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Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

Surviving Is Not Governing

On chaotic equilibrium, the four singular interests, and the constitutional reckoning Ethiopia cannot defer

By Endex, Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune

16 June 2026

There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes not from silence but from the opposite from having said, again and again, what is true and necessary, and watching the words dissolve into a political atmosphere too saturated with noise to absorb them. It is the fatigue of the serious analyst in a season that rewards the demagogue. Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu knows it well. In the note he sent us alongside this, his concluding instalment in a series of nine essays published in these pages over the past six months, he described the experience with a candour that struck this editor as the most honest thing written about Ethiopian public discourse in recent memory:

“I am gradually learning that our politics often generates more noise than traction. One writes and writes, hoping to be heard, yet too often the words disappear into the ether. In time, the process itself can become a kind of addiction, a relentless attempt to persuade, explain, and warn, even when the echoes seem to return unanswered.”

We publish those words here, in this foreword, because they deserve to be read as part of the record not as an admission of defeat, which they are not, but as a diagnosis, offered by the same disciplined mind that has spent half a year mapping Ethiopia’s converging crises with the tools of systems science, geopolitical analysis, and institutional economics. MGH writes as a nationalist, he tells us, but not a partisan; and that distinction has been the animating principle of everything this series has produced. The distinction is rarer than it should be. It has made his work essential.

This final essay, “Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?”, is the series at its most ambitious and, in places, its most sombre. It arrives in the immediate aftermath of the 1 June snap election an exercise conducted under telecommunications blackout in parts of the country, with scores of polling stations that never opened and it reads that domestic reality against a regional storm the analysts did not price in: the US–Israel war on Iran, launched on 28 February, that has refused to end cleanly and has now, as these words go to press, produced a Geneva settlement that enriches and validates Tehran while sidelining Jerusalem and overruling the very coalition on which Ethiopia’s most ambitious external bets were quietly staked.

The argument MGH assembles is, characteristically, not about the headline but about the structure beneath it. He draws on the mathematics of dynamical systems strange attractors, dissipative structures, Lorenz, Prigogine not as ornament but as analytical instrument, using the science to interrogate the fashionable claim that Abiy Ahmed’s method constitutes the “mastery” of chaotic equilibrium. His verdict is precise and unsparing: surviving is not governing; and a strange attractor not anchored to the nation’s constitutive interests does not hold a state together it merely postpones the moment it flies apart. The Middle East permacrisis, he argues, supplies the illustration at scale: two of the most powerful men alive tried to ride the chaos and lost control of it. The temptation being marketed to Addis Ababa is identical. The margin for error is far smaller.

“A detonator mistaken for a microphone.” On the public record, the Office of the Prime Minister folded the Arsi massacre into a statement dominated by the seventh national election—treating the dead as a footnote to a campaign. That is not analysis. It is denial wearing the costume of statesmanship.”

At the heart of the essay and, the Tribune believes, at the heart of the Ethiopian moment—is Arsi. The systematic attacks on Orthodox Christian communities in East Arsi Zone, escalating since October 2025 and surging around the election itself, are not, MGH argues, a regional incident to be managed by press line. They are what he calls the super-coupler: the violence that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one, assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single insurgency Ethiopia faces, and places before the state a test it cannot pass with a messaging strategy. A burned church cannot be split the difference of in a negotiation. And the institution most capable of unmaking a government the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, with its pan-ethnic reach and its centuries of accumulated moral authority is watching.

The essay does not confine itself to catastrophe. MGH opens a genuine developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed crediting the inheritance he kept from the Meles era, the agricultural programmes that earned international recognition, the completion of GERD, the private investment arriving at scale and he refuses the lazy comfort of imagining the opposition as the remedy. His assessment of the diaspora’s self-defeating fervour, of the ethnic entrepreneurship institutionalised by the 1995 constitution, of the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build, and of the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies these are the most searching pages of the series, and they demand the kind of re-reading that our noisy public square is least equipped to offer.

The prescription is the same one this series has returned to with the discipline of a compass: the four singular interests Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine legislated and made invariant, anchored not in the operator’s survival but in the survival of the state. And beneath that, the founding text itself. You cannot fix the basin around civic unity, MGH writes, while operating under a constitution that makes ethnicity, not citizenship, the fundamental unit of the state. It is the constitution, stupid and has been, all along.

A WORD OF APPRECIATION

The Ethiopian Tribune owes Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu a debt that a foreword can only begin to acknowledge. Since January 2026 he has contributed to these pages nine major essays spanning the Abraham Accords and the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn security architecture, the June election and the developmental state question, national unity and Red Sea sovereignty, and now this concluding synthesis. Each piece arrived rigorously sourced, analytically independent, and written with the kind of moral seriousness that is the rarest commodity in Ethiopian public life. He wrote not to be agreed with, but to be useful. That, in this political season, is an act of considerable courage.

He writes now that his sabbatical is drawing to a close, and that other pressing responsibilities will soon demand his attention. He takes comfort, he says, in knowing he has said what he felt compelled to say. We take comfort, for our part, in knowing that these essays exist that they are on the record, available to the patient reader who returns to them when the noise has subsided, as noise always does, and the questions MGH has been asking remain exactly as unresolved as they are today. History will adjudicate his analysis; we do not doubt the judgement will be generous.

