ANALYSIS

Two Fronts, One Army

As Abiy Ahmed forms his new government, he faces a rebel alliance in the field, rumours of disloyalty in his own barracks, and a national dialogue report that offers another way out. What he does to guard against one threat may weaken his defences against the other.

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 September 2026

When the House of Peoples’ Representatives opens its new term in the coming weeks, Abiy Ahmed will do what every Ethiopian prime minister does at the start of a mandate: name a government. The last time he did so, in October 2021, after an election held in the middle of a war, he used the occasion to place twenty institutions under his own office, among them the National Intelligence and Security Service and the Information Network Security Agency. The cabinet he names this time will tell us more than any parliamentary speech about how he reads the danger now facing him. That danger has two faces, and they point in opposite directions.

The threat in the open

Late on Sunday 20 September, Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement, read a founding statement on the TPLF-controlled Tigrai TV. It announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, a coalition of seven organisations: the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (Ugugumo), the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement and the Gumuz People’s Democratic Movement. Its declared purpose is to remove what it calls the Prosperity Party’s personalist and dictatorial regime and to install an inclusive transitional government.

There is no doubt about the coalition’s reach. Its members claim constituencies in six of the country’s twelve regional states, and in Amhara and Oromia they are already at war with the state. Its cohesion is much less certain. Fano fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF in 2020–22, and Amhara and Tigray still both claim Western Tigray. Within a day of the announcement, OLA figures were describing their participation as a procedural consensus, not submission to a unified military command. The founding text commits members to resolve their differences according to the “freely expressed will” of their peoples. Applied to Wolkait, that formula would divide the alliance’s two largest partners.

Addis Ababa’s first responses were predictable. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, told Reuters that the groups had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing. Asmara has denied such accusations before, and no evidence has been published. On Monday the Ethiopian Media Authority prohibited news outlets from using Tigrai TV as a source.

The threat in the barracks

The second threat is harder to see. For some time, claims have circulated on social media that elements of the officer corps are prepared to move against the Prime Minister. Some of these claims are attributed to the exiled Oromo politician Jawar Mohammed. The Tribune has not been able to verify them, and nothing in this analysis depends on their being true. Rumours of disloyalty in the barracks shape a ruler’s behaviour whether or not they are accurate. In a system as personalised as Abiy’s, the perception of a threat is a threat in its own right.

The rumours also carry a politics of their own. In July, according to a ZeHabesha summary of a TikTok discussion, Jawar warned against coalitions formed only to topple Abiy without first agreeing on what would replace him. A transition managed by the army and a victory by an armed alliance are very different outcomes. Those who talk up the first may be positioning themselves against the second.

Nor is the idea alien to Ethiopian history. The Imperial Bodyguard moved against Haile Selassie in 1960. The Derg dismantled the monarchy from within the armed forces in 1974. Senior generals tried to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1989. And in June 2019, on the night of the killings in Bahir Dar, the Chief of the General Staff, Se’are Mekonnen, was shot dead in Addis Ababa. Every Ethiopian ruler has had reason to watch his own officers.

“Every lock he fits against his generals is a weight he hangs on his soldiers.”

The coup-proofing dilemma

Political scientists call it coup-proofing. A ruler rotates his commanders, divides the chain of command, promotes loyalists over the able, and builds parallel forces that answer to him alone. Each measure makes a coup harder, and each makes the army worse at fighting. Abiy must now do both at once: field an army strong enough to hold Amhara, Oromia and the Tigray frontier, while making sure that no part of it is strong enough, or united enough, to turn on him.

The precedent he will least want to hear is 1989. After the failed coup, Mengistu purged his senior officer corps and later had a number of its generals executed. The army that remained was loyal, and it was hollow. Within two years it collapsed before the EPRDF. The lesson is not that Abiy faces the same fate. It is that a regime which answers an open threat and a hidden one with the same instrument, a more tightly controlled army, can win the second contest and lose the first.

What the new government is likely to do

The first and most visible move will be at the top of the security state. Expect changes at the Ministry of Defence and in the general staff, and possibly further agencies brought under the Prime Minister’s office on the 2021 model. Expect, too, another round of promotions. Abiy has used mass promotion before to widen the pool of officers who owe their rank to him personally, and a larger pool of generals is a smaller risk from any one of them.

The second will be legal. The ban on Tigrai TV looks like an opening move, not a final one. The government has declared states of emergency before, nationally in November 2021 and in Amhara in August 2023, and it has designated armed movements as terrorist organisations, including the TPLF in 2021 before the designation was lifted after Pretoria. A designation of the alliance as a whole would make contact with any of its members a crime. That would reach far beyond the fighters, to intermediaries, diaspora organisers and journalists.

The third will be an effort to split the alliance. Its seams are visible, and Addis Ababa knows where they are. The ONLF can be reminded of its 2018 agreement, and the smaller Afar and Benishangul movements can be courted locally with offers of posts and budgets. Tigray’s own divisions give the government room to manoeuvre, as does the existence of Fano factions outside the AFNM. With the OLA, the government has already shown in its separate 2024 agreement with a breakaway commander that it prefers to peel off factions rather than negotiate with movements. Every member that signs a separate peace weakens the claim that the alliance speaks for Ethiopia’s peoples.

The fourth will be to externalise the threat. By naming Eritrea as the alliance’s paymaster, Addis Ababa converts a domestic insurgency into foreign aggression. That is useful for rallying nationalist opinion, and useful for binding an uneasy army to a common enemy. It is also dangerous. Combined with the government’s long-running rhetoric about access to the Red Sea, it builds a momentum towards interstate war that may prove easier to start than to stop.

The fifth will be aimed at those who spread the rumours. If talk of disloyal commanders worries the palace, it will act against the people spreading it. Jawar Mohammed was charged once before, in 2020. Renewed proceedings against him in absentia, pressure on Oromo Federalist Congress figures still inside the country, and action against journalists who amplify the claims are all plausible.

Finally, there will be the language of dialogue. The government will continue to present the National Dialogue as the peaceful route that the alliance has refused. It may repeat the gesture of 2021, when three opposition figures were brought into the cabinet, while keeping every security portfolio in trusted hands. Whether the dialogue amounts to more than language depends on what the new government does with the Commission’s report.

The Commission’s offer

The new government will not start from a blank page. The National Dialogue Commission was due to hand its report to the outgoing parliament before 22 September. It followed a 38-day conference in Addis Ababa at which more than 4,000 delegates debated over 400 agenda items under eight pillars: nation-building; government structure and electoral systems; federal cities; religious affairs; institution-building; social and economic questions; corruption and good governance; and peace-building. The full text has not yet been published, and the Commission insists that its recommendations are advisory, not binding. But the proposals reported to have emerged from it add up to the most coherent alternative yet placed before Abiy to the path of coercion described above.

