Editor’s Foreword

The Analyst Who Came Back to Thank the Women

Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu swore his last essay was his last. He has broken that promise and the Ethiopian Tribune is the better for it.

He wrote to tell us he had meant it. A man does not break his word lightly, and MGH does not break his at all or so we had every reason to believe. We took him at that word when he sent us what he called his last piece, and we would have honoured his silence. What we did not anticipate was the one force capable of returning a man of his discipline to the page against his own resolve: not vanity, not the itch of an unfinished argument, but conscience. He could not, he tells us, forgive himself for keeping a promise while the danger he sees so clearly gathered, unanswered, on the horizon.

Regular readers will know the shape of that danger, for he has charted it these six months with the cold instruments of his trade the Abraham Accords, the Red Sea, the June election, Arsi, and now the alignment Ethiopian officials have learned to fear by a single word: Tsimdo. A soldier, he reminds us, knows the non-triviality of war: its weight, its cost, the faces of the dead. The ethnic entrepreneur what this newspaper’s readers now recognise as the monkey habit, knows only its profits, and prices them in other people’s children. He sells the war he will never fight. Someone, MGH decided, had to say so plainly before the bill came due.

Yet it is not the danger that gives this essay its unusual warmth, and it is worth marking plainly what sets it apart from everything he has sent us before. For half a year MGH has written as a defence strategist, in the registers of engineering, mathematics, economics, and governance. This piece began not with a strategy paper but with a song — Yehager Kasma, “The Nation’s Anchor,” conceived and led by Sayat Demissie and sung by the veteran Kuku Sebsebe amid a company of the country’s finest voices, released in May 2021 as the north slid into the worst of the war. It was, in effect, a plea from women to both sides to stop. It was ignored, as he documents, while the men with the guns sang their own songs.

His argument is one this newspaper has long held and rarely seen stated with such rigour: that the capacity for communal love, forgiveness, and shared sacrifice is not lost from Ethiopian society but latent, abundant, and conserved chiefly by our mothers; that a nation survives not by winning its quarrels but by repeatedly choosing to let go of its pain rather than nurse it into war; and that the women who carry this wisdom are no sentimental supplement to his four singular interests but the human substrate the kasma, the unseen peg driven into the joint without which none of them can stand. He sets that wisdom in the long company of peace-making women, from the siiqqee-bearers of the Oromo and the shimgilina elders of the highlands to the women in white in Monrovia and the mothers in silence in the Plaza de Mayo and he does so, characteristically, without conscripting a single artist to a faction.

The conclusion is simple and, we think, unanswerable. Ethiopia need not fight itself; there is no internal quarrel worth a single kilometre of that road. If Ethiopians must fight at all, let it be for the one cause that belongs to all of them, the sovereignty of the nation and its rightful access to the sea, and even then by peaceful means first, with force the genuine last resort it ought always to be. Between the refusal of the senseless war and the defence of the nation’s life lies, as he has it, the whole of sound statecraft.

We are grateful to Dr Hailu for the patience of his argument and for the grace of breaking a promise in order to make it. The full nineteen-page essay with its diagram of the four interests and the substrate beneath them, its cross-cultural evidence, and its careful answers to the objections a serious reader will raise, is longer and richer than any foreword can hold. We commend it to our readers in full.

— The Editor
The Ethiopian Tribune

The Prayer and the Broom

When a Prime Minister’s Confessor Becomes His Critic

By Sewasew Teklemariam  |  The Ethiopian Tribune

There is a particular kind of testimony that carries more weight than any opposition press release, any diaspora podcast, any hashtag campaign: the testimony of the man who used to be in the room. Dr Yonas Zewdu was in the room. For years he sat, by his own account, close enough to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s inner counsel to hear the prophecies before the cameras did, to watch the ministers panic before the public did, and to be told over dinner, no less that the false prophets peddling their revelations on Ethiopian media would not be tolerated “as long as I am here.” He has now told EMS, in an interview that runs a brisk nineteen minutes and manages to unsettle rather more than that, that he no longer believes it.

One does not have to reach for melodrama to find the sentence that will outlive the segment. Asked, in effect, to explain why so many Ethiopians have taken to calling this the “Pentecostal government,” Dr Zewdu obliged with the precision of a man who has rehearsed the thought many times in private and is only now permitting himself to say it aloud: if the Prime Minister’s office extended clemency to Sebhat Nega on the grounds of advanced age a decision Dr Yonas Zewdu concedes was the Prime Minister’s prerogative and beyond serious challenge then why does Tadios Fantu, a historian who held no office, commanded no militia, and wielded nothing more dangerous than a thesis, continue to languish in prison? “He spoke the ideas he believed in,” Zewdu said of Fantu, with the weary clarity of a man stating the obvious to an audience that has been told, for years, that the obvious is somehow controversial. It is a neat inversion of Ethiopian justice as currently practised: those who did much and are old are forgiven; those who did little and are merely inconvenient remain behind bars. Fantu’s crime, so far as this newspaper can discern, was to write history rather than to make it disappear.

The instinct to reach for comparison is, in this case, irresistible, and Dr Yonas Zewdu himself no stranger to theology has done half the work already by invoking the Gabriel Church folded into Haile Selassie’s palace compound, a monarch’s God visibly co-located with a monarch’s throne. But the Ethiopian case is hardly unique in the modern era, and it is worth setting alongside its cousins. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has spent two decades braiding the Russian Orthodox Church into the machinery of the state so thoroughly that Patriarch Kirill now blesses wars the Gospel he preaches would struggle to endorse. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey converted Hagia Sophia back into a mosque with the theatrical timing of a man who understood exactly what message a building sends when a head of state chooses which prayers it will host. Narendra Modi’s India has allowed the line between Hindu nationalism and state ceremony to blur to the point that a Prime Minister can lay a temple’s foundation stone on television and call it statesmanship rather than liturgy. Poland’s Law and Justice party spent its years in office governing in such close embrace with the Catholic hierarchy that judges, textbooks and reproductive law all came to bear the fingerprints of the confessional. In each case the defenders said the same thing Ethiopia’s defenders now say: that personal faith and public office are separable, that washing feet or blessing tanks or laying foundation stones is merely the private conscience of a public man. In each case, eventually, the citizens who did not share that particular conscience discovered they were governed by it anyway.

What distinguishes Dr Zewdu’s account from a mere catalogue of grievances is that he locates the critique inside the theology rather than outside it. He does not argue, as a secularist might, that religion has no business near the National Palace. He argues, as a believer, that this religion practised this way, in this palace fails its own test. “By their fruits you shall know them,” he reminds his interviewer, before observing that the fruit on offer includes bulldozed neighbourhoods in Kazanchis, preceded, he says, by sermons in which poverty itself was cast as a demon to be exorcised and its residents as “witches” whose eviction was less a housing policy than a cleansing. A prophecy about a broom, delivered in a prayer circle before an appointment to municipal office, becomes in Dr Zewdu’s retelling not colourful anecdote but operative doctrine: a divine mandate to sweep, applied literally to the homes of people who had lived in a neighbourhood for forty years and were given three weeks to leave it.

