By Yonas Biru, PhD

Editor’s Forward

Ethiopia on the Brink: The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity

(A Summary of the full 30‑page article by Yonas Biru, PhD)

Ethiopia today stands at a crossroads where political ambition collides with economic reality. In this sweeping and meticulously argued essay, Dr. Yonas Biru dissects the country’s current trajectory with a clarity and urgency rarely found in contemporary analyses of Ethiopia’s political economy. His central thesis is stark: Ethiopia is governed by a philosophy of abundance a belief that vision, ambition, and positive thinking can override the hard constraints of economics while the nation itself is trapped in an economy of scarcity.

The result, he argues, is a widening gap between rhetoric and reality, between the spectacle of megaprojects and the erosion of the productive foundations that sustain real development. This forward distills the core arguments of the full article, which readers can access in full via the provided PDF link.

A Nation of Contradictions

Dr. Biru opens with a parable: Ethiopia’s economy resembles the elephant touched by blind men each observer perceives a different truth. The glittering skyline of Addis Ababa suggests progress to some, while for others it is a monument to property confiscation and displacement. Government speeches promise a “Digital Ethiopia 2030,” yet 92% of high school students fail the national university entrance exam. The data tell a sobering story: manufacturing has declined, education spending has collapsed, poverty has risen, and foreign direct investment has dried up.

The author’s diagnosis is not merely that Ethiopia is struggling, but that its struggles are structural, self‑inflicted, and accelerating.

The Philosophy of Abundance vs. the Economics of Scarcity

At the heart of the critique is the Prime Minister’s governing philosophy one that treats scarcity as a psychological barrier rather than a structural constraint. Dr. Biru contrasts this with the development paths of China, Vietnam, South Korea, and India, all of which embraced disciplined sequencing, prioritization, and institutional strengthening.

Ethiopia, by contrast, pursues simultaneous megaprojects, prioritizes showpiece construction over productive investment, and attempts to leapfrog into a digital economy without the educational or industrial foundations required to sustain it.

The result is a eucalyptus‑style growth pattern: fast‑growing, shallow‑rooted, and dangerously fragile.

The Shrinking Middle Class: A Nation Consuming Its Future

One of the most compelling sections of the article examines the erosion of Ethiopia’s middle class. In every successful late‑industrializing economy, the middle class expands before construction booms and technological leaps. In Ethiopia, the opposite is happening.

Doctors earn $70–$100 per month. Professors and teachers struggle to afford food and rent. Inflation erodes wages faster than they can be adjusted. Meanwhile, billions are poured into palaces, corridors, and vanity projects.

Dr. Biru’s conclusion is blunt:
No country has ever developed while shrinking its middle class. Ethiopia will not be the first.

Diaspora Investment: From Catalyst to Casualty

Where China and India mobilized their diasporas to build factories, technology hubs, and export industries, Ethiopia has channeled diaspora capital into speculative real estate. Currency devaluation, punitive taxes, and arbitrary property seizures have turned diaspora investment into a trap rather than a catalyst.

The article provides a striking example: a diaspora investor who bought a condominium for 2 million birr in 2019 would lose nearly 40% of their dollar investment if they sold today. The nominal birr gains are illusions; the real returns are negative.

This is not misfortune, the author argues, it is policy failure.

Institutional Decay: Property Rights, Corruption, and the Rise of Political Entrepreneurship

The essay devotes significant attention to the erosion of property rights and the rise of political entrepreneurship. Land is leased to multiple parties. Legally binding contracts are unilaterally rewritten. Properties are seized for corridor projects without compensation. Corruption investigations are launched with fanfare, only to be quietly buried when they implicate senior officials.

In such an environment, productive entrepreneurs are crowded out by politically connected actors. Investment flows not to the most efficient, but to the most favored.

This is not merely an economic problem it is a political one. Weak property rights fuel rent‑seeking, which fuels competition for state power, which fuels instability. Conflict becomes endogenous to the system.

Macroeconomic Fragility: Debt, Foreign Exchange, and the Illusion of Growth

Dr. Biru dismantles the government’s narrative of self‑reliance and rapid growth. Ethiopia is not borrowing less because it needs less; it is borrowing less because no one will lend. All three major rating agencies have downgraded Ethiopia to junk or default territory. The IMF and World Bank classify the country as being in debt distress.

Meanwhile, the government projects 10.2% GDP growth far above the estimates of the World Bank (7.2%) and the UN (5.8%). The author asks a simple question: Where is this growth coming from?

Not tourism, which remains constrained by security and infrastructure.
Not agriculture, which still imports wheat and leaves millions food‑insecure.
Not manufacturing, which has declined to 4.4% of GDP.
Not exports, which remain stagnant.

The only sector expanding is construction an import‑dependent, debt‑driven, speculative bubble.

The Counterfactual: What Ethiopia Should Have Built

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of the article is its counterfactual analysis. What if Ethiopia had invested in:

• electric transmission lines
• large‑scale irrigation
• electrified pumping systems
• agricultural modernization

instead of urban corridors and palatial complexes?

The data are unequivocal:

• Electrified irrigation increases farm profitability by 58–98%.
• Ethiopia spends $4–5 billion annually on fuel imports—three to four times its coffee export earnings.
• Irrigation could raise national agricultural output by 15–30%.
• Ethiopia has over 1 million hectares of viable irrigation potential.

These investments would have strengthened agriculture, boosted exports, reduced fuel imports, and provided raw materials for manufacturing.

Instead, Ethiopia built corridors.

The Coming Crisis: How Structural Fault Lines Interact

The author warns that Ethiopia’s vulnerabilities are not isolated they are interconnected. A foreign‑exchange shock can stall construction, which can trigger a real‑estate crash, which can destabilize banks, which can collapse tax revenues, which can force inflationary financing, which can erode confidence, which can accelerate capital flight.

This is how systemic crises begin.

A Path Forward: Institutional, Fiscal, and Structural Reform

The article concludes with a sequenced set of recommendations:

• Restore constitutional governance and legislative oversight.
• Rebuild credible property rights and rule‑based administration.
• Replace cadre‑driven policymaking with expert‑led institutions.
• Confront systemic corruption with independent enforcement.
• Rebuild trust with the diaspora through a joint commission.
• Rebalance public spending toward productive sectors.
• Address the foreign‑exchange constraint by expanding exports.
• Reinstate fiscal discipline and transparency.
• Reinvest in human capital especially education.
• Institutionalize technocratic policymaking beyond any single leader.

These are not incremental adjustments they are foundational reforms.

A Final Word

Dr. Biru’s essay is not a lament. It is a warning and a roadmap. It argues that Ethiopia’s crisis is not inevitable; it is the result of choices. And because it is the result of choices, it can be reversed by different choices.

But the window is narrowing.

This forward captures the essence of the full 30‑page analysis. For readers who wish to explore the complete argument, data, and case studies, the full PDF is available here.

[Download the full article: Ethiopia on the Brink – The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity]

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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By Professor Girma Berhanu

Introduction

The ongoing violence directed against Christian Amhara communities in the Arsi Zone raises serious concerns regarding the protection of vulnerable populations in Ethiopia. Recent reports indicate an intensification of targeted attacks, including killings, abductions, and the destruction of civilian property, particularly in districts such as Shirka, Guna, and Aseko. Investigations by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission have documented incidents since late 2025 in which armed groups carried out attacks that resulted in deaths, injuries, and displacement of local residents, severely undermining the security and basic rights of affected communities.

These developments must be understood within the broader context of Ethiopia’s complex and evolving conflict dynamics. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented widespread human rights violations in multiple regions of the country, including Oromia and Amhara. In 2023 alone, thousands of civilians were killed in violent incidents across these regions, while thousands were subjected to abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, and forced displacement. Such patterns indicate that the current violence is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader cycle of armed conflict and intercommunal tensions orchestrated by the system.

Historically, Amhara communities living in parts of Oromia have periodically faced episodes of mass violence and forced displacement. Several documented incidents—including massacres targeting civilians identified as ethnically Amhara—illustrate the recurring nature of such attacks. One example occurred in 2020 in western Oromia, where hundreds of Amhara civilians were killed in an attack widely reported by international media and human rights observers. These events underscore the vulnerability of minority communities residing outside their region of ethnic majority.

In recent months, observers and human-rights organizations have expressed concern over what appears to be a renewed escalation in violence. Reports describe killings, kidnappings, and large-scale displacement in parts of Oromia, with civilians caught between insurgent groups, local militias, and government forces. The insurgency involving the Oromo Liberation Army has contributed to a deteriorating security environment in which civilians are frequently exposed to abuses by multiple actors. However, the group claimed the violence aimed to fracture collective opposition by pitting communities against one another, including along Oromo–Amhara and Christian–Muslim lines. The OLA further stated that “whether in uniform or without, whether carrying a gun or a pen,” any actor who “weaponizes innocent civilians for political ends” would be considered its enemy, adding that it would confront such forces decisively.

Despite the gravity of these developments, the international response has often been perceived as limited compared with the scale of the humanitarian and human rights concerns involved. Scholars and policy analysts have noted that Ethiopia’s overlapping conflicts—spanning regions such as Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia—have complicated international engagement and reduced sustained attention to localized patterns of violence against minority communities.

Given these conditions, the situation warrants sustained monitoring, systematic documentation, and deeper international engagement. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, accountability, and civilian protection remains essential for mitigating further violence and ensuring that vulnerable communities are afforded the protections guaranteed under international human rights and humanitarian law.

Atrocities in Arsi: A Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region

The country of Ethiopia has been engulfed in war, massacres, and displacement at an alarming rate since Prime Minister Abiy came to power. The victims are mostly Amharas, particularly those who belong to the Orthodox Church. Such incidents have become increasingly common in the Oromia region. The perpetrators are often described as state-sponsored paramilitary groups and the so-called OLF, with each side blaming the other. This situation has continued for approximately eight years. Millions of people have lost their lives, properties have been destroyed, and displacement has become a defining feature of the new Ethiopia. The crimes being committed against Ethiopia and the defenseless Amharas are unbelievably horrifying and multifaceted. Yet both national actors and the international community remain largely silent.

The current spree of massacres in Arsi is telling. It took now over 6 months unabated. Many known media and newspapers have reported the atrocities. A good gesture is that three major Ethiopian religious bodies condemned the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi, urging swift investigations, accountability and stronger protection to prevent further inter-religious tensions. The Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council have each issued statements condemning the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi Zone of Oromia Region. They urged authorities to take immediate action to bring the perpetrators to justice and strengthen protection for residents. In their statements, the religious institutions denounced the attack and called for swift, transparent investigations, warning against attempts to exploit the incident to incite further violence. The known Borkena news outlet has reported the massacres continuously.

Violence in Arsi Zone and Competing Narratives

The Oromo Liberation Army has accused what it described as “mercenaries” of moving through the Arsi Zone and deliberately targeting Orthodox Christian civilians in order to inflame inter-religious and inter-ethnic tensions. The group has denied responsibility for attacks against civilians and instead alleged that unidentified armed actors are attempting to provoke conflict between communities.

In a statement dated 1 March 2026, the Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church reported that it had received information from its dioceses indicating that at least 21 civilians were killed in an attack in East Arsi. According to the statement, several survivors were abducted and their whereabouts remain unknown, while homes and property belonging to more than ten households were burned. The Synod emphasized that the victims were Orthodox Christians with no involvement in any armed conflict and stated that perpetrators who invoke religion to justify violence do not represent the teachings of any faith tradition. It further warned that such attacks risk creating divisions among religious communities that have historically coexisted in relative harmony and called upon Muslim and Christian leaders to jointly condemn the violence.

The Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council similarly expressed deep sorrow over the killings of what it described as innocent Orthodox Christian civilians in Shirka Woreda. In its statement, the council stressed that the attack does not represent any religious teaching and warned that such incidents threaten long-standing traditions of inter-religious coexistence and mutual respect. Independent reporting and advocacy sources have also highlighted the severity of the violence in the region. According to reports cited by the media outlet Borkena, districts including Shirka, Merti, Guna, and Holonto have experienced repeated attacks in which civilians were killed or injured, property was destroyed, and communities were displaced. These reports characterize the situation as a significant escalation of violence in the Arsi Zone.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has documented a pattern of attacks affecting civilians in the area in its March 2026 reporting. According to the commission, recent incidents resulted in dozens of deaths, including multiple killings in Shirka and Merti districts, alongside cases of injury, abduction, and missing persons. The EHRC also noted broader patterns of insecurity in parts of Oromia since 2025, where recurring attacks on civilians have contributed to a wider humanitarian and human rights crisis. Eyewitness accounts collected by investigators and journalists describe highly coordinated attacks in which armed assailants targeted households and villages, leading to civilian deaths and widespread displacement. These testimonies indicate that communities have been subjected to intimidation, destruction of homes, and forced migration, contributing to a deteriorating humanitarian situation in the region.

At the same time, responsibility for the violence remains contested. Federal and regional authorities have repeatedly attributed many attacks to the Oromo Liberation Army, while the OLA has denied involvement and accused government forces or affiliated militias of staging or exploiting violence in order to justify security operations. This cycle of mutual accusations has complicated efforts to establish accountability and has hindered independent verification of events on the ground. The resulting climate of uncertainty underscores the need for impartial investigation. Without credible and transparent inquiries into the perpetrators of these attacks, the persistence of violence risks normalizing impunity and further undermining social cohesion in Ethiopia’s ethnically and religiously diverse society. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, civilian protection, and accountability therefore remains critical to preventing further atrocities and restoring trust between communities.

Borkena. (2022, September 27). Ethiopia: Attack in Horo Guduru Wollega, Oromia region. https://borkena.com/2022/09/27/ethiopia-horo-guduru-wollega-oromo-region/

The ‘New Auschwitz’? Mass Violence and the Targeting of Civilians in Arsi Zone

Many years ago, I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, located on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp during World War II. Several years later, I also visited a Jewish cultural center and museum in Riga, Latvia, which similarly commemorates the persecution and destruction of Jewish communities during the Holocaust. Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Holocaust memorial institutions serve as powerful sites of remembrance, preserving the memory of immense human suffering and reminding visitors of the catastrophic consequences of hatred, discrimination, and systematic dehumanization.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum provides a detailed historical account of the camp complex and the atrocities committed there. It stands as a solemn warning about what can occur when prejudice, exclusion, and ideological extremism are allowed to escalate unchecked. The enduring message of such memorials was eloquently articulated by Ellen Germain during the 75th anniversary of the museum on 13 July 2022. She emphasized the responsibility of future generations to safeguard historical truth:

“We must safeguard your testimony, their testimony, so that truth will never die. The world must never forget. The world must never deny. The world must never downplay the Holocaust. We must remain ever on guard, and we must do far more to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and apply them in our own time. We must counter hate and lies with tolerance and truth. And we must stand up for human dignity and freedom wherever they are imperiled.”

These reflections underline a critical principle: remembrance is not solely about honoring the victims of the past, but also about recognizing warning signs in the present. The lessons of the Holocaust compel societies to remain vigilant when patterns of discrimination, dehumanization, and targeted violence begin to emerge. When communities are singled out because of their identity—whether ethnic, religious, or cultural—the risk of escalating persecution becomes real.

It is within this broader moral and historical framework that contemporary reports of violence against civilians in the Arsi Zone must be considered. While historical contexts differ, the persistence of attacks against vulnerable populations raises urgent questions about protection, accountability, and the international community’s responsibility to respond when civilians become targets of systematic violence.

