African News – Ethiopian Tribune

The Rule of the Number

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:10:00 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 29 Second

The Rule of the Number — The Ethiopian Tribune

THE TRAP — WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ETHIOPIAN DREAM OF FREEDOM

PART III OF V

The Rule of the Number

Reform by milestone, and the loneliness of a citizen the state cannot count

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

The second jaw of the trap does not announce itself with militias or secession. It arrives wearing a lanyard, carrying a spreadsheet, speaking the reasonable language of reform. It does not want to oppress you. It wants to measure you — and in the measuring, it will quietly decide that the parts of you it cannot count do not exist.

To see how the number came to rule, we return to the theorists. If game theory gave the Cold War its suspicious citizen, it was public choice theory that turned that same suspicion upon the state itself. The economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, in The Calculus of Consent (1962), performed a single devastating inversion: they took the self-interested maximiser of economic theory and seated him behind the desk of the civil servant. The bureaucrat, on this account, is no selfless steward of the public good; he is a rational actor like any other, maximising his budget, his department, his own security. The politician does not serve; he buys votes. From this followed the whole apparatus of the coming age. Since you cannot trust the servants of the public, you must bind them — strip them of discretion, subject them to incentives, measure their output, and make the state, so far as possible, imitate a market. Judgement was the enemy, because judgement could be corrupt. The number was the solution, because the number could not lie.

Except that it could, and it did. This is the burden of Curtis’s second episode, The Lonely Robot, which follows the theory into the reconstruction of the British public services and watches it curdle. Governments enthralled by public choice replaced professional discretion with targets — waiting times, exam pass-rates, crime figures, arrest quotas. And human beings, being rather more resourceful than the theory allowed, did exactly what self-interested maximisers do: they gamed them. Ambulances idled outside hospitals so the clock on the four-hour target would not start. Patients were parked on trolleys in corridors reclassified as wards. The figures improved magnificently while the care beneath them rotted. The metric had detached from the mission and floated free, and the managers, trusting the metric, could no longer see the rot — because in the world their instruments described, there was no rot, only green numbers. The system meant to free the citizen from the arrogance of the professional had produced a new and lonelier subjection: to be reduced to the data a stranger collects about you, and to have that data believed over your own testimony of your life. Curtis’s point is not that measurement is wicked but that measurement, once it becomes the whole of governance, hollows out the thing it was meant to serve — and leaves everyone, governor and governed alike, staring at a dashboard instead of at one another.

Hold that image — the green number floating serenely above the burning reality — and turn to Ethiopia, because we have staged this drama on a national scale, and we have staged it twice.

The first staging was the developmental state. Meles Zenawi’s doctrine of agriculture-led industrialisation and the successive Growth and Transformation Plans were the planning vanguard in its confident mode: a state that claimed to know the people’s destiny, wrote it into five-year targets, and reported, year upon year, the double-digit growth that proved the plan was working. That those figures came to function as a kind of theology — recited, defended, and quietly disbelieved by everyone who actually bought bread — is now widely conceded even by sympathisers of that era. The planning state trusted its own numbers over its own citizens. It was the first Ethiopian rule of the number.

The genius of the post-2018 order was to present itself as the escape from that discredited planning — and to install, in its place, the very same worship under a new and more fashionable authorship.

We did not leave the rule of the number in 2018. We merely changed the hand that held the pen — from the vanguard’s plan to the market’s milestone.

The Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda, unveiled in 2019, announced liberation from the dead hand of the developmental state: liberalisation, privatisation, a currency freed to find its “true” value, an economy opened to choice and competition. In the vocabulary of this series, it was a pivot from positive liberty to negative — from the state that plans your prosperity to the market that merely frees you to pursue it. But look at the machinery through which the pivot was actually conducted, and it is public choice theory in its purest institutional form. The reform did not proceed by public deliberation about the kind of country Ethiopians wished to inhabit. It proceeded by milestone: a sequence of prior actions and structural benchmarks agreed with the International Monetary Fund, each a number to be hit to unlock the next disbursement. The floating of the birr in the summer of 2024, undertaken as Ethiopia secured a new IMF programme reported at around 3.4 billion US dollars; the opening of the banking sector to foreign entrants; the partial sale of the state telecom monopoly and the arrival of a foreign-led competitor; and the launch, in early 2025, of a securities exchange in a country where the overwhelming mass of the population has never held a share — these were narrated to us, and to the world, as milestones met. The green numbers turned green on schedule.

And beneath them, by many accounts, the reality burned much as the theory predicts it must. Independent monitoring and the Fund’s own reviews have recorded inflation running for extended stretches near or above thirty per cent in the years around the float, with the sharp devaluation passing through to the price of imported essentials — cooking oil, fuel, medicine — even as it satisfied the external benchmark. The “true” value the market discovered was true for the balance sheet and punishing for the household. The reform is reported in the register of achievement — targets hit, tranches released, confidence restored — while the lived economy, the one that cannot be entered into a letter of intent, contracts into a daily struggle the instruments are structurally unable to register. This is the loneliness of Curtis’s robot, denominated in birr: to be a person whose actual hunger is invisible to a state that has agreed to trust its metrics over your mouth.

There is a final turn of the screw, and it is the one that should trouble us most, because it is where the counting becomes literal. The suspicious, measuring state does not merely reduce the citizen to data as a metaphor; it is building the apparatus to do so in fact. The Fayda digital identity programme proposes to render every Ethiopian a unique, biometric, machine-readable entry — enrolled, de-duplicated, verified, a self resolved at last into a number the state can trust because, unlike the human being attached to it, the number cannot dissemble. The same logic runs in reverse in the network shutdowns that digital-rights monitors such as Access Now and NetBlocks have repeatedly documented across restive regions: to govern by subtraction, removing whole populations from the data-space, un-numbering them until they fall quiet. To be counted when the state wishes to see you and erased when it does not — this is the citizen as data point. It is the reductive self of a checklist psychiatry and the “survival machine” of popular genetics, given an administrative body: the person becomes a record, the record becomes the person, and the parts that overflow the boxes — the parts a life is actually made of — are, for the purposes of the state, simply not there.

Once again the discipline this series owes itself. None of this romanticises the developmental state we came from, nor pretends that a modern economy can be run without measurement, nor that identity systems and stock exchanges are inherently instruments of tyranny — they are not, and a serious accountability journalism must say so plainly. Numbers are not the enemy. The enemy is the substitution — the moment the number stops being a servant that describes the reality and becomes a sovereign that replaces it; the moment the state believes its milestone over its market, and its biometric over its citizen. The economist Amartya Sen, whom we will meet at the end of this argument, spent a career insisting that development is meaningful only as the expansion of real human freedom — of what people are actually able to do and to be — a measure the milestone cannot capture and was never designed to. Hold that thought. It is the first crack of daylight in the wall.

For now, mark the second jaw closed. The first taught each people to arm against the others. The second taught the state to trust its instruments over its people. What remains is the most dangerous movement of all — the one in which the dream itself, the beautiful dream of prosperity and greatness, becomes the justification for the bulldozer. The one in which they demolish your home, and your history, and tell you, sincerely, that they are setting you free.

Sources

The theory. James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962); Adam Curtis, The Trap, Part 2, The Lonely Robot (BBC, 2007).

The Ethiopian record. The Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda (Government of Ethiopia, 2019); the birr float and associated IMF Extended Credit Facility (2024, programme value reported at c. US$3.4bn); banking-sector liberalisation and telecom entry; the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (2025); the Fayda / National ID programme. Inflation figures per IMF country reviews and independent monitoring. Network-shutdown documentation per Access Now’s #KeepItOn coalition and NetBlocks. Specific figures and dates to be locked to named sources at production.

The measure invoked. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999).

THE TRAP · PART III OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

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The Constitution of Distrust

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:10:00 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 36 Second

The Constitution of Distrust — The Ethiopian Tribune

THE TRAP — WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ETHIOPIAN DREAM OF FREEDOM

PART II OF V

The Constitution of Distrust

How a founding document wrote a prisoner’s dilemma into a nation

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

If the trap has an Ethiopian birthplace, it is not 2018. It is 1995 — the year the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia came into force — and to see why, one must read that founding document not as a charter of rights but, in Curtis’s manner, as a model of human nature written into law. To read it so, we need first to meet the model itself, and to follow it back to the strange and paranoid room in which it was made.

The model is the suspicious actor: the isolated, rational, self-interested individual who assumes the worst of everyone around him and plans accordingly. Its formal origins lie in game theory, set out by the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), which recast human conduct as the strategic calculation of players each pursuing advantage. At the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon’s Cold War think-tank, this became the mathematics of nuclear survival. It was there, around 1950, that Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher devised the scenario the mathematician Albert Tucker would name the prisoner’s dilemma: two rational actors, unable to trust each other, each betraying the other and so arriving together at an outcome worse than cooperation would have produced. And it was there that the young mathematician John Nash formalised the equilibrium that would later win him a Nobel — the stable point at which suspicious players, each defending against the others, become collectively locked in place, none able to improve his position by moving alone.

Curtis makes a deliberately provocative move at this juncture, and honesty requires that it be presented as his interpretation rather than as settled fact. He links this model of man-as-suspicious-loner to Nash’s own paranoid schizophrenia, and to the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War that funded the work — as though a picture of human beings as mutually distrustful competitors had been generalised from a mind, and a moment, in the grip of suspicion. One need not accept the biographical causation to see that the structural point stands. A specific and pessimistic picture of what a human being is was built into the machinery of the modern state at the very moment it was being sold as rationality itself.

Now hold that picture against the opening words of Ethiopia’s constitution. “We, the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia…” Not we the people, singular, but we the peoples, plural — each a discrete and calculating entity, each entering the federation as a party to a contract it may one day rescind. Article 39 makes the logic explicit, and it is worth quoting exactly, since the whole reading rests upon it: “Every Nation, Nationality and People in Ethiopia has an unconditional right to self-determination, including the right to secession.” The exit is not treated as a failure of the system. It is written in as a feature of it, constitutionally guaranteed, permanently on the table.

Read through the theory we have just laid out, the design reveals itself. What Meles Zenawi and the architects of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front built, whether or not they ever used the vocabulary, was a prisoner’s dilemma given the force of law. Each people is modelled as a rational, self-interested actor. Each is invited to assume the others are pursuing their own advantage. Each is handed, in Article 39, a standing threat to walk away from the whole. In such a structure the individually rational move — as Nash’s mathematics predicts — is never to trust first, never to disarm first, always to secure one’s own group against the possibility of the others’ bad faith. The stable outcome, the equilibrium of the thing, is not cooperation. It is a low-trust standoff in which every party arms against every other, and all are left worse off than a single act of mutual trust would have made them. This is the architecture of suspicion, carried from the RAND seminar room into the founding law of an African state.

There is a scholarly bridge worth naming here, because it lets us extend Curtis with rigour rather than by loose analogy. The political scientist Barry Posen, in “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” published in the journal Survival in 1993, took the same game-theoretic core — the mutual, self-fulfilling fear at the heart of the prisoner’s dilemma — and applied it precisely to multi-ethnic states. His insight, drawn from the collapse of Yugoslavia, ran as follows: so long as an imperial or hegemonic power sits above the groups and forbids them to compete, the game is suppressed and the peace, however unloved, holds. But the moment that power withdraws, each group finds itself in a sudden anarchy, forced to provide for its own security, reading every neighbour’s defensive preparation as a possible offensive threat — and the dilemma, long dormant, springs shut. Curtis never made this move. Posen did. Ours is to recognise that Ethiopia ran the experiment.

The design did not fail in 2018. It was in 2018 that the design was finally, catastrophically, permitted to work.

For a quarter of a century the dilemma was held in check — not by trust, but by a hegemon. The EPRDF’s doctrine of revolutionary democracy and democratic centralism placed a single dominant party above the federation and simply forbade the peoples to play the game the constitution had written for them. Competition was suppressed; the exit clause was theoretical; the vanguard internalised the cooperative outcome and imposed it from above. The federal architecture appeared to function, but it functioned the way a coiled spring appears to be at rest. What looked like a federation of trusting nations was in truth a federation of restrained ones.

Then the restraint was removed. The transformation of 2018 — the very opening we called, in the first part, a genuine liberation — was in Posen’s exact sense the withdrawal of the hegemon. The dominant player stepped back from the board, and the game it had suppressed for twenty-seven years asserted itself with the speed of released tension. Each people, now genuinely free, did what the structure had always instructed it to do. It calculated. It looked at its neighbours, remembered its history, and moved to secure itself first.