The first is electoral: a move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation. Under the present system the Prosperity Party took 438 of the 486 seats decided in June. Under a proportional system, parties that now win nothing would win something, and the arithmetic of armed struggle would change. A movement that cannot win a constituency outright has little reason to lay down its arms for an election. A movement guaranteed a share of seats has more. It is also a reform that peaceful opposition parties and civic movements have pressed for years. Adopting it would reward those who chose the ballot over the gun, and show that non-violent pressure can change the rules.

The second is constitutional. Amending the 1995 constitution is the demand that unites the government’s critics and divides them at the same time. Amhara nationalists want to revise the ethnic federal settlement and Article 39, while Oromo, Somali and Tigrayan movements regard that same article as the guarantee of their existence. Like proportional representation, constitutional reform belongs to the vocabulary of peaceful protest. It was the largely non-violent demonstrations of 2015–18, the movement that brought Abiy to power, that first put the 1995 settlement openly in question. Opening the constitution through dialogue would answer the protesters in the streets, not only the fighters in the field. The alliance has avoided the question, and so, carefully, has the government. It should also be said plainly that a constitutional door opened in the name of dialogue can be walked through in either direction. Before the election, critics alleged that Abiy wanted to amend the constitution to create a presidential system. A reform that entrenched the executive would serve none of the Commission’s purposes.

The third concerns cities: metropolitan governments for the country’s major urban centres. This goes to the heart of the contest over Addis Ababa, in which Oromo nationalists assert a special constitutional interest, and over the control of fast-growing regional towns. Giving cities their own governance, instead of treating them as trophies of whichever ethnic region surrounds them, could take one of the most combustible questions off the battlefield. It would also be fiercely resisted by those who regard Oromia’s claim to the capital as settled and non-negotiable.

The fourth speaks most directly to the events of this week: that the armed movements now gathered in the Alliance for Survival be invited into talks within the framework of the Pretoria agreement. Pretoria was a bilateral deal between the federal government and the TPLF. Fano was not at the table and has never forgiven its exclusion. Extending that architecture to Amhara, Oromia and the other regions would turn a two-party ceasefire into something closer to a national settlement. The Commission has itself argued that armed groups belong in the dialogue. The question is whether a government that has just called the alliance an Eritrean project can bring itself to negotiate with it.

The fifth looks outward: negotiations with Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Egypt. Each relationship is a potential front. With Sudan there is the al-Fashaga border; with Mogadishu, Somaliland and sea access; with Asmara, an unfinished peace; with Cairo, the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Abiy told the BRICS summit this month that Ethiopia would seek sea access only through negotiation. If he means it, regional diplomacy is also domestic security, because a neighbour at peace with Addis Ababa has less reason to finance its enemies. The remaining pillars, from religious affairs and institution-building to corruption and the economy, lack the drama of these five but would matter as much to whether any settlement lasted.

“The best coup-proofing is a settlement that leaves the generals nothing to rescue the country from.”

This is where the Commission’s offer meets the barracks. Coups in Ethiopia have always been presented as rescues: of the nation from a failing emperor, of the revolution from a failing Derg. A government that opened talks with its armed opponents, reformed the electoral system and made peace with its neighbours would leave any ambitious officer without a story to tell. In effect, the Commission has handed Abiy a political alternative to coup-proofing. It is not the only option on his desk. The Reporter reported last week that Washington has lifted the arms embargo it imposed during the Tigray war, which makes the military route cheaper. Whether he takes up the report or shelves it will be decided in the same weeks as his cabinet.

The Mengistu question

Mengistu Haile Mariam hangs over this moment in two ways, and either could describe what Abiy does next. The first Mengistu went to any length in the name of Ethiopian unity. From the Derg’s early slogan, Ityopia Tikdem, “Ethiopia First”, to national call-ups, a war economy and the purge of his own officers, he justified everything as the defence of an indivisible state. A leader convinced that he alone stands between the country and disintegration can persuade himself that almost any measure is warranted. The alliance, by warning that Ethiopia is at risk of breaking apart, has handed him that argument.

The second Mengistu is the one who left. In May 1991, with his army broken and the EPRDF closing on the capital, he flew to Zimbabwe, and his departure hastened the end of the war. Most Ethiopians remember it as flight, not sacrifice, and his motives were his own. But the precedent stands: an Ethiopian ruler concluded that the state would outlast him only if he went. Abiy, too, could decide that national unity is better served by his leaving than by his staying. Such an exit could be negotiated through the very transitional process that the alliance demands and the Commission’s report points towards, and it could be made on his own terms instead of an enemy’s.

“The first path, taken too far, ends on the second — on worse terms.”

This newspaper does not predict which course he will choose, and there is no public sign that he contemplates the second. But the two paths share a premise: that the unity of Ethiopia outranks any individual, including the one in the palace. They differ in who pays. On the first, the price falls on soldiers and civilians; on the second, on one man’s ambition. The lesson of 1991 is that a ruler who follows the first path too far may find himself left with only the second, and on far worse terms than he could have had.

The hidden price

Each of these measures has a cost that will not appear in a communiqué. Emergency powers mean mass detentions, and mass detentions in Ethiopia have tended to fall along ethnic lines. Designation and media bans narrow the space for the reporting that might tell the public what is happening in its name. The drone strikes already recorded by conflict monitors in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia fall on communities, not only on combatants. And an army reorganised for loyalty is an army less able to protect civilians from anyone at all.

What to watch

The signs will come quickly. Watch who is named Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff, and whether more of the security apparatus moves under the Prime Minister’s office. Watch for a state-of-emergency proclamation and for any terrorist designation of the alliance. Watch for unexplained retirements, transfers or arrests of senior officers. Watch for a separate deal with any single member of the alliance. And watch the temperature of Addis Ababa’s language towards Asmara. Above all, watch whether the Commission’s report is published in full, and whether the new government’s first programme adopts any of it or merely thanks the Commission for its work.

In July, Abiy told lawmakers that even if others joined the TPLF, the government did not have “an iota of fear” for Ethiopia’s sovereignty. A government that fears nothing has no need to fortify its own barracks. The cabinet he now presents, and what he does with the report on his desk, will show which of his two fronts he fears more, and whether, in guarding against one, he leaves the other open.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics: A Warning to the Ethiopian Political Landscape

Professor Girma Berhanu

17 September 2026

Synopsis

Editorial Foreword

Every liberation movement eventually faces a question it would rather not ask: at what point does the discipline needed to win begin to resemble the order it set out to defeat? Ethiopian history answers this with painful clarity. A generation of students who called for freedom in the 1970s watched the language of revolution harden into a culture of denunciation. In that culture, the wrong question could make someone an enemy of the people, and intellectuals became functionaries of the line.

Professor Girma Berhanu, a long-standing contributor to these pages, writes because he sees that pattern stirring again. He does not write as a detached observer. He states plainly that Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and he does not question the legitimacy of the grievances behind the Amhara struggle. What he questions is something more fragile and, in the long run, more decisive: the right to think aloud within a movement without being labelled for it.

