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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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

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By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

What She Was Covering — and Why It Matters

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

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

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

Tsimdo: The Coalition Abiy Cannot Name Aloud

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

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

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

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

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

A Pattern, Not an Incident

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

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

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

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

The Logic of the Blackout

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

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

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

What the Ethiopian Tribune Holds

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

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

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

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

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Bekele Gesesse (PhD), June 2026

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest condolences regarding the utterly shameful and barbaric massacre recently committed against the church and the faithful in Arsi. May the Lord our God rest the souls of the deceased, and may He bring His judgement upon the murderers and the destroyers of the church.

1st/ Who is Ethiopia? What has she contributed?

Ethiopia is a holy country that has existed for thousands of years, created by the Lord our God who endowed her with everything in abundance.
She is a unique country where Orthodox and Muslim followers have coexisted with mutual respect and love. It was a nation where various ethnic groups and tribes intermarried, cooperated, and lived together in peace. She is deeply hospitable.
When foreign invasions threatened her, she united through the power of God, repelled the forces, and preserved her independence. She is an honoured nation that contributed immensely to liberating Africa from slavery and colonialism. She was Africa’s sole member of the League of Nations and a founding member of the United Nations. She played a monumental role in the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity.
For these reasons, she became the seat of the African Union and various international branch organisations.

2nd/ Why have her enemies multiplied?

a) Historical foreign enemies harbour grudges against us.

• Emperor Tewodros did not surrender to the British invading forces at Maqdala.
• We made history by defeating Italy at Adwa.
• During the second invasion at Maychew, we resisted poison gas and modern weaponry, safeguarding our independence after five years of bitter struggle.
  As mentioned above, Ethiopia contributed immensely to the liberation of African countries from slavery and colonialism. Because the Amhara people and the Orthodox faith played a major role in this achievement, enemies wish to destroy them, dismantle Ethiopia, and return Africa to subjugation.
  b) The role of internal slaughterers and secessionist forces
  It was expected that the Italians would be completely cleared out after their defeat at Adwa. Instead, they retreated to the Bahre Negash (the maritime province) and occupied it, changing its name to Eritrea. Eventually, Eritrea reunited with its motherland through a federation. When that federation was dissolved, the ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front) rose up to reverse it. Subsequently, the EPLF was formed. Due to external backing and internal weaknesses, the question shifted from federation to secession.
  The military Derg regime, after seventeen years of weakening the country by slaughtering numerous leaders, generals, and intellectuals, handed over power to the EPLF and TPLF forces and fled abroad. When the TPLF took power, they quickly facilitated Eritrea’s secession. They introduced an ethnically divisive constitution. Through fabricated narratives, they framed the Amhara people, in particular, as the public enemy.
  After twenty-seven years of exploitation, a weakened TPLF handed power over to Oromo forces and retreated to Mekelle.

3rd/ The ongoing massacres and the campaign to destroy the country

The situation has rapidly deteriorated, particularly since the establishment of Abiy’s Oromuma administration.
The following explicit crimes are actively being perpetrated:

• The massacre of the Amhara people,
• The massacre of Orthodox Christians,
• Attacks on churches,
• The closure of schools,
• The denial of medical treatment,
• The displacement of people,
• The destruction of heritage and looting of property,
• The stripping away of stability,
• The destruction of the economy,
• Causing the nation to be despised in the eyes of Africa and the world,
• Dismantling the country,
• And so forth.
  Why? Why? Why?