The evidence is the last seven years of our national life. The proliferation of regional “special forces” and ethnic militias — region after region fielding its own standing army, because to be the one region without one was to accept the sucker’s payoff. The scramble for new statehood in the south, where the old Southern Nations region fractured as zone after zone calculated that its safety lay in its own regional exit rather than in a shared house: Sidama voted itself a region in 2019, a South West cluster followed in 2021, and further splits were legislated in 2023. And, in the purest illustration the theory could ask for, the federal move in 2023 to dissolve the regional special forces into the national army — a demand, in effect, that everyone disarm at once. In a system built on trust it would have been the obvious good. In a prisoner’s dilemma it was close to unthinkable, because to lay down your arms first, while others might not, is exactly the move the structure punishes worst. In Amhara the order was widely read as disarmament before rivals, the Fano mobilisation followed, and the equilibrium reasserted itself in blood. Tigray before it and Oromia around it tell the same story in different keys.

Here we must hold the discipline this series owes itself — the discipline Curtis himself so often abandons. The prisoner’s dilemma illuminates; it must not be permitted to exonerate. An equilibrium does not demolish a village or shell a town. People do, and they choose to, and some choose it for gain rather than survival. The frame explains why trust was so structurally fragile; it does not dissolve the responsibility of those who exploited the fragility. To let the game theory become a theodicy — a proof that the blood was no one’s fault, merely the mathematics working itself out — would be to fall into the very trap we are trying to describe: the seductive total system that explains everything and therefore excuses everything. The model is a light to think by, not an alibi.

What it does show, unmistakably, is that our national suspicion is not a cultural failing or an ancient hatred waiting in the blood. It is a designed outcome — engineered into a founding text, suppressed for a generation by a party, and released by a liberation. We were handed our freedom in 2018, and the freedom was real. But the self the constitution had modelled for us — the wary, calculating actor — was waiting inside the gift. We opened the door, and it walked in with us. That is the first jaw of the trap. The second is quieter, and wears the face of competence. It counts.

Sources

The architecture of suspicion. John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944); John Nash, “Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games” (1950) and “Non-Cooperative Games” (1951); the prisoner’s dilemma formulated at RAND by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher (1950), named by Albert Tucker. The link between Nash’s illness and the model is Curtis’s interpretation, presented here as such.

The ethnic security dilemma. Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35:1 (1993).

The founding text. Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995), Preamble and Article 39, quoted from the official English text.

The Ethiopian record. Sidama regional referendum (2019); formation of the South West Ethiopia Peoples’ region (2021); further southern restructuring (2023); the 2023 federal move to integrate regional special forces and the ensuing Amhara/Fano mobilisation — to be cited to the Tribune’s own reporting and named external sources at production.

THE TRAP · PART II OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

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When the Cell Doors Opened

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:32:21 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 43 Second

When the Cell Doors Opened — The Ethiopian Tribune

THE TRAP — WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ETHIOPIAN DREAM OF FREEDOM

PART I OF V

When the Cell Doors Opened

Ethiopia’s dream of freedom, and the machine folded inside the gift

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

In the spring of 2018 the cell doors opened, and for a season it was possible to believe that Ethiopia had walked out of its own history. They came out blinking into the light — the journalists, the bloggers, the opposition figures who had been named terrorists for the crime of dissent. Exiles booked their flights home. Armed movements long declared beyond the pale — the Oromo Liberation Front, Ginbot 7, the Ogaden National Liberation Front — were struck from the terror list and invited back into the political fold. A new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, spoke a language the country had not heard from its rulers in living memory: apology, reconciliation, the deliberate un-clenching of the state’s fist. By July he had reached across the trenches of one of Africa’s longest cold wars and made peace with Eritrea, and men who had assumed they would die without hearing an Asmara voice again wept into telephone lines that had been dead for twenty years.

To grasp what follows in this series, one must first take that year seriously on its own terms, without the condescension of hindsight. The joy was not manufactured and the hope was not naïve. For a few extraordinary months a nation of a hundred million people allowed itself the dangerous luxury of belief — belief that the machinery of fear that had governed them since the Derg, and arguably long before, could be switched off by an act of will from the top. They were not wrong to feel it, because the liberation was, in that moment, entirely real. The prisoners really did walk free. The press really did breathe. This is the first and most important thing to understand about a trap: it does not begin with a lie. It begins with a genuine gift.

It is worth pausing on the sheer velocity of that hope, because velocity is part of how a trap works. Within months a word had attached itself to the mood — a giddy, half-ironic “Abiymania” — and the diaspora, which had spent decades organising against the state from the cafés of Washington and the suburbs of Frankfurt, began booking one-way tickets home. Men and women who had assumed they would grow old in exile stood in the arrivals hall at Bole and wept. A whole generation that had known only the closed fist of the security state allowed itself to imagine that the future had, without warning, come early. It felt less like a change of government than a change of era — and it is precisely at such moments, when a people is most open, most trusting, most willing to be remade, that the deepest assumptions about who they are and how they must be governed slip in unexamined.

This series takes its frame from the British documentary-maker Adam Curtis, and in particular from his 2007 BBC film “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.” Curtis has spent four decades advancing a single unsettling argument: that those who govern modern societies rule less through open force than through stories about human nature — simplified, often bleak models of what a person fundamentally is — and that these models, though partial and born in strange places, escape the seminar rooms in which they are made, remake the world in their image, and finally close around us like a trap. In earlier films — “The Century of the Self” (2002), on how Freud’s ideas were turned into the machinery of consumer persuasion, and “The Power of Nightmares” (2004), on the mirrored fantasies of neoconservatives and Islamists — he rehearsed the method. “The Trap,” in three parts, is his most sustained attempt to explain how a sincere ideal of freedom curdled, across the late twentieth century, into a new and subtler system of control.

It is a film worth watching from Addis Ababa in 2026, because we have lived its argument at compressed speed. Curtis builds his case on a distinction drawn by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, to which this series will return in detail: the distinction between freedom from interference and freedom to become one’s truer self. His bleak suggestion is that both, once run through the machinery of the modern state, become cages — the first a marketised loneliness, the second a licence for coercion. Before we can test so grand a claim against our own condition, we must sit inside the Ethiopian spring of 2018 and ask a question almost no one asked at the time. Not whether the freedom was real — it was — but what model of ourselves, what picture of who Ethiopians are and how they behave, was quietly folded inside the gift.

Because here is the thing about that spring that we did not see, for who looks a gift of freedom in the mouth. Every door that swung open was also a mechanism. The same amnesty that let exiled fighters come home let older grievances come home too, and remember themselves, and look about for redress. The same opening that unbanned the parties and freed the press invited every people in the federation to calculate — at last out loud, and without penalty — exactly what it stood to gain and what it stood to lose in the new dispensation. Freedom of speech became, among much that was noble, also the freedom to inflame. The lifting of the state’s hand from the scales did not produce a weightless equilibrium. It produced a scramble.

The consequences arrived faster than the celebrations could fade. Along the frontier between the Southern Nations and Oromia, in Gedeo and West Guji, communities that had lived intermingled for generations turned on one another, and hundreds of thousands fled. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Ethiopia recorded over the course of 2018 one of the highest figures for new conflict-related internal displacement of any country in the world that year — a grim distinction for a nation whose leader would, the following year, be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one in the new government had ordered this. That is precisely the point. It followed. It was the logic of the thing, working itself out.

What logic? That is the subject of everything that follows, and it is worth stating the shape of the argument at the outset so the reader can hold the whole in view. Ethiopia in 2018 did not step out of a trap. It stepped into one that had been laid, with the best of intentions, a generation earlier — and the opening of the doors was not the escape but the release of the mechanism. Over the coming parts we will trace three jaws of that mechanism. First, a constitution that models each of the country’s peoples as a suspicious, calculating actor, and quietly rewards distrust — the subject of Part II. Second, a mode of government that trusts its own numbers over the lived reality of its citizens, compressing the person into a data point — Part III. And third, a dream of national prosperity so beautiful and so total that it licenses the bulldozer and calls the demolition freedom — Part IV. In the fifth and final part we will ask whether there is any way out at all.

There is a temptation in an argument like this one that must be named and resisted from the very first page, and it is a temptation to which Curtis himself sometimes succumbs. It is the temptation of the total explanation — the single hidden machine that accounts for everything, that turns every death into a data point in a theory and every actor into a puppet of a structure. That way lies both bad history and bad faith. The men and women who govern Ethiopia are not the helpless marionettes of a Cold War equation, and to present them so would be to hand them the greatest gift a powerful person can receive: the alibi that nothing was ever a choice. This series uses the trap as a lens, not as a theology. The structure explains why certain choices were tempting, why trust was structurally fragile, why the open doors let in what they let in. It does not dissolve the responsibility of those who chose.

The illusion was not that the freedom was real. It was real. The illusion was that freedom, once handed down from above, would keep itself.

So let us begin where the dream began, and remember it honestly. The prisoners walked free. The phones to Asmara rang after twenty years of silence. A leader stood before his people and spoke of love — መደመር, medemer, coming together — and meant it, and the people believed him, and for a moment the belief was its own kind of truth. That is not the illusion this series will puncture. The illusion was subtler and sadder: it was the belief that a nation could receive its liberty as a finished gift and not have to build it, painfully and against the grain of its own machinery, from below. A Curtis film would freeze the frame here — not on a villain’s face, but on a door swinging open, and something stepping through it that no one had invited and no one could now call back. We opened the door in the spring of 2018. In the next part we turn to the room it opened onto — and to the founding document that had been waiting, patiently, on the other side.

Sources

The film. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (BBC, 2007), in three parts. Also The Century of the Self (BBC, 2002) and The Power of Nightmares (BBC, 2004).

The theory named. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), for the distinction between negative and positive liberty developed across this series.

The Ethiopian record. The reforms of 2018 (prisoner releases, de-listing of the OLF, Ginbot 7 and ONLF, the July 2018 rapprochement with Eritrea) and the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize are matters of public record. Displacement figures for 2018 as monitored by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement; to be cited to the specific IDMC figure at production.

THE TRAP · PART I OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

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The Golden Tourniquet

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 05:46:00 +0000

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The Golden Tourniquet — The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune · Economy & Sovereignty

The Golden Tourniquet

Ethiopia has spent $2.2 billion this year to keep the birr from bleeding out. The gold now replenishing those reserves flows toward the same Gulf market that finances Sudan’s war — and runs through a mine part-owned by a UAE-and-China-backed chain, beside a border the state cannot control.

BY E. FRASHIE
| Addis Ababa · 22 August 2026

On the twelfth of August, Ethiopia’s commercial banks arrived at the central bank’s foreign-currency auction and asked for roughly four times the dollars on offer. Some bid at rates weaker than the official one. It was a small, technical event, unremarked beyond the trading desks — and it was also a verdict. The market had looked at the birr the National Bank of Ethiopia was defending and concluded, in the only language markets speak, that it was worth less than the state insisted. Two days later the NBE announced an unscheduled special auction of half a billion dollars. The line, for now, would be held. The question this piece asks is a simpler and more troubling one: held with what, and at whose cost?

The headline figure, reported by Bloomberg in mid-August, is arresting on its own. The central bank has spent in the region of $2.2 billion this year defending the currency, and the birr still slid to a record low of almost 162 to the dollar — the worst performer among the twenty-three African currencies the agency tracks. But a figure spent tells you little until you know what it was spent from. And the reserves the NBE is burning are, increasingly, made of gold. That is where the story stops being a currency story and becomes something closer to a map of the country’s entanglements.

An intervention that persuades no one

The bitter irony sits in the reform itself. When Ethiopia floated the birr in July 2024, abandoning years of an artificial peg, the entire logic was to stop precisely what is now happening: the haemorrhage of scarce reserves in defence of a rate the market did not believe. A floating currency was meant to find its own level and spare the treasury the cost of the fight. Two years on, the currency has surrendered close to two-thirds of its value, and the central bank is once again spending reserves to manage the number — a float quietly re-managed whenever the figure grows politically intolerable.

The diagnosis offered by Standard Chartered’s Sarah Baynton-Glen is unsentimental and, one suspects, correct: the shortage is driven by a structural current-account deficit, not a passing squall. The distinction matters, because you cannot auction your way out of a structural deficit; you can only ration scarcity at a subsidised price and hope the calendar is kind. This year the calendar is not. Higher oil prices tied to the Iran conflict have inflated the fuel and fertiliser import bill while thinning the Gulf remittances that once cushioned it, and demand is set to climb into the Ethiopian New Year on 11 September as letters of credit pile up. August into September is a seasonal squeeze laid over a war-driven import shock — and the birr must absorb both.

You cannot auction your way out of a structural deficit. You can only ration scarcity at a subsidised price, and hope the calendar is kind.

What the reserves are made of

Here the government has a genuine achievement to point to, and it is important to grant it plainly. Gross reserves, estimated by the IMF in July at around $5.9 billion, now cover roughly 2.1 months of imports — a substantial climb from the 0.7 months recorded two years earlier, when the buffer sat below a single month almost continuously from late 2021 to mid-2024. The engine of that recovery is gold. Exports reached some $3.5 billion as the state leaned hard into mining-led growth, formalising artisanal output and channelling it through the central bank. On the government’s own terms, this is the reform working.