More than seventy-five years after the crematoria ceased their inhuman work, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum continues to preserve the former camp complex as a permanent site of memory. The preservation of this Holocaust memorial serves an essential purpose: to help future generations understand the consequences of hatred, racism, and systematic violence, and to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. The site also stands as enduring evidence against those who attempt to deny or distort the historical reality of the Holocaust.

Yet the lessons of these memorials are not confined to the past. The warning they convey—that societies must remain vigilant against hatred, persecution, and mass violence—remains deeply relevant today. Reports from several contemporary conflicts suggest that civilians continue to face grave abuses, including in the ongoing war in Ukraine and in parts of Ethiopia.

Particularly troubling are reports of attacks against civilians in the Arsi Zone of the Oromia Region. Accounts from religious institutions, local sources, and human-rights observers describe killings, abductions, and the destruction of homes affecting vulnerable communities. These reports raise serious concerns about the protection of civilians and the ability of affected populations to seek safety during episodes of violence. While historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Holocaust, the recurrence of violence against civilians underscores the enduring importance of remembering past atrocities and applying their lessons to contemporary crises. Memorials such as Auschwitz remind the world that indifference to suffering, denial of abuses, and failure to protect vulnerable populations can have devastating consequences. Ensuring accountability and safeguarding human dignity therefore remain essential responsibilities for governments, civil society, and the international community alike.

Violence, Silence, and Moral Responsibility

Reports emerging from parts of Oromia Region, particularly in areas such as Arsi Zone and Wollega, describe widespread violence against civilians, including killings, displacement, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Observers and advocacy groups have raised concerns that armed actors operating in the region have targeted vulnerable communities and that humanitarian access has at times been restricted, making independent verification and relief efforts extremely difficult. Allegations have also surfaced that bodies of victims have been burned and that attacks on civilians have been carried out with extreme brutality—imagery that evokes memories of some of the darkest chapters of twentieth-century violence.

This paper seeks to draw attention to what many observers describe as a deeply underreported humanitarian tragedy unfolding in these regions. While the historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Nazi concentration camps, the scale of civilian suffering and the persistence of violence raise urgent moral and political questions. Reports indicate that armed groups operating in the region, sometimes in environments where security institutions have failed to provide adequate protection, have created conditions in which communities live under constant fear of attack. As a result, thousands of civilians have reportedly been displaced and forced to flee their homes, creating a growing humanitarian crisis.

The failure of state institutions to adequately protect citizens exacerbates this tragedy. When attacks occur repeatedly without credible investigation or accountability, communities lose confidence in the ability of authorities to safeguard their security and basic rights. Observers have therefore called for independent investigations into allegations of mass killings, human rights abuses, and other violations in order to establish the facts and ensure that perpetrators are held accountable under the rule of law.

Ethiopia today faces immense human suffering and a profound national crisis. Many citizens feel that the country’s political future is increasingly shaped by competing ethno-nationalist movements and armed actors. In such an environment, atrocities—including killings, arrests, and the mistreatment of civilians—risk becoming normalized. The silence of political leaders, humanitarian actors, and international institutions in the face of such reports has raised troubling questions among many Ethiopians about whether the suffering of their communities is receiving adequate attention.

Religious and moral leaders may have an especially important role to play in such circumstances. Ethiopia is a deeply religious society in which spiritual institutions often serve as sources of moral guidance and social cohesion. Leaders from all faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, and indigenous spiritual traditions—can help promote reconciliation and emphasize the shared humanity of all Ethiopians. Their voices are particularly important in reminding communities that violence committed in the name of religion or ethnicity contradicts the ethical principles that faith traditions claim to uphold.

Periods of national crisis also highlight the importance of collective moral responsibility. Philosophical discussions of responsibility emphasize that institutions and leaders bear a duty to prevent harm when they possess the power to do so (Risser, 1996). Silence in the face of injustice can enable further abuses, while moral leadership can help mobilize societies toward peace and accountability. As the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned in The Gulag Archipelago, ignoring evil allows it to grow and ultimately undermines the foundations of justice.

Understanding why societies sometimes fail to respond to mass atrocities has also been explored by scholars. Psychologist Paul Slovic describes the phenomenon of “psychic numbing,” in which large-scale human suffering paradoxically leads to reduced emotional engagement and weaker public action (Slovic, 2007). People often respond strongly to the suffering of a single identifiable victim, yet become increasingly indifferent when confronted with statistics describing thousands of victims. This dynamic may help explain why some humanitarian crises fail to receive sustained international attention.

Political scientists have also highlighted how ethnic identity can be mobilized by political elites in ways that intensify violence. According to James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ethnic violence is frequently linked to strategic political mobilization in which elites frame conflicts in ethnic terms in order to consolidate power or mobilize supporters (Fearon & Laitin, 2000). Such narratives can generate fear, deepen divisions, and ultimately legitimize violence against perceived out-groups.

These dynamics underscore the importance of resisting propaganda, rejecting narratives that dehumanize other communities, and reaffirming the shared dignity of all citizens. Throughout history, attempts to manipulate ethnic identity for political purposes have produced devastating consequences. Divide-and-rule strategies and discourses of ethnic superiority can create cycles of resentment and retaliation that undermine national cohesion and long-term stability.

Ethiopia’s future therefore depends on a renewed commitment to accountability, justice, and reconciliation. Independent investigations, protection of civilians, and responsible leadership are essential steps toward breaking cycles of violence. Equally important is the willingness of citizens, community leaders, and institutions to confront injustice openly and to reject the normalization of cruelty and hatred.

As writer E. A. Bucchianeri observed, “It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf; perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.” Speaking out against violence and defending the dignity of all human beings is not an act of division—it is a necessary foundation for a just and peaceful society.

In conclusion, I argue that the Abiy regime’s leadership incompetence, systemic cruelty, and moral vacuum have directly fueled Ethiopia’s current crises—the result of a leadership class lacking fundamental moral intelligence. Beheshtifar, Esmaeli, and Moghadam (2011) define moral intelligence as the “central intelligence for all humans,” distinct from both cognitive and emotional intelligence. Lennick and Kiel, the architects of this concept, identify its four pillars as integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. Ethiopian ethnonationalists, particularly Oromo extremists, exhibit a profound deficit in these competencies—a legacy of moral decay inherited from their TPLF predecessors. For those lacking this essential intelligence, deception and malice become the standard, creating a pervasive political pathology that defines the current era.

References

Beheshtifar, M., Esmaeli, Z., & Moghadam, M. N. (2011). Effect of moral intelligence on leadership. European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 43, 6–11.

Cohen, S. (2013). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Polity Press.

Eurasia Review. (2021, May 16). The logic behind events in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/16052021-the-logic-behind-events-in-ethiopia-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, April 13). Victims and victimization in Ethiopian politics: Targeting the Amhara on three fronts (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/13042022-victims-and-victimization-in-ethiopian-politics-targeting-the-amhara-on-three-fronts-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, July 26). Oromummaa unchained: Ethnic apartheid and territorial expansion in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/26072022-oromummaa-unchained-ethnic-apartheid-and-territorial-expansion-in-ethiopia-oped/

Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2000). Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity. International Organization, 54(4), 845–877.

Lind, G. (2008). The meaning and measurement of moral judgment competence: A dual-aspect model. In D. Fasko Jr. & W. Willis (Eds.), Contemporary philosophical and psychological perspectives on moral development and education (pp. 185–220). Hampton Press.

Risser, D. T. (1978). Power and collective responsibility. Kinesis, 9(1), 23–33.

Risser, D. T. (1996). The social dimension of moral responsibility: Taking organizations seriously. Journal of Social Philosophy, 27(1), 189–207.

Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Collective moral responsibility. http://www.iep.utm.edu/collecti/

The New Yorker. (2022, October 3). Did a Nobel Peace Laureate stoke a civil war? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/did-a-nobel-peace-laureate-stoke-a-civil-war

The Washington Post. (2022, July 18). Ethiopian genocide commands attention. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/ethiopian-genocide-commands-attention/

White, J. R. (2005). Auschwitz: A new history. History: Reviews of New Books, 34(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2005.10526737

The views, arguments, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Professor Girma Berhanu, and do not represent the editorial position of the Ethiopian Tribune. Readers are encouraged to consult multiple sources when forming their own judgments on the complex and evolving situation described.

Contact information:

Girma Berhanu

Department of Education and Special Education (Professor) University of Gothenburg

Box 300, SE 405 30

Göteborg, Sweden

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopian Airlines, and the Price of Personal Diplomacy in a War Zone

By E. Frashie, Senior Political Correspondent

On the morning of 12 March 2026, while Iranian ballistic missiles were still smouldering in the wreckage of Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft lifted off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa. Its passenger of distinction: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, commander-in-chief of the Ethiopian National Defence Force, and custodian of Africa’s largest airline. His destination: the United Arab Emirates. His stated purpose: a “working visit” to meet President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The timing, as millions of Ethiopians would note with quiet fury, coincided almost precisely with MBZ’s 65th birthday.

The visit has detonated a political controversy that cuts far deeper than protocol. It has forced Ethiopians at home and in the diaspora to confront uncomfortable questions about their Prime Minister’s sense of priorities, his stewardship of a flagship national institution in crisis, and whether personal affection for a Gulf monarch represents sound statecraft or dangerous vanity in the middle of a regional war.

Iranian missiles had struck the very airport he landed at. And he flew there on the airline that is losing £108 million every single week.

THE AIRLINE ON THE BRINK

To understand the full weight of this controversy, one must first reckon with the financial catastrophe enveloping Ethiopian Airlines. The airline Africa’s most profitable, most connected, and most strategically important carrier has been brought to its knees by the Middle East conflict.

ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES CRISIS — KEY FIGURES

$137Mestimated weekly revenue loss across passenger and cargo operations

100+flights cancelled per week; 15 per day on average

160cargo flights grounded weekly, severing diaspora supply chains

$100+per barrel Brent crude surge from a forecast of $62, fully unhedged

Before the conflict erupted in late February 2026, the airline operated three daily flights to Dubai, three to Tel Aviv, one to Abu Dhabi, and one to Sharjah. Today, it runs precisely two daily flights to Amman. Its entire Gulf network built painstakingly over decades has effectively collapsed overnight.

The consequences for fuel costs and insurance premiums have been equally brutal. Prior to the war, analysts at IATA had forecast that oil prices would ease to approximately $62 per barrel through 2026 a figure that underpinned the industry’s record $41 billion global profit forecast. By early March, Brent crude had soared well past $100 per barrel, exposing airlines that had abandoned fuel hedging strategies to the full ferocity of market volatility. It is into this burning financial landscape that the Prime Minister chose to fly on his own airline to celebrate his friend’s birthday. The symbolism, many would argue, is devastating.

THE MISSILES WERE ALREADY FLYING

The security dimension of this journey beggars belief on closer inspection. Iran did not merely close its airspace in the weeks preceding Abiy’s trip. It actively, repeatedly, and deliberately attacked civilian aviation infrastructure within the UAE, the very country the Prime Minister was travelling to.

Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest air terminals, was struck by Iranian drones, prompting full-scale evacuation. A second attack followed within hours, with thick black smoke rising above the city’s skyline. Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi was also struck, killing one person and seriously injuring four others. In total, Iran launched 174 ballistic missiles at the UAE during the initial assault phase, with 689 drones deployed, 44 of which caused confirmed impact within the country. Targets included the Palm Jumeirah, the Burj Al Arab, Jebel Ali Port, and a French naval base. Six civilians were killed in the UAE from Iranian strikes.

The theoretical danger is chilling: had an Iranian missile or drone struck Ethiopian Airlines’ aircraft as it approached or departed Dubai International, who would bear responsibility? Iran would almost certainly deny deliberate targeting, characterising any such incident as collateral damage from strikes on US-allied Gulf infrastructure a defence Tehran has already rehearsed after striking a hotel it justified as hosting American military personnel. Ethiopia, a non-combatant with no leverage over Tehran and no meaningful military alliances, would have had no mechanism whatsoever to hold Iran accountable. The tragedy would simply be absorbed.

THE DIASPORA SEVERED FROM HOME

Beyond the geopolitical drama lies a quieter, more intimate human cost that has been largely overlooked in the noise of high politics: the severing of Ethiopia’s diaspora communities from the cultural lifeline that connects them to home.

Ethiopian Airlines has long served a function that transcends commerce. For the millions of Ethiopians living in Washington DC, Stockholm, Oslo, Toronto, and across the Gulf, the airline’s cargo holds carry something more precious than freight: fresh injera, delivered within 24 hours of being baked in Addis Ababa or Gondar. Companies such as Mama Fresh ship injera to Washington DC six days per week, to Sweden three times weekly, and to Norway twice weekly. Before the conflict, this supply chain operated with quiet, extraordinary efficiency and it flowed almost entirely through the Gulf hubs that are now either closed or under fire.

The scale of this trade is significant. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, teff injera exports earned $36 million in three months, accounting for 44.4% of all Ethiopian food and beverage export earnings. An estimated 6.5 million small-scale farmers depend on teff cultivation for their livelihoods. And it has all been cut. For diaspora Ethiopians in the Gulf states particularly, the irony is acute and painful: their Prime Minister was physically present in that warzone not to attend to his countrymen’s welfare, but to deliver birthday greetings to a billionaire autocrat.

THE VOICE OF SUPPORT: ‘A MASTER STROKE OF DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT’

Not everyone views the visit as reckless. Within Abiy’s Prosperity Party and amongst his core supporters particularly those who argue that the UAE relationship is existential for Ethiopia’s economic survival a different narrative has emerged, forcefully if not always convincingly.

“People misunderstand what this relationship represents,” argues a senior policy adviser aligned with the Prosperity Party who spoke to this correspondent on background. “The UAE has underwritten Ethiopian financial stability for years. Abu Dhabi’s billions have been the single most important external factor in preventing a sovereign debt collapse. When MBZ invites you, you go. That is not personal weakness, that is the arithmetic of survival.”

Some diplomatic observers in Addis Ababa echo this view, albeit cautiously. A Western envoy who requested anonymity noted: “Abiy’s relationship with MBZ is not simply personal. The UAE has strategic interests in the Horn of Africa, Red Sea access, counter-Islamist positioning, commercial investment and Abiy is their primary interlocutor. Maintaining that channel, even symbolically, has real value.” Prosperity Party loyalists pointed further to the 2018 peace deal with Eritrea, brokered partly through UAE facilitation, as evidence that personal diplomacy with Gulf leaders yields concrete results.

THE OPPOSITION’S FURY: ‘CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE OF THE NATION’S ASSETS’

Opposition voices were far less measured, one party issued a formal statement describing the visit as “an inexcusable dereliction of duty during a national economic emergency,” while calling on parliament to demand a full account of the trip’s costs and stated objectives.

• “Ethiopian Airlines belongs to the Ethiopian people. It is not the Prime Minister’s private jet.“🛩️

Oromo federalist opposition figures were equally pointed, framing the visit as emblematic of a broader pattern of governance they characterise as Gulf-dependent, personalised, and disconnected from ordinary Ethiopian suffering. “While the diaspora cannot get injera,” said one opposition parliamentarian, “the Prime Minister is eating birthday cake in Dubai. This image will not be forgotten.“

Academic voices added intellectual weight to the critique a Professor of Addis Ababa University’s Institute of Political Studies argued that the visit represented a structural failure: “Modern statecraft has abundant tools for symbolic personal communication encrypted video conferencing, personal envoys, handwritten letters delivered by senior ministers. The physical presence of a head of state in an active conflict zone serves no purpose that these instruments cannot replicate, at a fraction of the cost and precisely zero risk.”