It is here that Dr Zewdu’s testimony does something few opposition interviews manage: it refuses the comfort of pure accusation and insists on self-implication. He was there, he says, for the messages before and during the Tigray war the “God told me this” utterances that, in his account, steadied nerves that ought instead to have been listening to intelligence briefings. He was in Harbu the morning after it fell. He walked through Mai Tsebri and Debark and counted the fallen. He spent twenty days afterward too sick to rise from bed, not from any injury but from the accumulated weight of what a theology of certainty does when it is handed the machinery of a modern army. “Some of us need to be questioned,” he says of his own circle, and it is to his credit that he does not exempt himself from the sentence.

Whether Dr Zewdu’s account changes anything for Tadios Fantu still in his cell, still a historian, still guilty of nothing more severe than accuracy remains to be seen. Governments that have married their faith to their statecraft rarely divorce it because a former advisor gave a candid interview to an opposition channel; Moscow did not disestablish the Church because a dissident found the arrangement uncomfortable, and Ankara has not reconsidered Hagia Sophia because critics found the symbolism heavy-handed. But testimony of this kind performs a different function. It removes, permanently, the government’s ability to claim it did not know what its critics meant. Dr Zewdu was in the room. He heard the message about the broom. And now, so have we.

Pass Freely and Without Hindrance

What a borrowed Ethiopian passport asked of the world in 1962 and what South Africa now refuses the continent that once sheltered its liberator.

In 1962 a wanted man with no country of his own boarded an aircraft in Addis Ababa carrying a passport that did not bear his name. The document was issued by the Empire of Ethiopia, stamped with the Lion of Judah, and made out to one David Motsamayi. The bearer was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, commander of a newly founded guerrilla army, fugitive from a state that called him a terrorist, and by the grace of an emperor he had never met a free traveller for the first time in his life.

The passport carried a request, set in the formal cadence of imperial English: that the civil and military authorities of all friendly countries allow the bearer to pass freely and without hindrance, and to afford him every assistance of which he stood in need. Sixty-four years later, those words read like an indictment. For the question that should trouble every South African political elite who has lodged a brief at The Hague while a mob gathers at home is brutally simple: what has become of that request?

The debt that built a nation

Mandela did not arrive in Ethiopia as a curiosity. He came as a delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa, the body that would become, the following year and on Ethiopian soil, the Organisation of African Unity. He addressed that conference directly after Emperor Haile Selassie, and he named Ethiopia for what it was a country that had paid the full price of its own freedom and now extended that freedom to others.

What followed was not symbolism. It was logistics, money and weapons training. At the Kolfe police camp outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopian officers drilled him seven days a week in tactics, sabotage, explosives and the discipline of guerrilla command. He left with five thousand pounds, granted by order of the Emperor, to arm Umkhonto we Sizwe. On the flight in, he had been startled to find a black man in the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft the first he had ever seen and understood, before he had even landed, what an Africa governed by Africans might look like.

Ethiopia was the keystone, but the arch was continental. Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika gave him passage and, later, sanctuary to thousands of exiles. Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia handed him another five thousand pounds for weaponry. Nasser’s Egypt received him; Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal opened their doors. Zambia would host the principal camps of the ANC’s army. And when the imperial era gave way to the Derg, the patronage did not stop: Mengistu Haile Mariam trained Zimbabwe’s ZANLA guerrillas and the fighters of half a dozen liberation movements a debt Robert Mugabe would repay, controversially, by sheltering Mengistu in Harare for the rest of his days.

This is the unglamorous machinery of African solidarity: passports issued, camps built, instructors seconded, money pressed into the hands of men the West had branded criminals. Much of it remains unwritten. The Ethiopian instructors who trained liberation cadres at camps across the region men such as Asnakew Sisay, whose account The Ethiopian Tribune has documented from his own testimony have largely vanished from the official record their students went on to govern. That forgetting is itself part of the story.

The brother at the border, turned away

Now hold that history against the present.

South Africa today presents the world two faces. Abroad, it wears the robes of moral conscience most visibly at the International Court of Justice, where Pretoria lodged a genocide case over Gaza and won the applause of the Global South. At home, in the same season, African nationals are hunted in the streets. Movements such as Operation Dudula have made a political programme of it: the harassment of asylum seekers, the blockading of clinics, the demand that the foreigner overwhelmingly the African foreigner be expelled. Vigilante ultimatums set deadlines. Authorities issue statements and look away.

The word for this is not xenophobia in the abstract. Its victims are specific: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Congolese the nationals of precisely those states that armed, hid, funded and trained the men who broke apartheid. The grandchildren of the liberation are raising the panga against the grandchildren of the liberators. There is no crueller inversion of Mandela’s passport than a South African mob demanding that an Ethiopian ‘go home’.

The failure is not of the young it is of those who failed to teach them

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of an under-educated, ethnocentric youth who never learned the principles the African Union and the United Nations were built to protect the dignity of the refugee, the rights of the migrant, the idea of an African citizenship larger than the tribe. The temptation should be resisted, because it lets the guilty off lightly.

A generation does not forget its own history by accident. It forgets because those entrusted with transmitting it the governing party that calls itself the heir of Mandela, the ministers, the curriculum-setters, the elders who sat in those exile camps found it expedient to let the memory lapse. It is easier to govern a frightened population that blames the foreigner for joblessness than to answer for three decades of unemployment, inequality and collapsed service delivery. The xenophobe is manufactured, and the factory is political. To call South Africa’s angry youth ignorant is true but insufficient; the deeper charge is against the elites who profited from keeping them so.

None of this is to flatten a difficult reality. South Africa’s pressures are real an economy that cannot absorb its own, a state that struggles to manage migration, communities competing over genuinely scarce resources. Those conditions explain the violence. They do not excuse it, and they certainly do not license a government to perform humanitarianism at The Hague while withholding it in Diepsloot. (A note of editorial honesty: the documented core of this crisis is afrophobia — violence against fellow Africans. Claims of a coordinated campaign against the white minority belong to a separate and contested debate, and the Tribune does not conflate the two.)

Coda

The passport that carried Mandela out of bondage asked a single thing of the world: that its bearer be allowed to pass freely and without hindrance, and be given the assistance of which he stood in need. Ethiopia granted it. Tanzania, Zambia, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and a dozen other African states granted it. They did so for a man their own governments could have handed back for a reward.

South Africa is free today because the continent refused to turn its liberator away at the border. The least it owes to Mandela, to the OAU founded in Addis, to the brothers who sheltered him is to extend that same grace to those who now stand, frightened and unwelcome, at its own gate.

Pass freely and without hindrance. It was never only a sentence on a forged passport. It was the founding promise of a free Africa. South Africa, of all nations, should be the last to break it.

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune · Comment

The Deadline and the Debt

As a vigilante ultimatum falls on 30 June, the country whose liberation drew on Adwa turns on the Africans it shelters — while the world is told the wrong people are dying

By E. Frashie

Tomorrow a deadline expires that no law recognises. The movement that set it — March and March, a vigilante coalition that surfaced in 2025 — has spent months marching through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town demanding that every undocumented foreigner quit South Africa by the thirtieth of June. Pretoria has said plainly that the ultimatum carries no standing in law. Yet the standing it lacks in statute it has seized in the street: foreign-owned shops looted across several provinces, families driven from their homes, and a procession of African governments — Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique — mounting emergency airlifts of their own citizens. The Malawians repatriated on 18 June stepped off into a stadium pressed into service as a reception hall.

A date with no standing in law has acquired all the standing it needs in the street.