But 2.1 months is not safety; it is merely a less acute danger. The threshold widely treated as a minimum cushion for an import-dependent economy is three months, and the IMF’s own aspiration — 3.5 months by the end of the programme — remains two years and a great deal of good fortune away. Against a projected 2026 trade deficit of roughly $6 billion, reserves worth two months of imports are the very definition of running to stand still. And so the $2.2 billion already spent this year is not a large expenditure from a comfortable store. It is more than a third of the entire cushion, poured into a fight the market keeps winning. The relevant question becomes urgent: where does the next tranche of gold come from, and to whom is it sold?

[FIGURE 1 — Depreciation chart: birr per US$, June 2024 peg to August 2026 record low. Place inline-styled asset here.]

The birr has lost close to two-thirds of its value since the float. Source: NBE indicative rates and market data (approximate).

The deal that wasn’t

To answer that question, follow the country’s crown jewel. Kurmuk, in Benishangul-Gumuz, is Ethiopia’s first industrial-scale gold mine — a deposit of some 2.7 million ounces, engineered to yield around 290,000 ounces a year in its early life at a cost that comfortably undercuts the current gold price. It is, quite literally, the future of the reserve pile. And its ownership has been the subject of a year-long tug-of-war that the Ethiopian press has, for the most part, reported wrongly.

The story circulated through the first half of the year was that China’s Zijin had bought the mine’s Canadian parent, Allied Gold, outright for some $4 billion, and that Addis had blessed the sale. It had not. The full takeover collapsed on 29 July, when Chinese regulators failed to approve it before the deadline and both sides conceded there was no reasonable prospect they would. What actually completed, days later, was a far smaller and stranger thing: a private placement of around $295 million giving Zijin Gold a minority holding of roughly 9.2 per cent in Allied. Allied’s share price fell some eighteen per cent on the news, and its chairman signalled he remained willing to sell further slices, perhaps to several buyers. The mine did not pass into Chinese hands. A Chinese firm took a sub-ten-per-cent stake in the parent after its bid fell apart. The distinction is not pedantry; it is the difference between a sale and a scramble.

And Zijin was not the first suitor. In February 2025, an obscure Emirati company, Ambrosia — run by an Abu Dhabi businessman of the Al Amry Group — announced a half-billion-dollar deal for half of Allied’s assets, only for it to dissolve when conditions went unmet and the gold price surged. Two acquisitions attempted, two collapsed, before a diminished third limped over the line. The pattern of a distressed asset circled by larger powers is not incidental to this analysis. It is the analysis.

For the label “UAE-backed Chinese company” is not rhetoric. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund, has been a major shareholder of Zijin’s parent since 2022, and filings this year showed it among the top ten holders after committing some $680 million. The investor Ethiopia now counts among the owners of its flagship mine is, at one remove, the same Gulf capital that tried and failed to buy it directly a year earlier. Chinese metal and Emirati money are not competing for Kurmuk. They are, increasingly, the same hand.

The reserves keeping the birr alive are increasingly made of gold. And the gold, increasingly, leads to Abu Dhabi.

[FIGURE 2 — Ownership chain: ADIA / Chinese state → Zijin Mining → Zijin Gold → 9.2% of Allied Gold → Kurmuk. Place “kurmuk-ownership-chain-final.svg” here.]

Who owns Kurmuk, after the July 2026 collapse. Solid lines denote confirmed ownership; dashed, collapsed deals.

The geography of complicity

It is where the mine sits that turns a corporate saga into a question of conscience — and here precision matters more than anywhere else, because the distance between what can be documented and what can be alleged is, in this terrain, the distance between journalism and libel. So let the facts stand in their own order, each attributed, none stretched.

Kurmuk lies roughly twenty kilometres from the Sudanese border and about a hundred from the Grand Renaissance Dam. On the very day the Zijin deal was announced, according to reporting by Middle East Eye, mass graves believed to hold victims of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces were uncovered some twenty kilometres away. The same outlet has previously reported that Asosa, the regional capital, hosts a logistics hub the UAE and Ethiopia have used to train and arm RSF fighters. It is a matter of wider record that the UAE is at once the principal buyer of Ethiopian gold and the main destination for smuggled Sudanese conflict gold, which moves through Dubai; and that Chinese-made weapons have reached the RSF by way of the Emirates despite United Nations embargoes, without visible objection from Beijing.

Set these facts beside one another and the conclusion is not that Kurmuk’s gold funds atrocity — there is no evidence for that claim, and this newspaper does not make it. Allied, asked by Middle East Eye whether it could guarantee its new partners would not exploit the mine’s output to support Sudanese militias, offered no answer for the record; Zijin did not reply; the UAE and Ethiopia both deny any role in the war. The honest conclusion is narrower and, in its way, more damning: Ethiopia’s newest instrument of monetary stability has been placed inside a single geography of Gulf money, Chinese arms and Sudanese blood, and the state has done nothing to demonstrate that the walls between them are sound. Proximity is not proof. But a government that stakes its currency on gold owes its citizens an account of where that gold goes — and Addis has not given one.

The Egyptian ghost

There is a final irony buried in the ledger, and it belongs to Cairo. Kurmuk was run for a decade, from 2007, by the Egyptian firm ASCOM, until its licence was revoked and transferred to Allied in 2017 — reportedly because an Egyptian company operating in the watershed of the Renaissance Dam was judged a national-security risk. Allied maintains that ASCOM and its parent, Qalaa Holdings, exited fully through a negotiated settlement in 2023. Yet documents cited by The Reporter suggest a residual exposure: some sixty-six million dollars still owed in deferred instalments running to September 2027, and a mine that Qalaa has continued to list in its annual filings.

If that residual interest is real — and it is disputed — then a company Ethiopia expelled from the dam’s watershed on grounds of sovereignty may still hold a paper claim on the very asset now anchoring the national reserves. The state that guarded its water from Egyptian hands has, in the same decade, invited Emirati and Chinese ones to underwrite its money. It is worth asking which sovereignty was the more valuable to keep.

The tourniquet and the wound

Return, at the end, to the balance of it. For its 7 per cent free-carried stake in Kurmuk — a holding it earned not in cash but by building the mine’s power line — together with a five-per-cent royalty and corporate tax, the Ethiopian state may collect something in the order of $100 million to $150 million a year. Set against $2.2 billion burned in eight months to hold a currency the market still shorts, it is very nearly a rounding error. This is the arithmetic of the reform stripped of its language: the commanding heights of the mining economy conceded to foreign capital, in exchange for a thin slice of revenue and a reserve buffer that buys months, not security.

The float did not fail. It did what floats do; it found a level, and the level was low. What has failed is the quieter promise beneath it — that liberalisation would restore, rather than mortgage, the country’s command of its own economy. The birr today is kept alive by a golden tourniquet, and a tourniquet is an honest thing: it stops the bleeding, and it heals nothing. This one, moreover, is tied by hands in Abu Dhabi and Beijing, beside a border the state cannot police, in a landscape where its own gold and its neighbour’s war have grown difficult to tell apart. Stability bought on those terms is not sovereignty recovered. It is sovereignty postponed — and the interest, as ever, will fall due.

Sources: Bloomberg (currency intervention and rate data, August 2026); IMF fifth-review estimates (reserves and import cover); Standard Chartered (analyst commentary); Reuters, Mining.com and The Northern Miner (Allied Gold–Zijin deal collapse, 29 July 2026); Middle East Eye (19 August 2026, ownership and regional-security reporting); The Reporter Ethiopia and Qalaa Holdings filings (ASCOM residual interest); Pan African Visions and Addis Insight (fiscal terms). Figures for reserves and import cover are estimates and diverge between the IMF and Afreximbank; the more conservative IMF figures are used throughout.

The Ethiopian Tribune · Independent since 2012

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The Wall of Silence

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:50:01 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 51 Second

The Wall of Silence — The Ethiopian Tribune

Europe · The Horn of Africa

The Wall of Silence

A prince of the old Solomonic line carried the case of Ethiopia’s persecuted Orthodox Christians into the European Parliament. The institution has the power to act — and a long practice of looking away.

By E. Frashie

The whole of southern Germany had stopped moving. Storms had taken down the railways, and the keynote speaker was late — he had changed trains four times and called it, when he finally reached the lectern, a small miracle that he had arrived at all. There is a metaphor in this that the afternoon did not need spelling out: a man had come to Brussels to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing. Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate apologised for the delay, thanked the room, and proceeded to lay before it a charge sheet that the institutions of the West have spent the better part of a decade declining to read.

The hearing had been convened in the European Parliament under the intergroup on freedom of religion or belief, and organised by the European Centre for Law and Justice, a faith-aligned legal advocacy body whose report on the subject — bluntly titled The Silent Suffering of the Amhara People in Ethiopia — was first published two years ago and has now been revised. The choice of witness was deliberate. Asfa-Wossen Asserate is a grand-nephew of Haile Selassie and a descendant of a Solomonic line that traces its claim to Aksum; he is also a German-based historian and author whose father was among the sixty senior officials executed on the Black Saturday of November 1974, while the prince, then a student, was stranded abroad. He has spent fifty years in exile. He is, in other words, the rare witness whom even an indifferent chamber finds difficult to wave away.

He had come to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed rail timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing.

His thesis was delivered in the flat, exhausted register of a man who has made the argument before. Ethiopia, he said, is not enduring a civil war but several at once, governed throughout by what he called an ethnic-elite lens that has hollowed out its institutions, its press and its courts. The portion he had come to document was the fate of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church — an institution he dated to the first century, older than the Roman and the Byzantine traditions, custodian of the Books of Enoch and Jubilees and of manuscripts that survive nowhere else on earth. For eight consecutive years, he charged, a coordinated campaign has been waged against Orthodox communities in parts of Ethiopia, and above all in Oromia.

The case, as he made it

The specifics were grim and familiar to anyone who reads the Horn closely: churches burned to their foundations, some of them ancient repositories of manuscript heritage; priests, monks, deacons and nuns killed; crucifixes torn from the necks of worshippers, children among them, in footage that circulates widely and produces no arrests. The victims, the prince noted, are predominantly Amhara, but include Tigrayan, Gurage and Oromo Christians — a point worth holding onto, because it complicates any attempt to file the violence under ethnic politics alone. He reserved his sharpest language for what he described as the state’s capture of the Church itself: the displacement of its canonical leadership, the installation of compliant bishops, and the dismantling of an autonomy that had survived emperors and Marxists alike. An institution that endured the Derg, in his telling, is now being asked to survive the peace.

On the gravest numbers, candour requires the distance the prince himself volunteered. His tally of nearly forty thousand casualties from federal air and drone strikes on Amhara across five months — some fourteen thousand of them dead, with further claims of mass rape, abduction and detention — was drawn, he conceded from the podium, from a single American monitor with few specialists on the country. Those figures sit far above anything in the independently documented record and should travel only with that caveat attached. The corroborated core of his case is narrower and no less damning. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has logged repeated mass killings of Orthodox Christians in the Arsi zone through this year; and in the final days of May, as the nation queued to vote, assailants moved through Arsi again, killing at least thirty-five worshippers and burning the Teleta Saint Gabriel church, a structure that had stood for a hundred and one years. The federal government blames the Oromo Liberation Army and the prime minister offered his condolences; the OLA denies responsibility and accuses forces aligned with the state. The attribution is contested. The dead are not.

An institution that endured the Derg is now being asked to survive the peace.

He widened the lens before closing. He cited the patriarch, Abune Matias, who in early May had pleaded with the country’s leaders not to be ruthless with God’s people. He noted that thousands of schools across Amhara stand damaged or destroyed and that, by the monitors he trusts, only about a fifth of the region’s children now attend one. And he turned, pointedly, to the singer Teddy Afro, whose record Ethiora — briefly the second-ranked album on a global chart — pleaded for reconciliation across faith and tribe, and whose premises were raided and whose managers were jailed for it. A confident state, the prince implied, does not fear a hymn to brotherhood.

Six things he asked for

The prince’s demands to the institutions of the West

The United Nations — an independent Human Rights Council inquiry into the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Oromia, with particular attention to the Arsi massacres, the church burnings and the displacement of clergy.
The United States — to invoke the International Religious Freedom Act and designate Ethiopia a Country of Particular Concern.
The European Union — targeted sanctions on the officials within the government who have enabled, coordinated or shielded the perpetrators.
The African Union — to end its institutional silence and acknowledge that a member state is committing crimes against its own religious minorities.
The international criminal bodies — to begin the systematic documentation of evidence for prosecution, naming the prime minister and his senior security and political officials.
The global media and civil society — to break the wall of silence, sustain coverage, and amplify the voices of those living in fear.

The institution he was addressing

It is the fourth and sixth of these that the afternoon implicitly tested, because they were addressed to the very rooms in which he stood. Brussels is not wholly deaf to the subject: in January the Parliament passed its annual human-rights resolution and, for the first time, named “Christianophobia” as a global pattern. But a resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs. The gap between the two is the whole of his complaint. The European Union has the legal machinery for targeted sanctions and the diplomatic standing to make an African Union member uncomfortable; what it has lacked, on Ethiopia, is the will to spend either.