4th/ Conclusion

Do we all equally understand the catastrophic dangers mentioned above? If so, why have we failed to form a grand alliance to swiftly bring about a change that benefits everyone? What more are we waiting for???
The TPLF’s dream of annexing fertile Amhara land to establish a Tigray nation is sheer madness. Similarly, the dream of the Oromuma forces to build an Oromo nation by slaughtering the Amhara, Orthodox Christians, and others is equally mad. It would be far better, especially for the Tigray and Oromo public, to wake up quickly and stand with others for unity, peace, and sustainable development.
Others, realising that tomorrow it could be them, must stand shoulder to shoulder with the Fano, who are currently fighting for their very survival.
If foreign powers believe they will benefit from the dismantling of Ethiopia, they are mistaken. They would do well to learn from their past errors and refrain from their malicious actions.
May the Lord our God stand by our innocent, impoverished citizens, break the arm of the murderous and destructive forces, and send down His peace. Amen.

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How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

By Sewasew Teklemariam the Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than argument. It is the silence that descends upon a room when someone has said the unsayable with perfect precision, when an accusation is so well-documented, so calmly delivered, and so unanswerable that the only available response is the panicked shuffle of papers and the avoidance of eye contact. That silence fell upon the representatives of Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party during the country’s first major televised multi-party debate of the 2026 election cycle. The person who produced it was not a veteran statesman, not a celebrated economist, not a familiar face from the long and exhausted gallery of Ethiopian opposition politics. She was a former television journalist in her early thirties, representing a coalition whose symbol is a thumbs-up, whose name is Mistresilasie Tamerat, and who, in one broadcast hour, did more damage to the government’s democratic pretensions than two decades of politely worded opposition press releases ever managed.

Ethiopia is preparing to hold its seventh national election in June 2026, with 24 national and 45 regional political parties contesting for power in what many analysts describe as a critical test of the country’s democratic evolution, a description that grows more ironic the more closely one examines the conditions under which that evolution is supposedly occurring. The scale is impressive on paper: 1,300 candidates nationwide, 936 for regional councils, a National Electoral Board with a mandate and a calendar. The substance is considerably less so. Political prisoners remain detained. Conflicts rage in the Amhara region and beyond. The media landscape is captive. International observation is uncertain. In this context, Mistresilasie Tamerat stood before the cameras and said, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for precisely this moment: we do not believe that the electoral process can be described as fair, democratic, or independent. She did not flinch. Neither did the camera.

Her background is essential to understanding the force of the moment. She trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter and political affairs analyst at Asham TV, a career that gave her something most Ethiopian opposition politicians conspicuously lack: the ability to communicate complex arguments clearly, quickly, and under the pressure of broadcast conditions. When she transitioned from journalism into active politics, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party one of the country’s oldest opposition formations, founded in the radical crucible of the 1970s student movement received her and, unusually for a party in a political culture dominated by elderly men, entrusted her with its most senior administrative post: secretary-general. The party also made her coalition secretary for the “Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity,” the five-party alliance that now stands before the Ethiopian electorate with its thumbs raised.

She has said as much herself. The political space, in her own precise formulation, is dominated by long-established figures, and penetrating its leadership structures requires persistence and resilience. Being both young and female in that environment means perpetual proof-of-concept, an exhausting requirement applied to no comparable male colleague of similar ability. What the debate demonstrated is that she has cleared that bar so comprehensively that the requirement itself begins to look absurd. She did not participate in the debate. She commanded it.

“Being both young and female often means having to prove oneself repeatedly in environments where experience is measured narrowly and leadership is traditionally defined.”

The four arguments she deployed were not improvised. They were the product of a politician who understands that in a televised debate, the purpose is not to persuade the other side but to expose it. Her first line of attack concerned political prisoners, specifically, the more than 300 ordinary citizens reported detained in the Amhara region alone, some in connection with the Fano armed movement, others for no apparent reason beyond identity. This was not rhetoric. It was documentation. The Prosperity Party has invested considerable effort in framing the Amhara conflict as a security matter: a necessary state response to armed rebellion, regrettable but inevitable. Mistresilasie relocated that framing to the electoral arena, where it becomes something else entirely evidence that the conditions for a free election do not exist, that citizens are being detained for who they are rather than what they have done, and that any government which presides over this whilst simultaneously claiming democratic legitimacy is engaged in a contradiction it cannot resolve in front of a camera.