For Ethiopians the fear is already intimate, though honesty demands precision about its shape. In April, five Ethiopian men were shot dead in central Johannesburg — three of them inside a McDonald’s, four within forty-eight hours. The temptation is to fold those killings straight into the xenophobia ledger, and some have: the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself an Ethiopian, counted them in a public appeal on 14 June. But South Africa’s foreign ministry disputes the framing, attributing the deaths to organised crime — extortion and trafficking networks — and the Daily Maverick, on investigation, could find no credible thread tying those particular murders to the marches. The distinction is not pedantry. A movement that thrives on conflation cannot be answered with conflation; the Tribune will not avenge five men by misnaming how they died. What is beyond dispute is the climate around the living: in Gauteng, a run of attacks on Ethiopian-owned businesses; in Pretoria, Ethiopians describing days spent indoors, threatening messages, machetes carried in the open, and an embassy slow to answer.

Beneath the spectacle of the mob lies a quieter and more durable cruelty, and it is the one the diaspora’s advocates too rarely name. A child born in South Africa to undocumented parents frequently cannot obtain a birth certificate; without it, the country becomes a trap that springs shut at eighteen. The Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town sets out the mechanism with clinical calm: on reaching majority, such a young person cannot be lawfully employed, cannot open a bank account, cannot marry, cannot enrol at a university, and may be detained or deported to a country never seen. It is no predicament peculiar to Ethiopians — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans and the children of every neighbouring state are caught in the same vice — and it does not spare the long-settled: there are men and women who have lived in South Africa for twenty-five and thirty years, schooled and graduated there, and still cannot lawfully take a job for want of a page. There are, by credible estimate, more than a million undocumented children in the country. The Basic Education Laws Amendment Act of 2024 now forbids schools from turning a child away for want of papers — a genuine advance — but it mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood. The wall at adulthood still stands.

It mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood.

That the wall can be lowered is not a fantasy; South Africa has reached for the ladder before. The Zimbabwean Exemption Permit, born of a 2009 dispensation, has for over a decade let some 178,000 Zimbabweans live and work lawfully where they held no passports to show. But the permit’s present is a parable in itself. In 2021 the government moved to scrap it; the courts found the termination procedurally unlawful and ordered consultation; it survives now only on an extension to May 2027 — and Operation Dudula, one of the movements behind this week’s marches, is in court trying to end it. The precedent exists, and it is under siege from the very forces that have fixed tomorrow’s date. That is the true measure of the continent’s free-movement ambitions: a single African passport and a protocol on free movement sit grandly in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, ratified by almost none of the states that would have to honour them. Solidarity, it turns out, is easy to sign and hard to keep.

The reason the wall stands is not mysterious. South African unemployment sits above thirty per cent and youth unemployment beyond sixty, and a frightened polity has been encouraged to read those figures as a foreign theft rather than a domestic inheritance. There is a grievance with a grain in it — South Africa, unlike Ethiopia, reserves no tier of petty commerce for its own nationals, so the foreigner is visible behind every market stall — but that is a quarrel with the absence of a law, not a licence for the street to write one in blood. The landlessness, the joblessness, the equity gap are the unsettled accounts of apartheid, not the handiwork of a Somali shopkeeper or an Ethiopian trader selling breakfast in the central business district. To charge the structural to the stranger is the oldest sleight in politics, and it is being performed again, at scale, with a date attached.

There is a particular bitterness in the stage on which it plays. It was the victory at Adwa in 1896 — Ethiopian in fact, continental in meaning — that proved European arms could be broken on African ground, and it was the Ethiopianism kindled in its wake that fed the current which would produce South Africa’s own movements of liberation. Nor is the kinship only spiritual. The Ndebele who form a substantial nation within Zimbabwe descend from the Nguni who moved north under Mzilikazi two centuries ago; the Tsonga straddle the Mozambican border as though it were a garden fence; and when South Africa’s liberation fighters needed sanctuary, it was Zambia and Tanzania and Mozambique that housed them, and a continent that funded them. The nation now fixing a date for Africans to leave is a nation whose freedom was, in some measure, an African loan — and it is being asked to repay the loan with expulsion. Empress Taytu — whose severing of the enemy’s water supply at Mekele hastened the reckoning at Adwa — is poorly honoured by men demanding papers in Hillbrow. The solidarity ran one way once. Asked to run the other way now, it is found wanting.

That fracture is no longer a matter of theory. When Bafana Bafana lost their World Cup opener to Mexico this month, much of the continent declined to mourn a fellow African side and chose instead to celebrate, filling the networks with Mexican flags and sombreros and saying plainly that a country which treats African migrants as South Africa now does had spent its claim on African goodwill. The team recovered to reach the knockout rounds for the first time in its history before Canada put it out days ago; but the verdict of that opening night will outlast the scoreline. The debt of Adwa is being called in — and it is the very brothers the marchers would expel who are calling it.

There is a crueller asymmetry still, and this one is global. In the same season that Black Africans are hunted through South African townships, the loudest cry of persecution to reach Washington — and to preoccupy President Trump personally — concerns not them but the country’s white minority. The United States has bent its refugee programme, all but sealed against the world’s war-displaced, into a rescue channel for Afrikaners said to face a “genocide” that South Africa’s government, its own farm-killing statistics, and even its principal Afrikaner lobby groups insist is not occurring; some six thousand have been resettled. No such airlift reached the Malawian who, by a credible account, died after police beat him for failing to produce his papers. Washington files the safer white farmer as a refugee while South Africa files the murdered Black migrant as a statistic of organised crime.

The murdered Black migrant is ‘organised crime.’ The safer white farmer is a refugee. Suffering is legible to power only in certain colours.

The thirtieth of June will pass. The police have promised to meet any violence beyond it with force — itself an admission that they expect some. What will not pass with the date is the trap beneath it: the child turning eighteen into statelessness, the trader weighing whether to raise his shutters, the embassy that answers too late. Ethiopia gave this continent a precedent at Adwa — that the African is not to be presumed upon. It falls now to Ethiopia’s diaspora, and to those who report on it, to insist the precedent still holds, and to refuse, even in grief, the consolation of the easy and the untrue.

E. Frashie for The Ethiopian Tribune

Published 29 June 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune · Horn of Africa

The Strategy of Strangulation

An analyst in Oslo says Ethiopia’s war is not coming soon. The chorus of brink-watchers says the fuse is already lit. The unsettling possibility is that both are describing the same powder.

By E. Frashie · 29 June 2026

The question that hangs over Ethiopia this June — is war coming? — carries a hidden assumption: that war is a future event, an arrival, something that crosses a border or a date on the calendar. Muhammad Omar, a Horn of Africa analyst speaking to Firstpost Africa from Oslo, quietly declined the assumption. Asked directly whether the tension around Tigray would tip into conflict, he gave an answer that flatters no camp. War, he said, is not coming soon. And then, almost in the same breath, he closed the door he had just opened: it is not about will there be war, but a matter of when and how.

That is not a contradiction. It may be the most honest sentence spoken about Ethiopia in weeks — and it deserves to be taken apart slowly, against the record, rather than swallowed whole.

I. The View from Oslo

Omar’s argument rests on a reading of Abiy Ahmed’s method rather than his intentions. The Prime Minister, he contends, has no need of a Tigray offensive because he is already winning by other means. Tigray is strangulated — his word — without cash, without much medicine, without humanitarian aid, its civil servants unpaid, its regional budget withheld, the off-switches for electricity and the internet still resting in federal hands and not yet thrown. Why march on a region you can quietly throttle? Better, on this account, to let the regions wear themselves down: Amhara against Amhara, Oromo against Oromo, and now Tigrayan against Tigrayan, as the Front splinters between Getachew Reda’s ousted moderates and the Debretsion hardliners who seized the regional administration in May.

