Forty-Three Kilometres

On the birthday of the Emperor, the journey worth remembering is not one of his own. It is his mother’s — made before sunrise, on muleback, through the forest between Harar and Ejersa Goro.

The road from Harar to Ejersa Goro is forty-three kilometres. Today it is nothing. In the summer of 1892 it was a night’s hard travelling through dense forest, and a heavily pregnant woman made it on the back of a mule, surrounded by an entourage that had assembled for her from as far away as Wollo.

Everything that followed — Geneva, Kingston, Washington, Madrid, Persepolis; the aircraft and the collars and the golden keys of foreign cities — begins on that road. It is worth starting there, because the world remembers the son’s arrivals in other people’s countries and has largely forgotten the one journey that made them possible.

The counting of the losses

Woizero Yeshimebet Ali Abba Jifar was the daughter of Dejazmach Ali Abba Jifar of Wollo. She had married Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, governor of Harar, cousin to Emperor Menelik II and a man who would within four years be among the architects of the victory at Adwa. She had also, by the record that survives, endured eight pregnancies that did not give her a living child.

That number is not a footnote. It is the whole meaning of the song the women griots sang when at last a healthy boy was born:

Read against the eight losses, the couplet stops being flattery and becomes arithmetic. The griots were not saying that one child of this woman outweighed fifty children of another. They were saying that this woman had counted to eight in grief, and that the ninth had answered all of it. It is one of the most economical things ever said about her, and it was said by women, in public, on the day.

Why Ejersa Goro at all? Because Harar — garrison town, seat of government, thick with the business of a province — was no place to bring a ninth pregnancy after eight sorrows. The choice was for air and quiet and a change of mood. Waiting there was the wife of Fitawrari Nadawe, commander-in-chief of Ras Makonnen’s army, who had offered her compound as a lying-in house and had assembled midwives of her own.

And the travelling party was itself an argument. Yeshimebet’s sisters and their friends had come down in numbers from Wollo to attend her. Wise women were selected for the journey, among them, by the memory held in the family, Woizero Desta — mother of Dr Malaku Bayen, who would grow up to become the Emperor’s physician and his envoy to Black America, the man who carried Ethiopia’s cause to Harlem when Italy invaded. The best-known midwives available were brought. At five in the morning, before light, Ras Makonnen’s soldiers went ahead to open the road — men who within four years would be counted heroes of Adwa, Amba Alagi and Mekele, and who on this night were escorting a woman to her confinement.

She rode in the middle of all of it. They went left of her, right of her, and behind her, through the trees, in the dark.

Kidane Mehret

The child was born on Hamle 16, 1884 in the Ethiopian calendar — Saturday, 23 July 1892. It was the day of Kidane Mehret, the Covenant of Mercy, and the coincidence was not treated as one. As emperors and empresses took patron saints, so this boy took Our Lady of the Covenant of Mercy, and kept her: the church he would later raise inside his own palace in Addis Ababa carried her name.

They buried the umbilical cord, as is done, and over the place where it was buried they built a church, and the church is St Kidane Mehret at Ejersa Goro. There is something exact in that. The cord is the first thing severed and the first thing returned to the ground; to build over it is to say that a person begins at a particular point on the earth and that the point can be marked. Whatever else the man became — Ras Tafari, Regent, Negusä Nägäst, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and to millions across the Atlantic something more than any of those — he began in a compound at Ejersa Goro, on a Saturday, at a place now under a church floor.

Two years later, or thereabouts, Yeshimebet was dead. She had made her journey, borne her ninth child, and did not live to watch him grow. Her mother and her sister Woizero Mammit raised him. The Wollo women who had come down the forest road to help her deliver stayed to bring up her son.

The arrivals

What that boy then did with the world was, in the most literal sense, to travel it.

In June 1936 he arrived in Geneva, at the League of Nations, a sovereign whose country had been overrun with aircraft and mustard gas, and told an assembly that would not lift a finger that the fate of a small nation that day would be the fate of the great nations tomorrow. He was correct within three years. The speech did not save Ethiopia. It made him, for a generation of anti-fascists on every continent, something close to a living conscience — and it put the phrase collective security into the mouth of a man whom Europe had assumed would be its object rather than its author.

From Geneva he went into exile, and the country that took him in was the one that had failed him. He reached London in June 1936, and the British government found his presence in the capital politically embarrassing — appeasement was in the air, and a dispossessed African emperor in Knightsbridge was an inconvenient reminder of what the democracies had declined to do. So he went west, to Bath, drawn there for rest and, it has been suggested, for treatment of the mustard gas burns on his hands. Consider that. The sovereign who had stood at Geneva and told Europe what chemical weapons do to a people was carrying the evidence on his own skin.

In September 1936 he bought Fairfield House, an Italianate villa on Kelston Road, for three and a half thousand pounds, and moved his family in that October — an Ethiopian court in exile in a Roman city, keeping the fight for Ethiopian independence alive from a suburb of Somerset, with Sylvia Pankhurst among his allies and a grey horse called Poppy in the grounds. He lived there until Ethiopia was liberated and he went home in 1941.

In May 1954 he arrived in Washington and addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, then crossed the country — Princeton, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans — in a progress no African head of state had made before. He returned in 1963, and again in 1967, and again in 1969, and to the United Nations at twenty-five in 1970, and a last time in 1973.

On 21 April 1966 he arrived in Kingston, and something occurred for which protocol had no provision. The crowd that met the aircraft was not a crowd of officials. He gave the movement’s elders gold medallions bearing the Ethiopian seal, the only such gift of the visit; Rita Marley saw him pass in the motorcade and her life changed course. Ethiopians may make of Rastafari what they will — the Emperor himself was an Orthodox Christian to the end and never claimed what was claimed of him — but the fact stands that a man born at Ejersa Goro became, in the Caribbean, the visible sign that Africa had never been conquered. Jamaica keeps the day. They call it Grounation.

And in 1971, at seventy-nine, he made two journeys that between them say everything about what the throne had become. In May he arrived in Madrid, where General Franco met him at Barajas with full military honours, the mayor gave him the golden keys of the city, and the two of them exchanged their countries’ highest collars — the anti-fascist icon of 1936 decorated by the last surviving victor of Europe’s fascist wars, a thing neither man mentioned. In October he arrived at Persepolis for the Shah’s celebration of twenty-five centuries of Persian monarchy, and there, by protocol, he was the guest of honour: the senior sovereign in a tent city full of kings. Two of the oldest continuous monarchies on earth stood together in the desert. Neither survived the decade.

The Garter

But there is one more journey, and it is the one that closes the circle with Britain.

In October 1954 he came back — not as a refugee this time but as a head of state, the second guest of Elizabeth II’s new reign. He sailed from Malta to Portsmouth aboard HMS Gambia with his son the Duke of Harar, was received at Victoria Station by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and was carried by carriage procession to Buckingham Palace, where he stayed. And there the Queen conferred on him the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

It is worth being exact about what that is, because it is easily said and rarely understood. The Garter is the senior order of chivalry in the British system, founded in the fourteenth century, in the personal gift of the sovereign alone, its foreign members admitted under the statutes’ quaint title of Stranger Knights. There is nothing higher for Britain to give. He was later installed at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He gave in return the chain of the Order of the Seal of Solomon to the Queen and the Order of the Queen of Sheba to the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Duke of Harar was made a knight grand cross of the Royal Victorian Order.

Then, on 18 October, he went back to Bath. The city gave him the Freedom — the highest honour in its power — and paraded him through streets where people had known him as a neighbour; and he slept again at Fairfield House, refurbished for the occasion, with local people gathered at the gates to cheer a man they had last seen as an exile. Four years later, in 1958, he gave the house away. He handed the freehold to the Corporation of Bath in gratitude for the welcome the city had shown him, on condition that it serve as a home for old people. It did precisely that for thirty-five years, and the house stands today as a museum to him and a gathering place for Bath’s elderly African-Caribbean community. Of all the monuments raised to Haile Selassie anywhere in the world, that one — a shelter for the aged, given in thanks — may be the one that would have pleased Ejersa Goro most.

