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The Bait Is the Dream

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:17:00 +0000

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The Bait Is the Dream — The Ethiopian Tribune

THE TRAP — WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ETHIOPIAN DREAM OF FREEDOM

PART IV OF V

The Bait Is the Dream

Prosperity, the bulldozer, and the freedom that compels

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

THE TRAP · PART IV OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

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The Rule of the Number

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

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The Rule of the Number — The Ethiopian Tribune

THE TRAP — WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ETHIOPIAN DREAM OF FREEDOM

PART III OF V

The Rule of the Number

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

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

THE TRAP · PART III OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

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The Daughter Ethiopia Expelled

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:57:00 +0000

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The Ethiopian Tribune

Profile · Diaspora & Technology

The Daughter Ethiopia Expelled

Timnit Gebru left Addis Ababa as an enemy alien and became the conscience of an industry. What, exactly, is ours to claim?

By E. Frashie

Every few years the Ethiopian press rediscovers Timnit Gebru, and every few years it makes the same small error. She is announced as one of ours, a daughter of Addis Ababa who conquered Silicon Valley, a scientist whose name is set in Amharic and Tigrinya alike, a source of national pride to be filed beside the marathoners and the coffee. The claim is warm, and it is not quite honest. For the plain fact at the centre of her biography is that the Ethiopian state did not nurture Timnit Gebru. It drove her out.

She was born in Addis Ababa in 1982 or 1983, the youngest of three daughters. Her father, an electrical engineer with a doctorate, died when she was five; her mother, an economist, raised the three girls alone. Both parents were Eritrean! and in the Horn of Africa that single sentence is a fate, not a footnote. When the Eritrean–Ethiopian War erupted at the end of the 1990s, families of Eritrean descent living in Ethiopia became suspect by blood. Some of her relatives were deported to Eritrea and conscripted to fight. At fifteen, Gebru fled the only country she had known.

The journey out was not the triumphant emigration of legend. Denied a United States visa, she lived for a time in Ireland before she was finally granted political asylum in America a process she has described, without softening, as miserable. She joined her mother and sisters, who had gone ahead, and finished her schooling near Boston. The refugee, not the prodigy, is the first identity the record gives her.

The Ethiopian state did not nurture Timnit Gebru. It drove her out.

The ascent

What followed is the part the celebratory profiles prefer. She went to Stanford and stayed for three degrees of bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in electrical engineering, under Fei-Fei Li, one of the architects of modern computer vision. She designed circuits at Apple in the years around the first iPhone and iPad. Then, in 2018, with Joy Buolamwini, she published “Gender Shades,” the study that showed commercial facial-recognition systems misclassifying darker-skinned women at rates approaching a third, while erring on lighter-skinned men less than one per cent of the time. It was the paper that forced an industry to concede its mirrors were warped.

By the time Google recruited her, she was the most senior Black woman on its Ethical AI team and a co-founder of Black in AI, the network that has done more than any diversity office to change who sits in the room where these machines are built. She had arrived at the summit of the field she had been taught, as a refugee, to trust as a neutral meritocracy. She was about to discover it was neither.

The rupture and the money that was not hers

In late 2020 Gebru co-authored “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,” a paper warning that ever-larger language models would launder bias, devour energy and mimic understanding they did not possess. Google’s management demanded she withdraw it or strip the Google authors’ names. She refused, set conditions, and left for a holiday. Her superiors announced they had accepted a resignation she says she never tendered. On 2 December 2020 she was gone. More than two thousand six hundred employees signed a letter of protest; directors and engineers resigned in her wake.

Here the Ethiopian Tribune must correct a figure that circulates in her name. Readers have seen the headline “Google pays $50 million” attached to Gebru’s story, and inferred a personal windfall. It is not so. That settlement, granted final approval in 2026, resolved a separate class action brought in 2022 by Black Google employees alleging systemic discrimination; Google admitted no liability, and the sum was shared across a class. Gebru’s case echoed through that litigation, but she was not its plaintiff and did not collect its proceeds. As for her own departure, no severance figure was ever made public. Anyone who tells you what Google paid Timnit Gebru to leave is inventing it. On a beat this contested, the absence of a number is itself the finding.

