a discussion draft circulating within the government that the author describes as a blueprint for ethnic domination. The document proposes transferring political authority, economic power, and land rights in Addis Ababa to Oromo stakeholders, invoking international models from Dubai’s “Sovereign Host” approach to Malaysia’s Bumiputera policy as templates for an “Oromo First” agenda. Professor Berhanu argues that this represents a direct assault on Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic federal capital and a flagrant attack on civic equality and shared citizenship. Evidence from the economic decline of Hawassa under the Sidama regional model and the effective “Bantustan-ization” of Harar are presented as real-world warnings of what such policies produce.

Oromummaa, Ethnic Federalism, and Comparative Politics

The paper provides a rigorous examination of Oromummaa as both a cultural framework and a state ideology. While acknowledging that proponents present it as a project of cultural revitalization and emancipation, Professor Berhanu argues that in its operative form under the current government, it exhibits structural features comparable to fascist and ethnonationalist movements: the primacy of a singular collective identity, the construction of existential “enemies,” nostalgic myth-making, the erosion of pluralism, and the subordination of individual and minority rights to ideological cohesion. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction and Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, the paper situates Oromummaa within a broader comparative political theory framework while carefully noting important historical and contextual differences from European fascism.

Ethiopia’s system of ethnic federalism, introduced under the TPLF in the early 1990s, receives extensive critical analysis. The author characterizes it as structurally analogous to the Bantustan model of apartheid-era South Africa a system that has transformed identity into the primary currency of power, normalized inter-ethnic suspicion and rivalry, and created fertile ground for racialized political mobilization, including the construction of a “Cushitic versus Semitic” dichotomy with dangerous ideological resonances.

The Amhara Crisis and Three Tiers of Victimhood

Professor Berhanu advances a three-tiered analytical framework to account for the full scope of the crisis facing Ethiopia’s Amhara population. First-tier victimhood refers to the direct and documented experience of mass killings, displacement, and the destruction of cultural and religious heritage. Second-tier victimhood refers to the manipulation of narrative the construction by ethnonationalist actors of a counter-victimhood discourse that obscures and denies Amhara suffering while reframing perpetrators as victims. Third-tier or “psychic” victimhood refers to the compounding effect of international invisibility: the failure of global media, diaspora networks, and international institutions to adequately recognize, document, and respond to the scale of atrocity. The campaign described by critics as “Amharafrei” an explicit parallel drawn to the Nazi concept of Judenfrei is presented as a deliberate strategy of cultural erasure encompassing historicide, ethnocide, and linguicide.

Significance and Urgency

This paper is not academic exercise. It is, as its author explicitly states, motivated by moral anger and by the conviction that accurate diagnosis of political pathology is a precondition for meaningful response. Its arguments carry direct implications for Ethiopian citizens, the diaspora, opposition figures, civil society, and the international community alike. The convergence of fascist-style political tactics, ethnic federalism’s structural fragmentation, the ideological entrenchment of Oromummaa, and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Amhara regions constitutes, in Professor Berhanu’s assessment, a coherent and escalating political crisis not an isolated series of events.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

The synopsis above conveys the structure and stakes of Professor Berhanu’s analysis, but it cannot substitute for the article itself. The full text develops each argument with scholarly depth, primary documentation, comparative historical evidence, and the kind of analytical precision that the gravity of the subject demands. We urge all readers to access and read the complete article at the link below:-

Fascism at Work_ Propaganda Conspiracy Lies Hatred and Incompetence in Ethiopia – polished.docx Download

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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The Spirit of Adwa Must Carry Ethiopia Through GERD and the RED SEA

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:45:33 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 40 Second

Sovereignty, Development, and Democratic Unity in the Age of Transactional Geopolitics

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

In moments when a nation stands at the hinge of history, clarity becomes a civic duty. Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s sweeping and meticulously argued essay, “The Spirit of Adwa Must Carry Ethiopia Through: GERD and the Red Sea,” arrives precisely at such a moment when Ethiopia’s sovereignty, developmental trajectory, and democratic future are being tested simultaneously at home and abroad.