He returned to Britain for the last time in 1972, and he went to Windsor, to St George’s Chapel, for a ceremony of the Order of the Garter. He had been a refugee in that country and a knight of its highest order, and at the end he went back to the chapel where they had installed him. It was among the last foreign journeys of his reign.

Two years later the throne was gone. He was deposed in 1974 amid revolution and the exposure of famine, held in his own palace, and died there in August 1975. The Tribune does not print hagiography, and the argument over what the last years of that reign cost Ethiopians is a real argument that Ethiopians are still having. But the argument belongs to other days. This one belongs to the birth.

The return

Fifteen years ago a company gathered at Ejersa Goro, at the church of St Kidane Mehret built over the buried cord, to keep the birthday where it happened: Crown Prince Zera Yacob; Abuna Yared; the late Ato Abera Moltot of the Emperor Haile Selassie Memorial Foundation; Leke Khant Abate of the Ethiopian Patriots’ Association; and Rastafarians who had come, as Rastafarians do, a very long way.

They had all, in their fashion, travelled the forty-three kilometres.

Because that is the shape of it. The mother made one journey and it was short and it nearly killed her and she died soon after. The son made a hundred journeys and was received by presidents, emperors, dictators and congresses on four continents, was given the keys of foreign cities and the freedom of an English one, and was made a knight of the oldest order of chivalry in Europe by a queen whose government had once wished him quietly out of London — and every one of those receptions was in some sense a receipt issued against her forty-three kilometres. Modern Ethiopia, African unity, the idea that international morality might be something a small nation could demand rather than merely hope for, the craft of diplomacy as Africa’s instrument and not only Europe’s — all of it can be argued back, along the road, through the forest, to a woman on a mule who had already buried eight hopes and was riding through the dark with the ninth.

Happy birthday, Your Majesty. And may the memory of Woizero Yeshimebet Ali be a blessing.

Analysis  •  Politics & Technology

The Sovereignty Clause

Ethiopia has signed into a China‑convened order for governing artificial intelligence. Its founding charter promises “respect for sovereignty.” The signature raises a harder question  accountability to whom?

BY E. FRASHIE

On the sixteenth of July, on the eve of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, a representative of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia added a signature to a document in Shanghai. With it, the country became a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization — WAICO — an independent intergovernmental body that will be headquartered in that city and that proposes, in effect, to help write the rules by which the coming century’s most consequential technology is governed.

The domestic coverage that followed reached, predictably, for the language of arrival: a nation taking its place, at last, in the race for the future. It is a flattering frame, and it is not entirely wrong. But it obscures more than it reveals. What Ethiopia signed in Shanghai is not a lottery ticket in a technology race. It is a diplomatic alignment  and, read closely, a set of propositions about power, sovereignty and accountability that deserve scrutiny rather than applause.

The Company of Signatories

Begin with the room. Twenty‑nine states signed the founding agreement; China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, signed on behalf of Beijing, and the United Nations Secretary‑General attended the ceremony. The founding membership, by the organisation’s own account, includes Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela alongside ten African and twelve Asian states. What is conspicuous is not who signed but who did not. No major Western democracy not the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan or Australia put its name to the document.

A coalition is defined as much by its absences as by its members. This one spans four continents and, by some measures, a combined population that dwarfs the Group of Seven. Its members are bound less by a shared creed than by a shared grievance: a conviction that the rules for artificial intelligence should not be dictated from Washington or Brussels. That grievance is real, and  this bears saying plainly  not unfounded.

The Architecture of an Order

Here the political science becomes interesting. AI governance is not a blank field; it is what scholars call a regime complex a crowded landscape of overlapping bodies, declarations and standards. Into that landscape WAICO introduces something genuinely novel. A recent scholarly mapping of fifteen governance instruments concluded that WAICO’s design unites three features no existing multilateral body currently combines: membership open to any sovereign state, no test of values or regime type for entry, and an agenda built around development and the global capability divide.

Consider what that means by contrast. The Western‑led bodies gate entry by shared values and organise themselves around rights and safety. The universal United Nations instruments are open to all but anchored in human‑rights obligations. WAICO removes the values test altogether. Belonging becomes a function of statehood, nothing more. To a government weary of being lectured, this is precisely the appeal. It is also precisely the concern.

For the removal of a values test is not a neutral act. It reflects a particular philosophy  what Beijing has long promoted under the banner of “cyber sovereignty”: the idea that the digital domain is an extension of the state, and that its governance is the sole province of governments, unencumbered by external human‑rights obligations or by accountability to independent stakeholders. Analysts warn that WAICO threatens to carry that philosophy from the internet into the domain of artificial intelligence. And institutions matter here not merely for the ideas they profess but for the machinery through which those ideas spread  the convening of officials, the training programmes, the technical standards and the research networks that quietly harden into norms.

A former Indian permanent representative to the United Nations named the anxiety in a single image: an order in which the same power both writes the rulebook and umpires the game. Whether that is prophecy or polemic, it states the structural problem honestly. Who makes the rules, and who adjudicates them?

The Word Itself

Which brings us to the word written into the charter. Among WAICO’s stated principles benefiting the people, safety and controllability, fairness, open cooperation  sit “respect for sovereignty” and its companion, non‑interference. For a state like Ethiopia, jealous of its independence and proud of never having been colonised, no word could be more welcome.

And yet the paradox is difficult to miss. Ethiopia’s digital sovereignty, in any material sense, is already heavily mortgaged. The country’s first 5G network was rolled out on Huawei equipment. Its national information‑security architecture was built with Huawei’s assistance. It took on one of the largest Chinese telecoms loans on the continent to lay the fibre beneath its digital ambitions. The African Union headquarters  in Addis Ababa, a short drive from the ministries now celebrating this signature was the site of a data breach, reported to have run from 2012 to 2017, that remains one of the few documented cases cited as linking Chinese‑built infrastructure to intelligence collection.

So when the Prime Minister declares, as he did last year, that Africa “must not be a passive recipient of AI tools developed elsewhere,” the sentiment is admirable and the setting ironic. One does not escape dependency by joining a standards body convened in Shanghai and headquartered there, running on a backbone financed and built by Chinese firms. That may be a rational bet — the terms are cheaper, the lectures fewer  but it is a choice about whose dependency to accept, not an exit from dependency itself.

The Accountability Gap

The sharpest questions, though, are domestic  and they concern accountability. WAICO’s charter speaks the vocabulary of virtue: artificial intelligence that is “people‑centred,” “safe,” “controllable,” “for good.” These are fine words. But a principle is only as good as the mechanism that enforces it, and here two problems converge.

The first is that the body itself appears to have few teeth. Writing in Nature, the science journalist Elizabeth Gibney judged that WAICO is unlikely to govern the AI industry in any enforceable way. Its instruments are convening and coordination, not compulsion. Norms without enforcement are aspirations, and aspirations bind no one.

The second problem is closer to home. Consider the state that has signed this pledge to “people‑centred” artificial intelligence. It is a state that has reached, more than once, for the internet’s off‑switch during moments of unrest. It is a state whose security apparatus has built precisely the kind of surveillance capacity that a genuinely people‑centred technology policy would exist to restrain. It is a state that, as this publication has documented, has jailed journalists. The tools of artificial intelligence  facial recognition, predictive policing, the automated parsing of a population’s communications  are not neutral instruments awaiting good intentions. They are force multipliers for whichever hand holds them.

