The Ethiopian Tribune · Long Read

Everything Was Forever, Until the Dam

The Nile dispute has slipped into a hypernormal state — a managed unreality that Cairo and Addis Ababa both know to be theatre, and both keep performing because neither can imagine the alternative. A television interview, and the way its own broadcaster edited it, shows us how the machinery works.

By E. Frashie  |  The Ethiopian Tribune

In late August, an American journalist sat across from Egypt’s foreign minister in Cairo and asked him why a country with the largest army in the Arab world would leave that army unused against Ethiopia. The exchange detonated in Addis Ababa. State media called it a reckless gamble with regional peace; commentators accused the interviewer of trying to talk a war into being. For a week the words themselves were oddly slippery. The broadcaster that aired the interview published a written account — authored by the interviewer — that omits the military question altogether; the only verbatim record in circulation belonged to an interested state broadcaster on the other side of the dispute. Then the full recording settled it. The provocation was real, put in almost exactly those words. What the broadcaster’s own text had done was quietly launder it out of the archive.

This is not a footnote to the crisis. It is the crisis in miniature. The Egypt–Ethiopia confrontation over the waters of the Nile has arrived at a condition in which the performance of the dispute has almost entirely detached from its substance — where warnings are issued to be heard rather than acted upon, where a decade of negotiations continues precisely because everyone understands it will resolve nothing, and where the most consequential document in a given week may be a television question that the channel airing it then tried to erase. There is a name for this condition, and it did not begin on the Nile.

The word for a managed unreality

The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined hypernormalisation to describe the last decades of the Soviet Union.¹ By the 1980s, he argued, everyone — citizens and commissars alike — understood that the system was hollow. But because no alternative could be imagined, everyone continued to perform the rituals of belief as though they were real, and the performance itself became the reality. The fakeness was not hidden; it was shared, normalised, and, in its very normality, made to feel eternal. Then, without warning, it collapsed.

The filmmaker Adam Curtis borrowed the term for his 2016 essay-film, extending it from the Soviet bloc to the whole post-1970s order.² His thesis: faced with a world of unmanageable complexity, those in power — financiers, technologists, politicians — retreated into a simpler, more stable fake version and worked to keep it standing. Real problems were not solved; they were converted into legible stories, villains, and managed perceptions. Curtis’s Middle East is the laboratory for this: a region where genuine grievances are repeatedly flattened into simplified narratives that serve the narrator, while the underlying complexity festers untouched until it erupts.

Read the Nile through this lens and the picture reorganises itself. The question stops being “will Egypt attack?” and becomes something more uncomfortable: why does everyone keep performing a crisis whose script they have all memorised?

The warnings are issued to be heard, not acted upon. The negotiations continue precisely because everyone understands they will resolve nothing.

Neither peace nor war

Early in the same interview, discussing Iran, the minister described a condition of neither peace nor war — a stalemate, a state of exhaustion in which nothing advances and nothing breaks. Minutes later, turning to the Nile, he reached for the very same word to characterise thirteen years of negotiation: deadlock. That is the dispute in a syllable. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was inaugurated in September 2025 after more than a decade of tripartite talks that never produced the binding agreement Cairo demanded. In March 2026, Addis Ababa announced a cascade of three further dams on the Blue Nile. Egypt responded not with mobilisation but with the familiar liturgy: an appeal to the UN Security Council, warnings of an existential threat, offers of external mediation, and the careful invocation of a legal right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Each move is a line in a script performed many times before.

The ritual has its own stable grammar. Cairo securitises; Addis Ababa asserts sovereignty; Washington offers to mediate; a mediation collapses; letters are exchanged at Turtle Bay; the dam fills anyway. The theologian of this liturgy is repetition. What the ritual conspicuously does not produce — a coordinated filling schedule, a drought-management protocol, a data-sharing regime, a joint operating framework — is precisely the set of technical instruments that water engineers on all sides broadly agree would defuse the danger. The solvable problem is left unsolved so that the unsolvable performance may continue.