Anyone who tells you what Google paid Timnit Gebru to leave is inventing it.

What she built, and what it is worth

Exactly one year to the day after her firing, 2 December 2021, Gebru launched the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, DAIR, an independent body founded to conduct “community-rooted” research free of Big Tech’s hand. It opened with roughly 3.7 million dollars in commitments from the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Open Society foundations and the Kapor Center. It is a non-profit, not a company; its “worth” is measured not in a valuation but in the grants that keep it independent and those have continued, including a further half-million dollars in 2026 from a pooled philanthropic AI fund, alongside general operating support from MacArthur and Ford.

DAIR is deliberately small and deliberately awkward. It is building its own modest computing cluster rather than rent the cloud from the very companies it critiques. Its work runs along three lines: equipping marginalised communities with data to argue their own case; devising research methods that do not extract from the people they study; and imagining technological futures in which those people are designed for rather than around. From this base Gebru has become the field’s sharpest dissident coining, with the philosopher Émile Torres, the term “TESCREAL” to name the tangle of futurist ideologies she argues underwrite the race to build artificial general intelligence, a race she calls, flatly, a scam.

The accolades have accumulated in proportion to her heresy: Nature’s ten people who shaped science, the TIME 100, Fortune’s greatest leaders, the Carnegie Great Immigrants award, the BBC’s hundred women. A memoir, “Deep Unlearning,” is due from a major New York house, and a documentary, “Ghost in the Machine,” has carried her argument to cinemas. She is, by any measure, among the most influential people the Horn of Africa has produced this century.

The debt, and the return

Which returns us to the uncomfortable question of what she owes the country of her birth, and what it owes her. Gebru’s tangible contribution to Ethiopia is real but modest against her global weight: she sits on the board of AddisCoder, the programme founded by the mathematician Jelani Nelson that teaches algorithms and programming, free of charge, to Ethiopian high-school students. She did not merely lend her name; during her doctoral years, in 2016 and again in 2018, she returned to Addis to teach the cohorts herself. Hundreds of young Ethiopians have met the discipline through a scheme she helps steward.

It would be easy, it is the season’s reflex, to wish for more: a laboratory in Addis, a repatriated fortune, an institute on Ethiopian soil. But that wish quietly repeats the original presumption. It treats her as a resource the nation may draw upon, the same logic, dressed in pride rather than suspicion, that once treated her family as aliens to be expelled. Gebru does not owe Ethiopia her genius as reparation for having survived it.

She is a daughter of Addis and a casualty of Addis in the same breath.

The honest posture, then, is neither to annex her nor to ignore her, but to hold both truths at once. She is a daughter of Addis and a casualty of Addis in the same breath made by this city’s schools and unmade by this state’s wartime paranoia, and now returned to it, on her own terms, as a teacher rather than a trophy. The diaspora’s most consequential technological conscience was manufactured, in part, by one of the Horn’s ugliest wars. That is not a matter for national congratulation. It is a matter for national reckoning which, as ever, is the harder and the more necessary thing.

The Ethiopian Tribune · Established 2012

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An Open Door onto a Wall

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:19:00 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 52 Second

An Open Door onto a Wall

Ecobank spans more of Africa than any bank alive, and it will enter almost anywhere. Its refusal to cross into Ethiopia’s newly liberalised banking sector is the sharpest verdict yet on a reform built to be announced rather than completed.

By E. Frashie

There is a kind of silence that carries further than any refusal, and Ethiopia’s financial authorities are now living inside it. In March 2025, after more than half a century in which no foreign lender could hold so much as a single share in an Ethiopian bank, Parliament threw the sector open. The Banking Business Proclamation No. 1360/2025 permitted foreign institutions to establish subsidiaries, open branches, plant representative offices, and acquire equity in domestic banks. It was celebrated — most loudly by the government that drafted it — as a historic act of opening, the financial keystone of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s liberalisation agenda. More than a year on, the number of foreign banks to have actually walked through that open door stands at precisely zero.