Her second argument, that one cannot speak credibly of democratic competition while war continues, was delivered with similar precision. She went further than most opposition politicians dare, calling not merely for ceasefire but for genuine, inclusive negotiations that encompass armed groups currently excluded from peace processes. This is the argument that sustainable peace cannot be achieved through exclusion, and it is one that speaks directly to the lived reality of millions of Ethiopians whose relationship with the state has been defined by violence rather than representation. The Prosperity Party’s representatives had nothing to offer in response that would not have required them to publicly justify policies they had spent considerable energy trying not to discuss.

The arguments on media independence and international observers were, in some ways, the most devastating precisely because they were the least dramatic. They required no statistics, no documentation of specific abuses, no emotional appeal. They required only the observation that these are the minimum conditions for any democratic process worthy of the name conditions so basic that their absence does not require lengthy argument, merely acknowledgement. The government’s representatives could not acknowledge them without conceding the point. They could not deny them without appearing to endorse a system of managed elections. They were, in the language of debate, trapped. The silence that followed was the sound of that trap closing.

The Prosperity Party excels at spectacle. What it struggles with is the rough-and-tumble of genuine democratic accountability and on that stage, there was nowhere left to hide.

It would be too simple to attribute this merely to the personal failings of the individuals who represented the ruling party on that stage. The deeper truth is structural. A party that has governed with the concentrated authority of the Prosperity Party, that has systematically dismantled independent judicial oversight, suppressed critical media, and treated dissent as a category of disloyalty , cannot easily produce, on short notice, the kind of confident, substantive defenders that open democratic debate requires. The machinery of authoritarian governance is not designed to generate intellectual accountability. It is designed to suppress the need for it. When that suppression fails — when someone stands before the cameras and refuses to be managed, the system has no response prepared, because it had convinced itself the moment would never come.

The Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice , EZEMA, occupies a different position in this story, and in some respects a more troubling one. EZEMA is, by most measures, the most institutionally coherent of the major opposition formations. It has a recognisable leadership, an urban electoral base, and a track record of participating in the formal processes of Ethiopian politics. It also has a track record, less frequently discussed, of accommodation. During the 2021 elections, EZEMA positioned itself against the formation of a transitional government at the precise moment when such a government represented the most credible alternative to the ruling party’s dominance. The practical effect of this position was to align EZEMA, at a critical juncture, with the preferences of the party it nominally opposed. In Addis Ababa in 2021, EZEMA and Balderas together received approximately 32 per cent of the capital’s vote and won zero seats in parliament a result that tells you everything you need to know about the electoral system, but also something important about the limits of a strategy built on institutional respectability rather than principled confrontation.

One of EZEMA’s own representatives captured this posture with an inadvertent candour before this year’s election. Despite the ongoing conditions the detentions, the lack of media freedom, the contested electoral environment the party acknowledged it had “no option but to participate in the election, if the government proceeds on its current track.” It is a sentence worth reading twice. It concedes the entire argument. It acknowledges that the conditions are inadequate. It then proceeds to participate anyway, not out of confidence but out of resignation. Compare this to Mistresilasie’s formulation: the process cannot be described as fair, democratic, or independent and here are the specific conditions that must change before it can be. One is a statement of principles with demands attached. The other is a statement of defeat dressed as pragmatism. The contrast, aired before a national television audience, was merciless.

The social media dimension of this story is not a footnote. Ethiopia is a country with a median age below 20. An overwhelming majority of its population has known no political dispensation other than the EPRP’s former enemies and, since 2018, the Prosperity Party. This is a generation whose relationship with politics has been defined by spectacle without accountability, by promises without delivery, and by the particular exhaustion that comes from watching one’s country torn apart by conflicts that feel simultaneously inevitable and entirely unnecessary. The appetite for a political figure who is young, female, articulate, and genuinely confrontational was not manufactured by social media. It was waiting. Mistresilasie gave it somewhere to go.