His essay is notable for its restraint. He does not claim knowledge he lacks. He explains, with a candour that is rare in today’s polarised climate, why he has not rushed to pronounce on the alliances now dividing the diaspora. Some readers will find that restraint frustrating. We would suggest that it is the point of the essay. Where information is fragmented and interpretations are hardened by loyalty, the honest answer is often “not yet.” A movement that cannot hear that answer without suspecting treachery has already lost something it will need later.

Unity is not uniformity, criticism is not betrayal, and the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

The Ethiopian Tribune has spent many years documenting how the present government treats dissent: the arrests of journalists, the targeting of communities and the shrinking space for independent speech. We would be failing our readers if we held the state to that standard and exempted those who seek to replace it. Our commitment to accountability does not depend on who holds power or who seeks it.

We publish this essay not as a verdict on any organisation or alliance, but as an invitation. It asks readers to accept that unity is not uniformity, that criticism is not betrayal, and that the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

— Endex, Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics

My years of engagement in social activism and human rights work have taught me an important lesson: a freedom struggle cannot sustain itself when independent intellectual thought is replaced by political conformity. Yet this is precisely the danger I increasingly perceive in the Ethiopian political landscape today.

The distinction between intellectuals and political activists is becoming increasingly blurred. More troubling still is the growing influence of what might be described as a cadre mentality—a political culture in which ideological loyalty takes precedence over independent judgement, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and questioning the dominant political line can be interpreted as betrayal.

This tendency is particularly concerning in the current debate over the direction of the Amhara struggle. Questions concerning political strategy, alliances, negotiations, military cooperation, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and the future political order of Ethiopia are far too consequential to be determined by political loyalty or factional pressure. They require serious intellectual examination, open debate, evidence-based reasoning, and the courage to challenge prevailing assumptions—even when such challenges are uncomfortable.

An intellectual is not a cadre. An intellectual’s responsibility is not to defend a political organisation, faction, leader, or predetermined political line. Rather, it is to interrogate ideas, examine evidence, identify contradictions, consider alternative interpretations, and assess possible consequences. Political activists and organisations have a legitimate role in mobilising people and pursuing political objectives. However, intellectuals should not be reduced to instruments for legitimising decisions that have already been made. Their role requires a degree of critical distance, even when they share the broader political aspirations of a movement. Straddling the roles of prophet, critic, political activist, and scientist, intellectuals defy easy categorisation. They often portray themselves as “free-floating” and independent of universities, political parties, and state power. Yet the reality frequently falls short of this ideal. Intellectuals across different historical and political contexts have not always lived up to their claims of autonomy and have often confronted difficult tensions between intellectual independence, political commitment, institutional interests, and social responsibility.

In this article, I wish to venture into the complexity of intellectual life and examine these tensions critically. What does it mean to be an intellectual? How can intellectual independence be maintained in politically charged environments? And what happens when intellectuals become too closely aligned with the organisations, movements, or power structures they are expected to scrutinise? These are large and complex questions, and the space available here does not allow me to address them in their full breadth. Instead, I offer some reflections on the tensions and dilemmas that lie at the heart of intellectual life.

When intellectuals become extensions of political organisations, intellectual independence is compromised. When disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty, genuine debate becomes increasingly difficult. And when political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

When political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

This is not merely an intellectual problem. It is also a political and strategic problem.

The Amhara struggle cannot afford to silence critical voices at a moment when it faces difficult and consequential choices. Military alliances, political partnerships, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and competing visions for Ethiopia’s future should all be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. No organisation, leader, intellectual, or political faction should claim a monopoly over what constitutes the correct political line.

A freedom struggle worthy of the name must create space for disagreement. It must distinguish between criticism and betrayal, between independent analysis and political advocacy, and between intellectual responsibility and political discipline.

There is a profound lesson in the history of authoritarian political systems: when political loyalty becomes the principal measure of intellectual legitimacy, independent thought begins to erode. When independent thought is weakened, political movements become more vulnerable to strategic errors, internal authoritarianism, groupthink, and manipulation.

The objective, therefore, should be larger than winning arguments within a particular political camp. It should be to protect the intellectual and political space necessary for a genuine struggle for freedom, democracy, dignity, and self-determination.

The Amhara struggle needs organisation, but it also needs independent minds. It needs political activists, but it must not turn intellectuals into cadres. It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

The future of the struggle—and potentially the future of Ethiopia itself—depends, in my view, on preserving this distinction.

I also want to be clear about my own position. I believe Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and I support political processes that can contribute to a more democratic, accountable, inclusive, and just political order. However, supporting political change does not require me to endorse every political or military actor, alliance, strategy, or claim presented in its name. Political change and political conformity are not the same thing.

Recently, I have become increasingly aware of the intense polarisation surrounding the alliance between the Amhara Fano and other armed groups. I do not claim to know enough about these developments, nor have I involved myself deeply enough in all of the political and military dynamics, to take a definitive position on every aspect of these alliances. People from different parts of the world have nevertheless asked me why I have not been more explicit or vocal in taking a position.

My answer has consistently been that I am observing the situation carefully. It is difficult to position oneself when information is fragmented, interpretations are deeply polarised, and numerous actors are involved, often with different interests, objectives, and strategies. The result is considerable uncertainty and confusion.

My reluctance to take a premature position should therefore not be interpreted as indifference to political change. On the contrary, it reflects my conviction that positions on matters of such historical importance should be informed by evidence, context, careful analysis, and intellectual integrity rather than by political pressure or group loyalty.

What concerns me particularly is the extent of labelling, personal attacks, and verbal abuse surrounding these debates. When people become afraid to ask legitimate questions or express disagreement openly, the quality of political deliberation suffers. Such an environment is dangerous for any movement that aspires to contribute to democratic transformation. I have empirical observations that support this concern. In what began as a friendly or comradely WhatsApp group, I have noticed an increasing level of intensity and, at times, striking animosity in response to questions or alternative viewpoints. What I would describe as Mashemakek—the immediate belittling, dismissal, or rejection of an idea, accompanied by labelling the questioner or inquiry itself as an obstacle to be avoided—has become increasingly visible.

I have also observed what appears to be an emerging discourse of personality cult, expressed in ways that are deeply concerning and, at times, embarrassing. It is troubling to see political reverence and unquestioning loyalty re-emerging in a context where one might have assumed that such political practices had been relegated to the past. We had perhaps believed that we had moved beyond this kind of political culture decades ago.

I therefore distinguish clearly between support for political change and uncritical support for particular political actors. A movement that cannot tolerate independent thought, critical inquiry, and internal disagreement will struggle to build the genuinely free society it claims to seek. Political transformation requires more than a change of government or political leadership. It also requires a political culture in which disagreement, scrutiny, accountability, and independent thought are protected.

Ethiopia is at a delicate historical juncture, and the future of the Amhara people is likewise being shaped by developments whose consequences may be profound. This calls for greater transparency, intellectual honesty, and a carefully considered path forward. We need to examine the available evidence, engage with competing interpretations, and distinguish political claims from ideological positions and empirically grounded analysis.