THE VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION QUESTION

This brings us to perhaps the most damaging and unanswerable critique of the entire episode: in 2026, was this journey necessary at all? Heads of state communicate through secure video conferencing systems, encrypted diplomatic channels, personal envoys of ministerial rank, and private correspondence on a daily basis. The G7, the African Union, the United Nations all conduct substantive diplomacy routinely without physical presence.

Even MBZ himself was actively managing a wartime crisis when Abiy arrived, visiting wounded patients in hospital and publicly declaring that the UAE was “in a period of war.” The idea that this was the right moment for a visiting African leader’s birthday call strains credulity. A personal birthday message could have been delivered by video call in four minutes. A handwritten letter of solidarity, co-signed by Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister, would have conveyed the same personal warmth, the same political signal of alignment, and the same bilateral goodwill without placing an aircraft over bombed runways, or leaving Ethiopia’s diaspora watching their Prime Minister fly into a warzone while they cannot receive a delivery of injera.

THE VERDICT: STATECRAFT OR SENTIMENT?

The defence of this visit ultimately rests on a single pillar: that Abiy’s personal relationship with MBZ is so financially and diplomatically valuable to Ethiopia that its maintenance justifies almost any sacrifice. It is an argument that has some merit in the abstract. Ethiopia’s dependence on UAE financial support is real, documented, and consequential.

But the argument collapses when subjected to elementary scrutiny. If the visit produced concrete relief, emergency fuel cost agreements, financial support for the airline’s losses, guarantees of airspace access, or accelerated cargo resumption for diaspora supply chains, there is no evidence of it. The Ethiopian government has announced nothing. Ethiopian Airlines has received no reported bailout. The injera flights remain grounded.

What the visit did produce, beyond birthday greetings, is a political image that will be difficult to erase: the Prime Minister of one of the world’s poorest nations, on the aircraft of its cash-haemorrhaging flagship airline, landing at an airport that had been bombed twice in 48 hours, to wish a billionaire autocrat a happy birthday. In the annals of Ethiopian political symbolism, few images have been so costly or so avoidable.

The question for Ethiopians is not whether the UAE relationship matters. It does, profoundly. The question is whether this particular trip, at this particular moment, served Ethiopia or whether it served only the personal comfort of a Prime Minister who has, perhaps, allowed the warmth of a friendship to cloud his judgement about when the nation’s airline, the nation’s reputation, and the lives aboard that aircraft are simply too precious a thing to risk. On the current evidence, history will struggle to find a convincing answer in favour of the flight.

———————//——————

E. Frashie is Senior Political Correspondent at The Ethiopian Tribune, covering governance, aviation, and Horn of Africa geopolitics.

Views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of The Ethiopian Tribune.

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By Endex, the Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

I have been a journalist for many years. I have written obituaries for kings and eulogies for activists, reported on wars and chronicled elections. But there are moments in a writing life when the subject demands not a report, but a confession a piece written not from the head alone, but from the marrow of one’s own story. This is such a moment. And the man who demands it is Haile Gerima.

Let me begin where it truly begins for me: 1993. A small cinema tucked away off Portobello Road in West London. It is a blustery autumn evening, and I have been dragged there, there is no more honest word, by a university friend whose enthusiasm for Ethiopian cinema far exceeded my own. She told me that a professor and filmmaker named Haile Gerima had made a film about slavery. She told me he had mentored extraordinary talent. She told me he was one of ours. I confess I was not immediately convinced. But I went.

What happened inside that cinema changed something in me permanently.

A Revelation Off Portobello Road

The film was Sankofa. Named for the Ghanaian Akan word meaning ‘to go back, look for, and gain wisdom, power and hope’, it follows a Black American fashion model who undergoes a harrowing spiritual journey to a plantation in the antebellum American South. In lesser hands, this could have been melodrama, or worse, exploitation. In Gerima’s hands, it was something I had never encountered before in a cinema and have rarely encountered since: truth delivered with the full force of art.

I felt it from the opening frames. The visual language was unlike anything Hollywood had offered us raw yet luminous, poetic yet unflinching, expressionist in the way that only a filmmaker who has absorbed both African storytelling traditions and the radical energy of the American counter-cinema movement could achieve. Sankofa was formally ambitious to a degree that seemed almost reckless, and yet every choice was earned. When the drums sounded and the spirits of the enslaved rose from the floors of Cape Coast Castle, I was not watching a film. I was bearing witness.

The respect I felt rising in me during those two hours was immense, the kind of respect one cannot manufacture or perform. It came from recognising craftsmanship of the highest order in service of a moral imperative that could not be ignored. Here was a man who had spent twenty years researching the trans-Atlantic slave trade, who had been rejected by every major American distributor, and who had taken his film city by city, cinema by cinema, to Black communities across the United States until the world had no choice but to take notice. The film that no one would distribute was eventually ranked by Harvard Film Studies professors as one of the most essential films in the history of world cinema between 1980 and 2000. But that evening in Notting Hill, I knew none of this. I only knew what I felt.

When he stepped onto the stage for the Q&A, the room shifted. Here was my fellow countryman, standing with grace and quiet dignity and I felt, for the first time in a long while, the particular pride of shared origin.

He spoke about the sacrifices behind the work. He spoke with a candour that was electrifying, and at moments heartbreaking the years of fundraising, the rejections, the loneliness of making films that the industry did not want, the determination to carry stories that others feared to touch. I remember sitting very still. It was the kind of stillness that falls over you when you are in the presence of something authentic. He was not performing humility. He simply had the ease of a man who had decided, long ago, what he was for and had never wavered.

I left that cinema altered. I had gone in knowing almost nothing about Haile Gerima. I came out knowing that I would follow his work for the rest of my life.

Born in Gondar, Shaped by the World

To understand Haile Gerima is to understand where he came from. He was born on 4 March 1946 in Gondar a city of ancient castles and highland winds in northern Ethiopia, a place that carries centuries of royal history in its very stones. His father was a playwright and dramatist who toured the Ethiopian countryside staging local theatre; his mother was a teacher. The house he grew up in was saturated with storytelling, with the Amharic oral tradition, with the fierce independence of a people who had never been colonised, not fully, not finally and who knew it.

In 1967, at twenty-one, he left for the United States first to study drama at the Goodman School in Chicago, then to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he would discover the cinema that would become his weapon and his calling. At UCLA, he fell in with an extraordinary cohort of Black, Chicano, Asian, and international students who collectively refused the grammar of Hollywood. They formed what would later be known as the L.A. Rebellion, a movement that sought to build an entirely alternative, politically conscious, aesthetically radical Black American cinema. Haile Gerima is one of its most towering figures.

His early films announced him immediately. Harvest: 3,000 Years, made in Ethiopia in 1975, won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Bush Mama, made the following year, was a searing portrait of Black poverty and resistance in Los Angeles. Ashes and Embers followed in 1982, winning awards in Lisbon and earning recognition at the Berlinale. Each film was stamping his name deeper into the conscience of world cinema, even as mainstream Hollywood looked the other way.

A Question at SOAS, and an Answer That Stayed With Me

Some years after that first encounter in Notting Hill, I saw him again, this time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at the premiere of his documentary Adwa. The film concerned the extraordinary Battle of Adwa in 1896, when Ethiopian forces under Emperor Menelik II defeated the Italian colonial army in one of the most significant military victories in African history: the first time an African nation had routed a European colonial power on the battlefield.

I was curious about the funding. The film, I had learned, had received Italian backing. This troubled me in a way I could not entirely articulate. Italy was the defeated party. Italy was, in the deepest sense, the villain of the story. Why had Gerima accepted their money? Was there not a risk, however subtle, of the narrative being shaped by the very power whose humiliation it documented?

I put the question to him after the screening. His answer was simple, disarming, and utterly characteristic of the man: no one else had been willing to finance it. The Ethiopian government had not come forward. The international co-production community had not come forward. The Italians had. And so he had taken their money, looked them calmly in the eye, and made a film that placed Ethiopia’s resistance and pride at its absolute centre, a film grounded in historical truth and the testimonies of those who had fought, refusing to soften a single frame of what Italy’s colonialism had meant.

He had taken the coloniser’s resources and turned them into a monument to the colonised. This is a particular kind of genius political, artistic, moral.

I walked away from SOAS that evening with a deeper understanding of what it means to operate without institutional support, without the safety net of a nation-state willing to fund its own history. Gerima had not waited. He had never waited. He had found whatever resource was available and bent it to the service of truth. This, I came to understand, was the defining characteristic of his entire career.

Teza, and the Courage to Look Inward

When Teza arrived in 2008, his first feature in nearly a decade, it felt like a homecoming of the most complicated kind. The film is a profoundly personal and politically courageous work, following an Ethiopian intellectual who returns home from Germany during the brutal era of the Derg military junta. It is a film about the particular tragedy of the educated African who goes abroad seeking knowledge and returns to find his country transformed into a place of terror, where the very idealism that drove him away has been weaponised into something monstrous.

Haile Gerima did not flinch from the darkness of the Mengistu era, the Red Terror, the disappearances, the way in which revolutionary rhetoric had curdled into authoritarian nightmare. Nor did he retreat into sentimentality. Teza is a film of extraordinary compassion and equally extraordinary rigour. It won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice Film Festival. It won the Golden Tanit and four additional awards at the Carthage Film Festival. It won the Golden Stallion of Yennenga at FESPACO. The world’s cinema community recognised what Ethiopian audiences had perhaps always known: that here was a filmmaker who loved his country enough to tell it the truth.

When he brought Teza to London, I was in the audience again, older now, a consultant and chief editor rather than a young journalist, but feeling once more that particular stillness of being in the presence of authentic work. Gerima had done it again. He had refused to make the comfortable film, the redemptive arc that tidies everything up. He had insisted on the full weight of history, and the audience bore it willingly, because he had earned our trust.

Thirty Years in the Making: Black Lions – Roman Wolves

And now, in February 2026, as the lights of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival fall upon him, Haile Gerima has completed perhaps the most monumental work of his extraordinary life.

Black Lions – Roman Wolves is nearly nine hours long. It took thirty years to make. It is a reckoning, vast, meticulous, and unsparing with Italy’s brutal colonial campaign against Ethiopia. Drawing on archival footage that Italian filmmakers, at Mussolini’s direction, meticulously recorded during the 1935 invasion, and combining it with contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses and descendants of those who fought, Gerima has built an epic from the coloniser’s own images, turning them against the ideology that created them.

The paradox was not lost on him. At the Q&A following the Berlin premiere, he spoke of it with characteristic directness: his people had not filmed. The Italians had. And so he took those images racist in their framing, propagandistic in their intent, and asked a radical question: how can I use the image depicted by the coloniser against itself? The answer, running to nine hours and screened in two parts across consecutive days at the Delphi Filmpalast, is his most sustained and audacious work to date.

He told the packed Berlin audience that he had begun the project in 1996, fed up with what he called the ‘fake history’ of Italy’s Ethiopian campaign the selective memory, the glossing over of mustard gas attacks, of massacres, of the systematic attempt to humiliate and subjugate a proud nation. He had been raised, as he put it, under the miseducation of the British education system that followed the Italian war, and he had never forgotten what that meant: to have the story of your own people’s suffering filtered through the lens of those who had caused it.

He had spent thirty years correcting that record. Thirty years giving the barefoot soldiers of Ethiopia their voices back.

The Berlinale Camera: A Recognition Long Overdue

On 17 February 2026, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the grand hall of the Delphi Filmpalast, the Berlin International Film Festival presented Haile Gerima with the Berlinale Camera, the festival’s honorary award, given since 1986 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to cinema and with whom the Berlinale feels a special and enduring connection.

The award itself is a remarkable object: crafted by Düsseldorf goldsmith Georg Hornemann, it is assembled from 128 individual components into the form of a real film camera. It is, in its way, a perfect symbol for what Gerima has built, piece by piece, film by film, year by year, into a body of work that has transformed not merely African cinema, but the global conversation about colonialism, memory, and resistance.

Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle said it with admirable precision when she announced the award: Gerima’s works bear witness to histories marked by oppression, resistance, and the unfinished work of decolonisation stories that speak with urgent force to the world today. It is an honour to present the Berlinale Camera to a filmmaker who has transformed the way so many understand the world.

For those of us who have followed him for decades who sat in a small London cinema in 1993 and felt something shift inside us this recognition carries a particular weight. Not because we needed the Berlinale’s validation to understand Gerima’s greatness. We never did. But because there is something profoundly moving about watching the world finally, formally, say: yes. We see him. We always should have.

Teacher, Builder, Cultural Keeper

No account of Haile Gerima is complete without speaking of the life he has built beyond the camera. Since 1975, for more than half a century, he has taught film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus. He has mentored hundreds of young filmmakers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the African-American diaspora, insisting to each of them that their stories matter, that their voices are necessary, that the industry’s indifference is not a verdict but an invitation to build something better.

With his wife and fellow filmmaker Shirikiana Aina Gerima, he founded Mypheduh Films, a distribution company dedicated to ensuring that independent African cinema reaches audiences without surrendering to the gatekeepers of the mainstream. In 1996, they opened Sankofa Video, Books & Café in Washington a cultural institution offering film screenings, book signings, community discussions, and a physical space for the kind of intellectual life that sustains a people’s sense of themselves. That café has been sustained, in no small part, by the revenue from Gerima’s own films, self-distributed with the same grassroots determination he has brought to every project.

He is not merely a filmmaker. He is an ecosystem of resistance. He built the conditions in which the next generation of African storytellers could imagine themselves.

What He Carried And What He Gave Back

There is a word in the Ghanaian Akan language sankofa that Gerima made the title of his most celebrated film. It means, at its most literal, to go back and retrieve. It is often symbolised by a bird flying forwards whilst its head looks back. It speaks of the necessity of understanding where you have come from in order to know where you are going.

Haile Gerima has lived this word. He left Gondar as a young man, carrying the landscape and the stories of his highland childhood into the lecture halls of Chicago and the film schools of Los Angeles. He carried the memory of his father’s plays into the grammar of his own cinema. He carried the defeats and the dignities of Ethiopian history, the Italian occupation, the Derg’s terror, the Battle of Adwa, into works that ensured that those events would not be forgotten, not be distorted, not be claimed by anyone but those who lived them.

And he gave it all back. Every film is a gift to Ethiopia, to Africa, to the African diaspora, to anyone who has ever had their history stolen and replaced with someone else’s version. Every student he trained is a continuation of this act of giving.

Watching him receive the Berlinale Camera alongside his old comrade Charles Burnett, the two old warriors of the L.A. Rebellion, grey now, unhurried, utterly undiminished felt less like a prize ceremony and more like a moment of profound historical reckoning. The industry that once ignored them was now placing golden cameras in their hands. I suspect Gerima found some quiet satisfaction in that. I suspect he also found it, in some deep part of himself, beside the point. The work was always the point.

Haile Gerima has never simply made films.

He has made memory.

He has made resistance.

He has made truth visible.