He ended where such testimony always ends, with the roll-call of the previously ignored. The world expressed its remorse after Rwanda, after Sinjar, after Srebrenica, he said, and remorse that arrives after the fact is not justice; it is paperwork. The Church he had described has outlasted the fall of Aksum, the medieval invasions and the Derg’s Marxist persecution across two thousand years. It would be a particular shame, he suggested, for it to be extinguished now, in plain sight, under the gaze of a world that possesses both the knowledge and the instruments to prevent it. Whether that world reaches for them, or reaches once more for the language of regret, is the only question the hearing actually posed — and the one it adjourned without answering.

A resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs.

◊ ◊ ◊

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The Witness Expelled: Tsimdo, Tigray, and the Geometry of Addis Ababa’s Silence

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:46:03 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 31 Second

By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

On 11 June, Augustine Passilly La Croix‘s 30-year-old Horn of Africa correspondent, resident in Ethiopia since 2023 boarded a departure flight from Addis Ababa under compulsion. She had not resigned. She had not completed her assignment. Ethiopian authorities had revoked both her press accreditation and her residence permit, valid until September 2026, and issued an exit visa that expired within the week. What preceded that departure was a sequence of actions that illuminates, with unusual clarity, the architecture of information control that Abiy Ahmed’s government has constructed around the Tigray theatre and why it has become structurally essential to maintain it.

Passilly had travelled to Shire, in Tigray, between 3 and 6 June, covering growing resident anxiety about the prospect of renewed conflict amid escalating political and military tensions in the region. On 4 June, while still in Shire, she was contacted by a representative of the Ethiopian Media Authority and ordered to return to Addis Ababa immediately. The next available flight was not until the 6th. She complied. Back in Addis, she was summoned to the EMA, where she met with four officials including Director General Haymanot Zeleke and Deputy Director General Yonatan Tesfaye. Officials questioned her decision to have travelled to Tigray amid the political and security tensions that have persisted since the TPLF reinstated the pre-war Tigray regional administration on 5 May. Her accreditation was suspended pending investigation. Two days later, the Immigration and Citizenship Services revoked both accreditation and residency. She departed Ethiopia on 11 June.

No formal charge. No public explanation. A journalist basing her travel on a region officially accessible to foreign correspondents — access to Tigray, which had been restricted during parts of the post-war period, was reopened to foreign correspondents in 2024 was nonetheless expelled for using it. The message is structural, not procedural: the right to access and the exercise of that right are not the same thing, and the government reserves the right to punish the latter regardless of what its own regulations say about the former.

What She Was Covering — and Why It Matters

To understand the expulsion, one must understand what is happening in Tigray and what Addis Ababa most fears being reported from Shire.

The 2022 Pretoria Agreement between the government and the TPLF has unravelled in recent weeks. The TPLF has moved to restore its regional authority by reconstituting the pre-war legislative council, subsequently electing party chairman Debretsion Gebremichael as regional president. This followed the federal government unilaterally renewing the term of interim regional administration president General Tadesse Worede. During early May 2026, the TPLF replaced the interim post-Tigray War administration in Mekelle a development that has significantly heightened tensions with the federal government, as the TPLF’s attempt to reassert control over Tigray is being seen as a direct challenge to Abiy Ahmed’s rule.

It is within this context of a shattered peace framework and a contested regional government that Passilly arrived in Shire on the eve of the federal snap election of 1 June, from which Tigray was again excluded. Despite both the government and the TPLF not favouring a formal return to war, the risks of renewed conflict are significant. The TPLF’s unilateral assertion of regional authority leaves little room for the federal government to back down without appearing weak. Shire, sitting close to Tigray’s northern and western perimeters, is precisely where the geography of potential conflict converges. A French correspondent asking residents about the prospect of war in that location was, from Addis Ababa’s vantage point, not doing journalism. She was mapping the edges of a secret.

Tsimdo: The Coalition Abiy Cannot Name Aloud

The deeper reason why the Tigray theatre has become so ferociously guarded from foreign press is the emergence of what the Ethiopian government has labelled the Tsimdo alliance a coalition of forces increasingly coordinating against the Prosperity Party government and, by extension, against Abiy Ahmed personally.

The TPLF has reinforced relationships with Eritrea and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), both of which have strained relations with the Ethiopian government. Eritrean forces operate in Tigray, and Eritrea provides the TPLF with its only accessible allied border. Tigrayan fighters based in eastern Sudan have fought alongside the SAF. A recent coordination meeting in Port Sudan brought together Ethiopian opposition groups with pro-SAF Sudanese and Eritrean participants.

Ethiopia’s government sees this ‘Tsimdo’ alliance as a threat, concerned about the risk to its border areas with Eritrea and Sudan, including Western Tigray known as Welkait by the Amhara and Benishangul-Gumuz. ENDF officials warned the foreign diplomatic community that any attempt to operationalise the Tsimdo initiative would face retaliation from Ethiopia, describing it as a threat to national sovereignty linked to opposition.

The geometry here is significant. Tsimdo is not a formal military structure with a unified command. It is better understood as an alignment of adversarial interests: the Debretsion-led TPLF, Eritrea under Isaias Afwerki whose own strategic calculations have been in flux and the Sudanese Armed Forces, which has been fighting Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces in a civil war that has drawn in, on the other side, both Ethiopia and the UAE. These actors are more widely aligned with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, and have sought to counter the growing regional influence of the UAE and Israel, who count Ethiopia and Somaliland among their partners.

The alliance is held together not by ideological coherence but by a shared opposition to Abiy’s regional project and, more broadly, to the UAE-anchored economic and security architecture that Addis Ababa has been building since the Abraham Accords era. To report from Shire to talk to residents about what they fear and what they know is to potentially document the operational texture of this coalition. That is what the EMA moved to prevent.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

The Passilly case is not an aberration. It is the latest instalment in a systematic effort to deny international media access to the conflict zones that would most embarrass Addis Ababa.

In February 2026, an accredited AFP journalist was barred from boarding a flight from Addis Ababa to Shire after airport security personnel said he lacked authorisation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That restriction followed Ethiopia’s decision not to renew the accreditation of three Reuters journalists after the agency published a report alleging the presence of a training base for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces on Ethiopian territory. The Reuters story was not a rumour: Ethiopia has reportedly facilitated support to the SAF’s enemies in Sudan the RSF and SPLM-N and has, according to Reuters and Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, provided a military training camp for the RSF in the Benishangul-Gumuz border region. Stripping Reuters of accreditation was not a rebuttal. It was an eviction.

The Committee to Protect Journalists described the Reuters accreditation revocations as a violation of press freedom and documented what it called increasing restrictions targeting international media in Ethiopia. In December 2024, local journalists working for Deutsche Welle were permanently suspended. Accreditation renewals for BBC correspondents were denied. And in February 2026, Addis Standard and Wazema Radio had their licences revoked.

Addis Standard, the most credible independent Anglophone outlet covering Ethiopian affairs is currently engaged in active legal proceedings before the Federal Court over the EMA’s regulatory conduct, with the case adjourned to 24 June. The Passilly expulsion lands in this context not as an isolated administrative decision but as a statement of intent: the government will protect the Tigray information environment from scrutiny at any cost, using whatever regulatory mechanism is available.

The Logic of the Blackout

There is an internal logic to all of this that deserves to be stated plainly.

Abiy Ahmed is seeking an election victory that enables his ruling Prosperity Party to reaffirm its mandate. It has also been suggested that an electoral victory could offer Abiy a route to enacting constitutional reforms that would strengthen central authority including creating an executive presidency and altering Ethiopia’s ethnic federal structure. A return to war in Tigray, or the exposure of Ethiopia’s proxy activities in Sudan, would undermine the international legitimacy that makes that reform project viable. The EU has recently resumed direct budgetary support to Ethiopia. The United States has softened its arms export ban. These are the diplomatic dividends Abiy is spending and which documented atrocities, visible military escalation, or RSF training footage would instantly revoke.

The blackout over Tigray is therefore not primarily about military secrecy. It is about protecting a political economy built on selective international engagement. Augustine Passilly was expelled not because she had done something wrong under Ethiopian law. She was expelled because she had gone somewhere that the government cannot afford to have witnessed.

What the Ethiopian Tribune Holds

For those of us who cover this region, the Passilly case carries a specific resonance. The La Croix correspondent was not doing anything we would not do. She travelled to a tense northern town to ask residents whether they were afraid of another war. That is the irreducible minimum of journalism in a conflict zone.

The expulsion of a foreign correspondent a French citizen, accredited, resident, legally present represents the clearest possible statement that Addis Ababa intends to manage the Tigray narrative unilaterally, and that it is willing to burn diplomatic goodwill with European partners to do so. That the EMA has not yet offered a public explanation only deepens the signal: they do not feel compelled to justify themselves.

The Tsimdo alliance, whether or not it fully materialises as a military coalition, has already achieved one thing: it has forced the Ethiopian government into a defensive posture so rigid that a 30-year-old reporter covering civilian anxiety in Shire is considered a threat to national sovereignty. When a state reaches that point, the thing it is protecting is not security. It is impunity.

News and reports compiled from available online sources, including Addis Standard, The Eastleigh Voice, Chatham House, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Al Jazeera, and the Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA). All sourced material has been independently verified where possible.

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The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:05:37 +0000

Read Time:17 Minute, 2 Second

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE Election Analysis — June 2026

The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls, the National Election Board is still totting up the figures, the system that produces such lopsided results remains exactly as it was, and a flank of the opposition has pre-emptively disowned a parliament it may yet have the numbers to sit in.

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Ethiopia’s seventh general election was, by the standards its own organisers set, a triumph of scale. Over 50 million registered voters; more than 10,900 candidates from 47 parties; a national holiday declared to encourage turnout. By the standards anyone else might apply, it has been a triumph of something else entirely: the art of taking a very long time to arrive at a very predictable answer.

Voting closed on 1 June. By NEBE’s own admission that evening, counting was still under way in Sidama, Gambella, Amhara and Somali, and final turnout figures had not been consolidated. On 6 June, the Board reported that 825 of 1,138 constituencies had declared results, citing the distance between polling stations and constituency centres and the sheer number of candidates as reasons for the lag. On 9 June a full week after polling day internally displaced people and military personnel cast their votes in a special round that, by NEBE’s own insiders, threatened to delay preliminary results still further. By 10 June, 1,008 constituencies had reached the national verification centre, with 446 of 501 House of Peoples’ Representatives seats and 562 of 638 regional council seats logged for “final scrutiny.” A day later, both NEBE and the African Union observer mission had pencilled in 11 June for the announcement of final results.

None of this should be read as evidence of unusual incompetence. It is, if anything, on brand. In 2005, results were delayed for weeks while complaints of vote-rigging were investigated investigations the opposition’s own representatives called “rigged from the start,” alleging their observers had been “harassed, threatened, barred and killed.” In 2010, the electoral board rejected calls for a re-run despite the ruling coalition and its allies taking 534 of 537 seats, a margin opposition leaders said “could not be accomplished without cheating.” The pattern across two decades is not that Ethiopia’s election commission is slow because it is overwhelmed. It is slow because slowness is the institutional environment in which adjustments, where they occur, are made and because nobody with the power to speed it up has ever had an interest in doing so.

THE MODERNISATION THAT WASN’T

What makes the 2026 cycle different is the sheer quantity of money spent trying to fix exactly this problem. The “Strengthening Ethiopia’s Elections for Democratic Sustainability” programme (SEEDS2) a multi-donor basket funded by Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Government of Ethiopia, administered through the UNDP was built explicitly around “electoral digitalisation.” UNDP signed a $40 million project document with NEBE to build “institutional and logistical capacity.” Japan contributed a further $3 million in equipment and systems “for the upcoming 7th General Election.” Ireland signed a separate €700,000 agreement aimed specifically at helping NEBE “adopt new technologies to lead a transparent and efficient electoral process.” The EU and Germany, via the KfW development bank, funded a parallel programme EURECS+ delivered jointly with UNDP and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, providing “further logistical and procurement support” to NEBE’s operations.

The visible product of all this is Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) the digital platform NEBE unveiled in January 2026 described at launch as “the first time the country is fully integrating digital technology into the election process,” covering voter and candidate registration, election management, and, in the words of the Federal Supreme Court’s president, present at the launch, intended to “enhance transparency and public trust.”

What Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) did not touch, it turns out, is the part of the process that actually generates disputes. Registration, candidate vetting, the ballot-order lottery all digitalised, all relatively uncontroversial. Counting, constituency-level tabulation, and the transfer of results to Addis Ababa for “verification” all still conducted in essentially the form they took twenty years ago: paper postings at polling stations, physical transmission to constituency offices, and a national tally centre that receives results in batches over a period of days, occasionally weeks. Opposition parties identified this gap before the vote was even held. In a joint statement issued in January, an eight-party coalition including the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), Hibir Ethiopia and the Wolayta National Movement rejected what they called an “unaudited digital election system,” accusing the Board of “uncoordinated increases in council seats and a lack of transparency.”

There are two ways to read this gap, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is straightforwardly bureaucratic: a decade of donor funding produced visible, demonstrable, photographable modernisation apps, registration drives, ballot lotteries because those are the outputs donors can point to in their own annual reports, while the unglamorous, politically fraught work of building an auditable, end-to-end digital chain of custody for actual vote counts was either never prioritised or actively resisted by an institution with no incentive to make its own discretion harder to exercise. The second reading is less generous: that a tabulation process kept manual, opaque and slow is not a failure of modernisation but its precondition. An auditable digital count would generate a data trail far harder to adjust at the margins than a process whose authoritative record exists only in the moment a regional official reads a number aloud to a colleague in Addis Ababa. Either way, the tens of millions of dollars spent since 2019 modernising Ethiopia’s elections have left the single most consequential five days of the electoral calendar the count almost exactly as they found it.

THE ARITHMETIC THAT NEVER CHANGES

None of this would matter nearly as much under a different electoral system. Ethiopia’s first-past-the-post arrangement, inherited from the 1995 constitution and never seriously revisited despite two decades of promises, converts even modest vote margins into landslide seat counts. In 2021, the Prosperity Party took 96.8% of federal parliamentary seats from roughly 90% of the vote itself a serious overcorrection, but nothing compared to the distortions at constituency level. In Addis Ababa that same year, opposition parties collectively won 32% of the vote and not a single seat. In 2015, the Semayawi Party took 16% of the vote in the capital and, again, nothing. In 2005, opposition parties won around 38% of the national vote and ended up with a small fraction of that share in seats.

The reform conversation is not new, and it has never gone anywhere. After the unrest of 2016, the government promised to revisit the electoral system; no measure followed. Years earlier, during the EPRDF-era political parties’ negotiation forum, the ruling party itself proposed a mixed system, 90% first-past-the-post, 10% proportional which would have required expanding the House of Peoples’ Representatives from 550 to 657 seats and amending the constitution. Even that modest concession was shelved. Academic studies of the system, going back to at least 2017, have concluded that first-past-the-post is “ill-suited to Ethiopia’s current needs and realities” and that a shift toward proportional representation the system used by roughly 130 countries, against fewer than 55 still using FPTP would produce more inclusive, more stable outcomes even under identical levels of political repression.

The reason none of this has moved is not mysterious. A ruling party that can convert a plurality into a supermajority under FPTP has no rational incentive to adopt a system that would convert the same plurality into, at best, a comfortable majority and, at worst, a coalition negotiation. Proportional representation would not, on its own, make Ethiopian elections free or fair, repression, detention and restricted media access would still shape who could compete. But it would make the result of that repression visible in a way FPTP currently launders into invisibility: a Prosperity Party that wins 60% of the vote under PR gets roughly 60% of the seats, prompting awkward questions about the other 40%. Under FPTP, that same 60% becomes 95% of the seats, and the other 40% becomes a rounding error. Donor money has, for fifteen years, flowed toward the parts of Ethiopia’s electoral architecture that are easiest to fund and least likely to threaten this arrangement. The one structural change that would actually rebalance outcomes was never going to be financed by the institution whose entire utility to the ruling coalition depends on its absence.

“WE CAME TO DOCUMENT, NOT TO WIN”

It is against this backdrop that the position taken by the Coalition for Ethiopian Unity becomes legible not as an eccentric or self-defeating gesture, but as possibly the most coherent response on offer. In an interview given after the vote, Mister Silassie Tamerat, Secretary General of both the Coalition and the EPRP, laid out a position that amounts to participation without consent: contesting the election while refusing, in advance, to recognise its outcome.

The Coalition and the EPRP had set out roughly seven preconditions before the vote chiefly concerning media independence, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the fighting in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia. “Absolutely none” were met, Tamerat said; if anything, conditions deteriorated, with media outlets shut down, journalists abducted, and election debates censored or cut from broadcast. The decision to participate anyway was not unanimous. Within the EPRP’s Central Committee, a majority judged that continued participation “exposing the fraudulent electoral process from within” while “protecting the security and survival of our party organisation” outweighed the principle of boycott. MistreSilasie by her own account, was outvoted, and deferred to the decision as a matter of internal democratic discipline.

What followed the vote was the more consequential decision: a declaration that any Coalition or EPRP candidates who won seats would not take them up. The reasoning rests on a distinction between participating in an election and recognising a parliament.

“Entering a parliament that is born from a completely fraudulent and illegitimate process would imply that we recognise the parliament as legally and legitimately established. We do not believe that.”
— MistreSilasie Tamerat, Secretary General, Coalition for Ethiopian Unity / EPRP

She pointed to the precedent of past opposition MPs “stripped of their immunity and thrown into prison simply because they held a dissenting political viewpoint” as evidence that the inside-the-system strategy had already been tried, and had “brought no real change.” Sitting in the chamber and “declaring our people are suffering,” in her words, “does not bring change.”

Asked whether refusing seats amounted to disrespecting the voters who cast ballots for Coalition candidates, Mistre-Silassie’s answer was unambiguous about priorities, if not entirely reassuring on the question of mandate: the Coalition, she said, had announced this position before polling day “even if we won a majority, we had no desire to enter parliament under these conditions” and had entered the race “merely to gather hard evidence,” not to contest for seats. Critics who suggest the rejection is sour grapes over an anticipated loss get short shrift: “We did not enter this process expecting to win… This has nothing to do with winning or losing.”

A COALITION OF ONE MIND, MOSTLY

The recent interview of Mistre-Silassie with Ethiopian insider also surfaced and sought to manage reports of a split within the Coalition. The president of the Amhara Regional United Movement, one constituent member, had told the press the election had been conducted “smoothly and in a good manner” an assessment, Mistre-Silassie noted pointedly, that was “heavily amplified” by state-affiliated media. She was unambiguous in disowning the remark: the individual “was not authorised or delegated by the Coalition,” the Coalition’s “core principles” remained intact, and the organisation was “internally purifying” its ranks rather than fracturing. Any elected candidate who attempted to take a seat under the Coalition’s banner without its blessing, she said, would face “immediate” disciplinary and legal consequences.

It is worth taking at face value Mistre-Silassie’s own account of what worries her most because it is not, by her telling, the regime.

“Dealing with the tyranny of the ruling regime is something we expected. What deeply concerns and threatens to break my hope is the severe fragmentation within the opposition itself — fractured, petty, and constantly turning on one another.”
Mistre-Silassie Tamerat

A planned peaceful protest for 30 April for which, under the constitution, only notification rather than permission was required was shelved for “logistical pressures and constraints” after a decision to act collectively rather than unilaterally; it never materialised, nor did any other rally. The EPRP, Mistre-Silassie said, held back its own planned action “to respect the principle of collective coalition solidarity.” The through-line across both the Amhara Regional United Movement episode and the failed protests is the same: a coalition whose member parties cannot reliably act in concert is, for practical purposes, several smaller oppositions wearing one name a condition that costs the ruling coalition nothing and the opposition everything.

THE VERDICT ON THE VERDICT

On the international response, Mistre-Silassie’s framing inverts the usual Mistre-Silassie courtesies. Any observer mission that grants the election legitimacy, she argued, is “actively participating in prolonging the misery and suffering of the Ethiopian people.” She drew a distinction between observers who acknowledged the vote merely “took place” reserving final judgment, as the EU did, for a longer review and any body offering outright congratulations, noting with something close to satisfaction that many embassies briefed by the Coalition on election day had so far stayed silent. “We view that silence as a major diplomatic achievement for our cause.”

She was careful, notably, not to indict NEBE’s staff wholesale acknowledging “certain individual officials” who “genuinely tried their best to ensure a clean process” while insisting the institution as a whole had failed systemically, operating, like every other institution in the country, under “the suffocating influence and control of the ruling regime.” The war is the backdrop against which she places the entire exercise: Tigray “plunged into conflict for a second time,” most of Amhara unable to vote due to active combat, Oromia’s security situation outside major cities “non-existent.” Against that, talk of “free and fair” becomes, in her telling, close to obscene: “citizens are actively dying in a war zone and screaming for the killings to stop rather than asking for voting cards.”

On armed resistance, Tamerat drew a careful line denying coordination with armed groups while declining to condemn them, and issuing what reads as a warning dressed as an observation: “Every single time you violently close the doors to peaceful political struggle, you automatically open the doors to armed resistance… No one picks up a gun and flees to the jungle to die or kill out of choice; they do it out of absolute desperation when all peaceful options are stripped away.”

THE SYSTEM’S MOST DURABLE OUTPUT

Put the three threads together and a single picture emerges, and it is not primarily a picture of fraud in the narrow sense ballot-stuffing, doctored tallies, the things that require forensic proof. It is a picture of a system whose component parts are individually defensible and collectively self-reinforcing. The count is slow because the institution that runs it has never had to make it fast: under first-past-the-post, even a contested, drawn-out tabulation poses no existential risk to the ruling coalition’s seat total, so there is no urgency to fix what donors have spent fifteen years and tens of millions of dollars failing to fix because the fix that would matter, electoral reform, was never on the table to begin with. And the opposition’s response to all of this is not unified resistance but fragmentation: a Coalition that agreed on seven preconditions, watched none of them met, then split three ways over what to do next participate to expose, boycott to preserve legal standing, or some uneasy combination of both, followed by a post-hoc refusal to take the seats that participation might have won.

That fragmentation is not incidental to the system described above. It may be its most reliable product. A ruling party facing a unified opposition demanding proportional representation, an end to detentions, and international observers with teeth would face a genuine cost-benefit calculation. A ruling party facing a half-dozen opposition factions arguing among themselves about whether occupying five parliamentary seats constitutes principled resistance or collaboration faces no such calculation at all. Tamerat’s own diagnosis that internal opposition fragmentation, not regime pressure, is what “keeps her up at night” may be the most analytically honest sentence to emerge from Ethiopia’s seventh general election. Everything else, the slow count included, was entirely predictable.

THE REGION THE ELECTION FORGOT

For TPLF supporters, the chronology of NEBE’s dealings with their party reads less like routine regulation than personal score-settling. Birtukan Mideksa rose to prominence as a leader of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy in the disputed 2005 election conducted under an EPRDF government in which the TPLF was the dominant faction and was subsequently imprisoned, controversially re-arrested after a conditional pardon, and spent years in American exile before Abiy brought her home in 2018 to chair the very board that had once certified the election that led to her imprisonment. When NEBE, under her chairmanship, cancelled the TPLF’s registration in January 2021 weeks after the federal offensive into Tigray began TPLF sympathisers read the timing as more than coincidence: a woman the old TPLF-dominated order had jailed was now the one stripping that same party of its legal existence. The institutional posture has since outlasted her TPLF’s final de-registration came in May 2025 under her successor, Melatework Hailu but the original grievance, whatever its merits, has never gone away in Mekelle.

Its consequences are visible in real time. Tigray did not participate in the 1 June election at all: Debretsion Gebremichael announced in May that no vote would be held in the region, arguing large parts of it remain outside TPLF administration and that Tigray’s territory is “incomplete” pending unresolved disputes itself a legacy of NEBE’s 2021 decision and the deregistration that followed. While NEBE in Addis Ababa spent the second week of June finalising a result that hands the Prosperity Party its expected supermajority, a very different kind of delegation was landing in Mekelle. On 11 June, the African Union’s Olusegun Obasanjo one of the architects of the 2022 Pretoria Agreement flew in with British and Australian diplomats for emergency talks with Debretsion, who has installed himself as Tigray’s regional president following the TPLF’s unilateral revival of the pre-war regional council, a move the federal government has refused to recognise.

The same day, in Al Jazeera, Getachew Reda the former TPLF spokesman who broke with the party, led the interim administration, and now advises Abiy on regional affairs co-wrote with the federal government’s own Pretoria negotiator, Redwan Hussein, a piece warning that the “rump TPLF,” in what they called an Eritrean-backed “Tsimdo alliance,” had “openly abrogated the Pretoria Agreement and is now gearing up for active and open hostility against the federal government.” Whatever one makes of that framing and it is very much the view from the side that now controls Addis Ababa’s narrative on Tigray, not TPLF’s the fact that the AU’s most senior mediator felt the need to be in Mekelle that same week speaks for itself.

The result is a grim symmetry. Ethiopia just completed an election in which the region with the most unresolved grievance against the federal state didn’t vote at all, conducted by an institution whose history with that region’s dominant party is, by the account of that party’s supporters, inseparable from the personal history of the woman who once ran it. The seventh general election may produce a parliament. Whether it produces a country at peace with itself by the time that parliament sits is, as of this week, genuinely an open question.