The conscription drive, in this reading, is not a war drum but a confession. A movement that still commanded genuine loyalty would not need to round up its young men. That the TPLF — which prosecuted a seventeen-year bush war without forced recruitment — now resorts to coercion is, Omar argues, the plainest measure of how far its popular support has fallen. People are leaving rather than enlisting. The mobilisation, he says, is desperation, not strength.

It is not about will there be war. It is just a matter of when and how.

II. The Evidence Beneath the Claim

Here the Tribune’s own standard requires that we test the analyst against the record, and the record is unkind to comfortable readings. Omar’s portrait of a desperate, coercive mobilisation is, if anything, understated. On 5 May the TPLF reasserted control over Tigray and removed the federally backed interim administration. In June it pushed through a mobilisation proclamation — forty-four pages, reaching back retroactively to the first day of the 2020 war — that makes military service a legal obligation and threatens evaders, and journalists who question the drive, with sentences of fifteen and twenty-five years, and in its gravest clauses with death. Human Rights Watch describes door-to-door round-ups that sweep up children and punish the parents of those who flee; the European Union, on 27 June, called the whole exercise a breach of the Pretoria agreement. Opposition figures inside Tigray have been blunter still, calling the law Eritrean in spirit and a device to salvage a legitimacy already in ruins.

So the strangulation thesis holds. But notice what it actually describes. A region without salaries, medicine or fuel; a leadership compelling its youth into uniform on pain of death; families fleeing across the federal line rather than answer the call-up. If this is peace, it is peace only in the narrow, technical sense that the artillery has not yet opened. Strangulation is not the absence of war. It is war conducted by other instruments — and, more dangerous still, it manufactures the very desperation in which someone eventually decides that the open kind is preferable.

III. The Brink-Watchers

Against Omar stands a chorus that has spent the year insisting the moment is now. The Atlantic Council judged the two states to be on the brink of war again. The Horn Review wrote of a drift toward catastrophe in which open hostilities looked increasingly likely — a war the Ethiopian Defence Forces might be forced to fight on three fronts at once, against Eritrea, the TPLF and the Amhara Fano, inside a framework coordinated from Asmara: the alignment Ethiopian officials have taken to calling Tsimdo. Foreign Policy placed an Ethiopia–Eritrea war among the conflicts most likely to erupt in 2026. At a February parade in the capital, soldiers stood beneath a banner declaring, in Amharic, that Ethiopia would not remain landlocked whether its neighbours liked it or not. The Red Sea, Assab, the sixty kilometres between the Ethiopian border and a rusting, half-disused port — Abiy has named maritime access a question of national survival, and survival is not a register in which compromise comes easily.

And yet the soberest voices in this camp arrive, by a different road, somewhere close to Omar. David Shinn, the former American ambassador, doubts a war will actually break out: the costs are ruinous, and even the present talk of it frightens off the foreign investment Abiy cannot do without. Martin Plaut observes that the great northern mobilisation cannot be sustained for long without leaving the Oromo and Amhara fronts dangerously exposed — a clock runs against Addis Ababa, not for it. The risk analysts at RANE judge a full invasion of Eritrea unlikely this year, and locate the real peril not in anyone’s decision to attack but in an escalation that no one chooses: a clash along the border that runs away from both capitals. That is a different thesis from Omar’s, but it shares his essential intuition — that no rational actor wants this war, and that the danger therefore lies elsewhere.

IV. The Web That Would Catch Fire

Omar’s second argument is the one the brink-watchers should weigh most carefully, because it concerns not whether the war begins but what it becomes. A war in Tigray, he insists, cannot remain in Tigray. Eritrea, having backed the Front, will not wait for the fighting to reach Asmara; it will choose to wage it on Tigrayan ground. Sudan’s army, locked in its own ruin, already has a hand in the same theatre. Behind them stand the Gulf patrons — the Emirates aligned with Addis Ababa, the Saudis and Eritreans inclined toward Sudan’s generals — and behind them the Red Sea lanes already disordered by the war on Iran. Then the newest thread: Israel’s movement toward Somaliland, the reported interest in a naval presence at Berbera, and the Houthi promise to treat any such base as a target. The African Union, in Omar’s flat verdict, is almost powerless, absent from every mechanism that might matter.

On the particulars, an editor must be careful where an analyst, speaking live, was loose: the documented external sponsor of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces is the United Arab Emirates, not the actor Omar named in passing, and the distinction matters for any honest map of patronage. But the architecture he sketches is sound, and it is corroborated daily. Washington has now imposed visa restrictions on hardline TPLF figures even as it edges toward a rapprochement with Asmara; the sea-lanes are contested; the patrons are arrayed. The question Omar leaves hanging is the right one: if the shooting starts, which of these sponsors stays on the touchline?

V. When, Not If

What, then, of the question we began with? The honest answer is that Omar and the brink-watchers are not, in the end, disagreeing about the facts. They are disagreeing about the verb. The kindling is not in dispute — a strangled region, a coerced mobilisation, a maritime grievance dressed as survival, a ring of foreign patrons, a continental body that cannot act. The dispute is only whether the fuse is already burning or merely laid in place.

Omar’s wager is that Abiy prefers the slow method, and that the slow method buys time. It is a shrewd reading of a ruler who has, again and again, profited from letting others bleed. But it underrates the logic of its own central metaphor. Strangulation does not relax tension; it concentrates it. A leadership convinced it faces extinction does not pause to weigh foreign investment or the price of oil; it reaches for the only instrument that still promises survival. Omar himself supplied the trapdoor: if any one of them feels there is an existential threat, then it is possible. In a Tigray stripped of salaries and medicine and ordered to the front on pain of death, the existential threat is not a hypothesis to be debated. It is the daily weather.

So perhaps the question is the wrong one. To ask whether war is coming presumes that war is an event still to arrive, and that someone, somewhere, is deciding whether to summon it. The more exacting question — the one that does not let power hide behind tempo — is whether anyone with the means to stop it actually wishes to. On the evidence of this June, the silence is itself an answer.

E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Comment

The Mourning Cloth and the Down-Payment

On Anchor Media, Abebe Akalu — teacher, author, and a politician now outside every party he once served — arrived dressed in another people’s grief. What he alleges about the Zayse, and what he says about the Prime Minister’s airport, indicts government and opposition in a single breath.

By Leeshan Kuratey  ·  Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

First broadcast by Anchor Media, 25 June 2026.

A Witness in Borrowed Cloth

He arrived dressed for a festival no one was celebrating. When Abebe Akalu sat with Anchor Media’s host — whom he greets as Mesay, in one of his now-regular appearances, and who introduces him as ever as teacher, author and politician — he wore the ceremonial dress of the Zayse, a small community in the Gamo Zone of Ethiopia’s south. He had not come to mark their new year. He had come, he said, to grieve.

“From today,” he told the programme, “I too am Zayse.” The cloth was an act of mourning and of enlistment at once: he asked viewers, at home and in the diaspora, to join what he called a campaign of solidarity with a people most of them, he suspected, had never been asked to think about. It is a deliberately theatrical gesture, and Akalu is a deliberate man. The costume was the argument — that a community can be erased not only by violence but by the plain fact that no one outside it is watching.