Among the absentees, one name should unsettle Addis Ababa more than the rest. Ecobank Transnational Incorporated operates in more than thirty African countries; it is the nearest thing the continent possesses to a genuinely pan-African lender, an institution whose entire identity rests on entering the markets others deem too small, too poor, or too fraught. If any bank alive was built to walk into Ethiopia, it is this one. Yet Ecobank — which has kept a representative office in Addis Ababa since before the reform — has studied the terms on offer and chosen to remain in the doorway, watching.

That choice is not timidity. It is a reading, and a pitilessly accurate one, of what Ethiopia’s liberalisation actually is.

The queue of the reluctant

Ecobank’s wariness might be dismissed as the disposition of a single cautious firm, were it not so completely shared. The roll-call of interested-but-unmoved now reads like a directory of African and international banking. Kenya’s KCB Group, which has held a representative office in Addis since 2015, still speaks of full entry — and still, tellingly, hunts for a local partner and contemplates asking the regulator to exempt it from the ownership ceiling before it will file. Equity Group, Kenya’s most profitable lender, held talks with the Ethiopian Investment Commission and then declined to commit. Absa has bound its entry explicitly to a further easing of the rules. Standard Bank, Stanbic, Nigeria’s Zenith and FirstBank — all have circled, professed interest, and kept their capital at home.

When every prospective entrant behaves identically, the explanation is not to be found in the character of the banks. It is in the design of the invitation.

The reform was announced in 2025. It was engineered, across the year that followed, not to happen.

The forty-nine per cent ceiling

Begin with the arithmetic of ownership, because it is here that the door narrows to a slit. Proclamation 1360/2025 permits foreign capital, but only within a lattice of caps: a single strategic investor may hold up to 40 per cent of a domestic bank, a foreign juridical person up to 10 per cent, a foreign individual up to 7 per cent — and the cumulative foreign stake in any one bank may not exceed 49 per cent. At least 51 per cent must remain in Ethiopian hands, always and by law.

For a portfolio investor content to clip a dividend, this is tolerable. For Ecobank it is close to disqualifying. The group’s competitive advantage — the very thing it would bring to Ethiopia — is its “One Bank” model: a single technological and operational spine, developed centrally and pushed out uniformly across its network. That model presupposes control. A permanent minority position, subordinate to domestic shareholders and to a central bank that reserves sweeping discretion over boards and management, offers Ecobank all of the risk of Ethiopian entry and almost none of the command it would need to make that risk pay. The ownership cap does not merely tax foreign entry; it forecloses the specific strategy that makes a pan-African bank pan-African.

Consolidation before competition

Had the ownership architecture stood alone, it might have been read as caution. Set beside the regulator’s conduct over the past year, it reads as strategy. For the National Bank of Ethiopia spent the first year of “liberalisation” not clearing a path for foreign banks but fortifying domestic ones against their arrival.

The instrument was capital. The NBE raised the minimum paid-up capital demanded of every bank tenfold — from 500 million birr to five billion — with full compliance required by the end of 2026, forcing the smaller domestic lenders to scramble for fresh equity or fold into their larger rivals. Layered atop this came Directive No. SBB/95/2025, issued in November 2025, marching the sector towards Basel II and Basel III: the minimum capital-adequacy ratio lifted from 8 to 11 per cent, a Tier 1 floor of 7 per cent, and fresh capital charges for credit, market and operational risk — in an economy whose data infrastructure and supervisory capacity are, by the regulator’s own quiet admission, not yet equal to frameworks of such complexity.