He closes his note to us with a wish: that we were more reflective, more strategic, more clear-eyed in our judgements, and above all—kinder to one another. It is a wish this Tribune shares, and one we commend to every reader. MGH continues to pray for healing, understanding, and reconciliation. So do we. We are grateful to have had him in our pages, and we shall remain so.

ABOUT THIS ESSAY: A SUMMARY FOR THE READER

“Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?” is the ninth and concluding instalment in MGH’s series for the Ethiopian Tribune, and it operates on three simultaneous registers: the geopolitical, the systemic, and the constitutional.

Geopolitically, the essay reads Ethiopia’s domestic crisis against the US–Israel war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 and, after months of a resilient Iranian resistance that held the Strait of Hormuz shut and weaponised what MGH calls “linkage” binding the Lebanese and Gulf theatres so that neither could be settled alone ended in a Geneva deal signed on 19 June that enriched Iran, sidelined Israel, and overruled the latent coalition of Israeli technology, Emirati capital, and American security cover on which Ethiopia’s Red Sea ambitions had been quietly staked. The lesson MGH draws is not one of misfortune but of method: sovereignty cannot be outsourced, and a bet placed on other people’s coalitions is clientage with better branding.

Systemically, the essay subjects to forensic examination the fashionable claim that Abiy’s method constitutes the mastery of chaotic equilibrium. Using the mathematics of dynamical systems—strange attractors, bifurcation thresholds, Lorenz’s butterfly, Prigogine’s dissipative structures—MGH identifies three things true of strange attractors that the flattering version omits: the basin is set by the system’s parameters, not chosen by the operator; sensitive dependence cuts both ways; and an attractor is not a goal, merely a description of where a system goes when no one is choosing where it should go. A state can orbit a basin of permanent low-grade civil war indefinitely. That, too, is a chaotic equilibrium. It is also a catastrophe.

Constitutionally, the essay returns, as the whole series has returned, to the founding text. The 1995 constitution does not merely permit ethnic mobilisation; it rewards it, vesting sovereignty in “nations, nationalities and peoples” and inscribing secession into the first principles of the state. Under those equations, the attractor the system is mathematically drawn toward is ethnic entrepreneurship—the monkey-habit that produces Fano, sustains the TPLF, gives the OLA its grammar, and hands Asmara its proxies. The four singular interests—Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine—are the invariants that could anchor a different attractor. But they must be legislated, not improvised. It is, as MGH has said from the beginning, the constitution, stupid.

Along the way, the essay examines: the convergence of three insurgencies (Fano, OLA, TPLF) with a sovereign default still unresolved two and a half years on; the role of Turkey as the straddler who profits from managed disorder; Eritrea as the patient spoiler whose bargaining position improves with every month the regional storm continues; the Arsi massacres as the super-coupler that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one and assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single armed movement Ethiopia faces; the developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed—credits and debits both; the formal logic of divide-and-rule as modelled by Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier; the historical engineering of ethnicity under the TPLF-led EPRDF; the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build; the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies; the weakness of an opposition that embodies rather than transcends the fracture; and the self-defeating fervour of a diaspora that holds a financial lever over an exchange-rate-starved state and never picks it up.

It is dense work, and it is important work. The Tribune commends it to every Ethiopian who believes the country can still choose the other dish.

READ THE FULL PUBLICATION

The complete essay including all footnotes, the full bibliography of sixty sources, and the extended analysis of the four singular interests as a controlling invariant, is available for download at the link below. Readers are encouraged to share it widely.

↓  Download the Full Publication.   ↓

ethiopiantribune.com/publications/chaotic-equilibrium

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About Post Author

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America is trying to prevent another catastrophic war in the Horn of Africa. The evidence suggests it is already too late, unless it is prepared to do something far more difficult than lifting sanctions on a dictatorship.

By E. Frashie   ·   Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Geopolitical Correspondent

The Economist put it plainly in its latest edition: America almost certainly wants to prevent a war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the Trump administration appears to be using both carrots and sticks to avert it. The carrot is the lifting of Biden-era sanctions on Eritrea’s military and ruling party. The stick is a private but repeated warning to Addis Ababa that Washington will not countenance any forcible seizure of Red Sea access. The diagnosis is correct. The prescription, unfortunately, does not match the disease.

What the magazine’s framing does not capture — and what the accumulated weight of reporting from Asmara, Port Sudan, Cairo and Addis Ababa now makes difficult to deny, is that the Horn of Africa is not drifting towards war. It is being steered there. The architecture of that steering has been under construction for the better part of two years. It has a name. It has sponsors. It has already produced facts on the ground that no amount of American diplomatic ingenuity, in its current form, is configured to reverse.

This is an account of what is actually happening, who is responsible, and what, if anything, might yet prevent it.