My conclusion is therefore straightforward: I support political change, but I do not believe that political change should require intellectual conformity. Let intellectuals, researchers, journalists, and other independent thinkers engage openly with evidence, historical context, competing perspectives, and difficult questions. Political activists and political organisations have their own legitimate roles, but those roles should not replace independent intellectual inquiry.

The distinction is crucial. One can support the necessity of political transformation while remaining critical, cautious, and intellectually independent of the actors who claim to represent that transformation. For me, this is neither neutrality nor political indifference. Rather, it is a commitment to intellectual independence at a moment when independent thinking is particularly important. For sustainable organisational growth and genuine democratic transformation to take place, freedom movements must actively cultivate feedback, tolerance, and humility. Rather than demanding blind loyalty or ideological uniformity, a healthy political culture should encourage constructive criticism, create space for internal disagreement, and cultivate the intellectual humility to recognise that no single faction holds a monopoly on truth.

By prioritising evidence, protecting independent thought, and allowing room for disagreement, a movement can guard against the emergence of internal authoritarianism and, in doing so, help lay the intellectual and democratic foundations for the freer society it seeks to build.

A genuine freedom struggle must be capable of accommodating disagreement within its own ranks. It must be strong enough to tolerate questions, confident enough to confront criticism, and mature enough to recognise that political unity cannot be built by suppressing intellectual diversity.

The struggle needs committed people—but it also needs people who are free to think.

Short Summary

The article argues that Ethiopia’s political transformation requires independent intellectual thought, open debate, and critical scrutiny—not political conformity or cadre mentality. It distinguishes support for fundamental political change from uncritical loyalty to particular political actors or alliances, while calling for greater transparency, evidence-based analysis, and space for disagreement, particularly within the Amhara political struggle.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984)

Coser, L. A. (1970). Men of ideas: A sociologist’s view. Free Press. (Original work published 1965)

Konrád, G., & Szelényi, I. (1979). The intellectuals on the road to class power. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Kurzman, C. (2008). Democracy denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the fate of democracy. Harvard University Press.

Leonard, M. (2008). What does China think? PublicAffairs.

Editorial front matter · The Ethiopian Tribune

Low Expectations — The Overlooked Discrimination of Our Time

Girma Berhanu, Professor · Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg

Synopsis

Professor Girma Berhanu argues that low expectations constitute an overlooked form of discrimination — one that operates alongside the more familiar categories of gender, ethnicity, religion, language and disability, yet attracts far less scrutiny. Drawing on the Pygmalion and Golem effects, he shows how expectation shapes not only how people perform but what opportunities they are offered and what image they form of themselves. What makes the mechanism so insidious, he contends, is its invisibility: it works not through open prejudice but through small, often well-meant remarks — “perhaps you should be more realistic” — that accumulate into a message about who belongs where.

The essay moves outward through widening circles. It begins in the personal, with the author’s childhood and his mother’s insistence, tied to the sign of the kirtas, that he was destined to succeed. It then examines the family, the classroom and the debate over Swedish as a second language, before tracing the same logic to its largest scale — the international arena, where dominant powers portray emerging nations as dependent or destined to fail. Throughout, the warning is the self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations that manufacture the very failure they predict, then read that failure back as proof. Berhanu’s prescription is not lowered standards but high expectations matched by genuine support — belief that, as he puts it, sometimes must precede a person’s belief in themselves.

Who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

Editor’s Foreword

We are accustomed to naming discrimination by its familiar categories. Professor Girma Berhanu asks us to attend to one that rarely announces itself and is seldom counted at all: the quiet verdict of low expectation. His argument is that a great deal of what constrains a life is delivered not through hostility but through solicitude — the gentle suggestion that something isn’t really for you — and that these small signals, repeated, harden into walls.

What recommends this essay to the Tribune is not only its care as a piece of educational thought, but the arc it traces. Berhanu begins in the most intimate register — a mother in Ethiopia who read a sign upon her son’s birth and refused, ever after, to let him think small of himself — and follows the same mechanism upward, through households and schoolrooms, until it arrives at the conduct of nations. When powerful states cast African and other emerging countries as incapable of governing, developing or succeeding on their own terms, they are not merely trading in rhetoric. They are practising, on a global scale, the same discipline of diminished expectation that a teacher visits on a child. For a publication concerned with the agency and standing of the Horn of Africa in the world, that continuity is the essay’s real gift.

Berhanu writes as a scholar at Gothenburg and returns to us, as he has before, with the instincts of both. Readers will find the piece personal where argument alone would not persuade, and unsparing where sentiment might have softened. It repays reading not as a lament but as a question put to all of us — parents, teachers, editors, states: who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

✦  ✦  ✦

Low Expectations — The Overlooked Discrimination of Our Time

Girma Berhanu, Professor

Low expectations may be understood as a subtle yet pervasive form of psychological and organisational harm that can erode human motivation, dignity, agency, and well-being. This phenomenon can manifest across educational institutions, workplaces, households, and the public sector, where persistently low expectations may contribute to diminished engagement, reduced aspirations, and the weakening of both individual and collective potential. Importantly, low expectations operate not only at the level of individuals and groups, but can also be extended to nations and national populations, including countries that are characterised as developing or underdeveloped. At broader social, economic, and political levels, such expectations may shape how societies are perceived, how their capacities are evaluated, and what opportunities and resources are made available to them.

We often talk about discrimination in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion, language, or disability. At the same time, there is another mechanism that receives far less attention, despite the profound consequences it can have for people’s life chances: low expectations.

Research has long shown that our expectations can influence people’s performance, motivation, and development. The Pygmalion effect describes how positive and high expectations can contribute to improved performance, while the Golem effect points to how low expectations can constrain people’s opportunities to develop and reach their potential. Expectations are, of course, not the only factors behind success or failure, but they can influence what opportunities people are given, what demands are placed upon them, and the perceptions they develop of themselves.

Despite this knowledge, society continues to signal to some people that they are not expected to succeed. Low expectations rarely emerge in a vacuum. They can interact with class, ethnicity, gender, language, and disability, thereby reinforcing existing inequalities. What makes low expectations particularly problematic is that they are often difficult to detect. They are not always expressed through explicit prejudice or intentional discrimination, but through small everyday actions, comments, and decisions.

When Someone Believes in You

To make this argument more personal, I would like to share an experience from my own childhood.

My mother was a great source of support throughout my schooling. In the beginning, I struggled and was not particularly successful at school. I was sometimes hit by a teacher and teased by students who performed better than I did. It hurt, both psychologically and physically. During those years, I had very little objective reason to believe that I would do particularly well in school.

But my mother saw something different.

She and my grandmother used to tell me that I had been born with part of the amniotic membrane still covering my head — what is called kirtas in Amharic and is sometimes referred to in Swedish as a segerhuva. In our cultural imagination, this was regarded as a special sign, almost a gift from God, indicating that the child was chosen and would succeed in life.

Whenever I encountered difficulties, my mother would say: “You are chosen. The kirtas is a sign that you will succeed.”