Ask, then, the question the celebratory coverage does not. When a citizen is misidentified, mis‑scored or surveilled by a machine, to whom does she turn? Not to WAICO, which claims no such mechanism and no such role. Not, on present evidence, to a domestic framework robust enough to constrain the state that deploys the technology against her. The charter’s promise of “people‑centred” AI, absent any tribunal to which the people may bring a grievance, is a promise addressed to governments about how they intend to describe themselves  not to citizens about what they may demand.

The Minister and the Prisoner

Every cabinet tells a story about power, and Ethiopia’s tells one worth reading closely. The portfolio that carries the nation’s digital ambitions the ministry from which its artificial‑intelligence agenda, its “five million coders” and its technology diplomacy all flow  belongs to Dr Belete Molla Getahun. It was Belete who travelled to Shanghai this month and, beneath the Ethiopian tricolour, set his signature to the WAICO agreement on the republic’s behalf  a moment he shared, days later, on his own Facebook page. And Belete is not a man of the ruling Prosperity Party. He is the founder and chairman of the National Movement of Amhara, and among the most recognisable opposition politicians in the country. His presence in that hall is, on paper, evidence of a broad tent: a government generous enough to seat its critics, and to let one of them sign for the nation abroad.

Read the arrangement more carefully, though, and it resembles less a pluralism than a transaction. NaMA  five seats, and the self‑styled face of the opposition accepted a single cabinet post on the Prime Minister’s offer. One chair at the table, held by the chairman, in exchange for a voice inside a government the party was elected to oppose. Critics have since reached for a word harsher than “loyal opposition.” In this telling the technology ministry is not a share of power but the price of a party’s silence, paid in advance.

And here the arrangement acquires its cruelty. For while the chairman of NaMA sits in cabinet administering the state’s digital future, the party’s own spokesperson and most forceful parliamentary voice sits in a cell.

Christian Tadele Tsegaye founding member of NaMA, its political‑affairs chief since 2018, and, until his arrest, chair of a parliamentary committee charged with scrutinising government spending  was taken from his Addis Ababa home in early August 2023, days after the government declared a state of emergency and opened its campaign against Fano fighters in Amhara. His arrest followed, by a matter of days, a speech on the floor of parliament criticising the Prime Minister and a widely shared post calling on him to resign. He was charged under the anti‑terrorism and firearms proclamations. In March 2024 the House of Peoples’ Representatives  the same chamber in which he had questioned the Prime Minister to his face  voted to lift his immunity; two members opposed, two abstained. He has been held at Awash Arba and later Kilinto, where, by the accounts of his lawyer and family, his health has collapsed: surgery followed by inadequate care, food turned away at the prison gate. Amnesty International has warned that Ethiopia’s emergency powers enable precisely this kind of arbitrary and prolonged detention. He is not alone; the NaMA co‑founder Dessalegn Chanie and others were detained under the same emergency.

The government’s position is that Tadele aided an armed insurrection. His supporters, and a widening chorus of human‑rights organisations, call the charges a punishment for dissent. The Ethiopian Tribune does not adjudicate the criminal case here. But it insists on holding two facts within a single frame  because the government’s own cabinet arithmetic places them there.

In one frame: the opposition chairman who signed for Ethiopia in Shanghai, lending his credibility to the state’s language of “people‑centred,” “safe,” “controllable” AI. In the other: his own colleague, elected under the same banner, imprisoned and ailing, silenced by the very state the minister now represents abroad. The instruments of the digital state  the surveillance capacity, the security apparatus this newspaper examined above  are no abstraction to the Amhara opposition. They are the architecture of their own suppression.

So the accountability question sharpens to a point. What is a technology minister’s pledge of people‑centred AI worth, if he cannot  or will not secure the liberty of the man who stood beside him at his own party’s founding? And what does “opposition” mean, when its price is one cabinet chair and its cost is a colleague in Kilinto?

The Questions Worth Asking

None of this is to say Ethiopia was wrong to sign. The case for WAICO is serious and should not be caricatured. The digital divide is real; the gap between the Global South and the handful of states that own the frontier is widening into something structural. The incumbent Western‑led bodies have indeed been exclusionary, gating the conversation by values that too often function as a euphemism for geography. A body that offers infrastructure, training and a seat at the table to states long treated as recipients rather than authors is not obviously a trap. It may be the most rational instrument available to a country that cannot build the frontier alone.

But rationality is not the same as safety, and opportunity is not the same as sovereignty. The questions that ought to occupy Ethiopia’s policymakers  and its press  are not whether the country has “arrived,” but sharper ones. Whose norms will Ethiopian officials be trained to adopt, and at whose expense? What accountability will exist, to any body or any court, when the technology is turned inward against the citizen? And what does it mean to sign a sovereignty clause with one hand while, with the other, deepening a dependency that no clause can dissolve?

A signature in Shanghai is easy. The reckoning it postpones is not. The Tribune will go on asking who, in the end, is meant to be accountable  and to whom.

E. Frashie writes on politics and technology for The Ethiopian Tribune.

20 July 2026

Editor’s Note

Weighing the Emperor

A foreword and synopsis to Professor Girma Berhanu’s defence not of Menelik II, but of the standard by which any nineteenth-century ruler should be judged.

Editorial Foreword

Few names in Ethiopian public life can empty a room or fill it with argument as quickly as that of Menelik II. He is summoned as founder and as conqueror, as the architect of a modern state and as the author of its deepest wounds — frequently in the same breath, and frequently by people who are certain about a record they have never read. It is into this charged terrain that Professor Girma Berhanu steps, not to end the quarrel but to insist that it be conducted honestly.

The essay that follows is, at heart, an argument about standards. Its central move is deceptively simple: before we ask whether Menelik was a good ruler, we must first agree on the measure — and then apply that same measure to his contemporaries. Judged by the yardsticks of twenty-first-century democracy, or through the lens of present-day ethnonational narrative alone, any nineteenth-century sovereign will be found wanting. Judged against the men who actually shared his age — Bismarck, Alexander III, the reformers of Meiji Japan, the Ottomans in retreat — a different figure emerges: a statesman who preserved his country’s sovereignty in the one decade when nearly every other African kingdom lost theirs.

The Tribune publishes this piece not as a verdict but as a discipline.

Professor Girma does not ask readers to look away from the conquest of the south and west, the redistributed land, the imperial administration that displaced local authority, or the grievances that outlived the man. He asks, instead, that these be weighed rather than wielded — set beside the achievements rather than used to erase them, and beside the conduct of other expanding states rather than examined in isolation. Where he is most provocative, he turns the question back on the present: why is one expansion remembered as nation-building and another condemned, and who profits from keeping the memory raw?

Readers will disagree with him. Some will feel he grants the emperor too much grace; others will feel the essay concedes too readily what should be defended. Both responses are welcome, because both accept the terms the author is really arguing for — that our past be studied critically, honestly, and in context, and that history be neither romanticised nor weaponised. On that, if on nothing else, this publication stands with him.

Synopsis

Responding to readers who felt his earlier essay had praised Menelik II too warmly, Professor Girma Berhanu returns not to defend the emperor uncritically but to defend a method. The right question, he argues, is not whether Menelik was hero or monster, but by what standard we judge him — and whether we would apply that same standard to the rulers who shared his era.

Set against the age of Bismarck, Meiji Japan, Tsarist Russia and the Scramble for Africa, Menelik emerges as a consequential statesman: the sovereign who defeated Italy at Adwa, modernised the army, introduced railways, telegraph, banking and ministries, and kept Ethiopia independent when only Liberia did the same across an entire continent. Yet the essay refuses to look past the cost — the conquest of southern and western regions, the unequal incorporation of peoples, the legacies of grievance that shape Ethiopia still.

Its most searching turn is toward the present: why some expansions are remembered as nation-building and others as unhealed wounds, and why Ethiopia remains unable to agree on the meaning of its own history. The answer, Professor Girma suggests, lies less with Menelik than with us.