From its opening pages, the article insists on a truth too often neglected in elite political discourse: Ethiopia’s future belongs to its young. As the author writes, “listen to the younger generation the nation is theirs to inherit.” With nearly 65% of Ethiopians under thirty, this is not a rhetorical flourish but a demographic fact that demands institutional response. Dr. Hailu’s insistence that Gen‑Z and Gen‑α must not merely be consulted but empowered is one of the most consequential interventions in contemporary Ethiopian political thought.

Yet this work is not a generational manifesto alone. It is a panoramic examination of the forces shaping Ethiopia’s sovereignty from the self-financed triumph of GERD, described as “a national narrative converted into steel and megawatts,” to the long arc of geopolitical engineering that rendered Ethiopia landlocked in 1993. The author does not shy away from naming the historical actors involved, nor from articulating Ethiopia’s legitimate and peaceful claim to restored Red Sea access.

Crucially, the article refuses the false binary that has long distorted Ethiopia’s public sphere: that one must choose between defending national sovereignty and demanding democratic accountability. Dr. Hailu argues instead that sovereignty without democracy is brittle, and democracy without sovereignty is hollow. As he notes, “The conclusion… is democratic accountability through democratic institutions… not the fragmentation of Ethiopia’s sovereign position.”

This is a work of scholarship, but also of civic courage. It confronts the country’s internal fractures ethnic violence, contested territories, democratic regression without surrendering to fatalism or cynicism. It situates Ethiopia’s challenges within global patterns of coercive mediation, transactional geopolitics, and great‑power opportunism. And it offers a strategic doctrine rooted in Adwa: principled resistance, coalition-building, technological ambition, and the disciplined use of national power.

Above all, this article is a call to responsibility directed at leaders, institutions, and especially the young Ethiopians who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions. As Dr. Hailu writes in one of the essay’s most resonant lines, “Stand with Ethiopia on GERD. Stand with Ethiopia on the Red Sea… and ensure that it is the youngest Ethiopians who hold the pen—because it is their story, and it always was.”

The Ethiopian Tribune is proud to present this work. It is not merely an article; it is an invitation to think, to argue, to build and to imagine Ethiopia not as a nation trapped by its past, but as one propelled by its youth, its ingenuity, and its unbroken sovereign will.

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

RedSea_GERD_mgh.pdf Download

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editor@ethiopiantribune.com

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ባለ ሁለት ስለት ቢላዋ፦ የኢትዮጵያ መንግሥት “ዲጂታል ፍቅር” እና የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ሱስ የሚያስከትለው የፖለቲካ-ኢኮኖሚ ቀውስ

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:21:48 +0000

Read Time:4 Minute, 10 Second

ትንታኔ፦ የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን የፖለቲካ እና የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳዮች ክፍል

መጋቢት 16 ቀን 2018 ዓ.ም (ማርች 25፣ 2026)

በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ዘርፍ ከፍተኛ ድንጋጤን በፈጠረ ውሳኔ፣ በሎስ አንጀለስ የሚገኝ የዳኞች ቡድን በቴክኖሎጂ ግዙፎቹ ሜታ (Meta) እና ጎግል (Google) ላይ ከዚህ ቀደም ታይቶ የማይታወቅ የሽንፈት ውሳኔ አስተላልፏል። ይህ ብይን የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ኩባንያዎች “ሆን ተብሎ ለተቀነባበረ የዲጂታል ሱሰኝነት” በሕግ ተጠያቂ የተደረጉበት የመጀመሪያው አጋጣሚ ነው። የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት ከሆነ፣ ይህ ውሳኔ እንደ ኢትዮጵያ ባሉ በማደግ ላይ ባሉ አገራት የሚገኙ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣት ተጠቃሚዎችን ጨምሮ፣ መላውን የዲጂታል ዓለም ገጽታ መሠረታዊ በሆነ መልኩ ሊቀይረው ይችላል።