It may sound like a simple story, perhaps even superstition. But for me, it acquired a deeper meaning. I often felt weak — both physically and intellectually — yet my mother continued to speak of me as someone destined to accomplish something significant. She had a much brighter image of my future than I had of myself.

Eventually, I began to believe what she told me.

Even today, I can hear her voice when I encounter setbacks, both in academia and in my private life. Many years ago, some of my siblings questioned the meaning of my kirtas and suggested that it might instead be explained by the fact that I had been born prematurely. My mother firmly rejected that explanation.

I chose to believe my mother, regardless of what medical researchers might say.

The important point here is not whether the amniotic membrane itself had any particular significance. Scientifically, of course, it did not. But the story gave me something else: an expectation that I could succeed. It gave me the motivation to keep going when life was difficult. Perhaps, then, it was not the membrane itself that made the difference, but the high expectations associated with the story surrounding it.

You are chosen. The kirtas is a sign that you will succeed.

When Others Begin to Define Who You Are

The other day, a young woman told me how her parents constantly compared her with her brother. Through repeated comparisons and demeaning comments, she developed a sense that she was never quite good enough.

This is more than a story about a complicated family relationship. It is also about how people learn from childhood to see themselves through the eyes of others. When a child is constantly told that someone else is better, smarter, or more successful, there is a risk that the child will eventually adopt the same judgement about themselves.

In a similar way, high expectations can become a form of social capital. When a teacher, parent, or other significant adult communicates, “I believe you can do this,” it does not automatically create success — but it can create motivation, perseverance, and a willingness to try again.

That is why expectations matter.

School Is Not a Neutral Place

The same pattern can be found in schools. Many students describe teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, signal that they will not succeed in education. Students report being discouraged from pursuing higher education or ambitious career choices because of their family background, language, gender, or disability.

Often, this does not occur through explicit prejudice. It can be much more subtle:

“Maybe that isn’t really for you.”

“Have you considered something easier?”

“Perhaps you should be more realistic.”

Such comments may appear well intentioned. But when they are repeated over time, they can have a powerful normative effect. They communicate more than something about a particular educational programme or career choice. They can communicate a more fundamental message:

“You are not the kind of person who belongs there.”

This is where low expectations can become a form of invisible exclusion.

Swedish as a Second Language — A Question of Expectations

Similar questions arise in discussions about Swedish as a second language. I have encountered students who have felt singled out or humiliated when placed in such instruction, sometimes on grounds that they or their parents have found difficult to understand or accept. This may relate to the student’s linguistic background, family circumstances, or other assessments made by the school.

This issue has long been the subject of discussion and, at times, conflict among students, parents, schools, and researchers.

Here, we need to ask an uncomfortable but important question:

What assumptions do we hold about a student’s abilities?

What assumptions are made about what a student with another first language can achieve? What expectations exist regarding the student’s academic development? And how do these assumptions affect assessments of the student’s opportunities to succeed in mainstream education?

This is not to claim that all students have the same needs or that special support is never necessary. Rather, it is about ensuring that educational decisions are based on the student’s actual needs and circumstances, rather than assumptions about what a student from a particular background is presumed to be capable or incapable of achieving.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The problem with low expectations is that they can become self-fulfilling.

When a person is constantly met with doubt, they may begin to doubt themselves. When they are given fewer challenges, their opportunities to develop their abilities may diminish. When they are not encouraged to pursue further education, they may never apply. And when they repeatedly hear that they do not belong in a particular place, they may eventually stop trying to get there.

In this way, low expectations can produce precisely the outcome they initially anticipated.

This is particularly problematic because society may then interpret the outcome as evidence that the original expectations were correct.

“We knew she wouldn’t be able to do it.”

But did we really know?

Or did our expectations help create some of the conditions that led to the outcome?

Raising Expectations Without Lowering Standards

We therefore need to talk more about low expectations as a mechanism contributing to discrimination and inequality. This does not mean that low expectations should replace other forms of discrimination as an analytical category. Rather, we need to make visible another process through which inequality is created and reproduced.

Treating people with respect does not mean lowering expectations of them. Quite the opposite.

High expectations mean believing that people can develop — while simultaneously providing them with the resources, support, and opportunities they need to succeed.

It is not enough to tell a student, “You can do it.” Schools must also create the conditions that enable the student to do so. High expectations without support can become empty rhetoric. But high expectations combined with pedagogical support, clear goals, and genuine opportunities can alter people’s educational trajectories.

My mother’s story about kirtas may not have been scientific. But it taught me something that I still carry with me: sometimes another person’s belief in you can come before your own belief in yourself.

Perhaps this is also one of the most important purposes of education — to see possibilities in people before they have learned to see those possibilities in themselves.

No one should be limited by other people’s assumptions about what they can or cannot become. It is time to recognise low expectations for what they can be: an invisible wall that limits people’s opportunities, participation, and hope for the future. With regard to nations, international politics, trade, and diplomatic relations, we can also observe how powerful states sometimes portray emerging or less economically powerful nations as incapable of succeeding or developing on their own terms. Such representations may be expressed through dismissive, degrading, or abusive language, including statements by political leaders that characterise African and other countries in highly derogatory ways.

These practices should not be understood merely as individual expressions of prejudice or political rhetoric. When such representations are repeated systematically by powerful political actors and institutions, they can contribute to a broader pattern of symbolic and structural abuse. They may reinforce hierarchies between nations, undermine the perceived legitimacy and agency of emerging countries, and influence how their economies, institutions, and populations are viewed internationally.

From this perspective, low expectations can operate at the level of international relations. Persistent portrayals of emerging nations as incapable, dependent, or destined to fail may contribute to an international environment in which their capacity for autonomous development is systematically underestimated. In this sense, the production and reproduction of low expectations can become part of a broader political agenda that constrains agency, reinforces dependency, and discourages the pursuit of independent economic, political, and diplomatic pathways.

And perhaps the most important question we can therefore ask is not only what do we expect from people? but also:

Who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

Girma Berhanu, Professor

The Ethiopian Tribune

Editorial Front Matter  ·  Foreword & Synopsis

GERD: From Engine of Ethiopia’s Renaissance to Engine of African Peace

An essay by Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) — the twelfth and concluding article in the series

Foreword — The Bridge, and the Wall We Keep Building

For a year this newspaper has carried Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s argument in instalments, and readers have watched it accumulate into something rare in our public writing: a single, sustained case, built stone by stone, about what Ethiopia is and what it might yet become. Eleven essays traced the architecture — the Foundations of unity and a sovereign coast, the Means of broad-based development, and the Engine meant to drive them both. This twelfth and final essay turns to the Engine itself, and to the question the other eleven were circling all along: not whether the dam can be built, but whether we can build the country around it.

It arrives at an unusual moment. This month TIME’s Africa edition put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on its cover and called it the power to unite a continent — a bridge, in the magazine’s image, rather than a wall. Dr Hailu takes that mirror and turns it on us with unsparing candour: strangers see cooperation in the concrete we poured; we see, in one another, one more thing to fight over. The distance between those two visions is his subject, and he refuses every comfortable name for it — settling, in the end, on shame.