The sequencing is the argument. A government impatient for foreign banks fast-tracks their licences. A government that wishes to be seen opening while it consolidates does exactly what Ethiopia has done: announce the opening, then spend the interval thickening the walls the new entrants will eventually have to scale. The reform is real on the page and deferred in practice, and the deferral is not an accident of bureaucratic slowness. It is the policy.

A government impatient for foreign banks fast-tracks their licences. Ethiopia has spent the year thickening the walls instead.

The macroeconomics of hesitation

Even were the regulatory door flung fully open tomorrow, the ground beyond it would give any prudent banker pause. Ethiopia’s headline growth remains formidable — the IMF projects real GDP expansion above 9 per cent — but the figure sits atop a structure of alarming fragility.

The 2024 float of the birr, undertaken to unlock IMF and World Bank financing, did what floats do: it revealed the currency’s true weakness. By January 2026 banks were selling dollars near 151 birr while the parallel market ran beyond 180 — a gap that is itself a confession that the “market-based” rate is not yet trusted by the market. That same depreciation drove the external debt-to-GDP ratio from 23.8 per cent in 2024 to 33.9 per cent a year later, as hard-currency obligations swelled in local terms. Inflation, briefly coaxed into single digits, crept back to 11.7 per cent by April 2026, with food prices rising faster still. Public debt approaches 52 billion dollars; the 2023 Eurobond default remains unresolved, with private creditors weighing legal action after rejecting a proposed haircut. And beneath the aggregates sits the market a retail bank must actually serve: a population whose poverty rate, the World Bank warns, may have climbed towards 43 per cent.

For a bank contemplating entry, these are not abstractions. They are the twin spectres of balance-sheet risk and blocked repatriation — the fear of earning profits in a currency one cannot reliably convert, and of lending into a consumer base too impoverished to sustain the growth the headline numbers promise.

The regulator’s tell

The most revealing evidence, however, is not in the directives but in the language of those who wrote them. The National Bank has fretted, openly, that foreign banks might “import economic crises” into Ethiopia, and has warned of their “cherry-picking tendencies” — the suspicion that international lenders will skim the profitable urban corporate custom and leave the developmental heavy lifting to the domestic sector.

Set that language beside the invitation and the contradiction becomes the story. A regulator confident in its opening does not, in the same breath, describe the guests it has invited as vectors of contagion. The vocabulary of Ethiopia’s banking authority is not the vocabulary of a market being opened; it is the vocabulary of a market being defended. Ecobank has simply taken the regulator at its word.

The wall behind the door

Here the banking file rejoins the larger pattern this newspaper has traced across every domain of Ethiopian governance. For the liberalisation, examined closely, is not producing a more open sector at all — it is producing a more concentrated one, and concentrated around the state. The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, state-owned, still commands more than half of all banking assets; the NBE’s own stability reporting has flagged the danger that reform is nudging state control back towards dominance rather than away from it. The private domestic tier is squeezed between the five-billion-birr capital wall and the Basel transition; the foreign tier is held at the threshold by the ownership caps and the sequencing. What emerges is not competition but a managed enclosure — an opening choreographed to leave the essential architecture of state and incumbent power precisely where it was.

This is the familiar Ethiopian manoeuvre, transposed from the political to the financial register. It is the form of liberalisation without its substance, exactly as the June 2026 elections offered the form of competition without its substance. The IMF receives its headline — a market opened after half a century — and the government retains every lever that matters. Reform becomes a performance staged for an external audience, its choreography designed to alter as little as possible behind the announcement.

Ecobank’s refusal, then, is worth more than a dozen ministerial communiqués. The bank engineered to enter the unenterable has looked past the rhetoric of opening, read the subtext of the caps and the capital rules and the regulator’s own anxious vocabulary, and concluded that the door leads not into the market but into a waiting room. Ethiopia’s banking sector, the proclamation insists, is open for business. For Ecobank and its peers, the more honest formulation is that it has been opened for announcement — and that the path beyond the threshold has been left, deliberately, unswept.