The coalition nobody wants to name

The word is Tigrinya for ‘yoke’ or ‘coupling’ two things bound together by necessity rather than by affection. In the political vocabulary of the Horn in 2026, Tsimdo has come to name something considerably more consequential: a convergence of former enemies who have set aside the memory of atrocity to prosecute a shared campaign against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Its architecture is striking. At its centre sit the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the hardline faction under Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, which reconstituted its pre-war 2020 regional council in May 2026, appointed Debretsion as regional president, and formally ended any residual commitment to the Pretoria Agreement that concluded the 2020–22 Tigray war and the government of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, whose forces fought alongside Ethiopia against the TPLF in that same war and were credibly accused of massacre, systematic sexual violence, and deliberate starvation of the civilian population. That these two parties are now strategic partners is the central geopolitical fact of the Horn in 2026, and it demands explanation.

The explanation lies in exclusion. The Pretoria Agreement, brokered in November 2022, did not include Eritrea. Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement a humiliation he has neither forgotten nor forgiven. His calculation since then has been methodical. By early 2025, Africa Intelligence, the French intelligence letter whose sourcing runs directly to principals and their entourages, reported that Isaias had convened a summit in Asmara with TPLF officials in January of that year and personally guaranteed to protect the TPLF in the event of renewed conflict with Ethiopia. By July 2025, the same publication reported that Eritrea had assumed effective operational control of the Tigray-Eritrea border a corridor that, once open, allows Eritrean military assets and supplies to flow into Tigray beyond the reach of Addis Ababa. These are not assessments. They are reported facts.

Around this Eritrean-TPLF core, additional actors have been drawn. Elements of the Amhara Fano militia which fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF during the Tigray war have reportedly entered into local tactical arrangements with TPLF commanders in border areas of Wollo. The Oromo Liberation Army, active in the south, has intensified its attacks since federal forces redeployed northward. The Sudanese Armed Forces, though consumed by their own civil war, have historically provided rear-base facilities to TPLF fighters in eastern Sudan, and a coordination meeting in Port Sudan has brought together Ethiopian opposition groups with Eritrean and pro-SAF Sudanese participants. Chatham House confirmed in May 2026 that Tigrayan fighters have fought alongside the SAF against the RSF Ethiopia’s own proxy in Sudan’s civil war. The two conflicts have fused.

Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement. His response has been to construct, from that exclusion, the most formidable external threat to Ethiopian federal authority since the Derg.

Egypt is the coalition’s external financier and strategic coordinator. Gebru Asrat, the former TPLF president of Tigray and now a fierce critic of Debretsion’s faction, told The Reporter Ethiopia in an interview published this weekend that the TPLF ‘is working with Shabia, Egypt, and the Sudanese,’ and that Egypt ‘is the primary coordinator of them all.’ He added: ‘If a conflict erupts, it will become a regional war.’ Egypt’s motivation is not obscure. Cairo has been unable to reverse the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam through diplomacy, multilateral pressure, or American mediation. It has concluded that strategic encirclement making Ethiopia’s security environment so costly as to force concessions is the viable alternative. The Tsimdo coalition is, among other things, Egypt’s GERD policy conducted by other means.

The Ethiopian National Defence Forces have formally briefed the foreign diplomatic community in Addis Ababa that any attempt to operationalise the Tsimdo initiative would face military retaliation. That briefing is not a diplomatic signal. It is a countdown.

Washington’s gamble and why it is failing

The Trump administration’s dual-track, as The Economist characterises it, has a coherent surface logic. Rehabilitate Eritrea through sanctions relief, thereby giving Isaias an economic incentive to disengage from Tsimdo. Warn Ethiopia off military adventurism by signalling that Washington will not back a forcible push for sea access. Use Egypt with whom Trump enjoys a personal rapport with President Sisi , as the mediating channel. Each element of this logic is wrong in a different way.

The sanctions relief is structurally unconditional. The Biden-era sanctions imposed in November 2021 under Executive Order 14046 targeted Eritrea’s Defence Forces, the ruling PFDJ party, its intelligence chief, and linked commercial entities, specifically for their role in atrocities during the Tigray war. No accountability has been rendered for those atrocities. No withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Tigray has occurred the opposite has occurred, with Eritrean forces now functioning as the TPLF’s security guarantor inside Tigray rather than its executor. Isaias has not acknowledged the American overture in any public statement. His Independence Day address on 24th May 2026 contained extensive criticism of the global order and of Trump’s foreign policy without a single reference to the sanctions relief being negotiated on his behalf in Cairo. He is not interested in appearing as a Washington client. He is interested in the economic relief, the international rehabilitation, and the continued freedom to operate on the ground in Tigray.

The mediation channel is the most consequential flaw. The meetings between US Envoy Massad Boulos and Isaias were brokered by Egyptian President el-Sisi a man whose government is the primary external coordinator of the coalition America is supposedly trying to dismantle. Foreign Policy’s April 2026 assessment was unsparing: the initiative ‘reflects a deepening lack of strategy.’ Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture, apparently without grasping the role it is being asked to play.