By contrast, the opening statements by ESDP and EZEMA, positioned at [00:04:53–00:08:15], produced what the analytics reveal as a characteristic “dip”: that moment, well known to anyone who has studied long-form political broadcast data, when casual viewers make their decision to stay or leave. ESDP’s pitch of gradual reform and EZEMA’s invocation of social justice are not unworthy positions. But they are positions that a viewer already fatigued by years of unfulfilled political promises will recognise and, the data suggests, will choose not to engage with further. The drop-off at this juncture is a verdict rendered not in ballot boxes but in closed browser tabs, and it is a verdict that the parties concerned would do well to examine. A political platform that cannot hold a free audience’s attention for eight minutes of prime-time debate is a platform with a communication problem that no amount of ideological refinement will resolve. The audience did not leave because the arguments were wrong. They left because the arguments felt familiar in the worst possible sense: competent, cautious, and utterly unexciting.

The TikTok virality, the comment threads declaring “she is who we wanted to become” these are not merely expressions of admiration for a single politician. They are an expression of political hunger: the demand of a generation for representation that actually looks like them, speaks like them, and is willing to say in public what they say to one another in private. That this hunger has found its focus in someone representing a coalition whose electoral history is modest and whose internal consolidation is incomplete is, simultaneously, the most interesting and the most precarious aspect of the current moment.

Because this column owes its readers scepticism as well as appreciation, certain questions must be put. Mistresilasie Tamerat has demonstrated, with considerable flair, the capacity to articulate what is wrong with Ethiopian politics and the electoral environment in which it currently operates. She has been notably less specific about what her coalition’s governance would look like in practice. Social democratic ideology and a commitment to equitable development are principles. They are not, in themselves, a programme for managing a country with rampant inflation, a currency under significant pressure, endemic unemployment, and a security situation that cannot be wished away with negotiations, however inclusive. The debate stage rewards the sharp identification of failures. Governing requires the harder discipline of proposing credible remedies.

The coalition’s internal cohesion presents a further question. Of the five parties that formed the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity alliance, only three remain actively engaged in the electoral process. A coalition that cannot fully consolidate before the election begins is one whose ability to hold together under the pressures of governance or even the pressures of a contested result must be considered uncertain. And whilst the demand for minimum conditions before participation is principled, the coalition has not yet articulated the clear red line that would tell the public: if these conditions remain unmet, we will withdraw and say publicly why. Without that line, the demand for conditions risks becoming a rhetorical position rather than a constitutional one.

None of which should obscure the significance of what has already happened. In a debate that the ruling party entered expecting to perform its usual controlled dominance, a young woman representing a minority coalition with a thumbs-up symbol and a name that translates as the Secret of the Trinity walked onto the stage and turned the performance inside out. She exposed the Prosperity Party’s inability to defend its record under genuine scrutiny. She implicitly indicted EZEMA’s decades of dignified accommodation. She gave the youngest generation of Ethiopians a face to attach to the possibility of a different kind of politics. She did all of this calmly, precisely, and entirely on her own terms.

“In a political landscape where the bar for meaningful opposition is depressingly low, she cleared it with visible ease and the camera caught every moment.”

The numbers, as it happens, are not merely anecdotal. An analysis of the YouTube broadcast of the seventh general election’s first debate officially titled “የ7ኛው ጠቅላላ ምርጫ የመጀመሪያው የክርክር መድረክ” reveals a viewing pattern that tells its own story about where public attention truly resided during more than two hours of broadcast. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity, known by its Amharic designation TIBIBIR, did not merely win the argument in the room. It won the audience at home, repeatedly, and at the moments that mattered most.