What He Alleges in Gamo

The substance beneath the symbolism is grave, and it should be read as what it is: a set of serious allegations, made by one man on a single programme and not yet independently verified. Akalu alleged that since the eleventh of Sené in the Ethiopian calendar — in mid-June — roughly seventeen people had been killed in and around the Zayse area of Gamo Zuria woreda. He described corpses left unattended for as long as a week, citizens still unburied. He alleged that the dead included a youth of sixteen, and that women were raped — among them, he said, a woman of sixty-eight. The perpetrators, in his account, were government-armed forces; he named the southern regional special police.

These are claims that demand corroboration before any newspaper treats them as fact, and the Tribune does not treat them as fact here. What can be said is narrower, and still significant: that a prominent former opposition official went on air to accuse state security forces of mass killing and sexual violence in a small southern community, and that, by his own account, the allegation had barely surfaced in the national press. The host conceded the point, noting that reports at “this level” had not reached the media.

The Zayse are a small Omotic-speaking community of the Gamo highlands and the Rift Valley lowlands — a people with, as Akalu put it, their own calendar, their own elders, their own faith and festivals. In a federation organised around large ethnic blocs, communities of this size are precisely the ones whose names rarely reach the capital’s bulletins. That structural invisibility is part of Akalu’s point, and it is why the cloth mattered to him as much as the casualty figure.

The Vote That Was a Protest

Akalu set the violence against an electoral backdrop that will be familiar to readers of this paper. In the Zayse constituency, he recounted, voters had returned an EZEMA candidate, Abraham Amoshe, to parliament rather than the Prosperity Party’s nominee. But he was unsparing about what that vote did and did not mean. The Zayse, he argued, had not chosen EZEMA out of love for EZEMA; they had reached for the only alternative within reach in order to register their rejection of Prosperity.

It is a remarkable thing to hear from a man who once served as EZEMA’s secretary general. In the same breath he allowed that his former party “is not seen as separate from Prosperity” — the very charge that drove seven of the party’s founders to resign in 2023. Coming from Akalu, the protest-vote thesis is not the opposition flattering itself; it is a former insider conceding that the opposition has become, in the public mind, a vessel for a grievance rather than a destination for a hope. For a paper that has argued the 2026 turnout measured rejection more than endorsement, his testimony is a primary source where there was previously only inference.

“The Problem Is Not the Election”

From the local, Akalu moved to the systemic, and here his argument sharpened into a thesis. “The election is not the problem,” he said. “The problem is the government’s administration; it is the problem of the system.” The crisis, in his telling, did not subside after the vote, as elections are meant to let crises subside; it intensified. He pointed beyond Gamo — to Dera, to central Ethiopia, where, he said, abductions from public buses had become a daily occurrence and roads were periodically closed by conflict.

His framing is worth stating precisely, because it is more than a complaint. An election, he argued, is something the system stages to consolidate itself — to persuade itself it is planting roots and extending its own lifespan — when the questions the public is actually asking are not electoral at all. “The question is a question of justice,” he said: “a question of peace, a question of bread, a question of the economy” — and, most elemental of all, a question of going out in the morning and coming home at night. A country, he said, now shredded “like a child’s tunic, like a torn rag.” It is a rhetoric of fundamentals: not the franchise, but the conditions under which a franchise could mean anything.

A Deposit on the Next Election

The interview’s most pointed passage came at its close, and it was aimed squarely at the Prime Minister. Akalu recounted a ceremony at the new Bishoftu airport project at which, as he tells it, Abiy Ahmed tied the next general election — the country’s eighth — to the completion of that megaproject, in effect asking the public to return him so that the work might be finished. Akalu’s reaction was not anger but something closer to embarrassment. “I was very ashamed,” he said. “I was very saddened.”

His objection repays unpacking, because it is sharper than ordinary grumbling. A government, he reasoned, builds great works as a matter of course; that is simply what holding power is for. He reached, pointedly, for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam — carried, he noted, across the efforts of three prime ministers — as the model of a national undertaking that needs no electoral bribe attached to it. To dangle an unfinished airport as a qebd, a down-payment, on a future mandate was, to Akalu, to mistake the ordinary duty of office for a personal favour the public should be grateful to repay. You do not, in his logic, take a deposit on an election you have not yet won.

What gives the passage its charge is the posture Akalu adopts. He cast himself, only half in jest, as an elder brother to the Prime Minister — a man whose place is to counsel rather than to oppose. He quoted a farmer’s proverb, that a horse you throttle and drag and tie down will go nowhere, as a parable of coercion: a leader can compel motion and still produce no genuine movement, no true consent. His prescription, accordingly, was not the fall of the government but the opening of its ears. Listen, he urged, to the shout the public is shouting. It is the counsel of a critic who would still rather be heard by power than triumph over it.

The Uses and Limits of a Lone Witness

What makes Akalu an unusually useful witness is also what makes him a difficult one. He is a man who has now stood outside every party he served — from the Unity for Democracy and Justice, through the Blue Party, to EZEMA — and who turns his fire, in a single sitting, on the ruling party, on the opposition that was once his own, and on the security institutions of the state. That breadth is his credibility and his complication at once. A critic with no remaining party has no obvious axe of ambition to grind; he also has no organisation to corroborate his claims, no caucus to share the burden of proof.

So the honest reading is twofold. His structural arguments — that the 2026 vote registered protest rather than consent, that the country’s crisis is one of governance rather than electoral procedure, that development cannot be offered as a substitute for safety — are coherent, serious, and consistent with much that is independently observable. His specific allegations from Gamo — the killings, the rapes, the unburied dead — are grave enough that they must be reported as allegations and pursued as questions, not received as findings. The Tribune will treat them as the former until they can be made the latter.

A word, finally, about the record itself. This column rests on the opening and closing portions of a long conversation; the long middle was not available to us, and we have not reconstructed what we could not hear. What the bookends establish is clear enough — a serial dissident, dressed in another community’s grief, indicting a system he says no election can repair, and asking, with the strange tenderness of a man who still hopes to be useful, only that those in power should listen before the path runs out. “Their journey,” he said of Prosperity, “is short, if it continues like this.” Whether that is prophecy or wish, he has at least made it harder to say that no one was watching the Zayse.

Source: Abebe Akalu in conversation with Anchor Media (broadcast 25 June 2026). Quotations are translated from the Amharic. Allegations described are attributed to Mr Akalu and have not been independently verified by the Tribune.

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SPECIAL TRIBUTE

When a Great Soul Leaves Us

In memory of Hirut Befecadu — Abaye Hirut

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Editor’s Foreword

The Tribune concerns itself, for the most part, with power — how it is gathered, guarded, contested, and abused. We turn far less often to the quieter architecture that holds a community upright between its crises: the conveners, the mentors, the keepers of a people’s stories. Yet these are the figures without whom no institution outlives its founders. Their leadership rarely makes a headline. Their passing deserves more than a line.

Hirut Befecadu — Abaye Hirut, or Madam Hirut, to the many who loved her — was such a figure. For a generation of Ethiopian Toastmasters and Rotarians she was, in the words of the reflection that follows, the reference library and the institutional memory of an entire community: a witty speaker, a generous mentor, a leader who possessed the rarer gift of making others feel seen. She belonged to that small company of people who do not so much join an institution as become its living record.