The stick aimed at Ethiopia is real but blunt. American officials have repeatedly communicated to Addis Ababa that Washington opposes any attempt to acquire sea access by force. But the economic leverage behind that warning has been weakened by the Trump administration’s own cuts to development assistance, and Abiy’s post-election mandate the Prosperity Party’s June 2026 electoral landslide, conducted without Tigray, without credible Fano engagement, and without meaningful opposition has given him a domestic political argument for dismissing external pressure as interference. He has done precisely that before: his 2021 open letter to President Biden accused Washington of an ‘orchestrated distortion of events and facts on the ground.’ There is no reason to expect a different response now.

Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture. The mediator is the arsonist. The channel it is using to broker peace is the same channel through which the war is being financed.

Egypt’s overextension the variable no one is pricing

There is, however, a structural variable that the Horn’s various war-planning establishments have inadequately priced, and it runs through Cairo.

Egypt’s domestic position in 2026 is considerably weaker than its aggressive regional posture suggests. Suez Canal revenues have collapsed: Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping since late 2023 produced at least a 60 per cent decline in canal traffic, and President Sisi acknowledged in March 2026 a cumulative loss of ten billion dollars in canal receipts since the decade began, describing Egypt as standing at a ‘historical crossroads.’ Inflation exceeds 15 per cent. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at approximately 83 per cent. The Egyptian pound has depreciated to 55 to the dollar. Fuel prices have been raised by 17 per cent, and Sisi felt compelled to address his citizens’ ‘negative feelings’ about the measure in a nationally broadcast address. The Arab Center DC was direct in its April 2026 assessment: ‘Involving the armed forces in external affairs is a luxury that the Egyptian economy cannot afford.’

The political threat is more dangerous still. Since his 2013 coup removed Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammed Morsi, Sisi has governed on the premise that his security apparatus has permanently suppressed the organisation. That premise is fraying. Egypt’s Interior Minister warned publicly in January 2024 against the Brotherhood’s efforts to revive propaganda activities and recruit members via social networks. By the summer of 2025, Brotherhood-affiliated movements had organised sixteen demonstrations outside Egyptian embassies worldwide each filmed and circulated virally under the slogan ‘Besiege their embassies until they lift the siege on Gaza.’ The Institute for National Security Studies documented in January 2026 that these campaigns explicitly linked Egypt’s human rights record to its role in maintaining the Gaza blockade, finding a receptive audience among younger Egyptians disillusioned by the violence they have watched, uninterrupted, on their telephone screens.

The Gaza dimension is critical. The Palestinian cause has historically been the Muslim Brotherhood’s most effective mobilising tool the one issue capable of moving Egyptians who are otherwise exhausted by political risk. A Gaza settlement that advances genuine Palestinian reconstruction will not, as some in Washington assume, simply release pressure. It will redirect Arab League attention and Gulf financial energy toward Palestinian statehood, diminishing Egypt’s role as the indispensable Arab mediator and removing the diplomatic centrality that has given Sisi his regional leverage. An Egypt whose Suez revenues have not recovered, whose population is under compound economic stress, whose Gulf patrons are questioning its commitment after its failure to provide military support during the US-Iran confrontation, and whose Brotherhood opposition is being re-energised by precisely the conflict that Sisi has used to justify his authoritarianism that Egypt is a less reliable strategic coordinator of a multi-front anti-Ethiopia coalition than the one that constructed Tsimdo in 2024 and 2025.

None of this constitutes an immediate Egyptian collapse. Sisi’s security institutions remain intact and the military remains the ultimate guarantor of regime survival. But it does mean that Egypt’s capacity to sustain the Tsimdo architecture indefinitely is diminishing, and that the strategic calculation Isaias made when he aligned himself with Cairo may be premised on an Egypt that will not exist in the form he is counting on.

Every missile launched near Bab el-Mandeb raises shipping insurance premiums, reroutes vessels, and drains Cairo’s coffers. Egypt is financing a coalition against Ethiopia while its economy haemorrhages. That is not a sustainable strategic position.

The Abiy problem and the case for transition

The Economist’s ‘carrots and sticks’ framing implicitly assumes that Abiy Ahmed is the addressable interlocutor on the Ethiopian side that calibrated American pressure can alter his strategic behaviour. That assumption deserves scrutiny.

Abiy’s public rhetoric on Red Sea access has not been walked back despite direct warnings from Washington. His description of Ethiopia’s landlocked status as a ‘mistake’ that would be ‘corrected,’ his invocation of sea access as an ‘existential’ and ‘natural right,’ his government’s subsequent conditioning of negotiations on Eritrea halting its activities in Tigray these are not rhetorical flourishes from a leader who intends to be dissuaded by private diplomatic communications. Foreign Affairs noted in its June 2026 analysis that Abiy’s reelection ‘paves the way for advancement of his Red Sea ambitions,’ which have ‘already triggered an alliance among Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt, risking a broader regional conflict.’ His snap election conducted without Tigray, without meaningful opposition produced a mandate that carries none of the political plurality the country’s crisis demands.

Ethiopian analysts across the political spectrum have reached a conclusion that Western analysis has been reluctant to state plainly: Abiy’s government has reached a structural dead end. A provisional transitional authority, they argue, is the only mechanism through which a genuine national dialogue one that includes armed groups, opposition parties, and regional administrations currently excluded from the state-led process can be convened. The argument is not merely about governance legitimacy. It is about strategic capacity. An interim government without Abiy’s accumulated personal antagonisms with Isaias, without his rhetorical investment in Red Sea adventurism, and without the Prosperity Party’s structural inability to accommodate ethnic federalist demands, would be in a position to negotiate the one settlement that might actually hold.