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The Church They Cannot Name

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:10:29 +0000

Read Time:23 Minute, 23 Second

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Analysis & Commentary | Horn of Africa Affairs

SPECIAL REPORT: FAITH, ETHNICITY & ERASURE

The Church They Cannot Name

How the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church became a target without a headline and why the massacres in Arsi indicted not only the perpetrators, but the silence of the world

4 June 2026

WHEN a ten-year-old boy was shot in a teff field in the Merti district of Arsi, his photograph travelled briefly across Ethiopian social media before disappearing entirely from the international press. His leg was amputated. His name was not reported by the BBC. Al Jazeera did not dispatch a correspondent. CNN did not file a segment. The child survived; the silence was complete.

The date was November 2025. In the weeks surrounding that shooting, more than 140 Orthodox Christian civilians had been killed in the Sherka district of Arsi alone since September. By late October, coordinated attacks across Guna, Merti, Sherka and Holonto districts, carried out on the night of the 24th to the 25th had left at least 24 dead in a single assault, including a toddler and an 86-year-old. The total across October reached 33 confirmed dead. Church representatives in the Arsi archdiocese told reporters that over 200 believers had been killed in Merti district in recent years. Local youths who attempted to share information about the killings were subsequently arrested.

The Oromia regional administration’s response was immediate and unambiguous. The Arsi Zone Administrator, Ibrahim Kedir, declared that no one had been killed. The Oromia regional police described the area as ‘peaceful.’ The Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia, dispatched to investigate, released a report claiming the victims ‘were not from one faith group’ a formulation that enraged the dioceses in the region and was characterised by prominent Ethiopian political figures as an attempt to dissolve the religious character of what had occurred into a neutralised, depoliticised abstraction.

When governments deny the dead and international media looks away, silence does not merely describe an absence. It becomes a policy.

This essay is concerned with that silence not primarily as a moral failure, though it is certainly that, but as a structural and politically explicable phenomenon. To understand why Arsi received no meaningful international coverage, one must first understand what the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church represents in the contemporary political imagination of Ethiopia’s ruling dispensation, and why it has become strategically advantageous for multiple actors domestic and foreign to render Orthodox Christian suffering legible only through the distorting lens of Amhara ethnic politics.

I. THE LABEL AS WEAPON

Professor Girma Berhanu, writing in these pages on 3 June 2026, observed that a painful and recurring pattern had emerged across major international outlets: when Ethiopia is discussed, Amhara perspectives are minimised, generalised, or excluded. The observation is precise, but the problem it diagnoses runs deeper than representation. The mechanism by which Amhara voices are excluded from international discourse is inseparable from the mechanism by which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is persistently mis-categorised and it is this mis-categorisation that makes violence against Orthodox Christians so consistently invisible.

The EOTC is, by any historical reckoning, a pan-Ethiopian institution. Founded in the fourth century, it predates the category of ‘Amhara’ as a political identity by more than a millennium. Its liturgical tradition, the Ge’ez rite, is shared across Tigrayan, Amhara, and many Oromo communities. Approximately forty-five per cent of the Oromo population is Christian, and Orthodox Christians account for a substantial proportion of that figure. The Church’s membership spans ethnic and linguistic lines in ways that the contemporary ethnic-federal architecture of Ethiopia is systematically unable to acknowledge.

Yet the political weaponisation of ethnicity since the early 1990s has produced a powerful counter-narrative: that the EOTC is, at its core, a vehicle of Amhara cultural supremacy, a relic of imperial domination that must be reformed, broken, or subordinated to achieve genuine multiethnic democracy. This framing, promoted by elements within Oromo ethnonationalist discourse and by certain international analysts sympathetic to it, has served a double function. It delegitimises Orthodox Christian civic action as ethnic chauvinism rather than religious conviction, and it provides intellectual cover for state and non-state actors engaged in what can only be described as targeted violence against the Church and its adherents.

The consequences are empirically documented. A 2025 research paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Humanities concluded that the weaponisation of ethnic politics since 1994 had enabled religion to be instrumentalised, resulting in ‘the demonisation of the Amhara people and, by extension, the EOTC.’ A January 2026 Rift Valley Institute report noted that the security crisis had ‘disproportionately affected new regional minorities, in particular the Amharas living outside the Amhara region and Orthodox Christians, where they are a religious minority,’ and linked this directly to the political logic of ethnonational insurgency particularly in Oromia, where violence was being ‘strategically deployed to disrupt political alliances.’

Yet this body of evidence has produced almost no sustained international journalism. The question is why.

II. ARSI AS MICROCOSM

The Arsi zone of Oromia is not, for those familiar with Ethiopian ecclesiastical history, an incidental location. It is part of the Arsi Archdiocese, one of the most historic and deeply rooted of the Church’s regional structures. Orthodox Christians in Arsi are not recent settlers; many are the descendants of communities who have inhabited the region for centuries, their faith woven into the landscape through churches, monasteries, and the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.

What occurred in Arsi between September and November 2025 was not, according to multiple independent sources, a spontaneous outbreak of violence. It was sustained, coordinated, and geographically targeted. The attacks in Sherka, Guna, Merti and Holonto were carried out by armed groups operating with a consistency of method targeting farmers in their fields, entering homes at night, shooting worshippers that left church representatives describing the pattern in terms of deliberate ethnic and religious cleansing. The Oromo Liberation Army, which has operated extensively in Oromia since at least 2018, was identified in multiple reports as responsible for or implicated in the attacks.

In February 2026, the violence continued. On the 26th of that month, armed attackers struck a market in East Arsi, killing twenty Orthodox Christians and one Muslim guard. Two days later, gunmen entered a church and opened fire on those gathered for worship. By April, the International Christian Concern was documenting a pattern of killings, looting and forced displacement that it characterised not as isolated incidents but as a growing and repeated programme of violence. Thousands of Orthodox Christians were by that point displaced from their homes across East Arsi Zone.

The Crown Council of Ethiopia, in a statement issued on 31 October 2025, noted with particular gravity that ‘in recent years, the targeted killing of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia has become a regular occurrence,’ citing additionally the massacre of monks at the Debre Kewakibt Ziquala monastery in June 2025, where four monks were abducted and killed. The statement called upon authorities to protect the faithful from ‘those elements who continue to persecute and kill people, targeting them on the basis of religion, ethnicity or any other criteria.’ No major international news organisation covered the Crown Council’s statement.

The Oromia authorities said ‘no one was killed.’ The international press agreed, not by disputing the claim, but by ignoring the question entirely.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, no radical body, confirmed in November 2025 that it had gathered information on killings in East Arsi’s Guna, Merti, Sherka and Holonto districts, and that five further farmers had been killed in Merti in early November, one of them a ten-year-old child. It confirmed that armed groups were responsible. The Inter-Religious Council’s counter-report, attempting to muddy the religious character of the targeting, was denounced by the affected dioceses as an exercise in institutional erasure.

None of this, not the numbers, not the official confirmation, not the children in hospital, not the displaced thousands generated a single substantive segment on the BBC’s Africa coverage, on Al Jazeera’s Ethiopia desk, or on CNN’s international broadcasting. The question of why requires more than an observation about editorial oversight.

III. THE POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE OF INVISIBILITY

There is no single conspiracy that explains the erasure of Orthodox Christian suffering in Arsi from international consciousness. What there is, instead, is a convergence of structural incentives, ideological assumptions, and access dynamics that together produce a reliable outcome: the disappearance of this violence from the global record.

The first and most important factor is the framing problem identified above. Because the EOTC has been successfully coded in much international analysis as an ‘Amhara institution,’ violence against its members is perceived however unconsciously as an episode in the ethnic conflict between Amhara and Oromo communities. This coding converts what is, at its core, a programme of religiously and ethnically targeted killing into a ‘both sides’ conflict, one that international editors have learned to treat with the caution they apply to all contested ethnic disputes. The victims become combatants by proxy; their faith becomes a political faction; and the massacre becomes an episode in a war, rather than a crime against a congregation.

The second factor is access. The Oromia regional government, under the political architecture of Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party, has not been hospitable to independent journalism in areas where OLA-linked violence is occurring. Journalists who have attempted to report from Sherka, Merti or Holonto have encountered military checkpoints, obstruction, and the risk that local sources will be arrested as indeed happened to youths who shared information about the November killings. Without boots on the ground, international desks default to official sources; and the official Oromia sources were saying, unambiguously, that nothing had happened.

The third factor is what might be called the denominational blind spot. It is a fact, uncomfortable for some, that violence against Orthodox Christian communities in Africa receives systematically less international media attention than equivalent violence against Muslim communities, or against Protestant minorities in authoritarian contexts. This is not primarily a conspiracy; it reflects the distribution of journalistic focus, the preoccupations of editorial boards, and the particular attentiveness that certain NGO networks have cultivated with major news organisations. Orthodox Christianity is perceived, in much of the global North, as a conservative and somewhat archaic tradition. This perception colours coverage in ways that its practitioners rarely have the platform to contest.

The fourth factor is one that Professor Berhanu’s essay illuminates with particular clarity: the structural exclusion of Amhara voices from the panels, briefings and expert circuits that feed international journalism. When Al Jazeera assembles a panel on Ethiopian democracy, and no Amhara representative is present, the conversation proceeds without the constituency that has been most directly subjected to organised violence under the current political order. When Mehdi Hasan interviews Getachew Reda on the future of Ethiopia, and the Amhara dimension of the post-Tigray settlement is not raised, the absence shapes what millions of viewers understand to be the relevant landscape of Ethiopian politics. The silence in Arsi and the silence on international panels are not separate phenomena. They are the same phenomenon.

Two silences, one structure: the voice not invited to the panel and the village not visited by the correspondent are governed by the same logic of erasure.

IV. THE PROSPERITY PARTY AND THE ASSAULT ON THE CHURCH

To understand Arsi fully, one must situate it within the broader strategy of the ruling Prosperity Party towards the EOTC, a strategy that has proceeded along two tracks simultaneously. The first is institutional: the engineering, in January 2023, of an illegal parallel synod in Oromia and the Southern Nations, orchestrated by three bishops led by Abune Sawiros and, according to extensive and credible reporting, backed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inner circle. The goal of this schism was the fragmentation of the Church along ethnic lines, converting it from a pan-Ethiopian institution into a contested space divided between an ‘Oromia Church’ and a rump ‘Amhara Church.’ This effort ultimately failed, defeated by mass non-violent civic action from Orthodox Christians across the country. But the attempt was revelatory.

The second track is security: the failure, whether through incapacity or design, to protect Orthodox Christian communities in Oromia from the militia violence that has killed hundreds in recent years. EOTC leaders from Arsi and Bale reported more than 200 Orthodox killed since 2024, communities frequently described in official and semi-official communications as ‘Amhara Christians’ a label that, once applied, removes them from the category of Ethiopian citizens requiring state protection and relocates them in the category of ethnic encroachers whose presence in Oromo land is itself a political provocation.

This is the mechanism by which the label becomes lethal. When an Orthodox Christian farmer in Arsi is killed, and the official response characterises the dead as ‘Amhara Christians in Oromia,’ the state has not merely misidentified the victim. It has pre-authorised the crime by establishing that the victim’s presence was itself anomalous, and that the violence visited upon them is a legible if regrettable consequence of ethnic geographic politics. The victim is twice erased: first in death, then in classification.

This logic is not unique to Ethiopia. It is the grammar of all ethnic cleansing operations in the modern era, from the Balkans to Myanmar: the target community is first categorised as alien, then their victimisation is absorbed into the narrative of an ethnic dispute, and finally the international community, confronted with a ‘both sides’ story, opts for studied neutrality. The EOTC and its communities in Arsi are living through a version of this grammar. The unique feature of the Ethiopian case is that the Church against which it is being deployed is among the oldest continuous Christian institutions on earth.

V. WHAT THE WORLD CHOSE NOT TO SEE

There is a standard objection to the argument presented here, and it deserves a direct response. That objection runs as follows: Ethiopia is a country with multiple simultaneous crises the Tigray war, the Amhara conflict, the Oromo insurgency, the Somali border tensions. International media has limited bandwidth; not every atrocity can receive equal coverage; and the absence of reporting on Arsi reflects resource constraints rather than ideological selection.

This objection would be more persuasive if the same standard were applied consistently. It was not applied to the June 2025 bombing of the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, Syria, which received extensive and immediate coverage across every major Western outlet, with detailed analysis, expert commentary, and on-the-ground reporting within hours. That attack killed thirty people. In Arsi, over a comparable period, more than 140 were confirmed dead in Sherka alone and the silence was total.