Cairo’s simplification: the existential frame

When Egypt’s minister called water an existential issue — one standing, he said, even above national security — he was doing something a political scientist would recognise instantly. The Copenhagen School calls it securitisation: the act of lifting an issue out of ordinary, negotiable politics by declaring it a matter of survival, thereby licensing extraordinary measures and foreclosing compromise.³ Once water is existential, every cubic metre becomes non-negotiable, every upstream turbine an act of aggression, and every diplomat who proposes a technical trade-off a potential traitor. Securitisation is the linguistic engine of the hypernormal: it converts a complex, shared, manageable river into a simple, total, permanent emergency.

Balance demands that we take Egypt’s underlying vulnerability seriously, because it is not invented. By the minister’s own account, Egypt draws some 98 per cent of its freshwater from the Nile, receives a sliver of the basin’s total rainfall, and watches its population grow by roughly two and a half million people a year while ten million refugees draw on the same supply. The fear is real. What is managed is the framing of that fear. Scholars of hydro-hegemony note that Egypt has for a century sat atop the basin’s power hierarchy, its position codified by colonial-era arrangements — the 1929 and 1959 agreements — that allocated the lion’s share of the river to Cairo and excluded upstream states entirely.⁴ The GERD does not merely raise a hydrological question; it dismantles a hegemony. Some portion of the existential language is not fear of thirst but grief for a lost order — and grief, unlike thirst, cannot be settled by a filling schedule.

Addis Ababa’s simplification: the development frame

Ethiopia performs a mirror ritual, and it deserves the same scrutiny. Its script is legally the stronger of the two: the GERD is a hydropower project that stores and releases water to spin turbines rather than consuming it through irrigation; Ethiopia was never a signatory to the 1959 allocation and cannot be bound by it; and the governing principles of modern international water law — equitable and reasonable utilisation, and the obligation not to cause significant harm — sit closer to Addis Ababa’s position than to Cairo’s.⁵ The claim that development is a right, not an act of hostility, is sound — and, tellingly, the Egyptian minister himself conceded it, acknowledging without hesitation Ethiopia’s fair right to development even as he pressed Egypt’s right to exist.

But a narrative can be true and still be a managed simplification. The dam was financed domestically, through bonds and payroll deductions, and marketed at home as the great unifying project of the Ethiopian nation — a monument raised precisely while the state was fracturing along the fault lines of Tigray and Amhara. Sovereignty over the Abbay is not only a legal principle; it is a legitimacy instrument, a story the government tells its own citizens about a nation that builds rather than begs. And a government that derives such returns from the symbol of the dam has its own reasons to prefer managed ambiguity over a binding treaty — because any enforceable operating framework would constrain the very cascade it has just announced. Both capitals, in the end, extract more from the performance of the dispute than they would from its resolution. That is the tell of a hypernormal system: the incentives of the powerful align around continuing the crisis, not ending it.

The interviewer offered a war. The minister, repeatedly, declined it. The escalation lived in the questions, not the answers.

The interview as artefact

Return now to that Cairo studio, because the interview is where the machinery becomes visible — and the full recording lets us check the choreography against the record. It holds. The questioning climbs a deliberate ladder: from the dam as Egypt’s lifeline, to the flat assertion that it threatens national security, to the suggestion that diplomacy has run its course, to the sharpest rung of all — “What’s the point of having the biggest Arab military and not using it?” — to the claim that Ethiopia is starving Egypt, and finally the demand for a solution now that diplomacy is spent. Framing theory teaches that questions are never neutral: the premise smuggled inside a question narrows the range of sayable answers and quietly builds the world in which the answer must live.⁶ To ask why an army goes unused is to have already decided that its use is on the table.