That settlement would need to address, above all, the Eritrea question. Isaias’s grievance is specific and documented: he was excluded from Pretoria. The country whose forces bled alongside Ethiopian federal troops in the Tigray war was given no seat at the settlement table, no acknowledgement of its military contribution, and no security guarantee against Ethiopian ambitions on its coastline. An interim Ethiopian government that offered Eritrea a structured bilateral framework not formal confederation, which Eritrean sovereignty politics render impossible, but genuine economic integration, guaranteed transit access, and a mutual security architecture that makes Eritrea’s Red Sea ports economically indispensable to Ethiopia rather than militarily coveted would remove the single greatest strategic incentive Isaias currently has for sustaining Tsimdo.

This is not a comfortable prescription. It requires the international community, and Washington in particular, to acknowledge that the leader it has been engaging as the legitimate interlocutor of a democratic election is also the single greatest obstacle to the regional settlement that would prevent a catastrophic war. That is a difficult truth. It is, however, the truth.

The diplomatic exit from the coming war is not a ceasefire between Abiy and Isaias. It is Abiy’s departure and the construction of a transitional government prepared to treat Eritrea as a partner in regional architecture rather than a threat to be managed and Egypt as an adversary rather than a mediator.

Who fights with what and who bleeds first

The military balance, stripped of its diplomatic overlay, is this: Ethiopia has numerical and technological superiority on paper, and loses it in practice against the specific conditions that a northern front war would impose.

The Ethiopian National Defence Force is one of Africa’s largest standing armies, with active personnel estimates ranging from 130,000 to over 300,000, backed by drone systems that proved decisive in the Tigray war, artillery, and air assets. But the ENDF’s record in the Tigray war also revealed serious command vulnerabilities, over-reliance on mass mobilisation rather than tactical precision, and a capacity to sustain enormous casualties without achieving political resolution. The 2020–22 war killed between 300,000 and 600,000 people and ended not with federal victory but with a negotiated settlement that has now dissolved entirely.

Eritrea’s Defence Forces, estimated by the International Crisis Group in February 2026 at below 200,000, are battle-hardened, deeply familiar with the northern Ethiopian terrain, and critically positioned behind the escarpment geography south of Asmara that would force any Ethiopian offensive to attack uphill into prepared positions. The 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war killed between 70,000 and 100,000 soldiers in precisely this geography and produced nothing. The Tsimdo coalition would simultaneously open fronts in Oromia, where the OLA has intensified attacks as federal forces have thinned southward, and maintain the western flank through SAF-controlled eastern Sudan. Ethiopia cannot fight a three-front war without a degree of economic and political cohesion that it does not currently possess.

Ethiopia’s war-financing position is the most critical constraint. The country carries a defaulted Eurobond, is under IMF structural adjustment, and is running down foreign exchange reserves at a pace that leaves limited headroom for a sustained military campaign. The UAE, which provided the drone technology decisive in the Tigray war, is itself caught between its backing for Abiy and its investment in Sudan’s RSF the SAF’s adversary in Sudan’s civil war, the SAF being the TPLF’s backer in eastern Sudan. Abu Dhabi cannot be assumed as an unconditional Ethiopian military partner in a war whose geometry places it on opposite sides of the Sudan conflict simultaneously.

The honest military verdict is that Ethiopia would likely hold its major population centres and inflict significant casualties on the TPLF. It would not likely neutralise Eritrea’s military capacity through conventional offensive action. It would not likely close the OLA front in Oromia. And it would not likely sustain the economic and political cohesion necessary for a protracted multi-front campaign before that cohesion gave way either through internal political fracture or through the kind of economic collapse that the IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation implicitly foreshadowed. In a war that neither side could afford to lose and neither could afford to win, Ethiopia is the party with fewer reserves of either kind.

What comes next

Three scenarios present themselves. The first, and most probable, is an attritional multi-front conflict that exhausts Ethiopia’s economic and political cohesion before it exhausts Eritrea’s. The ENDF holds the cities. Tsimdo sustains pressure across Oromia, Amhara, and the western frontier. International pressure eventually produces a second Pretoria-type negotiation. Abiy’s domestic position collapses under military stalemate and economic deterioration, triggering his removal. The settlement that follows will look like what a transitional government might have offered without the war but arrived at after years of catastrophic human cost.

The second scenario is a negotiated transitional resolution before open hostilities consolidate. This requires a set of conditions that do not currently obtain: credible American pressure on Egypt to cease coordinating Tsimdo; an Ethiopian internal political realignment producing a government willing to negotiate with Eritrea on the terms described above; and a Tsimdo coalition sufficiently aware of the war’s cost to accept a political settlement addressing its core grievances. The Economist’s carrots and sticks are trying to generate this scenario without acknowledging any of its structural prerequisites. It remains possible. It is not currently probable.