E. Frashie — The Ethiopian Tribune

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Eighty Years, and the Eighty Before Them

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:09:52 +0000

Read Time:5 Minute, 33 Second

History & Diplomacy · #sweeth80

Eighty Years, and the Eighty Before Them

The Swedish embassy has marked eight decades in the Addis Ababa house the Emperor gave away in 1946. But Sweden had already spent eighty years in Ethiopia before that — and the friendship now being commemorated was built long before there was a legation to house it.

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

This past weekend, on the 134th anniversary of the birth of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Embassy of Sweden gathered at the National Archives in Addis Ababa — a near neighbour of its own compound — to mark a round number: eighty. A daughter of the late Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen rose to address the gathering; among the guests sat two of the Emperor’s grandsons, Prince Michael Mekonnen and his younger brother Prince Beede Mariam Mekonnen. The tag beneath the embassy’s announcement, #sweeth80, counts the years since 1946, when Haile Selassie gave the residence that Sweden’s ambassadors have occupied ever since — first as a gift to King Gustav V, and then, without ceremony, as the beginning of permanent diplomatic relations between the two countries.

A daughter of the late Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen addresses the commemoration at the National Archives in Addis Ababa. Photograph: Embassy of Sweden.

It is a graceful anniversary, and an accurate one. But it marks the shorter half of the story. Sweden did not arrive in Ethiopia in 1946. It had, by then, already been there for eighty years.

The first Swedes came not with credentials but with scripture. The Swedish Evangelical Mission reached the northern highlands in 1866, and the presence it established would run, in one form or another, for a century and a half. Long before there was a flag over a gate in Addis Ababa, there were Swedish schools, printing presses and clinics across the highlands — and a slow accumulation of the mundane, durable familiarity out of which real relationships, as opposed to treaties, are actually made.

The soldiers came next, and their story is the one the anniversary tends to leave out. In 1934 the Emperor invited a delegation of five Swedish officers, led by Colonel Viking Tamm, to open his new military academy at Holeta — the Genet school — and to make officers of the young men who would command his guard. They had barely begun when Italy invaded in October 1935. The cadets they had trained were thrown into a war their teachers could not win; some of those same young men carried out the night raid at Lechemti in 1936 that annihilated an Italian column. The Swedish officers had come to build an army in peacetime and instead watched it march, half-formed, into catastrophe. It is not a triumphant chapter. It is, however, a true measure of how early and how deeply Sweden had been woven into Ethiopia’s fate.

No figure embodies that weave more completely than Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen. He first flew into Ethiopia in 1935 as a pilot for the Swedish Red Cross ambulance, lifting casualties out of the fighting under Italian aircraft and witnessing, at close range, the mustard gas Mussolini’s forces rained on villages and field hospitals. He never really left the country’s orbit. When liberation came, the Emperor asked him back — and from 1945 von Rosen built the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force almost from nothing, with Swedish instructors and Saab aircraft, earning the rank of colonel in the service of a foreign crown. He returned again in old age to fly famine relief, and he died at Gode in July 1977, killed during the Ogaden war in the country he had served for more than forty years. An airborne knight-errant, his biographer called him. Ethiopia was the cause he kept coming back to until it took his life.

Sweden was the European power that came to teach, heal, train and fly — and never once to rule.

Set against that history, the gift of 1946 reads differently. A house is a modest thing beside a war. But the Emperor’s gesture — handing a residence and its compound to the King of Sweden, and with it establishing a permanent Swedish mission — was the formal recognition of something that had been true in fact for two generations. Ethiopia opened its own mission in Stockholm the following year. The relationship carried for so long by missionaries, teachers and one stubborn count was, at last, given an address.

What followed was less dramatic and, in its way, more intimate. Sweden became one of the first countries in the world to make development cooperation a matter of state policy, and Ethiopia one of its earliest partners; the Ethio-Swedish Paediatric Clinic opened at the university in 1958. And in 1947 the Ethiopian government hired a Finnish-born Swede named Onni Niskanen to organise its physical education. Niskanen went looking for runners in the Imperial Guard and found a shepherd’s son named Abebe Bikila. In 1960, barefoot on the cobbles of Rome, Bikila became the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal, and repeated the feat in Tokyo four years later in world-record time. The most celebrated pair of feet in African athletics were trained by a Swede in the Emperor’s service.