And for those of us who first met him in a darkened cinema in London, who felt something change inside us as his images unfolded and his voice filled the room — he has made something rarer still.

He has made pride. Deep, resonant, enduring pride.

May his lens never rest.

Endex, Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

London, 20 February 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune celebrates Ethiopian excellence in arts, culture, politics, and society.

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By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune columnist

Ethiopia’s political theatre, under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has become a masterclass in the management of appearances, whispers, and global expectations. The recent succession of high-profile international visits  the conspicuously warm hand-holding with India’s Prime Minister and the measured, almost surgical formality of Türkiye’s President Erdoğan revealed far more than diplomatic protocol. They exposed the entangled web of elite culture, public rumour, and the ordinary citizen’s bewildered gaze upon a country balancing precariously between internal fractures and external pressures.

Hovering above all of this is the rumour of the UAE president’s death  a story so vivid and so swiftly circulated across Turkish media, pan-Islamic channels, and social networks that it painted, for many, a portrait of secretive foreign influence, invisible hands, and the tantalising notion that Ethiopia’s leader might be quietly managing external chaos whilst projecting an image of unshakeable calm at home.

The contrast between India’s and Türkiye’s visits is, at its core, a study in how symbolism and substance collide. When India’s Prime Minister arrived, Abiy Ahmed received him with ceremonial grandeur  the public drive, the embraces, the hand-holding that delights both domestic media and diaspora audiences alike. Military bands performed. State dinners gleamed. The optics were unambiguous: India and Ethiopia, friends in both trade and spirit, bound by something warmer than treaty language. It was, in the most generous reading, diplomacy rendered as soft-focus emotional theatre  reassuring, photogenic, and carefully curated for international consumption.

Erdoğan’s February 2026 visit was an altogether different affair. There were no embraces, no personal driving tours, no gestures of playful camaraderie. Instead, the Turkish President delivered firm, layered statements about the Horn of Africa warning that the region must not become a battleground for foreign powers, rejecting Israeli recognition of Somaliland, and invoking shared historical and cultural ties through gestures such as the restoration of the Al-Nejashi mosque. The messaging operated on multiple frequencies simultaneously: cultural diplomacy through Islamic heritage, strategic caution against external interference, and economic signalling through Turkey’s legacy of railway investment and infrastructure ambition in the region. Abiy, for his part, navigated Erdoğan’s visit with chess-like restraint measured nods, careful phrasing, and the composure of a leader acutely aware that every gesture is being read by multiple audiences at once.

Perhaps nowhere was Ethiopia’s diplomatic complexity more visibly compressed than in the pageantry of state ceremony itself. Female Muslim ministers appeared in modest, conservative attire a calculated gesture of cultural respect towards Erdoğan’s perceived Islamic sensibility. Simultaneously, Ethiopia’s military band performed with unapologetic professionalism in ceremonial dress that bore no such concession to conservative norms. To the casual observer, it appeared a contradiction: secular and Islamic, deferential and assertive, all within the same state theatre and the same afternoon. To those inside the inner circle, it was a deliberate and nuanced display Ethiopia asserting its inclusivity, its sovereign authority, and its capacity to speak to multiple audiences without committing entirely to any one of them.

Yet even as these carefully managed ceremonies unfolded, a parallel and far more troubling drama was playing out just beyond the edges of the official frame  one that seasoned security professionals have begun to regard not merely as an embarrassment, but as a genuine and escalating threat. Wander through the corridors of any recent state function, stroll the perimeters of a parliamentary session, or position yourself anywhere near a visiting dignitary in Addis Ababa today, and you will encounter them: a new and rapidly proliferating breed of young Ethiopian digital content creators, gimbal-stabilised cameras strapped to their bodies, backpacks laden with equipment, telephoto lenses the length of a man’s forearm trained with startling intimacy upon the faces, movements, and immediate personal spaces of heads of state, senior ministers, and foreign dignitaries. They move through these environments with the breezy, unearned confidence of those who have confused a press badge  or sometimes the mere appearance of one,  with a security clearance. They possess, by all observable evidence, no formal training in the protocols, boundaries, or responsibilities that govern proximity to protected individuals. And they appear entirely unbothered by this fact.

The entitlement on display is, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with close-protection doctrine, quite breathtaking. These are not seasoned photojournalists who have spent years learning where the line is, why it exists, and what it costs when it is crossed. These are, in the main, young men intoxicated by the social currency of expensive equipment and the follower counts that footage of powerful people can generate. They materialise at parliament. They appear at state receptions. They insert themselves into the working perimeters of visiting foreign leaders with a casualness that would trigger immediate and forceful responses in virtually any other capital city in the world. In London, Washington, Ankara, or New Delhi, a man walking within arm’s reach of a head of state with a backpack, a gimbal, and a telephoto lens  without verified, screened, and closely supervised accreditation would find himself face-down on the floor within seconds, surrounded by individuals whose professional instincts had already calculated every possible implication of his presence. In Addis Ababa, he gets the shot, posts it to his channel, and collects the views.

Security analysts who have observed this phenomenon with growing alarm are not mincing their words. The convergence of several factors  the accessibility of high-resolution imaging equipment, the hunger for digital content, the culture of entitlement that pervades certain social circles in the capital, and the conspicuous gaps in how access to sensitive environments is controlled and enforced creates what one expert described, in terms that should give every responsible official pause, as a gathering storm. These young operators, operating today with apparent innocence and tomorrow with unknown motivations or under unknown influences, represent a vector of potential harm that Ethiopian security architecture has not yet adequately reckoned with. A telephoto lens that can capture the iris of a dignitary from forty metres can equally be used to gather intelligence on movement patterns, security formations, and personal vulnerabilities. A gimbal operator who has learnt, through repeated unchallenged access, exactly how close he can get before anyone reacts, has also learnt something that no hostile actor should ever be permitted to know. The question is not whether these individuals intend harm today. The question is what happens when someone who does intend harm observes that the door is open, the access is easy, and the consequences are nonexistent.

The scene at parliament is particularly instructive, and particularly galling to those who understand what they are looking at. Session after session, these self-appointed videographers wander into the sight lines of accredited international media, their enormous lenses jutting into carefully composed shots, their gimbal rigs swinging with cheerful obliviousness through spaces that ought to be controlled, their physical presence a constant, low-grade disruption to the professionals around them. To the accredited journalist trying to capture a considered, properly framed image from a respectful distance, they are an irritant the photographic equivalent of someone talking loudly on their telephone in a library. But to the security professional tasked with maintaining a protective envelope around the individuals in that room, they are something considerably more serious. They are unknowns. They are unvetted. They are close. And in the calculus of close-protection work, an unvetted unknown in close proximity to a principal is not an inconvenience it is a contingency that must be planned for, every single time, because the one time it is not will be the time it matters.

What makes this situation particularly pointed in the Ethiopian context is the class and entitlement dimension that runs through it like a fault line. These are not individuals who have fought their way into these spaces through years of professional credibility. Many have arrived there through social connections, through the reflected glamour of association with powerful figures, through the simple fact that nobody with the authority to stop them has yet chosen to do so consistently. They carry their equipment like a credential and their confidence like a clearance. They have absorbed, somewhere along the way, the lesson that in Ethiopia, if you look the part and move with sufficient assurance, the doors tend to open. It is the same lesson, expressed through a very different medium, that underlies the Feyisa Lilesa scandal the conviction, whether held consciously or simply lived unconsciously, that certain people in this country are simply not subject to the same rules as everyone else.

This same duality, so carefully choreographed on the ceremonial stage, finds a far less flattering mirror in the domain of elite accountability at home  and no case has crystallised public fury quite like that of Feyisa Lilesa. The celebrated Oromo long-distance runner, who once captured the world’s imagination and the conscience of a people with a single crossed-arm gesture on the Olympic podium in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, now finds himself at the centre of a scandal that has ignited a firestorm of outrage across Ethiopian society. According to reports circulating widely and discussed at length by Addis Mereja, Lilesa was involved in a serious road traffic collision in the Jemo Michael area of Addis Ababa  an incident that has since escalated from a tragic accident into a deeply charged political and moral reckoning.

The human cost of that collision is not abstract. A sixteen-year-old child is dead. Another individual sustained a broken bone and remains under medical treatment. These are not statistics  they are lives, and families, torn apart on an ordinary Addis Ababa street. Yet what has incensed the Ethiopian public beyond even the tragedy of the accident itself are the alleged circumstances that followed it. Reports claim that rather than submitting to police authority at the scene, Lilesa brandished a firearm and used it to intimidate officers, effectively preventing his own arrest. If accurate, this is not merely a legal violation  it is a declaration, however implicit, that certain individuals in Ethiopia exist beyond the ordinary reach of the law.

And then came the Facebook post. In the immediate aftermath of an accident that had killed a child and injured another person, Lilesa reportedly took to social media to describe the incident as a common accident, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone. The public reaction was swift and visceral. To many Ethiopians who had watched this unfold, the post read not as an expression of remorse but as a performance of nonchalance the casual deflection of a man confident that consequence would not find him. It was, to borrow the language of the streets, the message of someone who does not believe he will ever truly be held to account.

The rumours that followed were, in some ways, the most damning development of all. Widespread reports began to circulate — unconfirmed as yet by any official authority — that Lilesa had fled Ethiopia entirely, with Dubai emerging as the most frequently named destination. The Ethiopian police have not, at the time of writing, issued any official confirmation or denial of these reports. That silence, in itself, speaks volumes to a public that has grown finely attuned to the language of institutional evasion. When the state says nothing, Ethiopians have long since learnt to interpret that nothing with considerable sophistication.

This is not the first time Lilesa’s conduct has drawn public censure, and the pattern is instructive. When previously accused of public intoxication and disputes with neighbours, his reported response was characteristically defiant: “If I drink, I drink with my own money.” It was the retort of a man who had confused personal achievement with personal impunity — who had, somewhere along the road from Rio to Addis Ababa, begun to believe that fame was a form of sovereignty. His dismissive remarks about Ethiopia’s rising fuel prices — a crisis felt acutely by millions of ordinary citizens — further alienated those who might otherwise have retained residual goodwill towards him. And his controversial comments regarding the use of the Amharic language in traditional Oromo Aba Gada justice proceedings struck many as wilfully divisive, a provocation dressed in the language of cultural assertion.

The political dimension of Lilesa’s trajectory adds yet another layer of complexity to an already tangled story. When he returned to Ethiopia in 2018 following his self-imposed exile after Rio, he did so as a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of the Abiy Ahmed government — a transformation that struck many of his former admirers as jarring, even bewildering. The man who had crossed his arms above his head on the world’s most watched sporting stage, in solidarity with an Oromo people then facing brutal state repression, had become, in the eyes of some, a symbol of the very political accommodation he once appeared to resist. Whether that shift reflected genuine conviction, pragmatic calculation, or something more complicated entirely is a question that only Lilesa can answer. What is beyond dispute is that it reconfigured his public identity in ways that continue to reverberate.

For ordinary Ethiopians watching all of this unfold, the Lilesa affair is not simply about one man. It is a referendum on the question that sits at the heart of every functioning society: does the law apply equally, or does it bend for those with fame, political proximity, and the means to board a flight before the consequences arrive? Citizens observe the contrast with bitter clarity — ministers in modest attire performing deference to foreign dignitaries, military women dancing in ceremonial dress for the cameras, and a celebrated athlete who allegedly pointed a firearm at police officers and may now be sipping coffee in Dubai whilst a sixteen-year-old lies in a grave in Addis Ababa. The cognitive dissonance is not lost on anyone. It feeds rumour. It deepens mistrust. And it makes even the most outlandish whispers about foreign power brokers and shadowy elite networks feel, to many, entirely plausible — because the architecture of privilege that surrounds them is demonstrably, visibly real.

It is worth pausing here to observe that the gimbal-toting content creator shouldering his way past protocol officers at a state function and the celebrated athlete allegedly brandishing a firearm at police officers in Jemo Michael are, at some fundamental level, expressions of the same cultural pathology. Both represent individuals who have concluded, through experience, through impunity, through the repeated failure of institutions to assert boundaries,  that the rules governing ordinary Ethiopians simply do not apply to them. The content creator has learnt that nobody will stop him from walking into sensitive spaces with a backpack full of equipment and a telephoto lens trained on a foreign head of state. Lilesa apparently learnt that a firearm and a certain quality of confidence could send police officers stepping backwards. The specific expressions differ enormously. The underlying logic is identical. And it is a logic that, left unaddressed, corrodes everything it touches,  from the credibility of state institutions to the physical safety of the nation’s most protected individuals.

Addis Mereja’s coverage of the Lilesa incident concludes with a call that is as simple as it is urgent: the police must provide a transparent and timely update to the Ethiopian public. It is a demand that ought not to require stating. That it does,  that citizens must actively petition their institutions for basic accountability in a case involving a dead child and a nationally known figure,  is itself a measure of how far public trust in those institutions has eroded. Justice, in this instance, is not a complicated philosophical concept. It is a sixteen-year-old who deserved to grow up, and a family that deserves to know that their loss was not simply absorbed into the great Ethiopian silence that tends to swallow inconvenient truths.

Ethiopia’s leadership is simultaneously juggling several weighty portfolios that seldom receive the coherent public narrative they demand. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones signal military cooperation and procurement ambition. Railway investments, stalled by conflict and entangled in international arbitration, symbolise both the country’s grand infrastructure vision and its fragility in executing it. Mosque restorations gesture towards humanitarian and religious legitimacy on the international stage. Each element is deployed strategically,  showing just enough to reassure partners whilst carefully concealing vulnerabilities that a more transparent posture might expose. Yet it is arguably the vulnerabilities closest to home,  the entitled photographer at the palace gate, the athlete on a flight to Dubai,  that pose the most immediate and corrosive risk to the project of building a credible, governed state.

The rumour mill, meanwhile, does not pause for diplomatic niceties. The widely circulated story of the UAE president’s death  amplified by Turkish media and pan-Arab channels became a proxy for a broader public anxiety about foreign influence in Ethiopian affairs. For elites, it was a whispered talking point, a potential leverage in shadow conversations. For the layperson, it was fuel for outrage, suspicion, and political imagination. For the Prime Minister, it represented an opportunity: demonstrate control through public calm, measured diplomacy, and the quiet redirection of attention. In Ethiopia, as in many states where official communication is limited and political opacity is the norm, rumour does not merely fill the gaps in understanding, it becomes the primary currency of political discourse.

The satirical image almost writes itself. The Ethiopian Prime Minister, immaculately composed, nods attentively as Erdoğan’s eyes sweep the room with the cool deliberation of a general reviewing a chessboard. Behind them, a military band plays with disciplined flair whilst ministers in conservative Islamic dress murmur protocol reminders to one another. And somewhere just off to the side, perhaps three steps closer than any security doctrine would permit, a young man in a branded hoodie swings a gimbal-mounted camera towards the Turkish President’s face, his enormous telephoto lens catching the light, his backpack brushing the elbow of a close-protection officer who glances sideways with visible unease but says nothing, because nobody has yet told him definitively what to do about this. Cameras flash. Social media erupts with speculation about Arab power brokers, athletes allegedly fled to Dubai, and railway arbiters counting their fees in distant capitals. The content creator posts his footage. The views pour in. And the Prime Minister smiles, pours the tea, and holds the room, master of ceremonies, tactician, and juggler of perceptions across a stage that is, in more ways than one, alarmingly unsecured.