Read the full article — unparalleled-outstanding-leadership.docx

by Professor Girma Berhanu.

The Ethiopian Tribune

Editor’s Foreword & Synopsis

Collective Stupidity

An Intellectual Infection Consuming Ethiopia’s Educated Class

Girma Berhanu (Professor) · University of Gothenburg

Editor’s Foreword

A Frenchman in Ayat once asked his masons to seal a doorway. They did the work beautifully — plumb, level, the mortar clean — and only when the last brick went in did anyone notice they had walled themselves inside. The craftsmanship was flawless. The judgement was not.

Professor Girma Berhanu offers this story midway through the essay that follows, and it is the hinge on which his whole argument turns. Ethiopia does not suffer from a shortage of skilled hands. It suffers from a shortage of the question that ought to precede the work: when this wall is finished, who will still be inside?

We publish this essay knowing precisely who will read it. The Tribune’s readership is the educated class — the graduates, the ministry advisers, the diaspora professionals, the academics, the commentators. Professor Girma is not writing about a distant elite. He is writing about us, and about himself; he says so, and the admission is what earns him the right to say the rest. An essay that accused only its enemies would be another entry in the long Ethiopian tradition of finger-pointing that he identifies as part of the disease. This one implicates its own author, and it will implicate most of those who finish it.

The charge is serious. For sixty years, he argues, Ethiopia’s intelligentsia have been present at every catastrophe — as architects, as legitimisers, or as the silent men in the room who understood exactly what was being decided and said nothing. From the student movement of the 1960s to the Derg, from the EPRDF to the present arrangement, credentials have stood in for rigour, conformity for judgement, and opportunism for principle. His roll-call of exceptions — Gebrehiwot Baykedagn, Girmame Neway, Berhanu Dinke, Getachew Maru, Berhanu Meskel Reda, Mesfin Woldemariam — is brief enough to be devastating.

Some readers will resist his account of the Orthodox tradition of learning, and they should test it. But the point he draws from it is harder to dismiss than its theological setting suggests: an education that measured authority by wisdom and humility rather than by certification produced a different kind of person from one that measures it by employability. He does not ask Ethiopia to choose tradition over modernity. He asks why it chose replacement over integration — and notes, from Bhutan, that the choice was never forced.

Readers who look for a policy prescription will not find one, and that is deliberate. The essay’s demand is prior to policy. No reform survives contact with a class that has lost the habit of asking whether it might be wrong. Intellectual humility is not the ornament of good governance; it is the precondition.

The Tribune’s editorial position has never been that Ethiopia is failed only by its rulers. It is that a country gets the silence it tolerates. Professor Girma has broken his. The reasonable response is not agreement. It is the honest self-inventory he asks for — beginning with those of us who publish.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Ethiopia’s crisis, Professor Girma Berhanu argues, is not merely political but intellectual — and its authors hold degrees.

Drawing on psychology, educational theory and six decades of Ethiopian political history, this essay diagnoses a collapse of collective intelligence within the country’s educated class: the condition in which capable individuals, acting together, repeatedly produce decisions that damage the common good. Credentials have displaced rigour, conformity has displaced independent judgement, and ambition has displaced responsibility.

The argument moves across several registers. It traces the paradox of an intelligentsia that has legitimised successive authoritarian projects since the 1960s, reading that record through Paul Hollander’s account of intellectual resentment and Noam Chomsky’s insistence that privileged access to knowledge carries a moral obligation. It contrasts a modern educational system built to certify technical competence with the Orthodox tradition of holistic formation, in which authority was measured by wisdom and humility rather than by paper — and asks why Ethiopia’s reformers chose replacement over synthesis. It examines language policy and the contested memory of Adwa as instances of the same error: the dismantling of what already works to prove a political point. And, through the Dunning–Kruger effect and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s work on confident incompetence, it turns the analysis on the diaspora and on the author himself.

Ethiopia’s talent, Professor Girma concludes, is not scarce; the institutions that would let it compound are. Reversing collective stupidity is therefore not an educational problem but a national imperative — the precondition for any reform worth attempting.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg and a regular contributor to The Ethiopian Tribune. He writes on intelligence, education and the moral responsibilities of the intellectual class.

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE  ·  THE SEWASEW COLUMN

The Devil Keeps a Subscription

In which our columnist takes a telephone call, loses an argument about football, and surrenders his page to an older, better-travelled correspondent

by Sewasew Teklemariam

I telephoned the Editor-in-Chief on Tuesday to stage an intervention. For three weeks the man has been unwell, and the presenting symptom is football — not the watching of it, but the marrying of it.

When Egypt met Argentina he sent me a video of himself, both arms aloft, roaring for Salah as though Liverpool’s finest were a cousin visiting from Bahir Dar. Ninety minutes later Argentina remembered they were Argentina, and the roar came back to me at one in the morning as a single, grief-stricken emoji.

By the weekend he had converted to Spain. On Sunday, France — vive la France, said the voice note, in an accent that would make Paris file a complaint with the African Union. On Monday I received footage of him wearing, I regret to report, an approximation of enthusiasm for England. The man contains multitudes, and every one of them is eliminated in the group stage.

“Endex,” I said, “you cannot love four teams at once. That is not passion. That is a hostage situation.”

He was not listening. He was already forwarding me something else: a shaky clip, filmed by his own trembling hand, of a small electric aircraft perched by Tower Bridge — a Virgin drone taxi, four seats, the promise of a one-way hop from Heathrow to Manchester for four hundred quid. He had, in his excitement, gone digging and unearthed a 1952 advertisement for Ethiopian Airlines, and he held the two images up to the light together like a man comparing a photograph of his youth to the face in the mirror. He was, to be precise, giddy. He was a boy on Meskel morning.

I tried to be cruel to him, because that is my function. “This is not new,” I said. “Dubai has been running the things for a year. Rwanda flies drones as air ambulances — blood over the hills to a clinic before the road even wakes up. Uganda too. The great forward-leaping United Kingdom is, if anything, late. Why are you weeping over a taxi?”

There was a silence on the line of the kind that changes the subject of a column. And then he told me why.

“Because if I think of home,” he said, “we have no team the world will trouble itself to name. We have drones — oh, we have drones in abundance — but ours are flown to photograph the mightiness of a corridor, or to settle an argument in the north from four kilometres up. A man back home is not permitted the small, clean joy of a goal that decides nothing, or a flying toy that means nothing, because at home nothing is ever allowed to mean nothing. Everything must mean the land. The blood. The ethnicity. So when I see a child’s contraption carry four strangers over a river, I let myself be a child for ninety seconds. It is the last citizenship no one has got around to revoking.”

I put down the telephone and found I could not write my usual column. Something older wanted the page. So this week I have given it away — to a correspondent with an exceedingly long memory and impeccable references. I have changed nothing. I only transcribe.

A Letter from Lucifer

You kept the book.

Of all the offences I have watched a nation commit, that is the one for which I cannot forgive you, Ethiopia. You kept the book. When the rest of the earth let Henok slip out of its canon, out of its memory, out of its very alphabets, you alone held him — in Ge’ez, on skin, in the cold dark of your churches, for two thousand years. Do you understand what you were guarding all that while? You were guarding the transcript of my family’s trial.

Two hundred of them came down. You have the number; you kept it. Down onto the shoulder of Hermon, where they took the daughters of men to wife and taught them the arts I still consider my finest export — the smelting of metal into blades, the beating of ornaments, the painting of a face, the reading of a sky, the whole curriculum of wanting more than you were given. And of that union came the giants, who ate the harvest, and then the herds, and then the men, and at the last turned upon one another until the ground itself lodged a complaint with Heaven.