And here the transcript delivers its real surprise — the part that neither the sanitised write-up nor the furious rebuttal dwelt upon: the minister would not climb the ladder. Pressed on why the army stood idle, he corrected the premise, insisting the military exists to defend Egypt’s borders, not to be spent on the Nile. He retreated at once to Article 51 and the language of international law, conceded Ethiopia’s right to develop, and returned, again and again, to diplomacy — even offering the historian’s lesson that military solutions lead only to suffering and ruin. The escalation, in other words, lived in the questions and not the answers. The interviewer offered a war; the interviewee kept setting it back down.

The words were spoken; that is now settled. But notice what the settled fact reveals. The most incendiary moment in the Nile crisis this year was not a shot fired or a sluice-gate closed. It was a question — and the reply to it was a refusal. Jean Baudrillard argued that a televised war could become hyperreal: an event experienced through its mediation, consumed as spectacle by publics who never touch the thing itself.⁷ The Nile has reached that condition. A minister spends an interview declining to threaten war, and the mediated event that circulates — clipped, framed, sanitised by one hand and weaponised by the other — is nonetheless a war scare. The spectacle detaches from its principal and acquires a life of its own. And the broadcaster’s decision to launder the exchange out of its own written record is no small journalistic lapse; it is the perception-management reflex in its purest form — editing the archive to fit the story the archive is meant to preserve.

Nor is the stage itself neutral. The programme runs on a Gulf-owned platform, and the Gulf states are not bystanders in the Horn of Africa — they hold ports, basing rights, and rivalries that run straight through the Red Sea corridor Ethiopia is trying to reach. A third set of interests, in other words, helps to build the frame through which the first two are seen. Perception management, as the manufacturing-consent tradition has long observed, rarely announces itself; it arrives as the ordinary shape of a news story.⁸

The danger in the fiction

It would be a comfortable conclusion that, because the principals keep declining to escalate, the crisis is therefore safe. Curtis’s warning — and Yurchak’s history — runs the other way. The hypernormal is not stable because it is true; it is stable until, abruptly, it is not. The Soviet system felt eternal on the eve of its disappearance. A managed non-war can rupture without anyone deciding to end it: through a proxy flare-up in Somalia or eastern Sudan, through the encirclement diplomacy by which Cairo has acquired footholds around Ethiopia’s periphery, through a drought that coincides with a filling season, or through a miscalculation by leaders who have spent so long performing resolve that they can no longer climb down without cost. The peril is sharpened, not softened, by the gap between spectacle and principal: publics and third parties respond to the war scare that circulates, not to the restraint the minister actually voiced. The war talk is theatre — right up until the moment the theatre catches fire. The physical infrastructure of the fiction — the naval access, the troop deployments, the axis-building — is real, and real infrastructure has a way of outliving the narratives that justified it.

The exit no one will take

The cruel irony sits in plain view. Beneath the existential language and the sovereign defiance lies a problem that is, by the standards of international disputes, remarkably tractable. The quantity of water Ethiopia consumes to generate electricity is negligible; the genuine risks concern the timing of reservoir filling during dry years and the coordination of releases — questions of scheduling, notification, and data, not of survival. A basin-wide framework built on equitable utilisation, drought protocols, and shared telemetry would not require either government to surrender its dignity. It would require only that both stop needing the crisis. And that, in a hypernormal system, is the one thing neither can presently afford, because the performance has become more valuable to each than the peace.

The most honest word spoken in that Cairo studio was not “existential” and not “army.” It was “deadlock” — a term the minister used first for Iran and then, almost in passing, for thirteen years of talks on the Blue Nile. He might as well have carved it above the river.

References & Further Reading

1. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press, 2005).
2. Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation (BBC, 2016).
3. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver & Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Lynne Rienner, 1998) — on securitisation theory.
4. Mark Zeitoun & Jeroen Warner, ‘Hydro-hegemony: a framework for analysis of trans-boundary water conflicts’, Water Policy 8 (2006); see also Mark Zeitoun, Power and Water in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2008).
5. UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (1997) — on equitable and reasonable utilisation and the no-significant-harm rule; and the historical 1929 and 1959 Nile Waters Agreements.
6. Robert M. Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43:4 (1993).
7. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995) and Simulacra and Simulation (1981); cf. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
8. Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988); on the Horn’s international relations, Christopher Clapham, The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay (Hurst, 2017); on virtual water, J. A. Allan, Virtual Water (I.B. Tauris, 2011).