The third scenario is a rapid Ethiopian military offensive against Tigray before the coalition fully operationalises a pre-emptive strike aimed at presenting Eritrea with a fait accompli. The ENDF’s January 2026 drone strike on Raya Azebo suggests this logic is being actively considered. The risk is that a rapid offensive produces exactly the regional war it seeks to forestall, drawing in Eritrea before Washington’s diplomatic channels can intervene.

What none of these scenarios produces is a winner in any conventional sense. Egypt wins strategically in any scenario that leaves Ethiopia weakened, distracted, and economically shattered but Egypt itself is weakening, and a Sisi administration consumed by economic crisis, Brotherhood revival, and Gulf scepticism is a less reliable paymaster for a prolonged proxy war than the one that began construction of this architecture two years ago. Isaias wins politically in any scenario that prevents Abiy from seizing his coastline but an Eritrean state that has spent its last political energy on a war it did not formally declare is not a state with obvious resources for reconstruction. The TPLF’s hardline faction achieves, at minimum, a return to de facto autonomous governance of Tigray the condition that existed before November 2020 and which the Tigray war failed to permanently alter.

What everyone loses is the possibility of the Horn of Africa as a zone of sustainable regional development. Ethiopia’s aviation hub, its nascent manufacturing base, its IMF stabilisation programme, its capacity to absorb the demographic pressures of 130 million people all of these become considerably harder to sustain inside a regional war. The civilian populations of Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Eritrea, who have endured a decade of compound catastrophe, will pay the price first and longest.

History teaches that wars in the Horn do not end cleanly. The 1998 conflict produced 100,000 dead and a cold war that lasted twenty years. The 2020 war produced 600,000 dead and a peace agreement that lasted three. The next one will not produce a winner. It will produce a landscape in which everyone has lost something irretrievable.

The Economist asked whether America’s carrots and sticks can avert disaster. The honest answer is: not in their current form, not through the current channel, and not without confronting the more uncomfortable truth that the political figure at the centre of this crisis is not the solution to it. Washington’s choices are narrowing. The window for a negotiated transition in Addis Ababa one that addresses Eritrea’s structural grievances and removes the war’s principal political driver will not remain open indefinitely. Once the shooting starts in earnest, it will not be closed by diplomacy. It will be closed by exhaustion, and exhaustion in the Horn of Africa is a condition measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE Election Analysis — June 2026

The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

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

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

THE MODERNISATION THAT WASN’T

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

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

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

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

THE ARITHMETIC THAT NEVER CHANGES

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

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

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

“WE CAME TO DOCUMENT, NOT TO WIN”

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

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

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

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

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

A COALITION OF ONE MIND, MOSTLY

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

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

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

THE VERDICT ON THE VERDICT

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

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

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

THE SYSTEM’S MOST DURABLE OUTPUT

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

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

THE REGION THE ELECTION FORGOT

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

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

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

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

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Editor’s Note

Before any of the above reaches a single reader, credit where it is overdue: the scorecard itself the unit costs, the conversions, the unglamorous arithmetic that turns “$291 billion” into “fifty-eight mega dams” is the work of Behailu Shiferaw, whose research did the actual heavy lifting here. Numbers of this scale do not assemble themselves, and the diligence required to build a coherent framework out of import bills, conflict estimates, and procurement figures is the kind of work that rarely gets a byline of its own.

Sewasew Teklemariam’s role, by comparison, was the easy part: take Behailu’s research and make it readable enough that someone might actually finish the article which, if you have made it this far, appears to have worked.

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By Girma Berhanu (Professor)

This reflection was prompted by a question from a 14–15-year-old girl who attends the homework support program (läxhjälp) at our university. Wearing a hijab and displaying both curiosity and ambition, she asked me a simple yet profound question: Why do people look at me?

My initial thought was that part of the reason might simply be her age. It is unusual to see someone so young in a university environment. Yet I was also aware of the broader social and cultural complexities that may have shaped her experience. These are not easy issues to explain to a young person who is eager to learn, full of aspirations, and still developing her understanding of the world around her.

I first encountered the concept of gazing during my time in the United States. Gazing is not simply the act of looking at another person. In human relationships, it can function as a powerful social mechanism that determines who is perceived as belonging and who is marked as different. It can signal inclusion or exclusion, recognition or marginalization. Its effects may be so penetrating that they become embedded in our bodies, emotions, and sense of self. In this sense, gazing can sometimes feel more forceful than a bullet. It becomes a form of surveillance and social control.

A master’s student of mine who wears a hijab shared her experiences of moving through streets and public transportation. She described how the gazes directed at her often left her feeling uneasy, unsettled, disgusted, and unwelcome. Only a few years ago, she dressed in what many would regard as ordinary Swedish clothing. She looked, in her own words, like any other Swedish woman: white, blonde, and confident. Yet changing her style of dress brought with it a daily experience of scrutiny and, at times, humiliation through the gaze of others.

A colleague and I are planning to study this phenomenon further. My colleague often wears clothing that challenges conventional gender expectations. He is very tall, while I am short and Black. Simply walking together, sharing meals, and moving through public spaces has taught us a great deal about how people react to difference. The responses are not always openly hostile, but they often reveal subtle forms of social regulation, categorization, and screening.