A dam can be a wall or a bridge — Ethiopia must choose the bridge.

I will not disguise where the essay lands, for the Tribune does not run it to flatter anyone, least of all ourselves. Its charge falls on all four estates of what the author has called the racket the cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit, and, not least, the pen. Among the writings it names is one this newspaper published only a week ago: Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal in the Tsimdo debate. We printed her argument in full; we now print the essay that faults it and its rival for quarrelling over how to wage a war while sparing not one line for how it ends. That is not inconsistency. It is what an independent press is for: to carry the argument and its judge alike, and to trust readers to weigh both.

What Dr Hailu leaves us with is not a lament but a blueprint five conditions under which a shared nation becomes the lived experience of ordinary people, not one of which asks any Ethiopian to surrender his language, his faith, or his pride in his people. Whether we build it is not for a newspaper to decide. But the question deserves to be put plainly, and few have put it more plainly than this.

Read it as it was written: as a wake-up.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

In the concluding essay of a twelve-part series, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu argues that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam must cease to be a monument and become an engine the physical spine of Ethiopia’s transformation, and then of its peace.

He begins from a mirror held up by outsiders: TIME’s Africa cover, The Power to Unite Africa, which reads GERD as a bridge an anchor of regional electricity trade and African integration where Ethiopians see only one more thing to fight over. That gap, he contends, is not about the dam but about the state behind it. A development engine is not self-executing; it needs a functioning institutional order to turn electricity into factories, factories into cities, and cities into a productive middle class for whom cooperation pays more than fragmentation. This is the “missing bridge” and precisely what a racket built on ethnic fear cannot supply.

Drawing on the economics of urbanisation and the arithmetic of a youth cohort of two million a year, Hailu recasts peace and development as a single question, answerable only by a national bargain in which every constituency holds a material stake that war would destroy. He sets out five conditions under which unity is actually made, impartial security, impartial delivery, the material bond, the mixing city, and an honest reckoning, none of which demands that any Ethiopian surrender his identity.

Against this he sets the “paper war” of hermitised intellectuals who argue endlessly over how to fight while never asking how the killing stops, and warns that a nation squandering GERD on ethnic conflict forfeits its seat in the age of artificial intelligence. The choice, he concludes, was never between Ethiopia’s peoples. It is between the country and the racket that farms it: the bridge, or the abyss.

The Ethiopian Tribune

In Depth · Infrastructure & Debt

Running on Half Power

Addis Ababa’s Railways and the Arithmetic of a Broken Promise

By E. Frashie

8 September 2026

A decade after its unveiling as the future of African urban transit, the capital’s light rail now runs on less than half its fleet — and the reasons lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

Every weekday at Autobus Tera, Surafel Tafesework performs the same quiet calculation. A bank officer bound for Megenagna, he would rather take the train — it is the cheapest way across the city — but the platform now fills faster than the trains arrive. He waits up to an hour, he told The Reporter, watching the crowd thicken the way it does at a bus stop. The fare still wins the argument. The waiting is beginning to lose it.

Multiply Surafel by the tens of thousands who ride the light rail each morning and you have the small, daily face of a large, expensive failure. A decade after Addis Ababa’s trains were unveiled as the future of African urban transit, the network runs on less than half its lungs — and the reasons why lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the foreign-currency desk of the National Bank and the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

The tyranny of the spare part

The immediate problem is brutally simple. The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit Service began life with 41 cars; by the account of its own chief executive, Berhan Abebaw (PhD), only 19 are now fit to run. The culprit is not sabotage or mismanagement of the theatrical kind, but something more mundane and more damning: there is no hard currency to buy replacement parts, down to the tyres that wear out fastest. The service has no dedicated workshop of its own, and leans on Ethiopian Railway Corporation engineers dispatched from Dire Dawa and Dewale.

This is not a new wound. As far back as 2023, only eight trains were moving; China stepped in with a spare-parts package worth some USD 23 million, and repair estimates ran past USD 60 million. That the operational count has crept back to 19 is, in a bleak sense, progress. But a USD 475 million system — 85 percent of it financed by a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China — sitting idle for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

A USD 475 million system idled for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

The ledger against the promise

When the line opened in 2015, it was sold as a machine that could sweep up to 60,000 passengers an hour. Today it carries roughly that number across an entire day. The Federal Auditor General has put the project’s accumulated loss at around ETB 16 billion. In the 2025/26 fiscal year, ticket sales brought in just ETB 270 million; the city administration pours in an annual ETB 500 million subsidy simply to keep the fares humane — a Kality-to-Piassa trip costs 20 birr by train against 80 to 100 by taxi.

Officials now wave away the original pledge that the line would service its own debt within ten years. “In any country, urban railway operates with state subsidy,” Berhan says — and he is right, as a matter of transport economics the world over. But that truth was conspicuously absent from the sales pitch a decade ago, and it does not answer the harder question: subsidy toward what return? The commercial ballast that was meant to make the numbers work — transit-oriented development, station retail, leased commercial hubs — has barely materialised beyond a handful of sites like Leghar and Autobus Tera. The light rail today carries only about six percent of the city’s public-transport load, stranded from the Anbessa buses, Sheger buses and minibuses it was never properly stitched into.

The case for the defence

Honesty requires the counterpoint, because the railway story is not simply one of waste. The cross-country Ethio-Djibouti Railway — a USD 4.2 billion line built on USD 2.5 billion of Chinese credit — earns its keep in a currency the balance sheet cannot see. It now moves better than nine in ten of Ethiopia’s port-bound goods and the overwhelming majority of its coffee exports, cutting the Djibouti run from three days by truck to ten or twelve hours by rail, and slashing the demurrage bills that once bled the treasury at the port. A senior corporation official, speaking anonymously, makes the fair point that judging a rail line purely on ticketed profit misses the productivity it lends everything else.

That defence is genuine — and it is also why the financing model matters so much. Even the EDR needed relief: in 2018 China agreed to stretch out its repayment terms, one of several reschedulings of an infrastructure debt to Beijing that now runs past USD 13 billion. A trade lifeline built on a loan that must itself be perpetually renegotiated is an asset and a vulnerability in the same breath.

The northern warning

Nowhere is that vulnerability clearer than on the Awash–Kombolcha–Hara Gebeya line. This USD 1.7 billion, 392-kilometre corridor — financed by Turkey’s Exim Bank and built by Yapı Merkezi — was nearly finished when war engulfed the north in late 2020. Looting, evacuation and two years of paralysis followed, and the contractor took its losses to arbitration in London, in a dispute reported to be worth around USD 2.6 billion all told. The London tribunal, with Professor Tilahun Teshome as sole arbitrator, threw out the bulk of the contractor’s roughly USD 1 billion claim and ordered a USD 29.1 million advance repaid to the corporation — hailed at home as a decisive victory.