Editorial note: the questioning analysed here has been verified against the full published recording of the interview. The broadcaster’s own written summary of the interview omitted the exchanges concerning Egypt’s military and the ‘starving’ of Egypt; those passages survive in the recording itself and in a rival broadcaster’s rebuttal.

The Narrow Door

Amartya Sen, Be’alu Girma, and the way out of the trap

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

Curtis leaves us in the dark. That is his signature and his limitation. Having shown us the trap with such brilliance, he stands at the closed door of the final reel and offers, in place of an exit, only the suggestion that we have forgotten there was ever another way to be free. It is honest, in its fashion; it refuses the cheap redemptive ending. But it is also, I want to argue, the point at which we must part company with him — because to accept that there is no way out is itself to fall into the deepest trap of all, the one his own method sets.

For Curtis’s method has a secret, and it is the same as his subjects’ secret. He too reaches for a single hidden mechanism that explains everything. He too imposes one tidy model — the suspicious actor, the closing trap — upon the vast and contradictory mess of human life, and makes it account for the welfare state and the family and the war and the self. His films are seductive for precisely the reason the theories he indicts were seductive: they promise that beneath the confusion there is one machine, one key, one story that makes it all cohere. This is the trap of the total explanation, and this series has been in danger of it on every page. Each time the prisoner’s dilemma seemed to explain the militias, each time positive liberty seemed to explain the bulldozer, we were one comfortable step from the theodicy — from the elegant proof that the blood was nobody’s fault, merely the structure working itself out. I have flagged that danger at every turn not as decoration but as discipline, because a lens that explains everything has quietly stopped being a lens and become a faith. The trap is real. It is also not the whole truth, and the moment we forget the difference we are inside it.

Hold that caution, and the search for an exit can begin — not in Britain, but with a man Curtis never names, who spent his life measuring freedom in a different currency altogether.

Amartya Sen — Bengali economist, Nobel laureate of 1998 — began from a memory Ethiopia knows in its bones: famine. As a boy he watched the Bengal famine of 1943 kill millions, and he spent his career proving, in Poverty and Famines (1981), that such catastrophes are almost never caused by a simple absence of food. They are caused by an absence of entitlement — by people losing the capacity to command food that in fact exists — and, most tellingly of all, they do not occur in functioning democracies with a free press. A free press makes hunger visible; visibility makes it politically fatal; and so no government that can be seen and voted out has ever presided over a great famine. The unfree state, by contrast, can starve its people in the dark. An Ethiopian does not need this argument explained. Our modern history is punctuated by famines that helped topple an emperor and outlived a dictatorship, concealed each time by a state that ruled the number and silenced the mouth. Sen’s thesis is the indictment of Part III written a decade in advance: the rule of the metric over the reality is not a technical error but, at the limit, a mechanism of death — and its only proven antidote is precisely the thing a publication such as this one exists to practise.

But Sen’s deeper gift is the concept the whole film lacked. In Development as Freedom (1999) he refused Berlin’s fatal binary. Freedom, for Sen, is neither the mere absence of interference nor the imposition of some authority’s vision of your higher self. It is capability — the real, plural, actual range of things a person is able to do and to be: to be nourished, to be literate, to move, to speak, to take part in the life of the community, to choose among lives she has reason to value. This is a positive account of freedom; it is about capacity, not merely non-interference. And yet it carries none of positive liberty’s poison, for one decisive reason. It names no single destination. It does not tell you who your true self is and then force you towards it. It multiplies your capacities and leaves the choosing to you. It is freedom-to, without a vanguard: the dream of human flourishing, disarmed of its bulldozer.