The differential is not explained by resource constraints. It is explained by the differential legibility of victims. Syrian Orthodox Christians killed by an ISIS-linked bomber fit a recognisable international narrative: the endangered Christian minority, the Islamist perpetrator, the secular state struggling to contain extremism. This narrative has an established audience, an established set of NGO interlocutors, and an established emotional grammar in Western journalism. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians killed by OLA-linked militants in a region governed by a ruling party whose leader received the Nobel Peace Prize do not fit that narrative. Their suffering requires context that most editors are unwilling to supply and most correspondents have not been briefed to seek.

This is what Professor Berhanu means when he writes that ‘silence can become part of the story’ and that ‘selective attention can become a form of erasure.’ The erasure of Arsi from the international record is not a passive omission. It is an active consequence of the architecture of international attention and that architecture, as he rightly notes, shapes diplomatic conversations, humanitarian priorities, and historical memory.

It is worth noting, in this context, the tribute Professor Berhanu pays to photojournalist Jemal Countess and journalist Jeff Pearce individuals who have pursued the truth about anti-Orthodox and anti-Amhara violence in Ethiopia at personal and professional cost. That such figures must be mentioned as exceptions, rare exemplars of integrity in a field that has largely looked away, is itself a measure of how far the norm has departed from what journalism is supposed to be.

VI. THE OLDEST CHURCH IN THE WORLD AND THE NEWEST SILENCE

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is not a political party. It is not a militia. It is not an instrument of any ethnic group’s hegemony, however vigorously that claim is prosecuted by its enemies. It is a living, ancient institution with a canon of scripture that predates the Arab conquest of North Africa, with illuminated manuscripts that predate the printing press, with a monastic tradition in Lalibela and on Lake Tana that has preserved theological and cultural knowledge through every catastrophe that the Horn of Africa has endured over seventeen centuries.

That this institution is under assault through schism, through land confiscation, through the killing of its priests and monks and farmers and children in their fields is a matter of historical record. That this assault has been made possible, in part, by an international discourse that has accepted the framing of the Church as ‘the Amhara institution’ is a matter of consequence that extends beyond Ethiopia’s borders.

Because if the oldest church in sub-Saharan Africa can be rendered invisible by the application of an ethnic label if two hundred dead in a single district of Oromia can be waved away by a regional administrator saying ‘no one was killed,’ and the world’s major newsrooms can nod along in silence then we have learned something important about the limits of the international community’s commitment to the protection of religious minorities and the documentation of atrocity.

What occurred in Arsi between September 2025 and April 2026 was not a communal conflict. It was not a land dispute. It was not the regrettable by-product of a complex civil war in which all sides bear responsibility. It was, as the Church’s own representatives described it, the targeted and sustained killing of a community on the basis of their religion and their ethnicity a campaign of elimination conducted in broad daylight, denied by the authorities responsible for the area’s security, and ignored by the institutions that exist, in theory, to bear witness.

The witnesses who did speak the dioceses of Arsi, the Crown Council, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, the International Christian Concern, the few independent journalists who managed to file from the ground spoke into a void. This essay is an attempt, however belated, to fill some part of that void. Not because the filling of a void in a periodical constitutes accountability. But because accountability begins, always, with the refusal to be silent.

VII. THE PANEL THAT PROVED THE POINT

On the occasion of Ethiopia’s June 2026 general election, the broadcaster TRT World’s programme The Newsmakers aired a segment titled ‘Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed seeks re-election amid fears of renewed civil war.’ It ran for approximately twenty-nine minutes. It is, for the purposes of this essay, a document of considerable instructive value not primarily for what it said, but for what it demonstrated about the architecture of international media representation of Ethiopia in practice, in real time, before a global audience.

The programme was structured in two parts. The first was a solo interview with Getachew Reda, identified on screen as adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Eastern African affairs and former president of the Tigray interim regional administration. The second was a panel of three analysts: Maza Gidei Gebremedhin, described as an international relations specialist, speaking from Washington; Robel Alemu, senior analyst and director of communications at the Amhara Association of America, speaking from Toronto; and Tsedale Lemma, journalist and founder of the Addis Standard newspaper, speaking from Frankfurt.

The presenter introduced this arrangement as a broadening of the discussion. In terms of the claims this essay has advanced, it was something rather more precise than that: it was a live demonstration of the erasure thesis, conducted under studio lighting, with credentials displayed, and streamed to an international audience.

One Amhara voice. Two Tigrayan voices. One figure from a publication with a documented record of minimising Amhara suffering. This was presented as ‘balance.’

Begin with Getachew Reda. His credentials as the interview’s primary subject were presented straightforwardly: adviser to Abiy Ahmed, former Tigray interim president. What the introduction did not dwell upon and what the presenter did not press was the particular quality of the political journey being described. Getachew Reda is a former senior official of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front: the organisation whose nearly three-decade dominance of Ethiopian politics Abiy Ahmed’s rise was explicitly designed to end, and whose subsequent armed conflict with the federal government produced hundreds of thousands of dead, the displacement of millions, and documented atrocities against civilian populations in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar alike. He is now, in the service of that same Abiy Ahmed, a figure of the federal establishment commenting on the fairness of an election from which the communities most subjected to state violence were systematically excluded.

When asked about the Amhara and Oromia regions, Getachew’s framing was revealing in its precision. He acknowledged ‘low-intensity conflicts’ in both areas, but his concern was not with the casualties or the humanitarian toll. His concern was with the fact that armed opposition elements were attempting to prevent people from voting. The violence itself the aerial strikes, the displacement, the killings was not his subject. The vote was his subject. Amhara suffering, in this framing, was relevant only insofar as it furnished evidence of the opposition’s illegitimacy, and irrelevant insofar as it might have furnished evidence of the government’s.

This is a form of rhetorical erasure so efficient that it barely registers as such. The dead are not denied; they are simply not mentioned. The conversation moves on. The presenter, to her credit, noted that ‘all parties involved have been accused of various atrocities.’ But this is the standard diplomatic hedge of professional broadcast journalism the gesture toward balance that preserves the impression of impartiality while declining to pursue the specificity that would make the accusation land.

Then came the panel. And here the structural problem identified by Professor Berhanu the systematic exclusion of Amhara voices from the expert circuits that feed international journalism was displayed with a clarity that no amount of editorial analysis can improve upon. Of the three panellists assembled to represent ‘opposition’ perspectives on the Ethiopian election, two were Tigrayan and one was the founder of a publication whose coverage has repeatedly been criticised, including by contributors to this newspaper, for insufficient engagement with the specific character of anti-Amhara and anti-Orthodox violence in Oromia.

The Amhara Association of America’s Robel Alemu, speaking from Toronto, was the exception and the exception proved the rule. In the space of approximately ninety seconds, he delivered the most substantive account of the humanitarian catastrophe in Ethiopia offered by any participant across the entire twenty-nine minute broadcast. He named the Lemkin Institute’s active genocide alert for the Amhara people. He cited the Amhara Association’s own documentation of more than 370 aerial strikes by state forces against civilian infrastructure health centres, schools, places of worship. He referenced a BBC report documenting mass rape in the Amhara region, with the majority of cases implicating government forces. He noted UNICEF’s figure of nine million children out of school nationally, with half drawn from Amhara. And then and this is the sentence that this essay has been building toward he stated directly that on election day itself, an active massacre was taking place in the Arsi area, implicating local militants, with attacks continuing against ethnic Amhara and Orthodox Christian communities.

Arsi. Named. On international television. On the day of the Ethiopian election.

Robel Alemu named Arsi on international television. Within seconds, the presenter moved to Maza on Eritrea. Neither of his fellow panellists ever returned to a single word he had said.

The presenter thanked him and pivoted immediately to Maza Gidei Gebremedhin on the subject of a potential Ethiopia-Eritrea war. The question of Arsi the massacres, the aerial strikes, the genocide alert, the nine million children was not returned to. Not by the presenter. Not by Maza, whose response routed the conversation firmly through the prism of Tigrayan victimhood under a prospective Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, emphasising that any future war would be fought ‘on the lines of Tigray, on the bodies of Tigrayan women, on the bodies of Tigrayan men.’ Not by Tsedale Lemma, who offered a fluent and well-informed analysis of the geopolitical dangers of Abiy Ahmed’s Red Sea ambitions important analysis, accurately framed but who did not once, across the entirety of her contributions, acknowledge the existence of the Arsi massacre, the Lemkin genocide alert, the documented rape campaign in Amhara, or the aerial strikes on civilian targets.

It is important to state clearly what this observation is not. It is not a claim that Tigrayan suffering is less important than Amhara suffering, or that Tsedale Lemma’s analysis was without merit, or that the TRT programme was uniquely or exceptionally deficient. The suffering in Tigray was real, massive, and is still unresolved. The analysis offered by Maza and Tsedale was, in its own terms, coherent and informed.

The observation is more precise and more structural than a comparison of suffering. It is this: a programme that assembled three ‘opposition’ analysts to comment on an Ethiopian election in which Amhara communities were among the most severely affected by state violence managed to produce, through the composition of its panel and the direction of its questioning, a broadcast in which the one representative of those communities stated his case once and was not heard from again on those specific terms. The panel did not engage with what he said. The presenter did not return to what he raised. The broadcast closed without any panellist having responded to the genocide alert, the aerial strikes, the rape figures, or the election-day massacre in Arsi.

This is the mechanism Professor Berhanu describes operating in plain sight. It does not require bad faith from any individual participant. Maza Gidei Gebremedhin was not lying when she spoke of Tigrayan vulnerability; she was speaking her genuine concern. Tsedale Lemma was not performing indifference when she analysed the Red Sea question; she was doing the work she knows how to do. The presenter was not malicious in her pivots; she was managing a panel format under time pressure. And yet the aggregate effect of all these individually defensible decisions was the production of a broadcast in which the systematic killing of Orthodox Christians in Arsi named on air by a panellist with direct organisational knowledge disappeared from the conversation within thirty seconds and was never retrieved.

This is what institutional erasure looks like when it operates not through censorship but through the ordinary mechanics of editorial selection, panel composition, and the distribution of follow-up questions. It is, in many ways, more difficult to challenge than censorship, because no single decision can be identified as the act of suppression. The suppression is the sum of the decisions; and the sum, in this case, was the burial, on international television, of an active massacre.

The TRT programme, in other words, did not merely illustrate the argument of this essay. It enacted it.

This essay draws on reporting by DNE Africa, Borkena, the International Christian Concern, the Global Human Rights Defence, the Rift Valley Institute, and the Crown Council of Ethiopia. The TRT World programme ‘Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed seeks re-election amid fears of renewed civil war’ (The Newsmakers, June 2026) is cited by transcript. This essay was developed in dialogue with the arguments advanced by Professor Girma Berhanu in his Tribune essay of 3 June 2026, ‘The Erasure of Amhara Voices in International Coverage of Ethiopia.’

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE | ethiopiantribune.com

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The Erasure of Amhara Voices in International Coverage of Ethiopia

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:13:53 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 41 Second

By Girma Berhanu (Professor)

Watching recent international coverage of Ethiopia’s election, I’ve been left with a question that grows harder to ignore: why are Amhara voices — and Amhara suffering — so consistently absent from the global media narrative?

A recent Al Jazeera segment brought this concern into sharp focus. The panel featured Martin Plaut and other commentators, but included no Amhara representative. More troubling than who was present, however, was what went unsaid.

There was no substantive discussion of the ongoing conflict in the Amhara region. No mention of civilians killed or displaced. No acknowledgment of the humanitarian toll borne by Amhara communities during the Tigray war — or of the violence that has continued since. The panelists referenced security problems in Oromia and Amhara as background factors affecting the election, but never confronted the specific, devastating reality of war in Amhara itself.

This was not an isolated omission.

Months earlier, journalist Mehdi Hasan interviewed Getachew Reda. The Ethiopian voices invited to respond, again, included no Amhara representative. Amhara concerns, again, went largely unspoken.

Across major international outlets — including the BBC and CNN — a painful pattern has emerged: when Ethiopia is discussed, Amhara perspectives are frequently minimized, generalized, or excluded. Coverage may acknowledge instability, conflict, and political crisis, yet routinely fails to examine how Amhara communities are specifically affected, or to include Amhara voices in conversations about the country’s future.

This pattern deserves serious attention.

This is not a call to shield any actor from scrutiny, nor a claim that one community’s suffering outweighs another’s. Ethiopia’s conflicts have brought devastating loss to many communities, and all civilian suffering demands recognition. But equal recognition matters. Representation matters. Accuracy matters.

When international media repeatedly discuss Ethiopia without meaningful Amhara participation—or without directly addressing violence against Amhara civilians—it shapes public understanding in ways that carry real consequences. It influences diplomatic conversations, humanitarian priorities, and historical memory.

I would like to seize this opportunity to commend the American photojournalist Jemal Countess and the Canadian author and journalist Jeff Pearce, who has long been known as a friend of Ethiopia in the face of foreign misinformation campaigns and the continued marginalization of the Amhara population. These are men of courage, sensitivity, remarkable honesty, and genuine journalistic integrity. They remain committed to truth, professional ethics, and conscience despite facing a barrage of attacks for who they are and for the principles they uphold.