We publish this tribute not only as an act of mourning but because it speaks to a preoccupation this paper has never abandoned. The reflection that follows reaches for Daniel Wegner’s idea of transactive memory — the recognition that we do not carry our lives wholly within ourselves, but entrust them to the minds and hearts of those around us. When such a person dies, a community loses more than a member. It loses a witness, an archive, a portion of its own memory. That loss is precisely the kind this paper exists to register and, where it can, to resist.

What follows is the personal testimony of Tazaxio Meqdela Mekuria, who counted Abaye Hirut among the people he looked up to, walked beside, and learned from. We have left it largely as he wrote it, in the conviction that the most honest tributes are those a friend sets down in his own voice, in his own grief. To her family, and to the Toastmasters and Rotary communities she helped to build, the Tribune extends its condolences. May her memory remain, as the best memories do, distributed widely and held with care.

◆  ◆  ◆

A Friend Remembers

By Tazaxio Meqdela Mekuria

ታዛዥዎ መቅደላ መኩሪያ

A decade or so ago, I came across a powerful idea from Tai Lopez’s Law of 33%. He suggests that we should intentionally build our lives around three groups of people: those we can look up to for inspiration and guidance, those who walk beside us as peers and challenge us to grow, and those whom we can support, mentor, and help along the way.

One of the greatest gifts Toastmasters has given me is exactly that. It has connected me with remarkable people from different walks of life, generations, professions, and backgrounds. It is like a vast living library where every person is a book filled with wisdom, stories, experiences, and lessons waiting to be discovered.

Among those treasured souls was Hirut Befecadu, whom we joyfully call Abaye Hirut or Madam Hirut — energetic and full of wisdom. When I met her fourteen years ago she was in her early seventies, young at heart, and someone who could bring light to everything she was part of; it didn’t take me long to have her in my 33% and call her a dear friend.

Abaye Hirut was a testament to what a true Toastmaster and a Rotarian is. For many, she was the reference library and the institutional memory of the Ethiopian Toastmasters and Rotary community, and a mother figure to many of us. She was a witty speaker, a gifted mentor, a true leader, and someone whose presence made people feel seen, valued, and encouraged. But for me, above all else, she was my sounding board, my confidant, and my Abaye. Every conversation we had, every laughter we shared, and every humour-flavoured moment was filled with wisdom, life lessons, and lots of takeaways.

As I reflect on her passing, I am reminded of psychologist Daniel Wegner’s concept of transactive memory, beautifully referenced by Malcolm Gladwell in The Bomber Mafia. The idea is simple yet profound: we do not store all our memories within ourselves. We store parts of our lives in the minds and hearts of the people around us.

When we lose someone with whom we have shared years of friendship, learning, laughter, and purpose, we lose more than a person. We lose a keeper of our stories, a witness to our journey, and a part of our collective memory. In a very real sense, a piece of us leaves with them.

That is why communities matter. That is why friendships matter. That is why mentors matter.

Abaye Hirut leaves behind a legacy of service, leadership, wisdom, and kindness that will continue to live through the countless lives she touched.

As I mourn her passing and bid farewell to this formidable soul, I want to celebrate her — a life exceptionally lived, a legacy generously shared, and a friendship that has made me by far a better person.

My deepest condolences go to her family, friends, fellow Toastmasters, and the Rotary community.

May her beautiful soul rest in eternal peace.

“What we have once enjoyed deeply, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

HELEN KELLER

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE · SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM

POVERTY PACKED ITS BAGS

On the gentleman who learned that no one is ever evicted, no rebel is ever a hero, and no handout is ever the one you took yourself

There is a special providence in the Reporter’s studio, and last week it descended upon Ato Girma Seifu: Head of the Beautification and Green Development Bureau, sometime Investment Commissioner, and member in good standing of an opposition he assures us still exists, somewhere, in a drawer. He came to answer the only question the public has ever put to him — what, precisely, have you done? — and he answered it magnificently, by praying for our ignorance to be lifted.

The Eviction of an Abstraction

The prayer worked. I am enlightened. For years I laboured under the peasant superstition that when the bulldozers arrive at first light and a family carries its mattress into the road, a person has been displaced. Ato Girma has corrected the record. What was displaced was poverty — not the poor. And he has proof: bring me one, he says, one evicted soul with a title deed, and he will seat you on this very chair and resign on the spot. It is the boldest wager in Addis, and it cannot be lost, because the house always defines the stakes.

“What was displaced was poverty — not the poor.”

Observe how the lock is built, for he did not forge it alone. In Sheger, the city that rings the capital, the administration explained its demolitions with the same key: only illegal houses fall — the unlicensed, the unregistered, the ones the city never deigned to recognise. The renter, the man who bought his plot from a farmer and raised his walls a decade ago — these were never legal tenants of the city, and so, by the hour the wall comes down, there is no legal person standing before it to be wronged.

This is the engine beneath the Honourable’s dare. He invites you to produce a displaced soul knowing the camp he cleared was packed with the deedless, the Kebele tenants, the renters, the people whose only claim was that they were already there — every one defined out of existence before the machine arrived. It is not a wager. It is a tautology with a chair and a microphone. Bring him a victim and he will explain, gently, that what you have brought is not a victim but a paperwork irregularity, since resolved.

The One Clean Window

His proudest hour, he tells us, was refusing to sign a Prosperity contribution cheque and having it carried from his office. A decent act — and, read closely, a full confession. Because I am the one leading it, he explains; were another man in the chair, the party work would resume on Tuesdays. He has not described a separation of party and state. He has described himself as the single clean window in a house with no walls, and asked us to applaud the glazing.

And what is the labour of his opposition? We work when we are elected; we don’t work when we are not. There it is — an opposition that opposes only on payday. The public’s questions about his choices are, he rules, none of the public’s business, since the public did not elect him. On this he is entirely correct. Nobody elected him. He was appointed — to the Commission, to the Bureau — the largest unearned handout in a room he spends his afternoons accusing of begging.

The Mendicant-in-Chief

Consider the arithmetic of that contempt. By his own account, the lesser parties are mendicants, outfits that exist only to queue for the half-million birr the state dispenses through the Electoral Board to anyone with a letterhead and a list of names. He says it as a man of means, from a party rich enough to wave the cheque away. But the trough he sneers at is the one the law itself dug, and the Board pays by a formula that rewards the padding of rolls — so faithfully that in one recent round eleven of twenty-one parties, the ruling Prosperity Party among them, were caught inflating their numbers, some swearing to as many as nine hundred thousand women and disabled members who reside chiefly on paper. The system does not punish the begging. It subsidises the lie. His grievance is not that the parties beg; it is that they beg so cheaply.

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

But the finest moment comes when talk turns to rebellion. A politician, he now instructs us, cannot run a respectable party with one hand and clasp armed insurgents with the other; should anyone lift a weapon against a functioning government, it is the state’s absolute duty to arrest and try him; and neither the Fano nor Shene carries a cause worth the blood. A stirring doctrine. It is also, word for word, the one under which his own chairman was sentenced to death.

For the party Ato Girma serves was assembled in 2019 by folding in Patriotic Ginbot 7 — Professor Berhanu Nega’s armed, Asmara-quartered, formerly terror-listed movement: the very outfit that ran a mainstream face with one hand and an insurgency with the other, whose leader an Ethiopian court condemned to death in absentia for plotting precisely the overthrow Ato Girma now deplores. By the standard he recites so crisply in 2026, the founders of his own house were the criminals the state was bound to crush.