The broadcast’s viewership data identifies four distinct peaks where audience engagement spiked, and the pattern is instructive. The first came at [00:02:18], barely two minutes into proceedings, when inter-party friction first surfaced during the direct questioning phase the segment in which each party had two minutes to put questions directly to its opponents. YouTube’s retention analytics consistently show that confrontational exchange drives re-engagement: viewers who have wandered lean back in; those who had the broadcast running in the background pick it up. The second, and arguably most consequential, peak arrived at [02:05:12] the precise moment at which the TIBIBIR representative delivered her direct assessment of the Prosperity government’s economic record. The single word “failed” is, in broadcast terms, what analysts call a high-engagement unit: a declaration short enough to clip, sharp enough to share, and specific enough to be held accountable. The critique of the cost of living, the inability to pay rent, to afford daily meals, moved the debate from the abstractly political to the viscerally personal, producing the kind of resonance that generates not just initial views but re-watches, the metric that most accurately measures genuine impact. Within one minute, at [02:06:13], a second peak followed, driven by the explanation of the coalition’s campaign symbol, the raised thumb, and the closing appeal to voters. Audiences who skip to the end of long political broadcasts are not disengaged; they are specifically seeking the summary, the verdict, the moment of meaning. The fact that TIBIBIR’s symbol and final statement produced a measurable viewership spike at exactly this point suggests that the coalition had successfully generated sufficient curiosity earlier in the broadcast that viewers returned to hear how it concluded.

The coalition did not merely win the debate. According to the broadcast’s own viewership curve, it owned the moments the audience came back to watch twice.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond the mechanics of YouTube analytics. Political communication in the digital age does not reward the measured and the moderate. It rewards the specific, the confrontational, and the emotionally resonant. Mistresilasie Tamerat did not go viral because she was young or because she was female, though both facts added to the novelty of the moment. She went viral because she said something true, in plain language, to a camera, without flinching. In a media environment flooded with managed statements and rehearsed equivocation, that quality, the quality of simply meaning what one says, is rarer and more powerful than any focus-grouped slogan. The viewership data confirms what the debate room already knew: when she spoke, people stopped scrolling.

The thumbs-up is, in the end, a simple gesture. It means: yes. Yes, there is something worth approving of here. Yes, this is possible. Yes, we see you. In the context of an Ethiopian election whose integrity remains in serious doubt, whose conditions remain deeply problematic, and whose outcome remains controlled by forces that have never willingly relinquished power, this small affirmative gesture is either a political act of considerable bravery or a symbol that will be crushed, like so many before it, beneath the weight of the system it challenges.

Which of these it turns out to be will be determined not in one debate, however memorable, but in the months that follow in whether the coalition holds, in whether the conditions are partially met or entirely ignored, in whether the international community chooses to observe or to avert its gaze, and in whether a generation of young Ethiopians can convert the emotional energy of a TikTok moment into the harder, slower, more dangerous work of political organisation. Mistresilasie Tamerat has earned the right to be taken seriously. Ethiopia has not yet earned the right to call what is happening a democracy. Between those two facts lies the entire story of this election.

The debate has begun. Whether it will be permitted to conclude on the people’s terms is the only question that matters.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. This column reflects political analysis and does not constitute endorsement of any party or candidate.

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

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

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

Download the PDF

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

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By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Introduction: A Song, A Summit, and Structural Amnesia

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

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

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

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

1.1 Airpower and Chemical Warfare as Strategic Terror

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

The effects were catastrophic:

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

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

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

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

1.2 Yekatit 12: The Massacre as Colonial Pedagogy

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

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

1.3 Anthropology as Administrative Weapon

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

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

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

2.1 Ethiopian Internal Conflict and Civilian Vulnerability

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

            ∙           Civilian casualties from aerial bombardments.

            ∙           Destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and schools.