የፍርዱ ይዘት

ሳምንታት ለፈጀው ከፍተኛ የምስክርነት ቃል መስማት ሂደት በኋላ፣ የዳኞች ቡድኑ ሜታ (የኢንስታግራም፣ ፌስቡክ እና ዋትስአፕ እናት ኩባንያ) እና ጎግል (የዩቲዩብ ባለቤት) ሆን ብለው ተጠቃሚን ሱሰኛ የሚያደርጉ የመገናኛ መድረኮችን ቀርፀዋል የሚል መደምደሚያ ላይ ደርሷል። ዳኞቹ እነዚህ የዲጂታል መድረኮች አወቃቀር በሕግ ሰነዶች ላይ ‘ኬሊ’ ተብላ በተጠቀሰችው የ20 ዓመት ወጣት የአእምሮ ጤና ላይ ቀጥተኛ ጉዳት ማድረሳቸውን አረጋግጠዋል።

የከሳሿ የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደ “infinite scrolling” (ገደብ የለሽ የመረጃ ፍሰት) እና የፍላጎት ስልተ-ቀመሮች (algorithms) በአጋጣሚ የተፈጠሩ ሳይሆኑ፣ የሕፃናትን ደህንነት መሥዋዕት በማድረግ ተጠቃሚዎችን ለረጅም ሰዓት ለማቆየት ታስበው የተሰሩ መሆናቸውን በማስረጃ አቅርበው ተከራክረዋል።

የኩባንያዎቹ መከላከያ ውድቅ መደረግ

የሜታ ጠበቆች ጉዳዩን እንደ ግል ችግር በመፈረጅ ኩባንያውን ከተጠያቂነት ለማዳን ጥረት አድርገው ነበር። ኬሊ በግል ሕይወቷ መከራ ቢደርስባትም፣ ኢንስታግራምን መጠቀምዋ ለሥነ-ልቦና ቀውሷ መንስኤ እንዳልሆነ ወይም “ጉልህ አስተዋጽኦ” እንዳልነበረው ተከራክረዋል።

ሆኖም ዳኞቹ በዚህ መከላከያ አልተረቱም። ይልቁንም ኩባንያዎቹ ራሳቸው ያደረጓቸውን የውስጥ ጥናቶች ጨምሮ፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች ልክ እንደ ቁማር የአንጎልን የደስታ ስሜት (dopamine) ቀስቃሽ በሆነ መልኩ መገንባታቸውን የሚያሳዩ ማስረጃዎችን በመጥቀስ ውሳኔያቸውን አጽንተዋል።

በዛሬው ዕለት በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ኢንደስትሪ ላይ እንደ መብረቅ የተሰማው የሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት ውሳኔ፣ ሜታ እና ጎግልን ብቻ ሳይሆን እንደ ቲክቶክ (TikTok) ያሉ ሌሎች ግዙፍ መድረኮችንም ስጋት ላይ ጥሏል። የ20 ዓመቷን ኬሊን የካሳ ጥያቄ መሠረት በማድረግ የተሰጠው ይህ “ታሪካዊ” ብይን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ለተጠቃሚዎቻቸው የአእምሮ ጤና ያላቸውን የሕግ ተጠያቂነት አዲስ ምዕራፍ ከፍቷል።

የብይኑ መሠረት እና የቲክቶክ ስጋት
ምንም እንኳን የዚህኛው ክስ ትኩረት በሜታ (ኢንስታግራም) እና ጎግል (ዩቲዩብ) ላይ ቢሆንም፣ የፍርዱ መሠረታዊ ምክንያት ግን እንደ ቲክቶክ ያሉ መድረኮችን በቀጥታ የሚነካ ነው። ዳኞቹ ኩባንያዎቹን ጥፋተኛ ያደረጓቸው በሚከተሉት ነጥቦች ነው፦