The measure of a nation’s freedom is not the boulevard it builds but the lives its people are actually able to lead. A corridor no widow can afford to live beside is not development. It is a monument to her exclusion.

Here, then, is the narrow door out of the trap, and it is worth stating plainly, because it reframes everything the Prosperity Party claims. If freedom is capability, then the float that empties the household is not a milestone of liberation but a subtraction of it; the demolition that displaces the poor is not a step towards prosperity but a destruction of the very capabilities — home, livelihood, neighbourhood, the fabric of a life — in which the only prosperity that matters actually consists. Sen lets us say something the milestone-language is structurally incapable of saying: that a development which reduces what people are able to do and be is not development at all, however green its numbers. The dream is not wrong to want flourishing for Ethiopia. It is wrong about what flourishing is — and it mistakes the monument for the life.

And yet I will not end on the Indian economist, because the deepest answer to this series’ own question — is this merely an imported diagnosis? — lies not in Delhi or Oxford but in Addis, and it was written in blood more than forty years ago. Be’alu Girma was among the finest novelists Ethiopia has produced, and for a time a senior figure inside the Derg’s own Ministry of Information — a maker of the regime’s dreams. In 1983 he published Oromay, a novel set amid the Red Star Campaign, the great offensive that was to deliver socialist liberation and national unity in the north. And Be’alu, who had stood inside the machine, told the truth about it: that beneath the intoxicating dream of liberation lay cynicism, corruption, futility and death; that the beautiful words concealed a mechanism of control; that the campaign of freedom was a lie the powerful told the people and, worse, told themselves. The title itself — ኦሮማይ, Oromay, “the end,” “finality,” “no more” — was a verdict on the dream.

For writing it, Be’alu Girma disappeared in early 1984, taken by the state he had served; his body was never recovered and his novel was banned. He is the answer to every accusation that this frame is foreign. Ethiopia did not import the critique of the dream of freedom. Ethiopia’s finest storyteller died of it, decades before a British filmmaker gave the idea a montage and a name. The trap is not a European notion we are trying on for size. It is a machine we have run before; one of us named it, and it killed him for the naming.

And lest this seem a wound sealed safely in the past, consider how recently the same machine has run. Gedu Andargachew helped to build the post-2018 order from its highest chambers: chief administrator of the Amhara region, then minister of foreign affairs, then national security adviser to the prime minister himself — an architect of the new dispensation, not a bystander to it. And when he broke with it, publicly and in unmistakable terms, accusing the government of betrayal, of authoritarian rule, and of answering the country’s crises with force rather than with politics, he was — by opposition-linked accounts the Tribune cannot independently confirm — placed under house arrest in his own home in the capital, watched and cut off from visitors. Four decades separate him from Be’alu Girma, and the particulars differ; the one was disappeared, the other reportedly silenced behind his own walls. But the grammar is identical: the insider who saw the machinery from within, said so aloud, and was removed from the conversation by the state he had served. This is not ancient history. It is the same door, closing again.

That is the tradition this series stands in, and it forbids both despair and comfort. It forbids despair, because Be’alu Girma wrote his sentence knowing what it might cost, which means the sentence was worth writing — the free word is not nothing; it is the one thing the trap cannot fully absorb, the reason Sen’s free press is the antidote to famine and not merely its witness. And it forbids comfort, because he was killed all the same, and the dream ground on regardless, and to pretend that truth-telling is a guaranteed deliverance would dishonour him. There is no guaranteed deliverance. There is only the narrow door, and the daily, unglamorous, dangerous labour of keeping it open.