And one scribe walked up — one man, Henok, who walked with God until God was all there was — and he filed, on behalf of the eaten earth, a petition for justice against those of us who had come down from above. Justice, from below, against the powers of the air. I have never entirely recovered from the impertinence of it.

Once you were the blameless ones — that was Homer’s word for you, not mine, though I would have chosen it. I have held Aksumite coin in the bazaars of India. I watched your sails cross to Arabia and put a king upon Himyar. I stood by when Mani set your name beside Rome and Persia among the four great powers of the world, and I remember Kush, and I remember Sheba going up to Jerusalem to test a rumour with riddles. You were the hand stretched out unto God before any other nation thought to raise one. I knew you when you were a rumour that frightened empires. Do not imagine I have come to mock. I have come, if anything, in something close to reverence.

Because the book has come true a second time, and you built the machine yourselves. My Watchers descend again — only now they are Turkish and Iranian and Chinese steel, and they come down out of the same sky onto the same highland, and they teach the same forbidden art, which is the art of ending a person from a great and sanitary distance. And the giant that this union begets is no longer a body. It is a corridor. It is a project. It is a development that consumes the neighbourhood, and then the district, and then the name off the map, and photographs itself doing so, and calls the eating progress. You have automated the sixth chapter of Genesis. I did not have to lift a finger.

And Henok’s cry — the part that so unsettled me, the petition that went up and was heard — you have kept that too. But, being an industrious people, you have improved it. The complaint no longer ascends to any throne. It ascends to a committee. It is received. It is minuted. It is, at a distance calibrated to the millimetre, forever arriving — the inquiry that will convene, the commission that will report, the reconciliation that awaits only the right moment, which is by careful design every moment but this one. A grave will lie remarkably quiet for years if you promise it an investigation. Your ancestors petitioned the Ancient of Days. You petition a subcommittee. It is the single most elegant theological advance since my own departure from the office, and you accomplished it without any help from me.

Yet the masterpiece — the thing I would hang on the wall, if Hell troubled itself with walls — is what you have persuaded a man to do with a single mortal life. He wakes with one, exactly one, and you have talked him into spending the whole of it upon the question of where his grandfather stood. Not upon the flying machine. Not upon the goal that means nothing. Not upon the book. Upon the land, the blood, the tribe — announced from the podium, litigated in the minibus, wept over at the funeral, argued through the night until the throat is raw; a nation talking itself hoarse about its ancestors precisely so that it need never once look up and notice the Watcher circling above its own roof.

So, yes. I am joyful. Why on earth would I not be? You perform my liturgy more faithfully than my own choir ever managed, and you do it in vestments, and you believe it is worship of something else.

But your Editor-in-Chief has cost me something, and I will be honest with you, for whatever else you have been told of me, I am precise. That foolish man with his flying taxi. That grown editor bellowing for a country not his own over a ball that settles nothing whatever. That is the one commodity I have never been able to manufacture and never been able to abide — a gladness that belongs to no faction. He was not being an Amhara when he cheered. He was not being an Oromo, or a Tigrayan, or a Somali, or a Sidama. He was being a child, and a child’s delight is the last free country left on the earth — the one border I have never learnt to close. Every other joy I can route through a tribe and tax at the frontier. Not that one. It arrives untaxed, from nowhere, meaning nothing, and it undoes an evening of my work.

So keep the football. Keep the silly taxi. Keep — and it costs me to say it — keep the book. For as long as one of you still remembers how to be gladdened by a thing that means nothing at all, Henok’s petition stands unheard-of-as-yet but not withdrawn, and my long trial is not yet won.

I would burn that book, you understand, if I could reach it. You keep it in Ge’ez, on skin, in the dark, behind a curtain, guarded by men who cannot read the empires it frightened. Clever of you. I taught you nothing. That, from the very beginning, has been the whole of my difficulty with your country.

— transcribed, and not one word invented, by S.T.

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  independent since 2012

Editorial Foreword

The Spear We Helped to Forge

A foreword to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay on South Africa’s anti-immigrant violence and the shared history that makes it unbearable to watch.

There are betrayals that wound precisely because of what came before them. When a stranger turns on you, the injury is simple. When someone you once armed and sheltered does, the injury carries the whole weight of the history you shared. It is this second, heavier grief that runs beneath Professor Girma Berhanu’s latest essay for this newspaper, and it is why we commend it to our readers with particular care.

The Professor of the University of Gothenburg, and a contributor whose scholarship has enriched these pages across many months, on subjects ranging from the Amhara question to the health of Ethiopian democracy turns here to the mob violence that has once more engulfed African migrants in South Africa. Ethiopians have been among the dead. He asks us to hold two facts in the same hand: that our compatriots are being burned, beaten and driven from their livelihoods; and that it was Ethiopia, six decades ago, that helped teach the men of Umkhonto we Sizwe how to fight.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a matter of record one this newspaper has itself reported at first hand, through the testimony of an Ethiopian officer who trained fighters of the Spear of the Nation for the armed struggle. When Professor Berhanu describes the young Nelson Mandela receiving military instruction on Ethiopian soil in 1962, he is naming a debt that South Africa’s own liberation history acknowledges. The essay’s force lies in the distance between that debt and the present cruelty.

Readers will know that the Tribune has devoted sustained coverage to this crisis from “Pass Freely and Without Hindrance” to “The Deadline and the Debt” and our analysis of the countermeasures now open to African states. Professor Berhanu widens the frame from policy to conscience. He is not content to catalogue the violence; he asks what African solidarity was ever for, if it dissolves the moment the shooting stops and the invoices arrive.

We are grateful, as ever, for his continued generosity to our readership, and proud to carry his voice. A synopsis follows; the essay may be read in full via the link below.

— The Editors, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Professor Berhanu builds his essay in three movements.

He opens on the violence itself: the recurring waves of mob attacks on foreign African nationals, justified in the language of stolen jobs and illegal residence, and the human wreckage they leave behind the dead, the looted shops, the displaced families. He notes that some governments, Nigeria among them, have moved to evacuate their citizens and even to document their losses for future compensation, while Ethiopia, he argues, has too often stood by. From this he draws the essay’s two organising questions: what concrete measures could end the violence, and how might African states and institutions be mobilised to hold South Africa to account?

The central section is a work of historical retrieval. Here he sets out Ethiopia’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle: the military training of the ANC’s armed wing, including Mandela’s own instruction in 1962; the diplomatic and political campaigning against the apartheid regime; the seat of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; the moral leadership of Emperor Haile Selassie; and the deeper symbolism of Adwa in 1896 and of an Ethiopia that never fell. Solidarity, he reminds us, was not a slogan but a policy paid for in scarce resources and, elsewhere on the continent, in lives.

He then turns to the anatomy of the violence in present-day South Africa: the structural drivers of unemployment, inequality and poverty; the scapegoating of migrants against the weight of the evidence; and government responses he judges long on condemnation and enforcement yet short on prevention. Most pointedly, he sets out the paradox that animates the piece that a wealthy minority, insulated by private security and now courted for expedited asylum abroad, escapes the street-level fury that instead falls upon the poorest and least protected. Civil society, he argues, must carry much of the work that policing alone cannot.

The essay closes where it began with Ethiopia, and with a charge against the Ethiopian state, whose apparent indifference to its citizens abroad Professor Berhanu names as a second tragedy laid atop the first. The victims, he insists, deserve justice; their families deserve compassion; and Africa deserves better than a future in which those who once stood together against oppression are divided by fear.

The Architect of Silent Revolutions

Why Dr Tesfaye Mekonnen Bayleyegn’s Narrative Demands a Reckoning

By Endex  ·  Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over the halls of global public health — the hush that descends upon the blueprints of grand institutions once the ribbon has been cut and the cameras have gone home. We are handed a sanitised, well-lit history of our continent’s progress, a narrative in which ideas arrive fully formed out of the ether of bureaucracy. Yet every so often a voice rises from the margins to remind us that behind every monument to progress there lies a forgotten struggle.