He has an answer, and it is the most honest thing he says. The old arrests, he says, were vendettas — personal scores settled by the regime’s enforcers, the hero whose only home was prison. But that was then. The hero’s prison belonged to the era of the wrong jailer; today’s detainees, held for the length of trials that never quite arrive, are merely meeting their constitutional desert. The line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, in the Honourable’s mature jurisprudence, turns out to be exquisitely simple: it is the cabinet post that comes afterward. Take up arms and lose, you are Shene. Take up arms, lose, withdraw to Eritrea, and return to a Ministry, you are a Professor. Same rifle, different epilogue.

So pray, by all means, for the lifting of our ignorance. We are nearly there. We have learned that eviction is a kindness to the evicted, that opposition is a salaried rest, that the unelected may scold the unfunded, and that the surest way to be remembered as a patriot rather than a criminal is to be on the winning side when the sentence is read. Poverty packed its bags. The Honourable saw it to the door himself.

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE · SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM

THE PARTY OF THE ACCUSED

EZEMA was built by men the terror law condemned to death and to life. Its highest serving official now recites the jailer’s catechism. A case, in dates.

Every political party keeps a founding myth, and EZEMA’s is unusually well documented, because the state wrote most of it down in court. The party was assembled in May 2019 out of men it had condemned. Its leader, Professor Berhanu Nega, had been sentenced to death in absentia in 2009 as the head of Ginbot 7, then a proscribed, Asmara-quartered, armed movement. Its deputy leader, Andualem Aragie, was serving a life sentence handed down in 2012 under the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation — arrested, as it happens, days after he stood at a press conference and denounced that very law as a machine for jailing opponents on fabricated charges. The party of the falsely accused. Hold on to the phrase; we will need it at the end.

The Founders’ Rap Sheet

Consider the dock from which EZEMA descends. Andualem Aragie spent more than two years in Kaliti after the 2005 vote, then helped found a party, then in September 2011 told a press conference that the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation was being used to cage critics on invented charges. Five days later he was caged on invented charges. The court that sentenced him to life declared that he and his co-defendants had set out to dismantle the constitution; the marquee evidence, by the accounts of those present, was a reel of nearly inaudible telephone recordings. Alongside him in that trial sat the journalist Eskinder Nega, handed eighteen years. Both refused to sign confessions admitting Ginbot 7 membership. In 2018 they walked out to crowds chanting hero, the death sentences and the life sentences dissolved by the same government that had written them.

This is not a smear retrieved from an enemy’s archive. It is EZEMA’s own pedigree, the thing the party once asked us to honour: that its leaders had suffered the machine, refused its lies, and emerged to build a citizenship politics above the ethnic fray. A noble story. It makes what followed harder to forgive, not easier.

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

For listen to the Honourable Girma Seifu now, in 2026, instructing the nation on rebellion. A politician, he says, cannot run a respectable party with one hand and clasp armed insurgents with the other; should anyone lift a weapon against a functioning government, it is the state’s absolute duty to arrest and try him; and neither the Fano nor the Shene carries a cause worth the blood. It is a crisp doctrine. It is also, almost to the syllable, the case the EPRDF made against Ginbot 7 — an outfit with a civil face and an armed wing, quartered in Eritrea, led by the man who is today EZEMA’s founder and the Republic’s Minister of Education. By the standard Girma recites so fluently, the founders of his own house were exactly the criminals the state was bound to crush.

And the wheel has not stopped turning. Eskinder Nega — who shared Andualem’s 2012 terrorism dock — now commands an Amhara Fano militia in the field. The doctrine Girma reads out points straight at his own party’s former co-accused. The line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, in this mature jurisprudence, turns out to be exquisitely simple, and it is not drawn at the rifle. Take up arms and lose, you are Shene. Take up arms, lose, withdraw to Eritrea, and return to a Ministry, you are a Professor. Same rifle, different epilogue.

The Hero’s Prison, Refurbished

He has a defence, and it is the most revealing thing he says. The old arrests, he allows, were vendettas — personal scores settled by the regime’s enforcers; he even reaches for the old line that in a tyrannical country the home of a hero is prison, and applies it, touchingly, to Andualem. So he concedes the machine was unjust. Then, without pausing for breath, he assures us that today’s detainees — held through trials that somehow never quite arrive — are merely meeting their constitutional desert. The machine did not change. Only the seat from which it is narrated changed.

The record is unkind to the distinction. Human Rights Watch warned that the authorities had not moved on from the old habit of arresting first and investigating later; seven members of one opposition party were held in defiance of repeated court orders to release them; the Amhara countryside has filled with mass detentions without due process, alongside the drone strikes and summary killings the monitors keep cataloguing. The hero’s prison is fully booked. Only the management has changed, and the new management used to be the tenants.

One man noticed before the rest of us. Andualem Aragie — the life-sentence survivor, EZEMA’s own deputy leader — walked out of the party in 2023, saying there was no longer any justification to remain under its roof, that its alignment and its image had drifted somewhere he could not follow. When the very man who embodied the hero’s prison can no longer share your house, the house is the story.

The Eviction of an Abstraction

The same talent for definition runs through his day job. For years I laboured under the superstition that when the bulldozers arrive at dawn and a family carries its mattress into the road, a person has been displaced. The Honourable has corrected the record: what was displaced was poverty — not the poor. And he has proof on offer: bring me one, he says, one evicted soul with a title deed, and he will seat you on this chair and resign. It is the boldest wager in Addis, and it cannot be lost, because the house defines the stakes.

“What was displaced was poverty — not the poor.”

He did not forge the lock alone. In Sheger, the city that rings the capital, the administration justified its demolitions with the same key: only illegal houses fall, the unlicensed, the unregistered, the ones the city never deigned to recognise. The renter, the man who bought his plot from a farmer and raised his walls a decade ago — these were never legal tenants, and so, by the hour the wall comes down, there is no legal person standing before it to be wronged. He invites you to produce a victim from a camp he had already defined out of existence. It is not a wager. It is a tautology with a chair and a microphone.

The Unelected Tribune

Now to the matter of the man’s own seat. Girma was made head of the Investment Commission, then of the Green Bureau; his chairman was made a Minister and, this spring, Chancellor of Addis Ababa University. Not one of these offices was conferred by a vote. The government’s own human-rights record notes drily that the opposition appointees took their posts although they were not elected. From that unelected chair, the Honourable rules that the public has no standing to question EZEMA’s choices — because, he explains, the public did not elect EZEMA. An opposition that campaigned for votes, lost, joined the winner, and then declared its own conduct a private family matter.

There is a tidy coda. In 2021 EZEMA decried the fairness of the process and withdrew from the second round of the very election whose result it now cites as the mandate it serves. You may keep the grievance or keep the cabinet post; the Honourable keeps both, in different sentences. His proudest hour, he tells us, was refusing to sign a Prosperity contribution cheque and having it carried from his office — a decent act, and a full confession, since he explains it was possible only because he is the one in the chair. He has not described a separation of party and state. He has described himself as the single clean window in a house with no walls.