What this theatre ultimately reveals is the extraordinary complexity of Ethiopia’s balancing act,  both internally and externally. Domestically, the government must speak to Christians and Muslims, to Oromo and non-Oromo communities, to elites and ordinary citizens whose lived realities could not be more divergent. Externally, it must manage relationships with the UAE, Türkiye, India, Israel, China, and Western donors, each with their own expectations, their own leverage, and their own interpretation of every gesture Ethiopia makes. Every decision, from a minister’s choice of attire to the selection of ceremonial music, from a drone procurement deal to a mosque restoration, carries multiple and often contradictory signals. The art lies not in eliminating that contradiction but in holding it together long enough to keep every audience sufficiently satisfied. What cannot be held together indefinitely, however, is a security culture in which entitlement substitutes for vetting, and a social culture in which impunity substitutes for accountability.

The lessons embedded in this complex choreography are not trivial ones. Opacity, wherever it persists, breeds narrative creation,  and not always the narratives that governments would choose. Perception, verified or otherwise, shapes legitimacy in ways that policy alone cannot correct. Optics matter as profoundly as action, because the theatre of governance is watched not only by foreign partners but by citizens who are drawing their own quiet conclusions about fairness, competence, and sovereignty. And satire, in such an environment, is sometimes the only honest lens available, the only tool capable of holding the absurdity and the seriousness of it all in the same frame without flinching. But satire has its limits. A security breach does not.

Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia is, in the final accounting, many things at once,  a secular state with a deeply religious population, a military state with a taste for flamboyant ceremony, a country navigating elite favouritism and foreign influence whilst performing confidence on a world stage. The Prime Minister’s particular genius lies not in controlling every rumour, some, like the story drifting in from the Arab world, are simply beyond any government’s reach, but in managing appearances with sufficient skill that the performance itself becomes a form of power. India’s warmth, Erdoğan’s formality, the whispers from the Gulf, the contradictions of the ceremony hall, the sight of a celebrated Olympian allegedly fleeing accountability on a flight to Dubai whilst a teenager’s family mourns in Addis Ababa, and the gimbal operator who has just walked, unchallenged, to within two metres of a visiting head of state all of it intersects within a single, breathtakingly intricate and increasingly fragile theatre of governance.

For the casual observer, it may read as chaos, even farce. For the political analyst, it is a study in survival, strategy, and the calculated management of perception. For the security professional, it is something closer to a slow-motion crisis waiting for its moment. And for Ethiopia itself, the lesson endures: in a world governed as much by optics as by facts, appearances, carefully choreographed, can be every bit as powerful as the truth. But a sixteen-year-old child is dead. A foreign dignitary’s movements are being filmed from arm’s reach by someone nobody has screened. And no amount of choreography, however immaculate, can indefinitely paper over the cracks in a state that has not yet decided, with full seriousness, that its rules apply to everyone equally including those holding the most expensive cameras in the room.

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The death rumour of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed has placed the survival of Abiy Ahmed’s government under uncomfortable scrutiny. For eight years, Abu Dhabi’s billions have underwritten Ethiopian stability. The question now is whether a new ruler in the Gulf will honour the debts of a very personal friendship.

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

THERE IS A THEORY in Ethiopian political circles, unspoken at cabinet level but widely understood by the civil servants who carry the trays in and out: that the government’s stability does not rest chiefly upon its democratic mandate, its macroeconomic competence, or even the loyalty of the federal army. It rests, with the elegant fragility of a line of dominoes, upon a single telephone number in Abu Dhabi.

The death of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known universally as MBZ has, in the days since his unconfirmed passing, given that unspoken theory a rather urgent public airing. In financial ministries and foreign embassies across Addis Ababa, officials are engaged in conversations they are characterising, carefully, as expressions of condolence. Those outside the ministries are characterising them, with rather less diplomatic restraint, as emergency planning.

The stakes are not trivial. Since 2018, the bilateral relationship between Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia and the UAE has constituted one of the most consequential and least institutionally robust financial and security arrangements in the Horn of Africa. Understanding why MBZ’s death matters so profoundly in Addis Ababa requires understanding precisely what was built, how it was built, and upon whose personal authority it depended.

A state whose foundation rests upon another leader’s personal cheque-book is not a state at all. It is a house of cards, waiting for a change in the wind.

A THREE-BILLION-DOLLAR WAGER ON ONE MAN

In June 2018, weeks after Abiy Ahmed’s improbable ascent to the premiership of Africa’s second most populous nation, the UAE pledged a $3 billion (approximately £2.4 billion) aid package to Ethiopia. A substantial portion took the form of a direct central bank deposit a sovereign intervention in Ethiopia’s foreign exchange reserves at a moment of acute liquidity crisis (Reuters, 2018).

The effect was threefold. The deposit stabilised the country’s foreign currency reserves, signalled Gulf confidence in the new premier’s reform programme, and critically furnished Abiy with the domestic political capital to present himself as a leader who could attract serious international investment. The economy did not collapse. The birr did not become, in 2018, a collector’s curiosity. The new Prime Minister stood before his countrymen as a man capable of conjuring order from chaos. He could, admittedly, do so in part because a prince in the Gulf had decided he was worth the gamble.

This was not philanthropy in the conventional sense. The UAE’s Horn of Africa strategy is a coherent piece of middle-power geopolitics, positioning Ethiopia with its 130 million citizens and considerable agricultural and logistical assets as a demographic and commercial anchor for Gulf ambitions. Emirati sovereign wealth funds and private investors expressed interest in logistics, port access, agriculture and renewable energy. The arrangement delivered concrete returns for both parties.

What it did not deliver and this is the crux of the present difficulty was institutional durability. ‘Institutionalised alliances tend to survive leadership change more easily than relationships centred on interpersonal trust,’ notes one analysis of the bilateral relationship. The Abiy-MBZ partnership was, by diplomatic accounts, unusually personal: high-frequency direct communication, strategic backchannel discussions, and mediation roles including in the normalisation of Ethiopia-Eritrea relations that bypassed conventional diplomatic machinery entirely.

Personal diplomacy of this kind is efficient. It is fast. It gets things done. The cost — that everything constructed through a personal channel is only as durable as the relationship itself was a cost that neither party had strong incentives to acknowledge whilst the arrangement was working.

DRONES, TIGRAY, AND THE UNACKNOWLEDGED PILLAR

The financial dimension of the relationship is the one most readily discussed. The security dimension is, by contrast, the subject of sustained official silence on both sides.

During the Tigray conflict the war that consumed the northern highlands between November 2020 and November 2022, and which claimed, by various credible estimates, between 162,000 and 378,000 lives multiple international reporting organisations documented the presence of armed unmanned aerial vehicles in Ethiopian military operations, some reportedly linked to Emirati supply chains (International Crisis Group, 2021). Neither government has confirmed this. The drones, in the official record, have therefore never existed.

The strategic implication was, however, sufficiently clear. The Ethiopian National Defence Force entered the Tigray conflict and, within eighteen months, had experienced a near-catastrophic reversal before reclaiming Mekelle in late 2022. Aerial surveillance and strike capability represented, by most informed assessments, a decisive technological advantage for a force stretched across multiple theatres simultaneously. A government that might otherwise have fallen did not fall. The connection to Emirati materiel support — however formally unconfirmed — is one that analysts in Nairobi, Washington and London have drawn with some consistency.

This forms the third pillar of the Ethiopia-UAE axis, and its vulnerability to a change in Abu Dhabi’s leadership posture is as significant as the financial dimension perhaps more so, given the current security environment.

THE DOMINO SEQUENCE: FROM RIYADH ROAD TO ARAT KILO

Geopolitical analysis of the potential consequences of MBZ’s death has converged, with some unanimity, upon a domino-effect model: the sequential collapse of interdependent structural supports, each toppled by the failure of the one before it.

The sequence begins with personal trust. A successor in Abu Dhabi, even one from the same ruling family, does not inherit personal relationships. He inherits a strategic calculus. In that unsentimental light, the risks associated with Ethiopia a nation managing multiple simultaneous armed conflicts, persistent macroeconomic fragility, and a deteriorating human rights record may rapidly appear to outweigh the perceived returns. The first domino falls.

The loss of personal trust triggers the financial domino. Without Emirati backing, Ethiopia’s underlying economic vulnerabilities are exposed with some brutality. The birr has already shed approximately 57 per cent of its value against the dollar since 2022. The foreign exchange reserves that the 2018 deposit helped to stabilise have no equivalent replacement in prospect. A liquidity shock of any severity would extinguish the political capital with which Abiy Ahmed has managed elite networks and contained centrifugal pressures within his ruling coalition.

The financial domino topples the security domino. A government running on depleted reserves cannot sustain the Ethiopian National Defence Force’s operational tempo across Amhara, Oromia and the western lowlands simultaneously. The Fano militia has been conducting operations in Amhara since 2023; the Oromo Liberation Army remains undefeated in the field. Each of these conflicts has been containable partly because the government has retained the resources to fund counter-operations. A government under acute financial strain cannot offer that guarantee.

A new leader in Abu Dhabi does not inherit personal relationships. He inherits a strategic calculus. In that unsentimental light, Ethiopia’s risks may rapidly appear to outweigh its returns.

The collapse of the security pillar produces what analysts term the market signalling shock, the final and, in some respects, most damaging stage of the cascade. When a substantial backer is seen to disengage from a developing-nation government, the message transmitted to every other participant in the system is unambiguous: the risk profile has changed. Domestic investors redirect their capital. China, Turkey and the multilateral lenders begin quietly reassessing their exposure. Political factions within and without the ruling Prosperity Party sense the vulnerability and mobilise accordingly.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS SAYING AND WHAT IT MEANS

The Ethiopian government has, since MBZ’s passing, issued statements describing the late President as a visionary leader and a close friend of the Ethiopian people. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attended the funeral in Abu Dhabi, where he was photographed alongside Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the new UAE President.

Officials at the Ministry of Finance speaking to this correspondent on terms that precluded direct attribution reported that urgent conversations have been initiated at both technical and political levels to ensure the continuity of existing financial arrangements. One official used the word continuity seven times during a ten-minute exchange. The statistical frequency was noted.

The official position is that the Ethiopia-UAE relationship is, in the preferred formulation, institutionally embedded, and therefore durable beyond any individual leadership. There is a degree of truth in this. The bilateral relationship does encompass investment frameworks, development agreements and humanitarian partnerships with formal standing. What it conspicuously lacks, after eight years of deepening engagement between two governments that were always better at closing deals than building architecture is the kind of treaty-grade institutional infrastructure that would render the relationship genuinely indifferent to the question of who sits on the Abu Dhabi throne.

THE REPUTATIONAL FACTOR

There is one further element in this analysis, and it is perhaps the most uncomfortable to discuss in a family newspaper. The global reckoning with elite financial networks intensified, in the assessment of economic historian Adam Tooze, by revelations including those arising from the Epstein investigations has materially altered the reputational arithmetic for Gulf states that serve as financial hubs (Tooze, 2020).

This newspaper is clear: no verified evidence links Ethiopian or Emirati leadership to any such network. The structural effect is, however, real regardless of individual culpability: philanthropic channels now attract investigative scrutiny; sovereign financial flows face enhanced anti-money laundering compliance demands; and reputational risk has become, for Gulf states seeking to maintain their standing as well-governed jurisdictions, a factor of genuine strategic weight.

A new Emirati leadership, establishing itself in its first months, would be acutely sensitive to the optics of sustaining a highly personalised, backchannel-intensive financial relationship with a government managing active conflicts and a contested human rights record. The institutional incentives to proceed with greater caution, to formalise, slow, or simply allow the relationship to cool, are likely to be considerable.

THE PARABLE OF THE BORROWED FOUNDATION

Since 2018, Ethiopia’s macroeconomic floor its foreign exchange stability, its capacity to service external debts, its ability to project state authority across a large and fractious federation has rested in substantial part upon a foundation borrowed from Abu Dhabi. This was not a secret arrangement; it was a deliberate strategy, and for several years it worked. The floor held. The country, despite everything, did not collapse. The Prime Minister received a Nobel Peace Prize, which in retrospect may mark the precise moment at which the arrangement began to look, to the sharper-eyed observers, somewhat precarious.

The challenge confronting the Ethiopian government is not simply one of mourning an ally, though by informed accounts the grief in certain quarters of the palace compound in Addis Ababa is sincere. It is the rather more pressing task of identifying, at some speed, an alternative foundation or, better still, beginning the uncomfortable work of building one.

China stands ready with its customary combination of generous credit lines and demanding conditionality. Turkey has been making encouraging noises. The International Monetary Fund remains perennially available, provided the recipient government is prepared to accept the attendant structural adjustment conditions, which have historically enjoyed approximately the same popularity in Ethiopian coalition politics as a proposal to relocate the capital.

None of these alternatives carries the particular warmth, the operational speed, or the uncomplicated financial generosity of a direct line to Abu Dhabi. They are, however, foundations. And a foundation of one’s own, however demanding of maintenance, is considerably more durable than borrowed architecture particularly when the person who lent it has, without much warning, departed the building.

SOURCES

Hall, T. and Yarhi-Milo, K. (2012) ‘The personal touch: leaders’ impressions, costly signalling, and assessments of sincerity in international affairs’, International Studies Quarterly, 56(3), pp. 560-573.

International Crisis Group (2021) Ethiopia’s Tigray War: A Deadly, Dangerous Stalemate. Brussels: ICG.

Koch, N. (2019) The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia. Cornell University Press.

Lancet (2023) ‘Estimating conflict-related mortality in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.’ The Lancet, March 2023.

Reuters (2018) ‘UAE pledges $3 billion aid package to Ethiopia’, 16 June.

Tooze, A. (2020) Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. London: Allen Lane.

This article contains satirical commentary alongside factual reportage. All sourced claims are attributed. The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. Reproduced under editorial agreement.

© 2026 Ethiopian Tribune. All rights reserved.

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FORWARDING: Yekatit 12 – From Oblivion to Memory (Inaugural Newsletter)
This groundbreaking newsletter, created by descendants of Ethiopians imprisoned during the Italian Fascist occupation (1935-1941), chronicles the Yekatit 12 massacre of February 1937 and its aftermath. The publication represents a collective refusal to forget honouring those who suffered imprisonment, exile, and death while resisting colonial violence.

Future quarterly editions will feature prisoners stories, scholarly reflections, and testimonies that illuminate this suppressed history with honesty and depth.

Essential reading for anyone committed to historical truth and remembrance. We encourage you to read, reflect, and share this critical work of remembrance.

Download the PDF

Source: https://www.fromobliviontomemory.org/asinara/

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By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Introduction: A Song, A Summit, and Structural Amnesia

In February 2026, at a state dinner in Addis Ababa during the Second Italy-Africa Summit, Ethiopian singers performed “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” (But the sky is always bluer), a 1975 classic by Italian singer-songwriter Rino Gaetano. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy was captured on camera by the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation smiling, humming along, and applauding the thoughtful musical tribute. The video, titled “Diplomacy in Melody! Meloni Amazed Addis Ababa,” circulated widely as an emblem of cultural exchange and warm bilateral relations.