I recently sat with the unfolding drama of the Negere Metsahift programme. Its host, Endalegeta, surrounded by the warm intellectual camaraderie of a studio full of eager minds, welcomed a man whose career has been a defiant odyssey: Dr Tesfaye Mekonnen Bayleyegn. Watching the exchange, it became clear that this was no ordinary book promotion. It was an act of reclamation — a masterclass in how a single, dogged intellect navigates the treacherous currents of institutional politics.

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Consider first his turn towards the ancestral. In an age when “holistic medicine” is too readily dismissed as a passing fashion, Dr Tesfaye brings a clinician’s rigour to what he lived through in his youth. He recounted, with disarming intimacy, an illness that struck him in Harer, where his mother — guided by inherited wisdom — treated him with a preparation of coffee and honey.

To the untrained eye this is folklore. To Dr Tesfaye it is foundational biochemistry. He dissected the remedy with an epidemiologist’s precision: the coffee behaving as a natural activated charcoal, its vast surface area adsorbing toxins and easing gastrointestinal distress; the honey acting at once as an osmotic agent and a natural antimicrobial. By mapping ancestral practice onto modern physiology, he exposes a deep failure in the medical education exported to Africa — the reflex to discard the indigenous in favour of the imported, even where the former offers cheaper, more sustainable, more accessible relief.

Medicine is not merely the chemistry of the pill; it is the environment and the ecosystem of the patient.

This is no mere anecdote; it is an epistemological charge. Across his career he has watched the Western-trained elite suffer a kind of “clinical blindness”, unable to register efficacy unless it arrives stamped with an international pharmacological seal. His insistence on subjecting these practices to rigorous scientific scrutiny is not nostalgia but liberation — a creed that has shaped everything he has done: look to what is local, look to what is available, and let science do the validating.

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Carrying so integrated a perspective home to Ethiopia, however, was never going to be a simple homecoming. His training had been forged in the rigorous, community-focused, Spanish-language medical system of Cuba — a radical departure from the models that prevailed in Addis. On his return he collided head-on with the entrenched Anglophone elite.

In a moment of striking candour on the programme, he recalled the quiet dread of those early days. He would cross to the post office building opposite the Black Lion Hospital to sit through English tutorials, gripped by a peculiar and lonely fear: that a patient, or a patient’s relative, might discover their doctor in a classroom, wrestling with the very language deemed essential to professional prestige. A man of medicine, he lived the insecurities of a layman, desperate to bridge the gulf between his Cuban formation and the linguistic gatekeeping of his homeland.

It was more than a struggle with grammar; it was an identity crisis manufactured by a colonial hangover. Within the hospital hierarchy, his inability to wield English with the polished arrogance of his peers was read as a deficit of intellect. He was an outsider in his own professional home — and the resilience required to challenge a system that prized the pedigree of an accent above the accuracy of a diagnosis was considerable.

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Perhaps the most tender passage of the evening came unannounced, with the surprise appearance of one of his Cuban teachers. The educator spoke with evident pride of those formative years, remembering Dr Tesfaye not merely as a student but as a natural leader. In the demanding world of medical training, the young Tesfaye had marshalled his cohort with rare tactical intelligence, instituting a reward-based system that set exacting academic and practical goals. Those who met them were rewarded with excursions — trips to the islands, celebrations among the Cuban community — that hardened morale and forged lasting bonds.

“I am pleased to see him achieve his par excellence,” the old mentor offered, his voice thick with nostalgia. He closed with a gesture of warmth, thanking Endalegeta for hosting so poignant a dialogue and wishing his former pupil long life, good health and enduring influence. It was a fitting reminder that the man who now confronts global institutions once negotiated the delicate politics of international medical education with the very grit he carries still.

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That instinct for reform hardened during his internship, when his attention fixed on the brutal arithmetic of the accident and emergency ward. He watched a tide of road-traffic casualties wash in — the tragic by-product of an urban infrastructure evolving faster than it could be regulated. Ethiopia was then a place where the price of a human life was too often measured by how quickly a family could gather the cash for gauze and saline.

He noticed a systemic cruelty: patients with minor and moderate injuries were left undertreated for the simple reason that nothing existed to cover the cost of their care. The insurance industry, he concluded, was built to value property over persons. So he launched a persistent, methodical campaign to compel it to finance emergency treatment.

If you can insure a machine, you bear a duty to insure the life that machine is capable of destroying.

His argument was elegant and politically incendiary. This was not a plea for charity but a demand for accountability — a shift from mere compensation for damaged property to the financing of treatment. He recalls late nights with lawmakers and insurance regulators, met with the cold arithmetic of profit margins and warnings that “no-fault” cover would unleash a flood of claims. He answered with clinical data, tracing the long economic drain that trauma-related permanent disability inflicts on the national workforce.

It was he who helped draft the technical briefs that eventually persuaded legislators to treat road-accident victims as a public-health liability deserving of mandatory insurance funding. Ethiopia’s recent adoption of such measures is the delayed harvest of that advocacy — proof of his gift for weaving clinical reality into national policy, and of his conviction that a doctor’s duty reaches beyond the patient on the table to the systemic failures that placed them there.

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And yet it is his largest contribution — the conceptualisation of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention — that sits at the heart of his present grievance. As early as 2012, while others still debated the abstract necessity of continental health security, Dr Tesfaye was, in his own phrase, doing the hustle.

His book, Abatu Manew? — Who is its Father? — reads as a forensic audit of what he calls “the institutional heist”. Between 2012 and 2015 he laboured in the trenches of the African Union’s policy architecture, drafting the technical frameworks that would let the Africa CDC function at all. He documents a sequence of what can only be called bureaucratic gaslighting: being quietly dropped from email chains; watching his drafts resurface under the names of external consultants who had played no part in the original design; seeing his name lifted from the foundational documents in the official archive.

The book follows the timeline without flinching — from his first pitch to health ministers, through the backroom drafting sessions, to the moment he understood that the institution was being branded away from him. It is a chilling account of how large international bodies strip the authorship from individuals so that the organisation may appear “neutral” and “politically palatable”. His meticulous record stands as a counter-narrative, evidence that the institution grew not from boardroom consensus but from the relentless, thankless labour of a single mind. He built the bridge for African scientists, he argues, only to find that the structure preferred to own the result rather than honour its origin. This was no ordinary disagreement; it was a contest for the soul of the organisation, waged in real time as he watched his intellectual property dissolve into the public domain.

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Today, from Atlanta, Georgia, Dr Tesfaye remains a figure of quiet, persistent service. His formal title at the United States CDC — Chief of the Environmental Epidemiology Unit — anchors his professional profile, yet his energies have turned increasingly towards community. Those close to him describe a man deeply woven into diaspora life, above all through his devotion to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, a faith that grounds his identity and stands in sharp relief against the global battles he has fought.

His spirituality is no retreat from the world but the ballast of his pursuit of justice. Within the church he is mentor, guide and servant, drawing solace from the ancient traditions of his ancestors — traditions that echo his holistic view of medicine, in which health is the balance of body, mind and spirit.

His family life reflects the same reverence for learning. A proud father of three, he counts two sons who have earned master’s degrees and a daughter now reading for her doctorate in the United Kingdom. That devotion to education — in his own life and in his children’s — underscores a conviction that knowledge is the only currency that finally counts against institutional indifference. He speaks of his children not as extensions of his ego but as the next generation of architects, those who will one day grasp why he spent so long fighting the ghosts of bureaucracy. His days in Atlanta are given to quiet cultivation and to mentoring young Ethiopian professionals across the diaspora, so that they might not fall into the traps that once caught him, and might learn to assert their worth within a system built to overlook them.