It is worth a note of caution: the contractor’s counsel has publicly disputed the “bulk knocked out” framing, and even a favourable award does not make the episode cheap. Years of frozen construction, depreciating assets and contingent liabilities are their own tax on a state-owned enterprise — and Ethiopian Railway Corporation is one of nearly forty such enterprises now folded under Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign fund quietly restructuring their balance sheets away from public view. The line has since been relaunched, with the government hoping Yapı Merkezi will return to finish what the war interrupted.

Who carries it

The recurring lesson, from the light rail to Djibouti to the north, is the one the planners kept postponing: track laid without last-mile links, local maintenance capacity or a revenue base beyond the farebox becomes a liability the moment the currency tightens. The fixes experts keep prescribing — unified ticketing across modes, developed station real estate, domestic manufacture of high-wear parts, and a firewall between operating budgets and legacy construction debt — are neither exotic nor new. They were simply cheaper to defer.

The cost of deferral is not paid in arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera.

The cost of deferral is not paid in the language of arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera, in the extra forty-five minutes, in the taxi fare a bank officer can barely justify, by the several hundred thousand residents who continue to ride a network running, as it has for years now, on half power.

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የወያኔ ተስፈኞች ቁማር፦ ርዕዮተ-ዓለማዊ ገዳይን ለጊዜያዊ ጥቅም የመቸብቸብ አደጋ

«የጽምዶ ግብዝ መሪና ዕውር ተከታይ»

በዶክተር ሶስና ታደሰ — በፖለቲካ ሳይንስ እና በስትራቴጂያዊ ጥናት

በቅርቡ በ«ቦርከና» ነፃ አስተያየት መድረክ ላይ «ጊዜያዊ እፎይታ ለዘላቂ ኪሳራ? በፋኖ እና ህወሓት ጥምረት ዙሪያ ያለ ስትራቴጂካዊ ምልከታ» በሚል ርዕስ በዶክተር ሲሳይ ሙሉ የቀረበው ጽሑፍ፣ የ«ጽምዶ»ን አክሳሪነት በፖለቲካ ስሌት መዝኖ ለማሳየት የሞከረና ጥምረቱን የተቃወመ ቢሆንም፤ የችግሩን መዋቅራዊ፣ ርእዮተ-ዓለማዊና ሞራላዊ ጥልቀት ሙሉ በሙሉ ወደ ጎን የተወ፣ ጉዳዩን ከሰማዕታት ደምና ከአማራ ሕልውና አውርዶ እንደ ተራ «የንግድ ስሌት» ያቀለለ ትንተና ሆኖ አግቼዋለሁ።

ሕወሓት (ፋሽስት ወያኔ) የትናንት የደምና የእልቂት ታሪክ ብቻ አይደለም፤ የዛሬም፣ የነገም፣ የዘወትርም የሕልውና ጠላት ነው! ሕወሓት አማራን ማጥፋትንና የዐጽመ-ርስቱን መሬቶች መዋጥ የፖለቲካ እስትንፋሱና የሕልውናው መሠረት አድርጎ የተፈጠረ፣ በዚያው ዓላማ የኖረ፣ አሁንም በራያ፣ በጠለምት፣ ሁመራ/ሸረሪና እና በየግንባሩ ጦር እየሰበቀ ያለ መዋቅራዊና ዘላቂ ጠላት ነው።

ይህንን አሁናዊና ዘላቂ ጠላት የሆነ ኃይል፣ «የአማራ ትግል አጋር» አድርገው ለማቅረብ ለሚሞክሩ አድርባዮች ምሁራዊ ሽፋን መስጠትም ሆነ ጉዳዩን ወደ ተራ «የትርፍና ኪሳራ ሂሳብ» ማውረድ፣ በድፍን አማራ ሕዝብ፣ በሰማዕታት አጥንትና በታሪካዊ ክስተት ላይ የተፈጸመ ከባድ የፖለቲካ ወንጀል በመሆኑ በዝምታ የሚታለፍበት ጊዜ አክትሟል።

ሕወሓት የትናንት የደምና የእልቂት ታሪክ ብቻ አይደለም፤ የዛሬም፣ የነገም፣ የዘወትርም የሕልውና ጠላት ነው!

፩. የዶክተር ሲሳይ ጽሑፍ አራት መዋቅራዊ ክፍተቶች (Conceptual Flaws)

የዶክተር ሲሳይ ትንተና በውጤቱ ደረጃ የፋኖ እና ሕወሓት ጥምረትን አውዳሚነት ለመጠቆም ቢሞክርም፣ ከርእዮተ-ዓለምና ከሞራል አኳያ የሚከተሉት አራት አደገኛ ክፍተቶች ተስተውለውበታል፦

፩. ጉዳዩን ወደ ተራ «የትርፍና ኪሳራ የንግድ ስሌት» ማውረድ፦ ዶክተር ሲሳይ የጥምረትን ቅቡልነት ለመመዘን ያቀረበው መለኪያ “ዛሬስ እያንዳንዱ ወገን ከጥምረቱ ምን ያተርፋል? ምንስ አሳልፎ ይሰጣል?” የሚል የንግድ ድርድር የሚመስል ስሌት ነው። የአማራ ሕዝብ የሕልውና ተጋድሎ ግን የሞራል እና የመርህ ጉዳይ እንጂ፣ በሰማዕታት ደም ላይ የሚደረግ የትርፍና ኪሳራ የሂሳብ ማወራረጃ ቁማር አይደለም።

፪. የርእዮተ-ዓለም እና የስትራቴጂ መደራረብ (Confusing Ideology with Tactics)፦ በፖለቲካ ሳይንስ «ቋሚ ጠላት የለም» የሚለው መርህ ለታክቲክና ለስትራቴጂ እንጂ ለርእዮተ-ዓለም አይሰራም። የዐማራ ሕዝብ የሕልውና ትግል ርእዮተ-ዓለም (የዐማራ ብሔርተኝነት) ደግሞ የዐማራን ዘር ማጥፋት ከፈጸሙና የሐሰት ትርክት ከገነቡ ኃይሎች ጋር መቆምን በቀይ መስመር ደረጃ በፅኑ ይከለክላል። ጉዳዩን ሙሉ በሙሉ ወደ «ጊዜያዊ ጥቅም» ስሌት ብቻ ማውረድ የትግሉን ሞራላዊ የበላይነት ያሳጣዋል።

፫. «ነገ የኃይል ሚዛኑ ቢቀየር ጥምረት ይቻላል» የሚል አደገኛ ቀዳዳ ይከፍታል፦ የዶር ሲሳይ መከራከሪያ “የበፊቱን በደል የሚያካክስ ጥምረት ከተፈጠረ… ጥምረቶች እንደሁኔታው እየተፈተሹ ቅቡልናቸው ሊመዘን ይችላል” የሚል አደገኛ ቀዳዳ ይተዋል። ይህ ማለት «ነገ ሕወሓት የተሻለ የሎጂስቲክስ አቅርቦትና ዋስትና ቢሰጥ ጥምረቱ ትክክል ሊሆን ይችላል» ወደሚል የክህደት መንደርደሪያ ይመራል። እውነተኛ የአማራ የሕልውና ተጋድሎ ግን «ሕወሓት ወንጀሉን አምኖ ሳይቀበል፣ የሐሰት ትርክቱን ሳያፈርስና ወርሮ የያዛቸውን ርስቶች ሙሉ በሙሉ ሳያስረክብ ምንም ዓይነት ጥምረት በምድር ላይ ሊኖር አይችልም» በሚል ፅኑ መርህ ላይ ይቆማል።