So we return, at the last, to the spring of 2018, and the doors that swung wide, and the freedom that was real. It was real. That was never the illusion. The illusion was that freedom, once handed to us, would keep itself — that we could receive it as a gift from above and not have to make it, again and again, from below. We know now what was folded inside the gift: the suspicious constitution, the ruling number, the coercive dream. But the knowing is itself the beginning of the refusal. A people that can see the trap is no longer wholly caught in it. It can choose, in Sen’s terms rather than the vanguard’s, to measure its freedom by what its poorest citizen is actually able to do and be. It can refuse the model of itself as a nation of rational defectors and perform, against the structure’s every incentive, the irrational and founding act of trusting first. It can insist that the corridor is not the country, and the milestone is not the meal, and the palace on the mountain is not the nation.

None of this is inevitable, and none of it is safe. The door is narrow, and it does not stay open by itself. But it is a door, and Curtis was wrong to imply there is only wall. Be’alu Girma found it. Sen described it. And every citizen who says the true sentence aloud — this is not freedom; this is its counterfeit — is, in that moment, standing in the doorway, holding it open with their body, for whoever comes next. ኦሮማይ, the dream said. The end. No more. We are not obliged to agree.

Sources

Turning the lens. On the totalising tendency of single-cause explanation — a caution the series applies to Adam Curtis’s own method as much as to his subjects.

The way out. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981) and Development as Freedom (1999); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998. The link between famine and the absence of a free press is Sen’s argument and is presented as such.

The Ethiopian witness. Be’alu Girma, Oromay (1983); his role at the Ministry of Information, the Red Star Campaign context, and his disappearance in early 1984 are drawn from the public record of his life and death. The gloss of Oromay follows common usage; the novel remains a landmark of modern Amharic literature.

A contemporary witness. Gedu Andargachew served as chief administrator of the Amhara region (2013–2019), minister of foreign affairs (2019–2020) and national security adviser to the prime minister (2020–2022); his public criticism of the Abiy Ahmed government (2024) is on the record. Reports that he was subsequently placed under house arrest originate with opposition-linked outlets citing anonymous sources and are presented here as reported, not independently confirmed by the Tribune. Note: a separate viral image purporting to show him working as a parking attendant has been assessed as AI-generated and false by the fact-checking services HaqCheck and MultiFactCheck (October–December 2025), and is deliberately not used in this series.

THE TRAP · PART V OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

The Bait Is the Dream

Prosperity, the bulldozer, and the freedom that compels

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

A trap needs jaws, and we have watched two of them close: the constitution that taught each people to arm against the others, the milestone that taught the state to trust its instruments over its people. But a trap also needs bait — something desired, something reached for, something that draws the creature onto the mechanism of its own accord. The cruelty Curtis wants us to feel is that no one is dragged into the trap of freedom. We walk in. And what draws us is the most beautiful thing we have: the dream itself.

Here we arrive at the idea on which his whole film is built, and it is worth stating with precision, for it is the hinge of everything. In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” his 1958 lecture at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin drew the distinction that has organised this series from the start. Negative liberty is freedom from — the absence of interference, the space in which a person is left alone to live as she chooses. Positive liberty is freedom to — self-mastery, self-realisation, the freedom to become one’s higher, truer, fully realised self. Berlin’s warning, delivered at the height of the Cold War and aimed at the totalitarianisms of his century, was that the second concept is by far the more perilous. For the moment I claim to know your true self — the self you would be if only you were wiser, freer of false consciousness, delivered from your own confusion — I have granted myself permission to override the self you actually are. I may coerce the empirical you, the you standing inconveniently before me, in the name of the real you I have decided to liberate. Oppression is transfigured into rescue. The boot on the neck becomes an act of care.

Berlin knew exactly where this idea was born, and so does Curtis. Its purest source is Rousseau, and the sentence in The Social Contract (1762) that ought to chill every citizen who hears it: that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body, which means “nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” From that phrase, Curtis argues, runs a line to Robespierre and the Terror — the Committee of Public Safety guillotining in the name of virtue, killing the people to deliver the People — and onward through every revolutionary vanguard that found itself, sincerely, demolishing in order to redeem. His third episode, from which this part takes its title, follows the line into our own age, through the neoconservative dream of imposing freedom on Iraq at the point of a gun. The paradox he leaves ringing is total: even the attempt to spread negative liberty — freedom-from — when pursued by force and vanguard and plan, becomes a positive-liberty project of the most violent kind. The men who would free you cannot help but force you.