Prince Michael Mekonnen, in the white cap, and his wife, Hirut, with his younger brother Prince Beede Mariam Mekonnen (right) — grandsons of Emperor Haile Selassie I — at the National Archives commemoration. Photograph: Embassy of Sweden.

This is the thread worth pulling, because it is nearly unique. Almost every relationship Ethiopia had with a European power in this period was, at bottom, a relationship about conquest — resisting Italy, managing Britain, balancing France. Sweden was the exception: a European kingdom that arrived to teach, heal, train and fly, and never once to rule. That is the light in which to read the house on the archive’s doorstep. It was not tribute paid upward to a great power. It was a gift exchanged between equals — one small proud nation to another — and it is the reason the anniversary feels warm rather than merely diplomatic.

Eighty years on, in a hall beside the house the Emperor gave away, one of his granddaughters rose to speak and two of his grandsons sat listening, while a European embassy laid its wreath for the man whose gift began it all. The number on the banner was eighty. The truer number is a hundred and sixty — and it was never really about the building at all.

■

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A Letter From Rome

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:59:39 +0000

Read Time:6 Minute, 41 Second

A Letter From Rome — The Ethiopian Tribune

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A Letter From Rome

Sewasew Teklemariam

Exiled, and long silent, Lemma Megersa has written to Ethiopia again. This time the former Defence Minister is not pleading for unity in the abstract — he is naming the war he sees coming, and the men who could start it.

For most of six years, one of the most consequential politicians of Ethiopia’s reform era has said almost nothing. Lemma Megersa — the man whose popularity in Oromia made the 2018 transition possible, who stepped aside so that Abiy Ahmed could take the premiership, and who then served as the country’s Minister of Defence — has spent those years first sidelined, then confined, and finally in exile. His public interventions since can be counted on one hand; a letter last September, marking the completion of the Renaissance Dam, was the most recent. So when he writes at length, as he has now from Rome, the fact of the letter is itself the news, before a word of its content is weighed.

The breach that sent him abroad was neither sudden nor, for want of trying, unmediated. It opened in November 2019, when Lemma went on the VOA Afaan Oromo service and said plainly what much of the old guard was thinking: that he did not accept the dissolution of the EPRDF into a single Prosperity Party, and did not believe in the “Medemer” philosophy being built around it. The merger was being rushed, he said. It was not the time.

What followed was a long and ultimately futile effort to keep the two men in the same tent. Party elders and figures with patronage inside the old Oromo organisation worked, more than once and largely in back rooms, to contain the difference before it could break the reform apart. For a season they seemed to have succeeded. They had not. By August 2020 Lemma had been stripped of his place on the Prosperity Party’s executive — in a meeting chaired by Abiy himself — and dismissed as Defence Minister; his office was searched by federal police; and before the year was out he was under house arrest. In the years after, he left the country altogether, settling in Rome, where until recently he worked as a consultant for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. In February 2023 the Prime Minister went further still, accusing his exiled former ally, in public and without producing charges or evidence, of leading the Oromo Liberation Army — the very insurgency Lemma now writes to disarm.

That last fact is worth holding in mind, because it changes how one reads what he has written.

The man Abiy accused of leading the Oromo Liberation Army now writes to its commander as ‘brother.’

The letter is titled, with deliberate gentleness, a short call of hope. It opens not in the language of politics but of the pulpit — Lemma is an evangelical of long standing, a board member of the Assemblies of God — and its diagnosis is frankly theological: that the love and mutual regard which once defined Ethiopians, and the fear of God he counts as part of their inheritance, are being worn away until the nation’s cruelty competes, as he puts it, with the very factory of cruelty. A secular editor might reach to trim the Satan from the paragraph. To do so would miss the point that here is a man who has swapped a political vocabulary for a religious one, and means every word of it.