የአልጎሪዝም አወቃቀር፦ ተጠቃሚው ሳያስበው ለሰዓታት እንዲቆይ የሚያደርጉ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች።ሆን ተብሎ የተሰሩ ዲዛይኖች፦ ልክ እንደ ቲክቶክ “For You Page” ሁሉ፣ ወጣቶችን ከእውነታው ዓለም የሚነጥሉ ማራኪ ግን ጎጂ ይዘቶችን የሚያስቀድሙ አሰራሮች።
የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት፣ ቲክቶክ በአሁኑ ወቅት በአሜሪካ እና በአውሮፓ መሰል ክሶች እየቀረቡበት በመሆኑ፣ ይህ የሜታ እና ጎግል መሸነፍ ለቲክቶክም “የመጨረሻው ማስጠንቀቂያ” ተደርጎ ተወስዷል።

“የዲጂታል መድኃኒት” ተጠያቂነት

“ይህ ውሳኔ በኢትዮጵያ ያሉ ወላጆች እና ተቆጣጣሪ አካላት የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ አጠቃቀምን እንደ ቀላል መዝናኛ ብቻ ሳይሆን፣ ከፍተኛ ጥንቃቄ እንደሚሻ ‘ምርት’ እንዲመለከቱት ያደርጋል።”

የሜታ ጠበቆች “ኢንስታግራም ለኬሊ ችግር መንስኤ አይደለም” ብለው ቢከራከሩም፣ የሎስ አንጀለሱ ውሳኔ ግን የቴክኖሎጂው ዲዛይን ራሱ “መርዝ” ሊሆን እንደሚችል አረጋግጧል።

ቀጣዩ እርምጃ ምን ሊሆን ይችላል?
ይህ ብይን በመቶዎች ለሚቆጠሩ ተመሳሳይ ክሶች መንገድ ከፋች በመሆኑ፣ ወደፊት ኩባንያዎቹ የሚከተሉትን ለውጦች እንዲያደርጉ ሊገደዱ ይችላሉ፦

ለታዳጊዎች የሚቀርቡ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ባህሪያትን መቀነስ።

በየቀኑ የሚፈቀደውን የሰዓት ገደብ ማጥበቅ።

ለደረሱ ጉዳቶች በቢሊዮን የሚቆጠር ዶላር ካሳ መክፈል።

በሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት በሜታ እና ጎግል ላይ የተሰጠው ውሳኔ ለኢትዮጵያ ትልቅ ደወል ነው። ሆኖም ለኢትዮጵያ ጉዳዩ ይበልጥ ውስብስብ የሚሆነው፣ እነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” የተባሉ ቴክኖሎጂዎች በራሱ በመንግሥት እና በከፍተኛ አመራሮች ዘንድ እንደ ዋነኛ የሥራ እና የፕሮፓጋንዳ መሣሪያ በመወሰዳቸው ነው።

የመንግሥት “ዲጂታል አባዜ” እና የተጋላጭነት ስጋት

ጠቅላይ ሚኒስትር ዐቢይ አሕመድን ጨምሮ ከፍተኛ የመንግሥት ባለሥልጣናት አዳዲስ የቴክኖሎጂ ውጤቶችን (እንደ ቲክቶክ፣ ኤክስ እና ፌስቡክ) በከፍተኛ ሁኔታ መጠቀማቸው ይታወቃል። መንግሥት “ዲጂታል ኢትዮጵያ 2025” በሚል መሪ ቃል ዜጎች ወደ ቴክኖሎጂው እንዲገቡ እያበረታታ ባለበት በዚህ ወቅት፣ የቴክኖሎጂው “አዳኝ” (Predatory) ባህሪ ግን ችላ ተብሏል።

ተባባሪነት ወይስ አጠቃቀም?