Now hold that lecture-hall abstraction in one hand, and in the other hold the ruling party of Ethiopia, and read its name. Prosperity. ብልጽግና. In 2019 the EPRDF dissolved itself and reconstituted its heirs as the Prosperity Party — and in doing so named itself, with an honesty it perhaps did not intend, after a destination. Not a party of process, of deliberation, of the patient negotiation of competing goods, but a party of arrival: the vehicle that will deliver the Ethiopian people to a prosperous, dignified, glorious future already envisioned on their behalf. Its guiding philosophy, መደመር — medemer, “coming together,” “synergy,” “addition,” given book-length form by the prime minister in 2019 — is, whatever its considerable poetry, a doctrine of the citizen’s true collective self: the self that would set aside its narrow, divisive, zero-sum attachments and add itself into a greater whole. In Berlin’s precise taxonomy it is a positive-liberty philosophy. It knows what Ethiopians ought to become. And a movement that knows what you ought to become has already, in embryo, granted itself the right to make you become it.

The man who opened the prison doors in 2018 did not betray the dream when he took up the bulldozer. He was serving it. That is the horror Berlin tried to warn us of: it is the same dream.

Watch the dream, then, become the bulldozer — literally, concretely, in the streets of the capital. The Corridor Development projects, driven across Addis Ababa from 2022 and extended through 2024 and 2025 into Adama, Hawassa, Dire Dawa and other cities, are the positive-liberty state made visible in asphalt and demolition. The vision is genuinely seductive: a clean, modern, world-class city of broad boulevards, fountains, cycle lanes and gleaming towers, a capital worthy of a great nation and a great continent. And to build it, homes are marked, cleared and reduced to rubble. Human-rights organisations and international media have reported the displacement of large numbers of residents — rights monitors have put the figure in the tens of thousands — with many relocated to the periphery and compensation that, by those same accounts, has ranged from inadequate to absent. The neighbourhood that overflows the plan, the informal life that cannot be entered into the rendering, is not consulted. It is removed. And the people who lived there are told — and I do not doubt that many of those doing the telling believe it — that this is being done for them, for their prosperity, their dignity, the beautiful Ethiopia their grandchildren will inherit. They are being forced, in the exact sense Rousseau and Berlin could have wished, to be free.

The aesthetic ascends from the boulevard to the palace. The vast, secretive project reported on the Entoto heights — a new national palace whose cost has been reported, on figures the prime minister himself has referred to, at around ten billion US dollars, complete with artificial lakes and imperial landscaping — is the dream in its most naked form: national greatness as a thing to be built, a destiny rendered in stone and water while the birr collapses in the valley below. One recognises the grammar. It is the grammar of every vanguard that has ever known the people’s future better than the people did — the monument, the five-year plan, the model village, the shining city on the hill. The scale of the vision is precisely proportioned to the scale of what may be sacrificed to it.

At the largest scale of all, the wars can be read in the same grammar — though here one must tread with the greatest care in this entire series. It is possible to see in the campaigns in Tigray, in Amhara, in Oromia the positive-liberty logic in its ultimate register: the conviction that a unified, orderly, prosperous Ethiopia is a good so great, so self-evidently the people’s true destiny, that resistance to it may legitimately be broken. The dream of the whole licenses the breaking of the part. But I will not reduce those wars to a philosophy lecture, and neither should the reader. Hundreds of thousands are dead. To fold that into a tidy genealogy of an idea would be to commit, on the page, the very abstraction this series condemns — the mistaking of the model for the reality, the number for the mouth. Let the frame illuminate the logic, and let the dead remain, insistently, dead. Some things must not be made elegant.