Over the years, I have spoken with many people about this powerful social mechanism. Disabled people, older adults, people experiencing frailty, individuals experiencing homelessness, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, religious minorities, and many other groups perceived as “different” often describe being subjected to gazes that categorize, regulate, and discipline them.

I plan to write more about this research in the future. For now, I would like to ask a few questions:

• How often do you find yourself gazing at marginalized groups in our society?

• How often do you gaze at people with cognitive, physical, or social disabilities?

• How often do you notice and react to a Jewish kippah, a Muslim hijab, other religious symbols, or visible markers of subcultures?

• And when you gaze, what assumptions are you making? What boundaries are you reinforcing? What forms of belonging or exclusion are you helping to create?

After reviewing an earlier draft of this piece, a former colleague who is a professor of special education offered an important reflection. He questioned how we distinguish between consciously categorizing people and the natural human tendency to notice what differs from what we expect. Is it the gaze itself that creates a sense of exclusion, or is it the attitudes and actions that sometimes follow? How can we investigate this phenomenon without assuming that every attentive glance is negative? Perhaps, he suggested, such a glance may simply be an expression of curiosity—or even an opening for dialogue.

His response prompted further reflection. It challenged the assumption that being noticed is necessarily a form of othering and raised the possibility that attention may stem from curiosity rather than prejudice. The distinction is subtle but important. While some gazes undoubtedly communicate exclusion, suspicion, or disapproval, others may reflect interest, uncertainty, or a desire to understand. Understanding where these meanings diverge may be one of the central challenges in studying gazing as a social phenomenon.

This is particularly important when considering how young people interpret the reactions of others. The question is not merely why people look, but how those looks are experienced, understood, and internalized by those who receive them.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY
Department of Education and Special Education

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Reading The Economist and Horn Review Against the Four Singular Interests

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)*

Editorial Foreword

Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls in an election whose conduct this publication has already documented in unsparing detail, from the 143 polling stations that never opened to the telecommunications blackouts that left whole zones uncounted the temptation, in Addis Ababa and the diaspora alike, is to settle on a verdict about the man who presided over it. Was the vote the death rattle of competitive politics, as The Economist concluded in its election-eve assessment of an “imperial vision”? Or was it, as Horn Review argued in the same week, the legitimate capstone of a state being patiently and irreversibly reconstituted? Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s essay, the latest in a series that has run in these pages since his analysis of Adwa, GERD and the Red Sea, refuses both verdicts and in refusing them, makes an argument this newspaper considers worth taking seriously, even where it does not take it whole.

His method is to insist that both readings, for all their sophistication, make the same mistake from opposite directions: each makes Abiy Ahmed the subject, when the architecture of the state is what actually determines what any leader can or cannot do. Readers of this series will recognise the scaffolding the four singular interests of unity, Red Sea sovereignty, broad-based development and GERD and what is new here is the discipline with which it is turned, in a single essay, against a Western newsmagazine and against a publication closely identified with the governing party itself. The section on the constitution’s vesting of sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” rather than in the citizen is, whatever else readers make of the piece, among the clearest statements of that argument we have published.

It is also, in places, an argument with this newspaper. Dr Hailu engages directly with our 29 May piece on The Economist‘s leader, “The Geography of Delusion,” and while his scepticism of the “imperial vision” framing runs in a similar direction to ours, his route there differs in ways readers should weigh rather than wave through not least his treatment of Article 51 and the Doumeira–Beilul claim, where the line between “peaceful priority” and a reserved right of last resort is doing a great deal of work, and where this newspaper’s own coverage of Eritrean and regional perspectives has been less sanguine about how that distinction is heard in Asmara and beyond. Similarly, his “ledger” of the second mandate crediting the float, the wheat programme and the corridor projects as deposits against a development account that this paper’s reporting has more often shown in deficit will strike some readers as generous in ways the polling-day record of 1 June, recounted in his own footnotes, does not obviously support.

We publish the essay not because it resolves these tensions but because it sharpens them, and because the question it poses is it the constitution, stupid? is one this publication has circled for months without naming so directly. Readers will form their own view of how far structural diagnosis should extend absolution to the men who govern within, and profit from, the structure. That argument is the one worth having, and Dr Hailu has, characteristically, made it harder to avoid.

The full essay, with its complete argument, references and accompanying tables, can be read at the following link :-

∗The author, aka MGH, is a global technical expert trained at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The views expressed are his own and do not represent any institutional position. MGH can be reached via mefkereseb.hailu1990@gmail.com.

Endex, Editorial Chief

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This article was inspired by a question posed by two young students during my läxhjälp (homework support) activities. They asked me a simple but profound question about friendship and whether I had many friends. In response, I spoke at length about friendship, family, and community. I also reflected on my own situation regarding friendships within the Ethiopian diaspora. This essay therefore focuses primarily on my relationships with fellow Ethiopians rather than on my social networks among Swedes or other communities in Sweden.