The central question is straightforward: who gets to tell Ethiopia’s story?

When one of the country’s largest communities finds itself spoken about but rarely heard from, concern about media imbalance is not merely reasonable — it is necessary.

This is why independent research into international reporting on Ethiopia is urgently needed: to examine whose voices are amplified, whose suffering is documented, and whose experiences remain invisible.

Silence can become part of the story. Selective attention can become a form of erasure. And when that occurs in coverage of conflict and political violence, the consequences extend far beyond any headline.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY
Department of Education and Special Education
Västra Hamngatan 25, A-hus room 168
Mail address: Box 300, 405 30 Göteborg
office: +46-(0)31-786 2325
mobile: +46 704731818
girma.berhanu@ped.gu.se
www.ips.gu.se

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Seven Times Lucky? Ethiopia’s Seventh General Election and the Art of Democratic Choreography

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:12:09 +0000

Read Time:12 Minute, 11 Second

On a continent where elections are frequently described as historic milestones before a single ballot is cast, Ethiopia’s seventh national poll has managed to be simultaneously predictable and remarkable predictably stage-managed, and remarkably revealing about the condition of the state.

By E. Frashie | Addis Ababa Correspondent

1 June 2026

ADDIS ABABA — By half past six on Monday morning, the queues outside polling stations across Addis Ababa had already assumed that particular character of Ethiopian civic patience: long, unhurried, and quietly dignified. For a government anxious about legitimacy, the photographs of citizens lining up before dawn were worth more than any campaign poster. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed understood this perfectly. His first act of the day was not to vote, that came later, but to appear before a carefully curated selection of domestic media outlets for an address that, in its confident sweep and selective omissions, told the electorate precisely what it was and was not supposed to think.

The speech was, by any measure, a performance. Ethiopia, Abiy declared, had foiled the machinations of ‘historical enemies’ who had hired internal proxies to spread propaganda and convince the public that democracy was impossible. The voters, in their wisdom, had rejected this counsel and turned out in their numbers. So far, so standard. But listen more carefully to the subtext and a more pointed message emerges: those who question this election, whether they be opposition politicians, international human rights bodies, or foreign journalists, are enemies or their instruments. The word he chose :- Banda, the Amharic for traitor or colonial lackey, carries particular historical freight in a country whose founding myth is built on resisting foreign interference. It is a word deployed with precision. It is also a word designed to foreclose argument rather than invite it.

“The word Banda carries particular historical freight. It is deployed with precision designed to foreclose argument rather than invite it.“

Set against the morning’s operational reality, the rhetorical architecture of the speech becomes still more instructive. While the Prime Minister spoke of the Ethiopian people’s heroic civic spirit, the National Election Board of Ethiopia was simultaneously informing journalists at the Skylight Hotel, the nerve centre of the day’s monitoring operations, and, it should be noted, also the base of the African Union observer mission, that no fewer than 143 polling stations in Amhara and Oromia had failed to open at all, on grounds of security. An undisclosed further number had been forced to close early. Voting in Kersa, Kutaber, Gilolopa, and Gosache had been interrupted. How many voters were thereby disenfranchised, NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu did not say. The number remains, as of this writing, undisclosed.

This is not a trivial omission. Ethiopia is a country of some 135 million people, roughly half of whom are under eighteen. The registered voter roll stands at just over 50 million a figure that critics have already disputed, arguing that large swaths of the country affected by ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, Gambella, and Tigray were effectively excluded from meaningful participation before the day began. Prior to polling day, NEBE had already announced that elections would not be held in 38 districts of Tigray and eight constituencies in Amhara. The figure of 143 closed stations on the day itself adds a further layer of practical exclusion that the official narrative of orderly, nationwide voting rather conspicuously declines to accommodate.

THE NUMBERS GAME

The scale of the exercise is not in dispute. Over 52,000 polling stations. Nearly 200,000 election workers. Forty-seven registered political parties. More than 10,900 candidates. These are impressive figures, and NEBE cited them with justifiable pride. Less prominently featured was the analytical context supplied by Chatham House’s Ahmed Soliman and Abel Abate Demissie, who assessed the contest as likely to be among the least competitive of the seven national elections held since multiparty democracy was nominally introduced in 1991. The Prosperity Party won 96 per cent of parliamentary seats in 2021. It is running unopposed in several dozen constituencies in 2026. The opposition fragmented across more than forty parties, starved of funds, and in several documented cases denied permits to hold rallies comparable to those the ruling party staged at Meskel Square enters this election not as a credible alternative government in waiting, but as democratic scenery.

WION’s correspondents on the ground noted a heavy military presence alongside the familiar picture of enthusiastic queues. That combination visible participation alongside visible security force deployment captures something essential about the texture of this election. Citizens are voting. Whether they are doing so in conditions that meet any recognised standard of free and fair is an altogether different question, and one that the official choreography of the day is not designed to answer.

“The opposition enters this election not as a credible alternative government in waiting, but as democratic scenery.“

There is also the matter of what was happening to journalism whilst all of this was unfolding. Reporters Without Borders placed Ethiopia 145th out of 180 countries in its 2025 Press Freedom Index company it shares, in that neighbourhood of the rankings, with Eritrea, North Korea, and Iran. Addis Standard, the country’s most consequential independent digital outlet, had its operating licence withdrawn ahead of the election. The Reporter, the largest-circulation newspaper, had been warned to align its editorial output with government narratives. The irony of an election designed to demonstrate democratic vitality being observed by a press corps operating under these conditions is one that the Prime Minister’s morning address did not find time to address.

UHURU’S CAREFUL ARITHMETIC

Into this environment arrived former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, leading the African Union Election Observation Mission of 73 short-term observers drawn from 37 African countries. The mathematics of oversight are, at minimum, thought-provoking: 73 observers for a country of 135 million people voting across 52,000 polling stations represents a coverage ratio that would tax even the most optimistic statistician. The AUEOM deployed at the formal invitation of the Government of Ethiopia a detail the AU’s own arrival statement saw fit to mention in its opening sentence, which is a choice.

Kenyatta, speaking to state media approximately three hours before this dispatch was filed, delivered himself of the following assessment: from the polling stations visited, and from reports received from observers elsewhere in the country, voting ‘seems to be going on smoothly.’ Stations had opened ‘on time.’ NEBE staff ‘seem to know what they’re doing,’ and ‘everything seems orderly.’ He expressed hope that ‘the people of Ethiopia will be able to do their civic duty.’

That is three uses of the word ‘seems’ in under forty seconds, from a man who met NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu the previous day and commands a continent-wide observation network. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a restaurant critic writing that the food ‘appeared to be cooked.’ The phrasing is not accidental. Kenyatta is an experienced political operator who knows exactly what his words will be used for by state media, and exactly what weight they can and cannot bear. He has preserved his position for the preliminary statement scheduled for 3 June, when the mission will say something more considered. But the government clip of him saying ‘seems orderly’ will be on Ethiopian state television long before that.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development has also deployed its own 26-member observer team, led by former Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe. Their preliminary statement is likewise due on 3 June. Both missions are based, with a symmetry too neat to be entirely coincidental, at the Skylight Hotel the same venue where NEBE staged its official monitoring operations.

WHAT THE CIVIL SOCIETY OBSERVERS FOUND

Rather more pointed in its same-day assessment was the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organisations for Elections, which deployed 3,149 observers 2,258 stationary and 891 mobile across the country. Their midday report, released whilst voting was still under way, documented a catalogue of procedural concerns that the government’s smooth-running narrative does not easily absorb.

The most significant finding concerned ballot box handling. At 26 stations monitored by CECOE roughly one per cent of those covered observers were unable to verify that boxes had been demonstrated to be empty before being sealed and opened for voting. This is not a bureaucratic footnote. An unsealed or unverified ballot box is the most elementary mechanism for the pre-stuffing of ballots, and the failure to perform the emptiness demonstration in public is a procedural violation that election law exists precisely to prevent. Beyond this, CECOE documented polling stations established in prohibited locations, unauthorised individuals assisting voters, restrictions on observer access, the distribution of unstamped ballot papers, the exchange of materials between stations, and the presence of individuals inside voting centres who had no business being there. Access was denied to CECOE observers at seventeen stations altogether.

“An unsealed ballot box is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the most elementary mechanism for pre-stuffing and the failure to demonstrate its emptiness is a violation election law exists to prevent.“

CECOE was careful to note that the vast majority of stations proceeded without incident, and that overall the day was peaceful. This is accurate and ought to be said. It is also the kind of qualification that the government will amplify and the irregularities will be footnoted. The Tribune notes, for the record, that peace and procedural integrity are related but distinct concepts. A peaceful election conducted with systematic procedural violations is not the same thing as a credible one.

THE PROCLAMATION AND THE QUEUE

By evening, a further data point had arrived. NEBE announced, citing Proclamation No. 1162/2019, Article 49, Sub-Article 4, that voting hours would be extended until every voter already standing in line by 6pm had cast their ballot. The legal basis is sound and the decision, on its face, is admirable, no citizen who made the effort to queue should be turned away. But the extension also tells a secondary story about the reliability of the digital voter registration system, which NEBE itself acknowledged had caused delays and longer queues throughout the day. When an e-registration platform deployed across a country of 135 million people generates queues long enough to require a legal extension of polling hours, questions about the system’s fitness for purpose are not unreasonable.

The Prime Minister, in his morning address, had spoken of Ethiopia’s aspiration to become a nation that breeds tech unicorns and meets most of its demands through domestic production. The voter registration app developed by NEBE, reportedly downloaded by over 5.5 million citizens experienced sufficient difficulties on election day to contribute to nationwide delays. The distance between the aspiration and the operational reality is a recurring theme in Abiy’s Ethiopia, and it surfaced again, quietly, in the queues outside polling stations across the country.

THE VISION AND THE VOID

It would be uncharitable and analytically incomplete to dismiss Abiy’s morning address as mere propaganda. Parts of it were more substantive than that. His call to elected officials to serve with ‘clean hands and clean hearts’ rather than focussing on the ‘ego of winning’ was, at minimum, an acknowledgement that the gap between electoral victory and effective governance is real. His framing of the next five years as demanding ‘more effort, deeper thinking, and greater unity than ever before’ suggested a man who understands, or at least affects to understand, that governing Ethiopia in 2026 is an enterprise of considerable complexity.

His promise that the Prosperity Party would ‘gracefully accept whatever election results emerge’ was received with the scepticism it merits, given that the party is running unopposed in multiple constituencies and won 96 per cent of seats at the last election. Accepting results one has pre-arranged is not, strictly speaking, a test of democratic grace. But the rhetorical commitment is on record, and the Tribune will hold it there.

The international media picture assembled around this election is less equivocal than the official one. Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, and WION all reported the contest within a framework of expected Prosperity Party dominance, significant regional exclusions, fragmented opposition, and meaningful questions about process integrity. The FIDH and the World Organisation Against Torture expressed serious concern at the civic environment in which the election was conducted, citing active armed conflict in Amhara and Oromia as backdrop. Human rights observers noted that the government’s tolerance manifest in pardons issued and exiles welcomed back had been interpreted by some armed groups as weakness, a framing Abiy himself deployed, though he drew different conclusions from it.

One further detail from the day’s events deserves to be recorded, and not only in passing. An election facilitator, unnamed in the NEBE briefing, lost his life in a motorcycle accident in Enamorena Enayer, Gurage Zone, whilst carrying out his duties. He will not feature in the preliminary statements due on 3 June, nor in the Prosperity Party’s victory address when it comes. The Ethiopian Tribune records his name as unknown and his loss as real.

The AU observer mission will speak on Wednesday. The results, NEBE has indicated, are expected within ten days. Abiy Ahmed will almost certainly be returned to office with a majority that renders the word ‘landslide’ barely adequate. The procedural irregularities documented by CECOE will be assessed, weighed, and in all probability found insufficient to alter the outcome. The 143 stations that never opened will remain a footnote. The voters of Kersa and Kutaber and Gilolopa and Gosache will be asked, in due course, to wait for a re-run.

Ethiopia’s seventh general election is, by the metrics its government prefers, a success. The stations opened. The queues formed. The ballots were cast. Uhuru Kenyatta said it seemed orderly. On a continent where elections have been far worse, this is not nothing.

Whether it is enough is a question that the Ethiopian people not the Prosperity Party, not the African Union, not the international wire services will be left to answer for themselves. They have, as Abiy noted with evident satisfaction, been doing so since early morning. The Tribune will be watching when the answers come.

E. Frashie is a correspondent and analytical writer for The Ethiopian Tribune.

The Tribune’s editorial policy requires attribution of all factual claims. Sources consulted for this dispatch include NEBE official briefings, translated transcripts of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s election-day address and AU observer Uhuru Kenyatta’s statement to state media, reports by Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, WION, CECOE midday observer release, FIDH, Chatham House, and Reporters Without Borders.

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