Yet beneath this surface cordiality lies a profound historical asymmetry. The same Italian state that Meloni represents deployed mustard gas against Ethiopian civilians ninety years earlier, conducted systematic aerial bombardments of villages and infrastructure, and orchestrated the Yekatit 12 massacre in Addis Ababa—one of the most notorious acts of fascist colonial terror in Africa. Italy has never issued a comprehensive formal apology for these crimes, nor has it undertaken a systematic public reckoning with the legacy of its occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941).

This article situates the Meloni-Abiy diplomatic encounter within the broader historical and structural continuities of Italy-Ethiopia relations. Drawing on the framework of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) and post-colonial memory politics (Mbembe, 2001), it examines how unresolved colonial violence intersects with contemporary economic engagement, migration control, and Ethiopia’s internal conflicts. The cheerful performance of an Italian song at a state dinner becomes, in this light, not merely a gesture of hospitality, but a symptom of what might be called structural amnesia, the diplomatic erasure of historical accountability in favour of pragmatic partnership.

I. The Historical Weight: Mustard Gas, Massacre, and the Architecture of Colonial Violence

1.1 Airpower and Chemical Warfare as Strategic Terror

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 was not a conventional territorial conquest. It was a laboratory for fascist military modernity, combining mechanised ground forces, aerial bombardment, and most infamously chemical weapons. Between 1935 and 1936, the Regia Aeronautica deployed mustard gas against Ethiopian military formations, civilian settlements, water sources, and livestock (Del Boca, 1991; Baer, 1967). This was not incidental collateral damage; it was systematic use of prohibited weaponry to terrorise, disable, and demoralise.

The effects were catastrophic:

            ∙           Tens of thousands of civilians suffered injuries, including burns, blindness, and respiratory failure.

            ∙           Agricultural infrastructure was destroyed, leading to long-term food insecurity.

            ∙           Psychological trauma permeated collective memory, embedding the Italian occupation as a paradigmatic symbol of racialised violence and technological asymmetry.

Airpower, as scholars of contemporary warfare note (Singer, 2009), functions not only as a tactical instrument but also as a political statement a demonstration of technological superiority designed to undermine the sovereignty and morale of the targeted population. In 1930s Ethiopia, this took the form of what Del Boca (1969) describes as “industrialised mass violence” deployed against a predominantly agrarian society.

1.2 Yekatit 12: The Massacre as Colonial Pedagogy

On February 19, 1937, following an assassination attempt against Italian Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, fascist forces conducted organised reprisals in Addis Ababa. Over three days, Italian soldiers and civilian collaborators systematically killed thousands of Ethiopians, including intellectuals, clergy, and ordinary residents. Entire neighbourhoods were razed. Religious institutions were targeted. The massacre, known as Yekatit 12 in the Ethiopian calendar, was not reactive mob violence, it was state-directed pedagogy, designed to communicate the consequences of resistance (Campbell, 2017).

The Yekatit 12 massacre is commemorated annually in Ethiopia as Martyrs’ Day. It occupies a place in Ethiopian historical consciousness analogous to other mass atrocities that define national identity and collective trauma. Yet in Italy, the event remains largely absent from public education, political discourse, and diplomatic memory.

1.3 Anthropology as Administrative Weapon

Italian colonial governance relied heavily on ethnographic and anthropological knowledge. Scholars such as Enrico Cerulli produced detailed studies of Oromo, Somali, and other ethnic groups, mapping linguistic, social, and political structures (Sbacchi, 1985). While some of this work had academic merit, it was instrumentalists to justify divide-and-rule strategies administrative partitioning designed to fragment national cohesion and empower intermediary elites loyal to colonial authority.

This echoes broader European colonial practices analysed by Mamdani (1996), who argues that ethnographic classification became a tool of indirect rule, embedding racialised hierarchies into governance structures that outlasted formal colonialism. In Ethiopia, these classifications influenced not only Italian administrative maps but also post-colonial debates about federalism, regional autonomy, and ethnic identity.

II. The Contemporary Landscape: Sovereignty Under Duress and the Continuity of Airpower

2.1 Ethiopian Internal Conflict and Civilian Vulnerability

Ethiopia’s internal conflicts since 2020, including the Tigray, Amhara and Oromo War, have involved extensive use of drones and airstrikes by the federal government. Reports by Amnesty International (2022) and Human Rights Watch (2023) document:

            ∙           Civilian casualties from aerial bombardments.

            ∙           Destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and schools.

            ∙           Mass displacement, with over two million internally displaced persons and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Sudan and neighboring countries (UN OCHA, 2022).

While the contexts differ markedly from the 1930s, this is not a colonial occupation but an internal federal conflict, the ethical continuity is undeniable: airpower remains a mechanism through which political authority exerts coercive force on civilian populations. The psychological trauma, infrastructural devastation, and displacement mirror, in contemporary form, the consequences of Italy’s aerial campaigns nine decades earlier.

2.2 Sovereignty, Accountability, and the Limits of Developmentalism

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has framed its military operations as necessary to preserve national unity and territorial integrity. Yet the use of drones supplied by external actors (including Turkey and the UAE) raises questions about sovereignty under duress the extent to which Ethiopia exercises autonomous decision-making amid economic dependency and strategic partnerships with external powers.

This dilemma is not unique to Ethiopia. It reflects a broader post-colonial reality in which African states navigate structural asymmetries inherited from colonialism, including economic dependency, debt burdens, and reliance on foreign military technology. The Mattei Plan, Italy’s investment framework for Africa announced in 2024, exemplifies this tension: it promises infrastructure development and economic partnership while operating within a geopolitical architecture that restricts African mobility, limits fiscal sovereignty, and perpetuates unequal terms of trade.

III. Urban Displacement and the New Colonial Geography: Addis Ababa’s Corridor Development as Gentrification

3.1 The Corridor Development Project: Infrastructure or Exclusion?

Even as Meloni and Abiy exchanged diplomatic pleasantries in February 2026, Addis Ababa was undergoing a dramatic spatial transformation. The Abiy government’s ambitious “corridor development” projects framed officially as infrastructure modernisation and urban renewal have resulted in mass displacement of longtime residents from central and peri-urban neighbourhoods. Tens of thousands of families have been evicted to make way for highway expansions, luxury residential complexes, commercial zones, and landscaped boulevards designed to attract foreign investment and tourism.

Government rhetoric emphasises economic development, job creation, and beautification. Yet critics argue that these projects constitute urban gentrification on a massive scale, creating a new colonial geography in which working-class Ethiopian residents are displaced to make room for European and other foreign investors, expatriate professionals, and wealthy elites (Harvey, 2008; Smith, 1996).

3.2 Historical Echoes: Italian Urban Planning and Contemporary Spatial Violence

The spatial politics of contemporary Addis Ababa bear uncomfortable resemblances to Italian colonial urban planning. During the 1936–1941 occupation, Italian authorities redesigned Addis Ababa according to racialised segregation principles, creating distinct zones for Italian settlers, indigenous elites, and the broader Ethiopian population (Labanca, 2002). Markets, residential areas, and public spaces were reorganized to reflect colonial hierarchies of race, class, and administrative power.

While today’s corridor developments are not explicitly racialised in the colonial sense, the functional logic is analogous: the displacement of poor and working-class Ethiopians to create premium spaces for capital accumulation and elite consumption. The fact that Italian and other European firms are among the primary beneficiaries of construction contracts, real estate investments, and tourism infrastructure compounds the historical irony.

3.3 Displacement Without Compensation: The Human Cost

Investigative reporting and human rights documentation reveal systematic patterns of forced eviction:

            ∙           Residents receive inadequate or no compensation for demolished homes.

            ∙           Alternative housing, when provided, is located on the urban periphery, far from employment opportunities and social networks.

            ∙           Legal recourse is limited; courts frequently rule in favour of government expropriation claims.

            ∙           Community organising and public protest are suppressed through arrests and intimidation.

This constitutes what Saskia Sassen (2014) terms expulsion the violent removal of populations from economic, social, and spatial frameworks to facilitate elite accumulation. In Addis Ababa, expulsion operates through the discourse of development and modernisation, rendering displacement as progress and resistance as obstruction.

3.4 For Whom Is the City Built? The Question of Spatial Justice

The corridor developments raise fundamental questions of spatial justice (Soja, 2010): for whom is the city being built, and who has the right to occupy, shape, and benefit from urban space? When luxury hotels, gated residential compounds, and European-style cafés replace informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods, the city is effectively reoriented away from its existing inhabitants and toward an imagined cosmopolitan elite, both foreign and domestic.

This is not unique to Addis Ababa. Similar dynamics characterise urban transformation across the Global South, from Mumbai to Lagos to Rio de Janeiro. Yet in the Ethiopian context, the displacement occurs in a city that has profound symbolic significance as the site of both anti-colonial resistance (the Battle of Adwa) and colonial atrocity (Yekatit 12). The spatial erasure of working-class Ethiopians to accommodate foreign capital investment becomes, in this light, a continuation of colonial logics by other means.

3.5 The Mattei Plan and Real Estate: Italian Capital Returns to Addis Ababa

Italy’s Mattei Plan, announced in 2024, includes provisions for infrastructure investment, energy projects, and private sector partnerships in Ethiopia. Italian construction firms, real estate developers, and hospitality corporations have expressed significant interest in Addis Ababa’s transformation. Preliminary reports suggest Italian capital is involved in:

            ∙           Construction of mixed-use commercial complexes in redeveloped corridor zones.

            ∙           Partnership agreements with Ethiopian developers for luxury residential projects.

            ∙           Tourism infrastructure, including hotels and restaurants targeting international visitors.

The political optics are striking: ninety years after Italian fascists occupied Addis Ababa, demolished neighbourhoods, and massacred residents, Italian capital returns not through military invasion but through investment frameworks welcomed by an Ethiopian government desperate for foreign currency and development finance. The mechanism has changed; the asymmetry persists.

IV. Migration, Borders, and the Asymmetry of Movement

4.1 The Closure of Europe and the Securitisation of Displacement

Ethiopian refugees fleeing conflict face increasingly restrictive European migration policies. Italy, under Meloni’s government, has intensified:

            ∙           Maritime interceptions in the Mediterranean.

            ∙           Agreements with Libya and Tunisia to prevent irregular crossings.

            ∙           Legislative tightening of asylum procedures, reducing approval rates and extending detention periods (European Council, 2023; Triandafyllidou, 2022).

This policy framework reveals a fundamental asymmetry: European states encourage investment and economic engagement in Africa while simultaneously fortifying borders against African mobility. The structural logic is one of selective permeability capital, commodities, and strategic partnerships cross borders freely, while displaced persons are intercepted, detained, or deported.

4.2 Historical Irony and Moral Incoherence

The irony is historically acute. Italy, which displaced hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians through colonial occupation and continues to evade accountability for war crimes, now restricts entry to Ethiopians fleeing contemporary displacement displacement caused, in part, by conflicts involving weaponry supplied by European and Middle Eastern states, and by urban gentrification projects that benefit European capital.

This is not merely hypocritical; it reflects what Mbembe (2001) calls the necropolitics of contemporary global governance, the differential allocation of life chances, mobility rights, and protection based on racialised hierarchies that echo colonial structures of power.

4.3 Displacement at Home, Exclusion Abroad: The Double Bind

For ordinary Ethiopians, the contemporary reality is a double bind: displaced from their homes in Addis Ababa to make way for foreign-oriented development, they are simultaneously barred from migrating to the European countries whose capital profits from that displacement. They are rendered invisible in their own city and inadmissible to the cities of Europe. This is the spatial and political logic of neo-colonial accumulation: extract value, displace populations, and externalise the consequences.

V. The Meloni-Abiy Encounter: What the Music Conceals

5.1 Cultural Diplomacy as Memory Management

The performance of “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” at the state dinner was, on its surface, a gesture of hospitality and cultural recognition. Ethiopian hosts honoured their Italian guests with a song from Italy’s own musical heritage. Meloni’s visible delight humanised the diplomatic encounter, generating positive media coverage and reinforcing the narrative of partnership and mutual respect.

Yet cultural diplomacy, particularly between former colonisers and colonised, is never politically neutral. It functions as a form of memory management, a way of foregrounding aesthetic exchange while backgrounding historical violence. The performance of an Italian song in Addis Ababa, in the absence of Italian acknowledgment of mustard gas attacks or the Yekatit 12 massacre, becomes a symbolic displacement a substitution of cultural goodwill for structural accountability.

5.2 The Silence of the Archive

What was not performed at the dinner is as significant as what was. There was no reading of the names of Yekatit 12 victims. No acknowledgment of the villages destroyed by Italian chemical weapons. No mention of the Axum Obelisk, returned in 2005 but still emblematic of decades of Italian refusal to repatriate looted cultural heritage. No reference to the fact that Italy has never paid reparations, issued a comprehensive apology, or integrated its colonial crimes into national education curricula (Labanca, 2002).

Nor was there acknowledgment of the residents being displaced, at that very moment, from neighbourhoods across Addis Ababa some to facilitate corridor developments in which Italian firms hold investment stakes. The state dinner occurred in a sanitised, elite space, hermetically sealed from the realities of both historical and contemporary violence.

This silence is not accidental. It reflects what scholars of post-colonial memory politics call strategic forgetting, the selective construction of historical narratives that emphasise reconciliation and partnership while obscuring the structural legacies of violence and exploitation.

5.3 The Gala as Spatial Performance

The state dinner itself, likely held in a refurbished or newly constructed venue designed to impress international dignitaries, is part of Addis Ababa’s spatial performance of modernity and investment-readiness. The aesthetic choreography of such events (elegant architecture, curated cultural performances, multilingual protocols) serves to project an image of cosmopolitan sophistication that attracts foreign capital and legitimises governance.

Yet this performance is built, quite literally, on the erasure of the city’s working-class residents and the silencing of historical memory. The melody of Rino Gaetano’s song filled a space from which Ethiopians have been systematically excluded both historically through colonial violence and contemporarily through gentrification and displacement.

VI. Ethiopianism and the Politics of Dignity

6.1 Ethiopian Exceptionalism and the Burden of Resistance

Ethiopia’s historical exceptionalism, its successful resistance to colonisation, culminating in the 1896 Battle of Adwa, has long been a source of national pride and Pan-African symbolism. Emperor Haile Selassie’s speech to the League of Nations in 1936, denouncing Italian aggression and appealing to collective security, remains a canonical text in anti-colonial history.

Yet this exceptionalism carries a burden. The expectation that Ethiopia, having resisted full colonisation, should navigate contemporary geopolitics with particular moral authority or strategic autonomy can obscure the structural constraints it faces. Economic dependency, internal conflict, and the pressures of migration management limit Ethiopia’s capacity to exercise sovereignty in the idealised sense.

Ethiopianism, the ideological assertion of Ethiopian sovereignty, dignity, and historical continuity, must therefore be understood not as a static nationalist mythology but as an ongoing political project, constantly negotiated amid internal diversity, regional tensions, and external pressures.

6.2 The Abiy Dilemma: Modernisation, Conflict, and Legitimacy

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s tenure exemplifies this tension. Initially celebrated for liberalising reforms and the 2018 peace agreement with Eritrea (for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize), Abiy’s government has since been implicated in mass atrocities, media repression, and authoritarian consolidation (Human Rights Watch, 2023). The deployment of airpower against Tigray and other regions, combined with the urban displacement of Addis Ababa residents, raises profound questions about the boundaries of legitimate state violence and the moral coherence of a government that simultaneously seeks international investment and domestic coercion.