መንግሥት እነዚህን መድረኮች ለፖለቲካዊ መልዕክት ማስተላለፊያነት ሲጠቀም፣ ሳያውቀው ወጣቱ ትውልድ በእነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች (Algorithms) ውስጥ እንዲዘፈቅ በር ይከፍታል። ይህም መንግሥትን የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ያልተፈረመ ስምምነት” ተባባሪ ያደርገዋል።

የፖለቲካ ጉዳት፦ “የአልጎሪዝም ፖለቲካ” እና አለመረጋጋት
በአሜሪካ የተሰጠው ብይን እንደሚያሳየው፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች የተሰሩት ሰውን ስሜታዊ በማድረግ ረጅም ሰዓት እንዲቆይ ነው። በኢትዮጵያ ፖለቲካ ውስጥ ይህ ትልቅ አደጋ አለው፦

የሐሰት መረጃ መስፋፋት፦ ስልተ-ቀመሮቹ (Algorithms) ይበልጥ አነጋጋሪ እና ስሜት ቀስቃሽ የሆኑ የጥላቻ ንግግሮችን እና የሐሰት ወሬዎችን ለተጠቃሚው በማቅረብ ሱስ ያስይዛሉ። ይህ ደግሞ በኅብረተሰቡ ውስጥ ዋልታ ረገጥ ፖለቲካ እንዲነግሥ እና ብሔራዊ መግባባት እንዲጠፋ ያደርጋል።

የወጣቱ ትውልድ መደንዘዝ፦ ወጣቱ በቲክቶክ እና በፌስቡክ ሱስ ውስጥ ሲወድቅ፣ ለፖለቲካዊ ተሳትፎ እና ለሀገራዊ ጉዳዮች ያለው ንቁ ተሳትፎ እየቀነሰ ይሄዳል (Digital Narcissism)።

የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳት፦ ምርታማነት እና የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት
ከኢኮኖሚ አንጻር የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ሱስ ለኢትዮጵያ ከፍተኛ ኪሳራ እያመጣ ነው፦

የምርታማነት መቀነስ፦ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣቶች እና የመንግሥት ሠራተኞች በሥራ ሰዓት በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ የሚያሳልፉት ሰዓት ለሀገር ውስጥ ምርት (GDP) እድገት ትልቅ እንቅፋት ነው።

የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት፦ ኢትዮጵያውያን በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ ማስታወቂያ ሲያወጡ ወይም የቲክቶክ “ስጦታዎችን” (Gifts) ሲለዋወጡ፣ በድብቅም ይሁን በግልጽ ከፍተኛ መጠን ያለው የውጭ ምንዛሬ ከሀገር ይወጣል። ኩባንያዎቹ (ሜታ፣ ጎግል፣ ቲክቶክ) በኢትዮጵያ ተጠቃሚዎች ቢከብሩም፣ ለሀገሪቱ የሚከፍሉት ግብር ወይም የሚያበረክቱት የኢኮኖሚ ድርሻ አነስተኛ ነው።

የሕግ ክፍተት፦ ተኩላው በበግ ለምድ
ኢትዮጵያ የ”ኮምፒውተር ወንጀል አዋጅ” እና የ”መገናኛ ብዙኃን አዋጅ” ቢኖራትም፣ እነዚህ ሕጎች በዋናነት የሚያተኩሩት ይዘት (Content) ላይ እንጂ በቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ሱስ አስያዥ ዲዛይን” ላይ አይደለም። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂዎቹ አድናቂ በመሆኑ፣ ኩባንያዎቹን በሕግ ከመጠየቅ ይልቅ “ለዲጂታል ዲፕሎማሲ” ቅድሚያ ይሰጣል።

የሎስ አንጀለሱ ብይን ለኢትዮጵያ የሚሰጠው ትምህርት ግልጽ ነው፤ ቴክኖሎጂን ማድነቅ እና መጠቀም አንድ ነገር ሲሆን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ዜጎችን (በተለይም ታዳጊዎችን) ለትርፍ ሲሉ ለሱስ እንዳይዳርጉ የመቆጣጠር ኃላፊነት ደግሞ ሌላ ነው። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂ አፍቃሪነቱን እና የቁጥጥር ኃላፊነቱን ማመጣጠን ካልቻለ፣ ውጤቱ “ዲጂታል ሱስ የተጠናወተው እና በፖለቲካ የተከፋፈለ” ትውልድ መፍጠር ይሆናል።

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Ethiopian Tribune editor

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