Which returns us, once more, to the discipline. The reading offered here carries a seduction of its own, and it is the seduction of the villain’s origin story — Abiy Ahmed as the man who was always going to become the coercer, the liberator with the bulldozer already idling in his heart. Resist it. The truer and more frightening account, the properly Curtisian one, the one Berlin actually wrote, is that there need be no villain at all. The dream does not require a cynic to become a cage. It requires only a sincere believer with power and a vision of who the people ought to be. It is entirely possible that the man meant every word in 2018 and means every word now, and cannot see — because the structure of positive liberty makes it almost impossible to see — that the freedom he now imposes and the freedom he once released are, philosophically, the same act turned inside out. That is not an exoneration. A sincere coercer is still a coercer, and the displaced are no less displaced for the purity of the intention that displaced them. It is something harder: an explanation that denies us the comfort of a monster, and hands us instead the far more disquieting possibility that the trap is built into the dream, and that any of us, holding that dream and that power, might have sprung it.

One need not reach for the grand scale to see the logic at work; the small scale, this very week, will do. On the morning of Saturday 16 Nehase 2018 in the Ethiopian calendar — 22 August 2026 — according to a video report by the outlet Bisrat Media, which the Tribune has not been able to corroborate elsewhere, a lone man walked into Megenagna, one of the busiest junctions in Addis Ababa, propped a placard naming the prime minister against a metal railing, and began, entirely by himself, to protest. He carried no weapon and led no movement. He was, in the most literal sense, a single empirical citizen declining to be added into the collective dream. Within minutes, by the same account, police who were in the area seized him and took him to a station; no official explanation had been offered by the time the footage circulated. The Tribune records the episode as reported by a single outlet, not independently confirmed. But mark its grammar: in a polity organised around a vision of who the people ought to be, the man who stands in public and says I am not well, and you have failed me is not answered and is not argued with. He is cleared, like rubble, from the frame.

The two jaws have closed. The bait has done its work. And so we come to the only question that finally matters, the one Curtis asks and, with characteristic bleakness, refuses to answer. Is there a way out of the trap? Is there any idea of freedom left to us that is not modelled on suspicion, not delivered by vanguard, not counted by the state or imposed by the dream? To answer — or at least to refuse despair honestly — we must leave the British filmmaker behind, and turn to two men he never mentions: an Indian economist who spent his life measuring freedom differently, and an Ethiopian novelist who was murdered for telling the truth about a dream.

Sources

The two freedoms. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762); Adam Curtis, The Trap, Part 3, We Will Force You To Be Free (BBC, 2007).

The dream in office. Dissolution of the EPRDF and formation of the Prosperity Party (2019); Abiy Ahmed, Medemer (2019).

The bulldozer. The Corridor Development programme (Addis Ababa from 2022; later phases in Adama, Hawassa, Dire Dawa and elsewhere). Displacement and compensation as reported by human-rights organisations and international media; figures stated here as reported, not as independently confirmed by the Tribune, and to be attributed to named monitors at production. The Entoto national-palace project and its reported c. US$10bn cost likewise to be attributed as reported.

A necessary caution. References to the conflicts in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia are illustrative of a political logic and are deliberately not quantified here; casualty and displacement figures, where used, must be sourced individually. The reported lone protest at Megenagna (16 Nehase 2018 / 22 August 2026) is sourced to a single video report by Bisrat Media; the Tribune found no corroborating report and no official police statement, and presents it as reported by a single outlet, not independently confirmed.

THE TRAP · PART IV OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

The Rule of the Number

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

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

THE TRAP · PART III OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

The Constitution of Distrust

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

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

THE TRAP · PART II OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

When the Cell Doors Opened

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

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

THE TRAP · PART I OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

The Golden Tourniquet

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

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

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

An intervention that persuades no one

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

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

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

What the reserves are made of

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

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

The deal that wasn’t

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

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

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

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

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

The geography of complicity

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

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

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

The Egyptian ghost

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

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

The tourniquet and the wound

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

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

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

The Ethiopian Tribune · Independent since 2012