Abiy’s engagement with Meloni must be read within this context. The Italian partnership offers economic resources and diplomatic legitimacy, but it also implicates Ethiopia in a broader geopolitical architecture that prioritises stability, investment returns, and migration control over human rights, spatial justice, and historical accountability.

6.3 The Critique from Below: Urban Movements and Counter-Narratives

Despite state suppression, resistance to corridor developments persists. Community organisations, displaced residents, and critical intellectuals have articulated counter-narratives that challenge official development discourse:

            ∙           The city belongs to its people, not to capital: Arguments emphasising the right to housing, spatial continuity, and community cohesion.

            ∙           Development for whom?: Questions about the beneficiaries of infrastructure projects and the distribution of costs and benefits.

            ∙           Historical consciousness: Linking contemporary displacement to colonial spatial violence and demanding that Ethiopianism include protection of ordinary Ethiopians, not just symbolic resistance to external domination.

These movements, though fragmented and precarious, represent the possibility of an Ethiopianism from below, one that insists on internal accountability alongside external sovereignty.

VII. Toward a Politics of Accountability: What Reconciliation Would Require

7.1 Beyond Symbolic Gestures

Genuine reconciliation between Italy and Ethiopia would require more than the return of cultural artefacts or state dinners with musical performances. It would necessitate:

            1.         Formal Apology: A comprehensive Italian acknowledgment of mustard gas deployment, the Yekatit 12 massacre, and systematic colonial violence.

            2.         Reparations: Financial compensation for victims’ descendants and funding for Ethiopian institutions dedicated to historical memory and public health.

            3.         Educational Integration: Incorporation of Italian colonial crimes into Italian national curricula, museums, and public discourse.

            4.         Archival Access: Full opening of Italian military and colonial archives to Ethiopian and international researchers.

            5.         Policy Coherence: Alignment of migration policies with ethical commitments to displaced populations, particularly those fleeing conflicts involving European-supplied weaponry or displacement caused by European-backed development projects.

            6.         Investment Transparency: Public disclosure of Italian investment stakes in Addis Ababa corridor developments and mechanisms for ensuring that profits benefit displaced communities.

7.2 Ethiopian Accountability and Internal Governance

Equally important is Ethiopian accountability for contemporary violence and displacement. The federal government’s use of airpower against civilians, detention of journalists, suppression of dissent, and forced eviction of urban residents undermine Ethiopia’s moral authority in demanding accountability from former colonisers. A credible Ethiopianism must integrate internal critique alongside resistance to external domination.

This requires:

            ∙           Independent investigations into civilian casualties from drone strikes.

            ∙           Transitional justice mechanisms for victims of the Tigray War and other conflicts.

            ∙           Halting forced evictions and implementing participatory urban planning that prioritises the housing rights and livelihoods of existing residents.

            ∙           Compensation and rehousing for displaced families, with community oversight of corridor development projects.

            ∙           Constitutional reforms that balance federal authority with regional autonomy and minority rights.

            ∙           Media freedom and civil society space to enable public debate and accountability.

7.3 Spatial Justice as Decolonial Practice

Addressing urban displacement in Addis Ababa requires recognising that spatial justice is inseparable from decolonial politics. If Ethiopianism is to mean more than symbolic sovereignty, it must encompass the right of ordinary Ethiopians to remain in, shape, and benefit from their own capital city. This means:

            ∙           Participatory planning: Involving affected communities in decision-making about urban development.

            ∙           Affordable housing: Ensuring that new construction includes social housing accessible to working-class residents.

            ∙           Economic inclusion: Creating employment opportunities for displaced populations in corridor development projects.

            ∙           Cultural preservation: Protecting historical neighbourhoods and sites of memory from demolition.

VIII. Conclusion: The Sky Is Not Always Bluer And the City Is Not Always Ours

The title of Rino Gaetano’s song, “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” (But the sky is always bluer), carries a lyrical optimism a promise of continuity, renewal, and hope. Yet for Ethiopians who remember the Italian aircraft that once darkened their skies with mustard gas, and for those now watching bulldozers demolish their homes to make way for foreign investment, the phrase resonates differently. The sky has not always been bluer. It has been a site of terror, displacement, and unacknowledged trauma. And the city Addis Ababa, the site of both Adwa’s pride and Yekatit 12’s sorrow is increasingly not theirs.

The February 2026 diplomatic encounter between Meloni and Abiy, framed by cultural exchange and economic partnership, illustrates the persistence of structural amnesia and spatial violence in contemporary Italy-Ethiopia relations. Investment frameworks, migration restrictions, urban gentrification, and symbolic gestures coexist with the unresolved legacies of colonial violence and the ongoing deployment of coercive force by Italy in the 1930s through airpower and massacre, by Abiy’s government in the 2020s through drones and bulldozers.

Ethiopianism, as a political and ethical project, demands more than the assertion of sovereignty or the celebration of resistance. It requires the integration of historical memory with contemporary accountability, the balancing of external critique with internal governance reform, and the recognition that true partnership cannot be built on the erasure of the past or the displacement of the present.

Until Italy acknowledges the full scope of its colonial crimes, and until Ethiopia confronts the ethical implications of its own use of coercive force, both military and spatial, the music at state dinners will remain what it is: a beautiful melody that conceals an unfinished reckoning. The sky may be bluer in song, but on the ground, the shadows of history remain long, the eviction notices are real, and the work of justice unfinished.

The question is not whether Ethiopians can hum along to an Italian song. The question is whether they will be allowed to remain in their own city, to shape their own future, and to demand accountability, both from former colonisers and from their own government. Until that question is answered affirmatively, in policy and practice, the gala remains a performance of amnesia, and the corridor developments a continuation of colonial geography by other means.

References:

Harvey, D. (2008) ‘The right to the city’, New Left Review, 53, pp. 23–40.

Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smith, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.

Soja, E. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Amnesty International (2022) Ethiopia: Civilian casualties from drone strikes. London: Amnesty International.

Baer, G. (1967) ‘Italian colonial policy in Ethiopia 1936–1941’, Journal of African History, 8(3), pp. 421–438.

Campbell, I. (2017) The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame. London: Hurst.

Del Boca, A. (1969) The Ethiopian War 1935–1941. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Del Boca, A. (1991) ‘The use of poison gas in the Italian–Ethiopian war’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1(2), pp. 187–203.

European Council (2023) EU Migration and Asylum Policy Update. Brussels: European Union.

Human Rights Watch (2023) World Report: Ethiopia. New York: HRW.

Italian Government (2024) The Mattei Plan for Africa. Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri.

Labanca, N. (2002) Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Mamdani, M. (1996) Citizen and Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mockler, A. (2003) Haile Selassie’s War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology, 15(2), pp. 215–232.

Sbacchi, A. (1985) ‘Italian colonialism in Ethiopia’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 23(4), pp. 563–585.

Singer, P. W. (2009) Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin.

Triandafyllidou, A. (2022) Migration and Europe’s Borders. London: Routledge.United Nations (2022) Humanitarian situation in Ethiopia: Situation Report. New York: UN OCHA

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On the curious disjunction between a capital that hosts the continent and a nation that cannot quite hold itself together

There is something peculiarly Ethiopian about the scene unfolding in Addis Ababa this February. The city presents itself with all the trappings of continental leadership summit halls filled with dignitaries, the hum of diplomatic motorcades, the unveiling of Africa’s first unmanned police station complete with biometric verification and artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed tweets invitations to experience “a new era of African-led tourism development,” whilst the International Monetary Fund nods approvingly at Ethiopia’s fiscal discipline and structural reforms. On paper, at least, this is a nation ascending.

Yet step outside the carefully choreographed radius of official optimism and a rather different Ethiopia emerges, one that sits uneasily with the grand pronouncements. This is a country where peace agreements seem to function more as intervals between violence than as genuine settlements, where millions drift through displacement camps whilst their government courts foreign investors, where the language of modernisation coexists with the brutal arithmetic of malnutrition statistics. The dissonance is not merely awkward; it is fundamental, speaking to contradictions that run through the very sinews of the Ethiopian state.

Consider the timing. Whilst Addis hosts the thirty-ninth African Union Summit and welcomes Italian delegates for the Second Italy-Africa Summit, fresh clashes erupt between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the same TPLF that signed a peace deal in Pretoria scarcely three years ago, ending a war that killed hundreds of thousands. In Amhara, irregular Fano militias who once fought alongside federal forces now turn their guns against them, engaging in nearly a hundred battles within seven weeks. The government speaks darkly of Eritrean meddling and TPLF conspiracies; Eritrea dismisses the accusations as fabrications. Meanwhile, satellite imagery suggests Ethiopia has been training thousands of fighters for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces in a secret camp in Benishangul-Gumuz, drawing the country deeper into regional conflagrations it can ill afford.

This is the Ethiopia that doesn’t make it into the summit brochures—fractious, militarised, its peace provisional at best. The Pretoria agreement was meant to close a chapter; instead, it seems merely to have turned a page. Violence mutates rather than dissipates, shifting fronts and allegiances with a fluidity that defies easy resolution. What was once a war between federal forces and Tigrayan rebels now fragments into multiple insurgencies, ethnic mobilisations, and cross-border entanglements, each with its own logic and grievances.

The humanitarian toll of this unravelling is measured in the usual grim metrics. Displacement runs into the millions. In Afar, severe acute malnutrition cases rise year on year, exacerbated by drought and conflict. Children bear the heaviest burden—interrupted schooling, psychological trauma, the gnawing hunger that doesn’t respect political cycles or diplomatic calendars. For these Ethiopians, the smart police station in Addis, with its promise of reduced response times and automated reporting, exists in a different universe entirely. One suspects they would trade all the biometric verification in the world for a meal, a school, a home that hasn’t been burned.

What makes Ethiopia’s predicament particularly fascinating and tragic, is how it manifests in the competing narratives of the country’s intellectual class. Two retired scholars, one Oromo and a pairing of Amhara and Tigrayan observers, offer interpretations so divergent they might as well be describing different countries altogether.

The Oromo intellectual sees vindication, a long-deferred reckoning in which Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group finally claims its rightful place at the helm of national affairs. For him, the summits and economic reforms represent not vanity but strategic reassertion proof that Ethiopia is becoming, at last, a nation that belongs to all its peoples rather than a narrow elite. The friction and realignment are the inevitable costs of any genuine transition. When he speaks of Oromos “leading the country and changing it as they always dreamed,” there is both pride and warning in his voice, a suggestion that this shift is non-negotiable, that history is finally being corrected.

His Amhara and Tigrayan counterparts see something rather different: fragmentation masquerading as reform, ethnic mobilisation threatening to tear apart whatever tenuous cohesion remains. To them, the persistence of armed conflict across multiple fronts reveals the hollowness of official stability claims. Identity politics, when weaponised, doesn’t build nations; it dismantles them. The Tigrayan scholar, shaped by the trauma of recent war, argues that reconciliation remains unfinished, that peace agreements signed under international pressure cannot paper over wounds still fresh and grievances still festering. The renewed clashes in Tigray are not aberrations but symptoms of structural failures that no summit can address.

Both narratives contain truth; both are incomplete. This is the bind of contemporary Ethiopia a country where every political advance for one group registers as a setback for another, where federal restructuring amplifies centrifugal forces, where the very diversity that might be a source of strength becomes instead a fault line. The competing visions of these retired intellectuals matter because they shape policy and public discourse, but they also matter because they reveal how profoundly Ethiopians disagree about what their country is and what it ought to become.

And so we return to Addis Ababa, that curious capital where diplomacy and displacement coexist, where economic reform proceeds alongside humanitarian crisis, where smart police stations rise whilst millions go hungry. The government’s wager seems to be that international summits and IMF approvals will gradually translate into domestic stability, that economic growth will eventually trickle down, that the performance of statehood will somehow conjure its substance. It is not an unreasonable bet, nations have bluffed their way to legitimacy before, but it is a precarious one.

The risk is that the spectacle becomes an end in itself, that branding exercises mask rather than address the deeper fractures. When citizens encounter militarised checkpoints in ordinary neighbourhoods, when secret training camps for foreign fighters dot the countryside, when food insecurity spreads whilst officials tweet about tourism development, the gap between official narrative and lived experience becomes unbridgeable. Credibility, once lost, is devilishly hard to recover.

Ethiopia has always been a country of contradictions; ancient yet modern, unified yet fractured, proud yet vulnerable. What distinguishes the present moment is how these contradictions have sharpened, how the space for ambiguity has narrowed. The nation stands at an inflection point, though whether it tilts towards consolidation or fragmentation remains genuinely uncertain.

For all the summit diplomacy and economic indicators, Ethiopia’s true test lies not in Addis but in its peripheries in Tigray and Amhara and Afar, in displacement camps and drought-stricken villages, in the daily struggles of citizens for whom stability is not a diplomatic talking point but a matter of survival. Can a government project continental leadership whilst struggling to govern its own territory? Can economic reform proceed whilst conflict simmers and millions go hungry? Can diplomatic capital substitute for domestic legitimacy?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that will determine whether Ethiopia emerges from this crucible intact or whether the contradictions finally prove insurmountable. The smart police station gleams in Addis, delegates fill the summit halls, the IMF reviews proceed apace. But beyond the carefully managed spectacle, Ethiopia remains a country at war with itself, its future hanging in a balance that no amount of diplomatic theatre can resolve. Only genuine reconciliation, inclusive governance, and enduring peace can do that and those, alas, cannot be unveiled at press conferences or tweeted into existence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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An investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached Ethiopia, and what it reveals about power, complicity, and the global reckoning with sexual predation

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

In the grand tradition of British scandals involving the powerful and the predatory, the Jeffrey Epstein affair has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving—or rather, taking. As the US Department of Justice released millions of documents related to the convicted sex trafficker and financier, Britons watched with grim familiarity as two of their own, Lord Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew, found themselves ensnared in the lengthening shadow of Epstein’s crimes. For Ethiopians and East Africans, however, the revelations have taken on a peculiar local dimension: their country appears in approximately 334 of the released documents, raising uncomfortable questions about who knew what, and when.

The British experience offers a cautionary tale. Lord Mandelson, the Labour grandee and former EU trade commissioner, has faced renewed scrutiny over his association with Epstein, leading to swift rejection of his potential appointment as US ambassador and intense public opprobrium. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has become a pariah within his own family, stripped of royal duties and forced to settle a civil sexual abuse case brought by Virginia Giuffre for a reported £12 million. Both men’s falls from grace illustrate a crucial shift in public tolerance: proximity to a convicted paedophile is no longer merely unfortunate it is damning.

For Ethiopia, a nation already grappling with internal conflicts, economic challenges, and questions of governance, the Epstein connection represents yet another unwelcome international embarrassment. But it also raises profound questions about how predators like Epstein exploited developing nations, and whether enough is being done to investigate his network in Africa.

Britain’s reckoning with the Epstein scandal has been particularly visceral, perhaps because it touches upon enduring anxieties about privilege, power, and paedophilia within the establishment. Lord Mandelson’s association with Epstein reportedly introduced through mutual connections in elite circles—has proven politically toxic. Despite his protestations that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their acquaintance, the court of public opinion has rendered its verdict. His nomination as ambassador to Washington was effectively dead on arrival, with both Conservative and Labour figures expressing alarm.