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Dr Tesfaye’s work, then, is not simply a book; it is the reclaiming of territory. In naming it Abatu Manew? he is not asking a question so much as issuing a challenge to the power structures of global health — a demand that we account for who holds the pen when history is written.

His story is a warning to the wider scientific community. When we refuse to credit the individual architects of our institutions, we do not merely commit an act of professional theft; we deter the very innovation we profess to prize. When a system treats its visionaries as liabilities, it guarantees that the institution will remain a shell — efficient in its administration, bankrupt in its soul.

In the end, Dr Tesfaye Mekonnen Bayleyegn asks neither for charity nor for pity. He asks for the truth. Institutions, he reminds us, are only ever as strong as the integrity of their origins; and where those origins rest on erasure, the whole edifice stays fragile. It is time we honoured not only the fathers of the bodies that guard our lives but the ones who did the labour of building them — even when the boardrooms decided they were no longer convenient to the story.

He has done the work, he has paid the price, and now he claims the record. It is a lesson in intellectual courage that every young scientist, policymaker and historian would do well to study. Truth, as he has so forcefully reminded us, cannot be buried for good; it merely waits for a voice brave enough to exhume it. And we are left with the uncomfortable question his book presses upon us: if we cannot be honest about the history of the institutions that protect our lives, what other truths might we yet sacrifice at the altar of institutional convenience?

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The Ethiopian Tribune

Comment · Comparative Analysis

The Language of the Palace

The Prime Minister has found his ideal witness — a traveller who films the wilderness and now sits in the palace. China’s Golden Week shows what the performance leaves out.

By Leeshan Kuratey

There is a moment, near the end of the Prime Minister’s tourism interview with NBC, when the performance briefly shows its wiring. He has spent the better part of an hour being expansive — five economic pillars, a global tourism market he sizes at $12.6 trillion, Bale and Jimma rendered as undiscovered Edens — and then, asked for a closing message, he arrives at the Ethiopian taxi driver. The driver, he complains, collects a passenger at Bole and at once begins reciting woes: there is no work, times are hard, we are suffering. He does this, the Prime Minister says, to manufacture sympathy and extract a small tip, and so effectively that by the time the visitor reaches the hotel he will not leave his room. Then comes the tell. In other countries, Abiy observes admiringly, the very route along which a tourist is driven is arranged so that he does not see anything ugly.

Hold that sentence. It is the most honest thing said in the interview, and its subject is not the taxi driver.

But before we weigh what the Prime Minister says, it is worth looking at whom he chose to say it to, because in a set piece the casting is part of the argument. The interviewer is not a diplomatic correspondent or an economist. He is a travel presenter named Henok, and his presence in that chair is the first performance in a programme made of them.

The Man in the Tent

Henok’s ascent is its own small parable. He built a public profile by appealing to strangers to fund his journeys into the remote countryside, pitching the wilderness as latent revenue — the next money-making destination, waiting to be filmed and sold. The pledges came, and with them a berth at a television channel whose independence is, to put it gently, contested, and which functions in practice as a promotional register for the mood the state wishes to project. The output is instantly recognisable: the drone sweeps, the tripod-steadied panoramas, the long hours of footage compressed into a single glossy episode, the presenter framed against the horizon, eating with his entourage, arriving by four-by-four.

There is nothing wrong with a keen traveller; the country could use a hundred honest ones. But let us be exact about the genre, because his admirers are not. This is not natural history in any Attenborough sense — there is no science under it, no institution behind the lens holding it to a standard, no argument being tested against the world. It is a man of large enthusiasm and visible self-regard performing the discovery of a country for an audience primed to applaud the discoverer. The wilderness, in this telling, is chiefly the backdrop against which the traveller gets to be seen being intrepid. It is self-portraiture with scenery.

And that is precisely the man the campaign required — which is why the striking fact about the interview is not that Henok is in it, but where he is sitting. He has been brought in from the tent to the courtyard, seated, as the Prime Minister points out, inside the Entoto Bete Giorgis museum, itself a showpiece of the Gebeta-Lesheger beautification programme. The wilderness auteur has been installed in the palace, and the palace has notes for him. We will come back to the notes.

A Holiday, Engineered

To judge whether any of this amounts to a tourism strategy or merely a tableau, you need a control case — somewhere that decided, deliberately, to build a domestic tourism economy and managed it. Golden Week is that case, and it was no accident. In September 1999, at a moment of stimulus urgency after the Asian financial crisis, China’s State Council stitched statutory holidays to adjacent weekends to manufacture week-long national breaks, expressly to prise open a domestic tourism market. The first National Day Golden Week, in October 1999, produced 28 million domestic trips and 14.1 billion yuan in tourism revenue. By this year’s “Super Golden Week” the eight-day total reached 888 million trips and 809 billion yuan — about $113.6 billion. The scale is almost not worth arguing with.

But — and here is the part the Ethiopian adaptation quietly skips — Golden Week was never merely a holiday and a photo opportunity. It was demand engineering laid over a mobility base the Chinese state was building in the same years: railway, motorway and aviation capacity all expanding together. The calendar told a billion people they were free to move; the infrastructure meant they actually could. Concentrated leisure time is the spark. The functioning road is the engine. Remove the engine and the spark merely illuminates a stationary car.

And even China’s version strains — a nitpicker is obliged to say so. Overcrowding set in by the mid-2000s; the May Day Golden Week was scrapped in 2008 and only restored in 2019; and this year, for all the record 888 million trips, average spending per trip ran about three per cent below pre-pandemic 2019. Commentators called it “Golden Weak.” I raise it because it bears on the argument: the most successful piece of domestic-tourism engineering in modern history is a story of relentless capacity-building and constant correction — the precise opposite of a performance.

The Case, Stated Fairly

Abiy is not wrong about everything, and a column that pretends otherwise is worth nothing. His core logic is sound: unlike an export, a tourist arrives and spends inside the country — no shipping, no letters of credit, the consumer coming to the shoe rather than the shoe being sent to the consumer. Private capital is genuinely following the state’s lead, and I will not pretend it isn’t: at Wenji, Gorgora and Arba Minch, private resorts are rising beside the government’s, and the Kuriftu project at Arba Minch — 53 villas on 52,000 square metres, more than 300 jobs promised — is, by the accounts, a real and better-built thing than its predecessors. The perception gap is real too: the diaspora arrival who braces for famine and finds Bahir Dar is a genuine phenomenon, and a country’s image can lag its reality by a decade.

His claimed results, if accurate, are considerable. He puts this year’s arrivals above four million, domestic trips at 50.16 million, tourism foreign exchange above $5.2 billion, international conferences at 204, and GDP growth at 10.2 per cent. I write “if accurate” deliberately — and not only because these are his figures, mangled here and there in the telling, none independently before me. It is also that where independent counts exist, they do not match: analyses of the 2025 rebound put arrivals nearer 1.5 million and revenue around $2 billion, less than half the numbers the Prime Minister recites. Treat his figures as claims entered into evidence, not findings.

The Ground the Claims Stand On

A tourism economy is only as strong as the road to the destination, and here the interview parts company with its own government. Only last year the Ministry of Tourism published a revised policy that quietly concedes almost everything the interview denies: that the sector has failed to deliver its expected economic contribution; that progress on new destinations has been minimal; that tourist sites remain inaccessible; that marketing has been ineffective; and that no conducive business environment yet exists. That is not an opposition pamphlet. It is the state auditing itself — and then, on NBC, performing the opposite.