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

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

2.2 Sovereignty, Accountability, and the Limits of Developmentalism

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

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

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

3.1 The Corridor Development Project: Infrastructure or Exclusion?

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

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

3.2 Historical Echoes: Italian Urban Planning and Contemporary Spatial Violence

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

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

3.3 Displacement Without Compensation: The Human Cost

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

            ∙           Residents receive inadequate or no compensation for demolished homes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            ∙           Partnership agreements with Ethiopian developers for luxury residential projects.

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

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

IV. Migration, Borders, and the Asymmetry of Movement

4.1 The Closure of Europe and the Securitisation of Displacement

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

            ∙           Maritime interceptions in the Mediterranean.

            ∙           Agreements with Libya and Tunisia to prevent irregular crossings.

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

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

4.2 Historical Irony and Moral Incoherence

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

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

4.3 Displacement at Home, Exclusion Abroad: The Double Bind

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

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

5.1 Cultural Diplomacy as Memory Management

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

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

5.2 The Silence of the Archive

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

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

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

5.3 The Gala as Spatial Performance

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

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

VI. Ethiopianism and the Politics of Dignity

6.1 Ethiopian Exceptionalism and the Burden of Resistance

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

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

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

6.2 The Abiy Dilemma: Modernisation, Conflict, and Legitimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.1 Beyond Symbolic Gestures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.2 Ethiopian Accountability and Internal Governance

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

This requires:

            ∙           Independent investigations into civilian casualties from drone strikes.

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

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

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

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

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

7.3 Spatial Justice as Decolonial Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ethiopia’s economic debate is increasingly shaped not by what appears in the national budget, but by what happens outside it. Across ministries, agencies and development bodies, a growing share of public revenue is now raised through so-called contributions, commissions and special charges that sit beyond the formal tax system. These collections are rarely debated in parliament, seldom time-limited and often weakly linked to measurable outcomes. What began as an emergency practice has, quietly, become a governing habit.

For ordinary Ethiopians, the effects are felt not in policy documents but in daily transactions. Traders speak of new charges appearing without warning. Salaried workers notice deductions they struggle to interpret. Small businesses recount inspections that end with payments rather than guidance. The frustration is not simply about money; it is about uncertainty. When obligations change frequently and explanations are thin, people stop planning for growth and start planning for survival.

Economists warn that uncertainty is among the most damaging forces in any economy. It discourages investment, compresses ambition and raises the cost of risk. In Ethiopia, where private enterprise is already navigating inflation, foreign exchange shortages and weak demand, unpredictable charges act as a further brake. The economy remains active, but its capacity to expand is steadily eroded.

Supporters of these off-budget collections usually advance a familiar defence. Ethiopia, they argue, is under exceptional strain. Debt servicing costs are high, security demands remain pressing and public expectations continue to rise. Formal tax reform is slow and politically sensitive. Contributions, commissions and special levies are therefore presented as pragmatic tools, necessary to keep institutions functioning in difficult times.

At first glance, this logic appears reasonable. Governments everywhere must balance ideals against constraints. Yet the defence begins to weaken when the practice becomes permanent rather than temporary. Emergency measures are meant to bridge gaps, not replace systems. When institutions rely on extraction instead of reform, necessity quietly turns into dependency.

The deeper problem is not revenue collection itself, but the absence of a clear link between payment and value. In public finance, legitimacy depends on reciprocity. Citizens accept taxation when they can see how it supports services, infrastructure and opportunity. When money is collected merely to sustain institutions, without visible improvement in performance, trust declines. Over time, compliance becomes grudging rather than voluntary.

This erosion of trust has tangible economic consequences. Businesses shorten their planning horizons. Entrepreneurs postpone expansion. Capital becomes cautious, then mobile. Skilled workers begin to consider exit options. None of this happens overnight. It unfolds gradually, often unnoticed by policymakers until the damage is well advanced.

Ethiopia is not the first country to face this dilemma. Around the world, states under fiscal pressure have experimented with parafiscal measures, especially during periods of crisis. The outcomes are remarkably consistent. Where extraction became routine, growth slowed, informality expanded and political resistance hardened. Where governments corrected course, recovery followed.