The Mendicant-in-Chief

Observe, finally, the arithmetic of his contempt. The lesser parties, he sneers, are mendicants, outfits that exist only to queue for the half-million birr the state dispenses through the Electoral Board to anyone with a letterhead and a list of names; serious houses like his fund themselves. But the trough he scorns is the one the law itself dug, and the Board pays by a formula that rewards the padding of rolls — so faithfully that in one recent round eleven of twenty-one parties, the ruling Prosperity Party among them, were caught inflating their numbers, some swearing to as many as nine hundred thousand women and disabled members who reside chiefly on paper. The system does not punish the begging; it subsidises the lie. And the largest handout in the whole pantomime was never collected at the Board’s window. It was carried to his office, unelected and unbidden. The mendicant-in-chief is the man delivering the sermon.

The Ledger

So here is the case, in dates. A party born in the dock, its leader under a death sentence, its deputy under a life sentence, both condemned by a terror law they had publicly denounced — and then, within a decade, that same party governing beside the machine, its leader running the schools, its deputy walking away in protest, its highest serving official touring the studios to explain that eviction is mercy, that opposition is a salaried rest, that the unelected may scold the unfunded, and that the surest way to be remembered as a patriot rather than a terrorist is to be on the winning side when the sentence is read.

“The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell.”

The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell. It signs where the state points, and it has trained itself not to read the charge. Pray, by all means, for the lifting of our ignorance. We are nearly there.

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune

Obituary · A Son’s Tribute

Hirut Befikadu: The Woman Who Gave Africa Its Voice

She helped give the Organisation of African Unity its public voice, built the institution’s first Women’s Division, and carried Africa’s case from Addis Ababa to Beijing and into the shattered districts of wartime Sierra Leone. She was a mother of three — and a figure of quiet instruction to a great many more.

By Endex  ·  Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  22 June 2026

The Tribune’s Chief Editor writes of his mother.

She belonged to the small, formidable company of Ethiopians who did not merely live through the making of modern Africa but helped to assemble it — patiently, precisely, one briefing and one document at a time. For the better part of thirty-four years, Hirut Befikadu served the Organisation of African Unity, the body founded in Addis Ababa in 1963 to speak for a continent finding its own voice. It fell to her, more than to almost anyone, to make that voice intelligible to the world.

The Voice of a Young Continent

Hirut joined the OAU in its earliest, improvised days, having begun her working life at the newly established Ethiopian Tourism Organisation in 1963. Within a year she had moved to the fledgling continental secretariat, where the work was relentless and the stakes were continental. Assigned to the Information and Protocol Division, she rose to lead it, serving for seventeen years as Head of Information.

The task was unforgiving. A new organisation, charged with shaping Africa’s political, social and economic course, had to be explained — persuasively, accurately, and often under pressure — to journalists and researchers who gave her no rest. To answer them she first had to know, which meant a discipline of constant reading that never left her. She travelled the length and breadth of the continent, and there was scarcely a country she did not visit in the service of introducing the OAU to Africa and the wider world. In the veteran Ethiopian journalist Gedamu Abraha she found a mentor who helped her master the craft.

The Platform at Beijing

If the Information Division made her name, it was the Women’s Division that became her legacy. Hirut was charged not only with establishing the OAU’s Women’s Division but with leading it. When Africa prepared its case for the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, it was Hirut who coordinated the drafting of the “African Platform for Action”, distilling the views of women gathered from across the continent, and who helped organise the participation of nearly ten thousand African women delegates at the conference. It was, by any measure, one of the largest acts of continental coordination on behalf of African women in the organisation’s history.

Addis, Asmara and Florence

She had been formed for such work long before she chose it. Educated at the Sandford English School in Addis Ababa, at Haile Selassie Secondary School in Asmara, and at Kokebe Tsibah — where she was one of the first two young women to graduate — she went on to read social and political science at Haile Selassie I University, among its first graduates after it became a university, and took a master’s degree in international relations at the University of Florence.

Hers was a household steeped in the wider world. Her father, German-educated, served as a provincial governor, as chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ultimately as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom; her mother, too, was educated in Europe. The eldest of six children, Hirut moved from city to city and country to country, and where she could not follow her parents she lived with an aunt rather than break her schooling.

Her ancestry ran the length of the country. She was descended from Hakim Workneh Eshete, the pioneering Ethiopian physician and statesman, and from Ras Gobena Dacche, the formidable nineteenth-century general — a lineage joining the north of Ethiopia to the south, as her own life and labour would. And hers was a family that seemed to bring forth remarkable women in every generation: the great educator Adey Befikadu; her sister Rosemary; the late journalist Elenee Mekuria; and the late Rachel Mekuria, who pioneered broadcasting education in Ethiopia, headed the Educational Television Production Division and served as board president of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Hirut belonged to that company, and enlarged it.

She came to believe there was something to learn from every person she met — a conviction earned, not inherited.

Two influences marked her above all. There was a meticulous, beautifully turned-out father who could not abide disorder, from whom she inherited an eye for elegance and an ear for language. And there was her maternal grandmother, Qetselawork Tulu, whose intelligence and resilience she revered — a woman who had married an England-educated doctor, moved to India, and worked at his side as a nurse. A shy child, Hirut taught herself courage through drama, public debate and the university debating club, until the girl who had once shunned attention made her living by commanding it.

Sierra Leone

Her continental service did not end with the OAU. For six years she served as spokesperson and policy adviser to the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) — a charge entrusted to her by Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, who knew her conviction and chose her for it. She carried her gift for clear, careful information into one of West Africa’s hardest conflicts, and into its most desperate hours. When hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers were seized and held hostage by rebel forces for seventy-five days, she was among those who laboured to win their release — and it was her voice, in the end, that carried the news of their freedom to the world. In the United Nations’ own record of those years she appears again and again, steadying the account through the mission’s most dangerous passages — the same discipline of fact she had practised in Addis Ababa, now exercised under fire.

A Mother, and a Mentor

In retirement she described herself simply as a community volunteer. It was characteristically modest. I write these lines not only as this newspaper’s editor but as her son — one of the three boys she raised, who like everyone who loved her called her Abaye — and so I may say what an obituary alone would not: that the rigour and grace she carried to a continent she carried first, and most fully, into her own home.

Her husband of a lifetime, the engineer Getachew Abebe, had gone before her; she leaves their three sons — Samuel, Daniel, and the one who writes these words. But the family she leaves is larger than that — the colleagues she trained, the women whose place at the table she helped to secure, and the many of us who took her, without hesitation and without blood, as a mother of our own.

She loved a difficult task and hated defeat. Africa was, for thirty-four years, her difficult task. She did not run from it. She faced it — and she gave it words.

When the family last gathered around her, in November 2024, she surprised us, as she always could. Late in a life that had never stopped facing forward, she took delivery of her first car — and chose an electric one, because the future, to her mind, was a thing to be embraced rather than feared. We were delighted, and we made her promises about the cleaner, braver world we meant to help build. It was entirely like her: the woman who had introduced a young continent to the world, still reaching, even then, toward what came next.

Samuel, her firstborn, reached her after her first surgery and was with her as she recovered. Daniel and I were to follow in July. We did not reach her in time. These last months had taken from her, one after another, others she loved; and in the end, it seems, she chose to go on to those who had gone ahead of her — her husband among them — rather than wait for us. We would have crossed any distance for that visit. We make it now, in these words.

Today the words are mine, and they are not enough. Rest now, Abaye. We were proud beyond saying to be yours.

❦

Hirut Befikadu — Hirute Silassie. Pioneering officer of the Organisation of African Unity. Died 22 June 2026.