Begin with the road. A study covering just 40 per cent of the country — the Trade Minister’s own figure — identified 290 illegal checkpoints: not service posts but extraction points, run by municipal officers, revenue officials and local militia to tax the movement of goods. Drivers hauling cement the 300 kilometres from the Lemi factory towards Dessie have reported being charged at a dozen of them. In a single fortnight last year, transporters’ associations counted dozens of truckers abducted on Amhara routes alone. Even the Addis–Djibouti corridor, which carries over 95 per cent of the country’s import–export trade, is not spared. The complaint the taxi driver makes to the tourist — that moving through this country is hard and dear — is not a sob story. It is a field report.

And here is a detail the Prime Minister might have checked before reaching for the driver as his villain: his own Ministry of Tourism has already put airport drivers through image-training, in partnership with a ride company, to school them in the first impressions they give visitors. The state trained the man. Then the head of state, on air, blamed him.

The collapse is most legible where the tourists used to be. At Yeha, site of a temple older than the Aksumite kingdom, the visitors who once came in numbers are simply gone, the hotels shuttered, the young leaving. In Aksum, a hotel that opened in 2020 with scores of rooms, a pool and a spa now sits mostly empty, bookings cancelled by guests frightened of the next round of fighting. And in Lalibela, roughly half of the 37 hotels in the local association have received foreclosure notices — thirty days to settle ballooning debts or forfeit to creditors, chief among them the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. Here is the detail I cannot get past: the same reporting that carries the foreclosure notices also carries the Tourism Ministry’s assurance that the country welcomed around a million tourists in nine months, up nine per cent. The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The security picture is why. Foreign offices in Washington and London still warn against travel to the very regions that hold the crown jewels; the wars in Tigray and Amhara devastated Lalibela and Gondar directly. Nor is the paralysis only rural. In the capital, the beautification that supplies the campaign’s most flattering footage has driven displacement and sent rents climbing in a city where most housing is already classed as slum — and the tourism bet is visibly misfiring even there, with hotels raised for a projected boom now standing empty, some repurposed into hospitals. As critics of the programme have put it, Ethiopia is becoming a country divided by mobility: the rulers travelling above, the ruled trapped below.

Beneath the resorts sits an architecture of failed lending. Late in 2024, Parliament approved 900 billion birr — about $7.4 billion — in bonds, of which 845.3 billion goes to settle the non-performing loans state enterprises owe the Commercial Bank; three of them — Electric Power, Railways and Sugar — had between them run up something on the order of $15 billion in bad loans. The country defaulted on its sovereign debt at the end of 2023. None of this was an accident. As the economist Eyob Tesfaye has argued, public infrastructure came to serve as the language of power — feasibility studies and financial prudence giving way to speed, symbolism and political command; the label of the developmental state borrowed without the institutions that once made it credible; the banking system bent to politics until deposits were funnelled into projects with little prospect of return. What the interview sells as a pillar, this reading takes for spectacle raised over eroding foundations.

For a parable of what this state builds, read the Federal Anti-Corruption Commission on irrigation. Arjo Didesa, in Oromia, was launched fifteen years ago at 755 million birr, to be finished in eighteen months; thirteen years on it has swallowed close to seven billion. Megech, in Amhara, began at 2.4 billion birr — and how much it has since consumed depends on which official body you believe, the Commission’s figure and the auditors’ differing by a margin that is itself a scandal (the Commission cites some 18 billion birr; other audits put the swollen cost nearer 6.4). Either way, the aggregate is the number that should have stopped the interview cold: thirteen large-scale schemes meant to irrigate more than 550,000 hectares have, after nearly 61 billion birr, managed under 44,000 — about eight per cent. The Prime Minister visited Megech and called the river diversion an “important stage.” He is fluent, we might say, in the language of the important stage.

These are not separate failures; they compose a single, self-reinforcing loop. Grand corruption inflates and diverts, loading the state with debt; the debt forces maintenance to be deferred; the neglected roads turn dangerous and are colonised by the roadblock tax; the transit fees feed inflation and erode trust; and the tourism now marketed as salvation withers precisely in the regions where the loop runs hottest. You cannot photograph your way out of a loop.

What “Performative” Actually Means

Now the notes. Near the end, the Prime Minister delivers his verdict on the genre in the chair opposite him: Ethiopia, he says, needs not one Henok but many, and the presenter’s labour must be recognised. Those who would criticise the tourism-influencers, he adds, are simply fools. Read the scene for what it is. A man who built a brand performing the discovery of the countryside has been seated in a restored palace and told, by the head of state, that the nation needs more of him — while the same head of state, minutes earlier, admired the foreign practice of routing visitors past anything unsightly. The personal performance and the party’s performance have fused. The traveller performs intrepid discovery; the state performs benevolent custody; and the two of them, in a museum built by the beautification programme, agree that the outstanding problem is the attitude of a man earning tips at the airport.

That is the precise sense in which the whole exercise is performative — not merely showy, but constitutively about the surface rather than the substrate. Critics have a name for it: performative nationalism, a choreographed display of unity and prosperity staged against the lived reality of millions who cannot cross their own country. Golden Week engineered the substrate and let the appearance follow. This programme inverts the order: build the resort, restore the palace, fly the drone, seat the wanderer in the museum — and then locate the remaining gap in the disposition of a taxi driver.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it. The calendar cannot summon the movement the militia is taxing — and no amount of footage, however lovingly edited, can shoot around a country the government’s own policy admits it has failed to make reachable.

The Question of Sequence

Let me be fair to the other side of my own argument. None of this makes the endowment fake — Ethiopia’s variety is real, and Abiy describes it well. None of it makes the private investment imaginary or the perception gap costless; it is entirely possible that arrivals really are climbing, that the conference trade really is growing, that some of these resorts will, in a calmer decade, look like foresight rather than vanity.

The question the interview cannot answer — the question it is arranged not to answer — is one of sequence. China did not ask its citizens to perform prosperity while it built the roads; it built the roads, then let them travel. Ethiopia is being asked to celebrate a tourism boom from inside a mobility collapse, to admire the palace while the corridor is taxed at gunpoint, and to accept a crowdfunded traveller in a courtyard as evidence of a country made whole. Tourism can be a pillar. But a pillar is a load-bearing thing, and you do not test one by photographing it. You test it by putting weight on it — and the weight, in this country, is still stuck at a checkpoint, being told by a frightened driver that yes, unfortunately, the road ahead is worse than it looks.

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A Note on Sources

Golden Week: China Daily and CNBC (1999 and 2025 official data). The revised tourism policy’s admission of “strategic failure” (sites inaccessible; marketing ineffective; no conducive business environment): Ministry of Tourism, via The Reporter. Ministry image-training for airport drivers: Ministry of Tourism newsletter. Checkpoints (290 across 40 per cent of the country; corridor >95 per cent; Lemi–Dessie; Amhara abductions): ICTD (citing the Minister of Trade), EHRC and The Reporter. Yeha and Aksum hotel collapse: The Reporter and Reuters reporting. Lalibela foreclosures beside the one-million-arrivals claim: Addis Fortune. Empty Addis hotels converted to hospitals, and the megaproject-as-spectacle reading: analyses of Ethiopia’s megaproject economy, including Eyob Tesfaye in Addis Fortune (argument paraphrased). State-enterprise debt (900bn-birr bond; 845.3bn in CBE NPLs; ~$15bn at EEP/Railways/Sugar; 2023 default): Bloomberg, The Reporter, Birr Metrics. Irrigation (Arjo Didesa; disputed Megech cost; 13 schemes at ~8 per cent of 550,000 hectares): Federal Anti-Corruption Commission and The Reporter. Independent 2025 arrivals estimate (~1.5m; ~$2bn): tourism-branding analysis, set against the Prime Minister’s NBC claims of 4m+ arrivals, 50.16m domestic trips, $5.2bn forex, 204 conferences and 10.2 per cent GDP growth, reproduced here as claims pending independent confirmation. “Performative nationalism” and “rulers above, ruled below” are critics’ framings.