In parts of Latin America, repeated emergency levies introduced during debt crises fragmented tax systems and undermined compliance. Businesses faced overlapping obligations, many poorly defined and inconsistently enforced. Investment retreated, and capital flight accelerated. Fiscal stability returned only after governments simplified revenue systems, restored legislative oversight and rebuilt credibility.

Closer to home, several African economies have encountered similar tensions. Special charges introduced to shore up revenue initially generated income, but over time discouraged formalisation and weakened trust. Where reform-minded governments intervened, the solution was not harsher enforcement but rationalisation. Temporary measures were sunsetted, tax bases widened through growth, and administrative efficiency improved.

East Asia’s experience offers perhaps the clearest contrast. During their periods of rapid development, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan faced immense fiscal demands. Yet they resisted the temptation to extract indiscriminately. Instead, they prioritised productivity, industrial expansion and employment. Revenue followed growth, rather than preceding it. Taxes were transparent, predictable and legislated, even as the state played an active economic role.

The common thread across these cases is not ideology, but discipline. Successful governments maintained clear boundaries between taxation and fees. Anything compulsory passed through law. Institutions were required to justify their budgets through performance, not pressure. Citizens were treated as partners in development, not merely sources of revenue.

In Ethiopia, the expansion of off-budget contributions suggests those boundaries are weakening. Institutions increasingly ask where money can be collected, rather than how value can be created. This shift in mindset has long-term consequences. When survival depends on extraction, reform becomes optional. Inefficiency hardens. Accountability fades.

The human cost of this trajectory is often underestimated. Economic pressure does not need to be dramatic to be decisive. For skilled professionals and entrepreneurs, the calculation is incremental. Each additional charge, each new uncertainty, nudges the balance away from investment and towards exit. The result is a quiet but persistent loss of talent and capital.

None of this implies that Ethiopia lacks patriotism or resilience. On the contrary, citizens have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to endure hardship when it is clearly linked to collective progress. What undermines that willingness is not sacrifice itself, but the sense that sacrifice is being demanded without direction or return.

There is also a political dimension that cannot be ignored. When revenue collection escapes parliamentary scrutiny, democratic accountability weakens. Legislatures exist not merely to approve budgets, but to legitimise extraction by linking it to public purpose. Bypassing that process may seem efficient in the short term, but it carries long-term costs for governance.

Critics of reform often argue that Ethiopia cannot afford restraint. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Extraction without growth narrows the future tax base. Growth without extraction expands it. The choice is not between revenue and development, but between short-term relief and long-term viability.

Progressive democratic governments that have faced similar constraints have learned this lesson through experience. They have moved to simplify revenue systems, protect predictability and focus on enabling economic activity. They have accepted that sustainable finance depends on confidence as much as coercion.

For Ethiopia, the path forward does not require abandoning revenue mobilisation. It requires re-anchoring it. Contributions must be exceptional, clearly defined and time-limited. Institutions must be incentivised to improve performance rather than seek payments. Parliament must reclaim its role in legitimising compulsory collections.

Most importantly, economic policy must return to first principles. Wealth is created through productivity, innovation and work. Revenue is a by-product of that process. When the order is reversed, economies strain and societies lose faith.

The debate sparked by recent analysis is therefore not a technical quarrel about fees. It is a question about the kind of state Ethiopia wishes to be. A state that finances itself by expanding opportunity builds resilience. A state that finances itself by constant extraction exhausts it.

History offers ample warning, but also reassurance. Countries that recognise the limits of extraction early can correct course. Those that delay pay far more to recover. Ethiopia remains at a moment of choice.

Whether that choice is taken will shape not only fiscal outcomes, but the relationship between citizens and the state. In the end, no economy grows on pressure alone. Growth rests on trust, clarity and the shared belief that effort leads somewhere worth reaching.

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

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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