The Mandelson affair echoes the Prince Andrew debacle but with notable differences. Whilst Andrew’s relationship with Epstein was documented through photographs, flight logs, and eventually legal testimony, Mandelson’s connection appears more tangential, dinners, social gatherings, the sort of networking that defines elite circles. Yet in the post-Epstein era, such distinctions matter less than they once might have. The question is no longer “Did you know?” but “Should you have known?” and increasingly, “Why didn’t you ask?”

Prince Andrew’s trajectory from the Queen’s favourite son to virtual exile illustrates the mechanism of social rejection in real time. The now-infamous BBC Newsnight interview in November 2019, in which he claimed he couldn’t have been at a nightclub with Virginia Giuffre because he was at Pizza Express in Woking and suffered from a medical condition preventing him from sweating, became a masterclass in self-immolation. Public revulsion was swift and comprehensive. Corporate sponsors fled. Charities distanced themselves. The military stripped him of honorary titles.

What united both men’s downfalls was their association with a man whose crimes were, by 2008, a matter of public record. Epstein’s initial conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, a sweetheart plea deal that saw him serve just 13 months, should have ended his social acceptability. That it didn’t speaks to the power of wealth, influence, and the willingness of elites to overlook uncomfortable truths.

Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors and his subsequent death by apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell merely confirmed what investigators had long suspected: his earlier conviction represented only a fraction of his crimes. The subsequent releases of court documents, flight logs from his private jet (dubbed the “Lolita Express”), and now the DOJ files have painted a portrait of industrial-scale sexual exploitation involving girls as young as 14.

Yet the released documents reveal something far more disturbing than the already horrific sex trafficking operation. Buried within thousands of pages are references to Epstein’s fascination with eugenics, transhumanism, and what can only be described as a God complex that would make Lucifer himself envious. Witnesses and associates described Epstein’s interest in using his New Mexico ranch to seed the human race with his DNA, impregnating multiple women to create a “superior” bloodline a scheme that echoes the darkest chapters of 20th-century pseudoscience.

The files contain disturbing allegations that extend beyond sexual abuse into territory that seems almost mediaeval in its barbarity. Court testimonies reference Epstein’s circle discussing practices that blur the line between scientific experimentation and occult ritual. One particularly harrowing account describes conversations about cellular regeneration theories and the procurement of biological materials from young victims allegations that, whilst unproven in court, paint a portrait of a man whose depravity knew no bounds.

Whether these represent literal truths or the exaggerations of traumatised witnesses struggling to articulate unspeakable experiences, they underscore a crucial point: Jeffrey Epstein was not merely a sex offender but a man who believed himself above natural and moral law. His interest in cutting-edge science, from artificial intelligence to genetics, was inseparable from his conviction that wealth and intellect entitled him to treat human beings, particularly young girls, as experimental subjects. This, then, was the “Lucifer” that Professor Berhanu Nega might have unwittingly invoked.

The revelation that Berhanu Nega, now Ethiopia’s Minister of Education, received scholarship funding from Jeffrey Epstein takes on an almost prophetic irony given the professor’s own public statements. During his years in opposition to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government, Nega famously declared that he would “work with Lucifer himself” if it meant overthrowing the regime he despised.

It was not mere rhetoric. Nega’s political journey has been one of scorched-earth pragmatism. Having left the United States, where he held academic positions, he took the extraordinary step of accepting Eritrean citizenship to wage an armed insurgency against the Ethiopian government. His organisation, Ginbot 7, launched attacks from Eritrean territory, making common cause with one of Africa’s most repressive regimes a government that has held no elections since independence in 1993 and operates what human rights organisations have described as an open-air prison.

The insurgency failed militarily but succeeded in keeping Nega relevant. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Nega was among the formerly exiled opposition figures welcomed back to Addis Ababa. His transformation from armed rebel to Minister of Education was swift and, to many observers, bewildering. That he now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children whilst having received funding from a convicted paedophile strikes many Ethiopians as a cosmic joke in exceptionally poor taste.

Nega has maintained that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes when he received the scholarship funding in the early 2000s. This is plausible, Epstein’s 2008 conviction came later, and his ability to maintain a veneer of respectability amongst academics was well-documented. Yet the symbolic resonance remains inescapable: a man who vowed to work with Lucifer did, in fact, accept money from perhaps the closest thing to a living embodiment of evil that modern America has produced.

The question now confronting Nega and the Ethiopian government is whether historical ignorance absolves present responsibility. Should a Minister of Education, responsible for safeguarding children, remain in post whilst associated, however tangentially, with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker?

The Epstein connection to Ethiopia becomes more disturbing when examined alongside recent developments in the country’s digital infrastructure. According to documents circulating amongst civil liberties advocates and technology researchers, the Ethiopian government has harvested DNA and biometric data from approximately five million children as part of a digital identity programme. The initiative, ostensibly designed to improve access to education and health services, has raised alarm bells amongst data protection experts.

What transforms this from a concerning privacy issue into a potential Epstein connection is the funding architecture. Investigative journalists have identified links between the biometric programme and funding arrangements involving entities connected to Epstein’s network of technology investments. Moreover, contracts with United Arab Emirates-based businesses, some of which appear in the periphery of the Epstein files, suggest a complex web of financial relationships that demand scrutiny.

The UAE connection is particularly troubling. Epstein maintained extensive business relationships in the Gulf states, where privacy laws and less stringent regulatory oversight provided convenient cover for questionable transactions. That Ethiopian government contracts for biometric data collection involving children might flow through similar channels raises urgent questions.

To be clear: there is no evidence of direct Epstein involvement in Ethiopia’s digital ID programme, which postdates his death. But the pattern is familiar developing nations desperate for technological advancement and foreign investment, complex funding arrangements involving offshore entities, and programmes that collect sensitive biological data from vulnerable populations. These are precisely the conditions that predators like Epstein exploited.

The collection of children’s DNA in particular evokes Epstein’s documented fascination with genetics and eugenics. His stated desire to “seed the human race” with his genetic material, his funding of research into human longevity and enhancement, and his connections to the transhumanist movement all suggest a man obsessed with biological manipulation on a grand scale.

For five million Ethiopian children to have their genetic information collected and stored in databases accessible to foreign contractors recalls the darkest elements of the Epstein files. What safeguards exist to prevent this data being sold, shared, or exploited? Who has access? What purposes, beyond the stated administrative ones, might it serve?

These questions acquire particular urgency given Ethiopia’s political instability and history of surveillance. The EPRDF government, which Nega spent years fighting, was notorious for its extensive security apparatus. The current government under Abiy Ahmed has shown little inclination toward greater transparency or respect for privacy rights. The Tigray conflict demonstrated the willingness to use technology, including telecommunications shutdowns, as weapons of war.

The majority of Ethiopian references in the released documents relate to market intelligence reports that Epstein commissioned from consultants, suggesting he had, or was considering, investments in the country. One confirmed investment was iCog Labs, an artificial intelligence research laboratory co-founded by Ben Goertzel, a prominent AI researcher, and Getnet Aseffa. The emails reveal Goertzel’s energetic cultivation of Epstein as a funder, with repeated assurances that “the guys” in Ethiopia were doing “amazing things”, the sort of vague enthusiasm that signals either genuine excitement or, more cynically, the massaging of a wealthy patron’s ego.

The iCog Labs connection is particularly relevant because it illustrates Epstein’s modus operandi in respectable society. By positioning himself as a patron of cutting-edge scientific research, he also funded Harvard University’s Programme for Evolutionary Dynamics and MIT’s Media Lab, Epstein purchased legitimacy. Scientists and academics who accepted his funding found themselves in an impossible position after his crimes became undeniable: return the money and acknowledge poor judgment, or keep it and face accusations of complicity.

Given Epstein’s documented interest in artificial intelligence, genetics, and human enhancement, his funding of an AI laboratory in Ethiopia takes on sinister overtones. Was this genuine philanthropic interest in African technological development, or was Ethiopia, with its limited regulatory oversight and desperate need for investment, an attractive location for research that might face ethical objections elsewhere?

More colourful, if less consequential, are the emails from Shaher Abdulhak, a Yemeni billionaire who died in 2020 and who addressed Epstein as “cousin brother” a term of endearment that sounds rather less charming in English than presumably intended. Abdulhak’s pitches to Epstein included the gloriously ill-conceived idea of creating an energy drink from khat (a stimulant plant chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen) mixed with lemon juice to compete with Red Bull.

More seriously, Abdulhak sought a $20 million loan for National Tobacco Enterprise Ethiopia, claiming his Sheba Investment Company owned 60% of it. Whether Epstein provided the funds remains unclear, though the brazen nature of the request speaks to the casual corruption that characterised elite interactions with the financier.

Buried in the correspondence is one email that transforms the Ethiopian connection from merely embarrassing to potentially sinister. In a message apparently sent to Abdulhak, Epstein mentioned that a “good friend who runs a modelling agency” believed there were “interesting girls” in Ethiopia.

In isolation, this phrase might be innocuous. In context, an email from a convicted sex offender who trafficked underage girls internationally, it becomes chilling. The term “interesting girls” echoes the euphemistic language Epstein and his associates used to discuss recruitment of victims. Modelling agencies, legitimate and otherwise, have long been identified as potential vectors for exploitation, offering young women from impoverished backgrounds promises of international careers whilst potentially exposing them to abuse.

Court documents from Epstein’s trials reveal a recruitment pattern that was both systematic and global. Victims were often approached through seemingly legitimate channels, modelling scouts, educational programmes, employment opportunities, before being groomed and trafficked. The operation relied on local recruiters who understood cultural contexts and could identify vulnerable targets.

Ethiopia, with its poverty, limited opportunities for young women, and a culture where deference to wealthy foreigners remains common, would have been an ideal hunting ground. That Epstein’s private jet received permission to land in Ethiopia, and that he mentioned visiting the country in correspondence with Steve Bannon, confirms he had physical presence there.

There is no direct evidence in the released documents that Epstein trafficked Ethiopian girls or engaged in criminal conduct within Ethiopia. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when so much of Epstein’s operation was deliberately hidden. Victims have described being trafficked to numerous countries, being flown on his private jets to locations where their passports were confiscated and they were kept in conditions resembling sexual slavery.

For Ethiopian law enforcement and civil society, these revelations demand investigation. If Epstein visited Ethiopia, whom did he meet? Were any young Ethiopian women recruited through his network? Did any of his associates, the modelling agency friend, for instance, operate in the country?

The reaction amongst Ethiopians and East Africans to the Epstein revelations has been complex, reflecting broader ambivalences about corruption, foreign influence, and accountability. On social media and in diaspora communities, there is genuine anger, not merely at Epstein, but at the Ethiopian individuals and institutions that enabled his presence.

The revelation about Berhanu Nega has proven particularly divisive. His supporters argue that accepting scholarship funding from Epstein over two decades ago, before the full extent of his crimes was publicly known, represents an unfortunate association rather than complicity. His critics counter that a man who vowed to work with Lucifer cannot now claim shock at having done precisely that.

The controversy has reignited broader questions about Nega’s judgment and principles. His acceptance of Eritrean citizenship to fight Ethiopia, making common cause with a regime at least as repressive as the EPRDF he opposed, already raised eyebrows. His seamless transition from armed insurgent to government minister suggested a pragmatism that borders on opportunism. The Epstein connection adds another troubling layer.

Yet there is also a strain of fatalism in East African responses, a sense that corruption and exploitation by wealthy foreigners is simply business as usual. Ethiopia has long experience with foreign actors from colonial powers to modern corporations and NGOs extracting value whilst leaving minimal benefit. In this reading, Epstein is merely the latest in a long line of predators, and focusing on him distracts from structural problems.

This cynicism, whilst understandable, is dangerous. It normalises exploitation and discourages the accountability mechanisms necessary to prevent future abuses. The global reckoning with Epstein’s crimes has demonstrated that exposure and prosecution are possible, albeit belatedly.

The convergence of Epstein’s eugenic obsessions with Ethiopia’s biometric data collection programme represents a thoroughly modern nightmare. Epstein’s interest in “improving” the human race through selective breeding was, at least in his expressed ambitions, constrained by biology how many women could he impregnate? But contemporary genetic databases and artificial intelligence offer possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction even a decade ago.

The five million Ethiopian children whose DNA has been harvested now exist as data points in systems whose full capabilities and access protocols remain opaque. In the wrong hands, such databases could enable precisely the sort of genetic manipulation and selection that Epstein fantasised about. Even in benign hands, the data represents extraordinary value pharmaceutical companies pay enormous sums for genetic information from diverse populations.

That contracts related to this programme involve UAE-based entities with peripheral connections to Epstein’s network may be coincidental. But given the pattern of Epstein’s investments, artificial intelligence in Ethiopia, genetic research globally, transhumanist projects, the possibility of intentional targeting cannot be dismissed.

The Ethiopian government’s response to questions about data security has been, at best, inadequate. Officials tout the benefits of digital identity whilst providing few details about encryption, access controls, or international data-sharing agreements. For a government that has demonstrated willingness to use technology repressively, and which employs a Minister of Education who received funding from a paedophile eugenicist, assurances ring hollow.

What the Epstein files ultimately reveal, whether the references are to Britain, Ethiopia, or the dozens of other jurisdictions touched by his crimes, is the banality of elite evil. Epstein was not a Bond villain operating from a secret lair. He was a fixture of respectable society, funding university departments, advising the wealthy, socialising with princes and presidents.

His crimes were enabled not by exotic conspiracy but by the mundane mechanisms of wealth and power: the assumption that rich men deserve privacy, the reluctance to ask awkward questions of generous donors, the willingness to overlook earlier convictions in exchange for access and funding.

For Ethiopia, the lessons are particularly stark. When Professor Berhanu Nega vowed to work with Lucifer himself to achieve his political aims, he articulated a principle, that ends justify means, which is fundamentally corrupting. Whether he knowingly accepted money from a monster is less important than his demonstrated willingness to do so. That such a man now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children, whilst his government harvests their genetic data through murky international contracts, should alarm anyone concerned with child welfare.

The parallels with Britain’s experience are instructive. Lord Mandelson and Prince Andrew discovered that wealth, title, and power provide no immunity from public judgment when the crimes are sufficiently heinous and the association sufficiently close. Both have been effectively exiled from polite society, their legacies permanently tarnished.

Ethiopian figures connected to Epstein deserve similar scrutiny. The fact that Ethiopia is poorer than Britain, that its media infrastructure is weaker, that competing crises demand attention none of these absolve the moral responsibility to investigate and, where appropriate, demand accountability.

As more files are released and investigations continue, the full extent of Epstein’s Ethiopian connections may become clearer. For now, Ethiopians are left with uncomfortable questions, partial answers, and the knowledge that their country appeared on the radar of one of history’s most prolific sexual predators a man whose interests in genetics, artificial intelligence, and young girls may have found fertile ground in a nation desperate for investment and incapable of effective oversight.

If Berhanu Nega truly made a Faustian bargain, working with his Lucifer to achieve power, the devil has certainly had his due. The question now is whether Ethiopia’s children will pay the price for their elders’ moral compromises. With five million of them reduced to data points in databases connected, however tenuously, to a dead paedophile’s trans humanist fantasies, the answer may already be written in code we’ve yet to fully decrypt.

The Ethiopian Tribune continues to investigate the Epstein files and welcomes information from readers regarding any connections between Epstein’s network and activities in the Horn of Africa. We particularly seek information about the biometric data collection programme, its funding sources, and its international partnerships.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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