Over the course of my academic work and public engagement with Ethiopian affairs, I have learned that speaking openly about injustice often carries significant personal costs. One of those costs has been the gradual loss of friendships, professional relationships, and social networks.

My involvement in public debate began with a series of articles examining structural inequalities under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). In particular, I analysed what I regarded as the disproportionate political influence exercised by members of the Tigrayan ruling elite and the preferential access to opportunities enjoyed by individuals connected to the governing establishment. Among the issues I raised was the allocation of international scholarships, which, in my assessment, reflected broader patterns of political patronage and ethnic favouritism.

I subsequently wrote about human rights abuses within Ethiopian prisons, including allegations of sexual violence, sodomy, and the mistreatment of political prisoners and activists. These interventions attracted criticism and hostility from individuals who preferred silence or denial. It became increasingly clear that my work had rendered me unwelcome in certain political and intellectual circles. At times, even some of those closest to me appeared uncomfortable with my public positions.

The political transition that followed did not alter my commitment to critical inquiry. On the contrary, I found myself equally compelled to scrutinise the policies and conduct of the new administration. While many observers initially celebrated the promise of political reform, I became increasingly concerned about the persistence of ethnic polarisation, large-scale displacement, atrocities against civilians, and the erosion of democratic norms. My criticism of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was based not on allegiance to any political faction but on a commitment to evidence, accountability, and universal principles of justice.

The reaction was often revealing. Some supporters of the government, including individuals within certain religious communities associated with Pentecostal and prosperity-gospel movements, appeared to regard criticism of political leadership as illegitimate or even sacrilegious. In such environments, rational debate became difficult, and personal loyalty frequently replaced critical analysis. As a consequence, some acquaintances and friends distanced themselves from me. Over time, I also withdrew from certain community gatherings and church activities because I perceived a troubling degree of opportunism, conformity, and hypocrisy.

One of my most widely discussed essays, The Many Faces of Abiy Ahmed, generated particularly strong reactions. Yet over time, some of its most vocal critics acknowledged that several of the concerns raised in the article had proven justified. A number of Ethiopian intellectuals who initially dismissed my arguments later expressed agreement with aspects of my analysis as the country’s political trajectory became clearer.

Over the past seven years, I have written approximately eighty articles addressing issues of governance, human rights, conflict, displacement, and ethnic politics in Ethiopia. Much of this work has sought to amplify the voices of communities affected by violence and marginalisation, particularly among the Amhara population, while maintaining a broader concern for the suffering of all Ethiopians regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation.

At the time of writing, reports continue to emerge of severe violence against Orthodox Christian communities in parts of Oromia, including the Arsi Zone. According to local accounts, civilians have been killed, displaced, and deprived of their homes and livelihoods. What I find particularly troubling is the limited international attention devoted to these events. The relative absence of sustained media coverage raises important questions about whose suffering receives global visibility and whose does not. These concerns motivated my recent article, The “New Auschwitz”? Targeted Atrocities against Orthodox Amharas in Arsi, Oromia, Ethiopia.

The cumulative effect of this engagement has been a growing distance between myself and many members of the Ethiopian diaspora. While some relationships were lost because of political disagreements, others dissolved because they were rooted more in convenience, conformity, or shared ethnic loyalties than in genuine intellectual exchange. I have increasingly concluded that meaningful scholarship and principled activism often require a willingness to stand apart from prevailing social pressures.

Rather than viewing solitude as a burden, I have come to regard it as a condition of intellectual independence. It provides the space necessary for reading, reflection, research, and writing. Equally important, it has allowed me to invest my energy in relationships and projects that I find genuinely meaningful, including my engagement with young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. These interactions have been among the most rewarding aspects of my professional and personal life.

The experience has reinforced a simple lesson: public intellectual engagement is rarely without cost. Those who challenge entrenched interests, dominant narratives, or collective myths should not expect universal approval. Friendship, professional advancement, and social acceptance may all be sacrificed in the pursuit of truth as one understands it. Whether this should be described as the cost of activism, the burden of intellectual honesty, or the price of dissent is ultimately a matter of interpretation. What remains beyond dispute is that openness carries consequences, and those consequences must be accepted by anyone committed to speaking freely.

After reading an earlier draft of this essay, a friend residing in the United States—a neurologist by profession, whom I have never met in person—offered a thoughtful observation:

“This is not unique to Ethiopia. Even in the United States, whether one is Republican or Democrat, speaking uncomfortable truths can sometimes lead to criticism, isolation, or the loss of friendships. The challenge is universal. What should guide us is not political affiliation, ethnicity, or personal loyalty, but the truth as best as we can discern it. As a professor and public intellectual, the responsibility is not to please one side or another, but to follow the evidence wherever it leads and to remain consistent in applying the same standards to everyone.

In the end, reputations come and go, political winds change, and governments rise and fall. What endures is integrity. Let truth guide the analysis, and let intellectual honesty be the legacy.”

His remarks capture an important reality. The tension between truth and belonging is not confined to Ethiopia. It is a universal feature of public life. The question each of us must answer is whether we value comfort and acceptance more than honesty and intellectual integrity. For my part, I have chosen the latter, despite the costs.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor 

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY

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