Beneath the scripture, the analysis is sharp, and in one respect startlingly current. Ethiopia’s deepest error, he argues, is that its factions would sooner conspire with outsiders than listen to one another — that they invite foreigners into quarrels they could settle among themselves, and mine the worst of a shared past for weapons to fire in the present. Written from abroad, this might read as a diaspora’s lament. Set against what is actually happening on Ethiopia’s borders, it reads as diagnosis. The proxy architecture that analysts now warn could tip the Horn into a general war — Eritrea accused of arming movements on several fronts at once, insurgent groups reportedly coordinating with Asmara and with one another — is precisely the entanglement with “outsiders” that his letter names. He is not describing a moral failing in the abstract; he is describing the mechanism of the coming war.

Then he does something a lesser letter would not have dared. He addresses the combatants by name, and as equals. To the Prime Minister and his party; to Jaal Marroo, commander of the Oromo Liberation Army; to Zemene Kassie of the Amhara Fano; to Debretsion Gebremichael of the TPLF — he writes to each as “brother,” and asks the same thing of all of them. The gesture is more radical than its warmth suggests. To address a head of government and the leaders of three armed movements in one breath, as parties owed the same appeal, is to treat them as equivalent claimants to a table that does not yet exist — a quiet insistence that this is a political conflict to be negotiated, not a law-and-order problem to be crushed. And for the man once accused of commanding one of those movements to call its commander “brother” in the open is neither the provocation nor the confession his enemies will read into it. In context it reads as something else: a man declining the frame that was built for him.

He goes on to redefine the words that matter most in a country at war. A hero, he writes, is not the one who fights but the one who chooses the road of peace and spares his people; the wise man is the one who abandons the old track and opens his heart to reconciliation, to dialogue, to the discipline of give and take. Coming from a former Minister of Defence, this is not the pacifism of a man who has never held a weapon. It is the settled judgement of one who once answered for all of them. And it closes on the line that has travelled the furthest on its own — the plainest sentence in the letter, and the one his career most entitles him to write: that neither by the Kalashnikov nor by the fighter jet, neither by weight of numbers nor by edge of technology, can peace be made, or made to hold.

It would be a sentimental reading that stopped there. Appeals of this kind carry no enforcement, and the men addressed have brushed aside graver warnings than a letter. Lemma’s own record is not spotless — the Oromia of his presidency was not a peaceful place, and the security failures of those years are partly his to answer for — and there is a fair question in why the clarity arrives only from exile, only once the office is gone. A letter from Rome costs its author less than the peace it asks of those still inside the fire.

But the discomfort of the messenger does not falsify the message, and the standing of this particular messenger is not easily waved away. Here is a man who sat at the summit of the security state, who was publicly accused of running the war he now begs to end, who has every grievance to wish his former partner ill — and what he has chosen to send, after years of silence, is not an indictment but a plea. In a country rehearsing its next catastrophe, the useful question is not whether Lemma Megersa has earned the right to warn. It is whether anyone still holding power has the humility to read the letter to the end, as he asked — before the guns make the reading academic.

The Ethiopian Tribune

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Surviving Is Not Governing

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:59:39 +0000

Read Time:9 Minute, 39 Second

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. ↓

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Carrots, Sticks, and the Coming Fire

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:38:08 +0000

Read Time:18 Minute, 3 Second

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.

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

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

Read Time:8 Minute, 31 Second

By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

What She Was Covering — and Why It Matters

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

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

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

Tsimdo: The Coalition Abiy Cannot Name Aloud

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

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

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

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

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

A Pattern, Not an Incident

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

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

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

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

The Logic of the Blackout

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

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

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

What the Ethiopian Tribune Holds

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

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

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

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

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Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

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Why should innocent people perish? Why should the motherland die?

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:14:33 +0000

Read Time:3 Minute, 48 Second

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.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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