፬. የታሪክ በደልን ማለስለስ (Softening Structural Genocide)፦ ጽሑፉ የዘር ማጥፋትና የወረራ ታሪክን “የታሪክ በደል እና ቅሬታ ብቻ ጥምረት ለመፍጠር ብቸኛ መስፈርት አይደለም” በማለት ያቃልላል። በሕወሓት የተፈጸመው ግማሽ ክፍለ-ዘመን የዘለቀ የዘር ማጥፋት፣ የወልቃይትና የራያ ወረራ እንዲሁም መዋቅራዊ ጭፍጨፋ እንደ ተራ «የቀደመ የታሪክ ቅሬታ ወይም ቁስል» ተደርጎ ሊወሰድ አይችልም።

በጥቅሉ ሕወሓት፣ በእርሱ ዘንድ “ቋሚ ወዳጅ፣ ቋሚ ጠላት የለም” የሚለው ዓለም አቀፋዊ የፖለቲካ መርህ አይሰራም። ዛሬም አማራን ቋሚ ጠላቱ አድርጎታል፤ በ1968ዓ.ም. በማንፌስቶው ላይ ያሰፈረውን ጠላትነት በቋሚነት ይዞት ዘልቋል። አቅምና እድል ባገኘበት ጊዜ ሁሉ አማራ ላይ የጥፋት ሰይፉን መዝዞ አጥቅቶታል።

ሕወሓት የሃምሳ ዓመት ደመኛ ጠላትነት የተከለ ኃይል ነው። ዛሬም ጊዜና ሁኔታዎችን አስልቶ በአማራ ሕዝብ ላይ የጭካኔ ሰይፉን እንደሚመዝ እየታወቀ፣ ከዚህ ኃይል ጋር ሊኖር የሚችልን ጥምረት በትርፍ እና ኪሳራ መልኩ የንግድ ችርቻሮ አስመስሎ ማቅረብ ኢ-ፍትሐዊነት ነው። ባለፉት ሦስት አስርት ዓመታት የአማራ ሕዝብ ሲዋደቅላቸው የኖረው ራያ አላማጣ፣ ራያ ኦፍላ፣ ኮረም፣ አበርገሌ፣ ወልቃይት ጠገዴና ጠለምት ታሪካዊ ርስቶቻችን በሁኔታዎች የማይቀያየሩ፣ ቋሚና ዘላቂ የማንነት እና የክብር ጉዳይ ነው። እነዚህ ታሪካዊ የአማራ ርስቶች የግዛት ሁኔታ እና የአማራ ሕዝብ ሥነ-ልቦናዊ ስሪት የሚወሰኑ የዕጣ ፈንታው ወሳኝ ጉዳዮች በመሆናቸው ጥምረትን በትርፍ እና ኪሳራ መልኩ ለማስረዳት መሞከር በሕልውና ትግሉ ላይ የሞራል የበላይነትን የሚያሳጣ ጉዳይ ነው።

፪. የወያኔ ተስፈኞች፣ የትርክት ክህደት እና የአንዳርጋቸው ፅጌ የራስ-ተቃርኖ ምስክርነት

ዛሬ ልባቸውንና ጉንጫቸውን አሳብጠው ሚዲያ ላይ እየወጡ ፋሽስት ወያኔን እንደ አማራ «ትግል አጋር» እንድንቀበለው የክፍለ ሕዝብ ስራ የሚሰሩ፣ የዘመኑ ሴኮቱሬዎች፣ አብዛኞቹ የዛሬዋን “የጥፋት ኢትዮጵያ” የፈጠረውን የፋሽስት ወያኔ አገልጋይ የነበረው አቋም ያልለቀቃቸው፣ በአማራ ሕልውና ተጋድሎ ላይ ተጣብቀው የተቀመጡ የሥልጣን ተስፈኞች ናቸው። እነዚህ ተስፈኞች ከ50 ዓመታት በላይ በአማራ ሕዝብ ላይ በቀጥታ መዋቅራዊ እና የቡድን ጥቃቶች ሲፈጸሙ፤ አንድም በዝምታ ውስጥ ነበሩ፤ አንድም የጥፋት ታሪኩ ተጋሪ ናቸው። በዝምታም ሆነ በተሳትፎ ሲያስፈጽሙ የኖሩትን የዘር ማጥፋት፣ ወረራ፣ ማፈናቀልና መዋቅራዊ ጭፍጨፋ «የቀደመ የታሪክ ቅሬታ» አድርገው ማቀለላቸው ትልቅ የሞራልና የመርህ ውድቀት ነው።

የሚገርመው ግን፣ የዚሁ የ«ጽምዶ» አጀንዳ ዋና አራጋቢ የሆኑት እነ አንዳርጋቸው ፅጌ ራሳቸው፣ ገና ከአራት ዓመታት በፊት ሕወሓት (TPLF) ለአማራ ሕልውናም ሆነ ለሀገር ድርድር የማይበጅ ፍጹም ተላላኪና አረመኔ ቡድን መሆኑን በይፋ የመሰከሩት ምስክርነት ዛሬ ላይ ትልቅ የታሪክ ፍርጃ ሆኖባቸዋል።

አንዳርጋቸው በወቅቱ የሕወሓትን መዋቅራዊ የክህደት ባሕሪ ሲያጋልጥ በቁጭት እንዲህ ብሎ ነበር፦

«ወያኔዎች በታሪካቸው ከተመሠረቱበት ጊዜ ጀምሮ ከማንኛውም ድርጅት ጋራ በውይይት እና በድርድር የፈቱት ችግር የላቸውም… ስምምነት የገቡትን ሰዎች በተኙበት በማረድ ነው የጀመሩት… ሌሊት በተኙበት የሰሜኑን እዝ እንዳረዱት ማለት ነው። … እነሱ የማይቆጣጠሩት፣ የበላይነትን የማያገኙበት ምንም ነገር አይፈቅዱም።… ይህንን ከፍተኛ የበላይነት ተጠቅመው ከአማራ ክልል እንደ ወልቃይት ዓይነቱን እና ራያን የመሳሰሉ ቦታዎች በጉልበት የወሰዱ ሰዎች ናቸው። እነዚህ ሰዎች ከዚህ ከፍተኛ በጉልበት ያገኟቸውን የበላይነት ዝቅ ወደሚያደርግ ድርድር ለመግባት ፈቃደኛ አይደሉም።»

ይህ ራሱ አንዳርጋቸው በአንደበቱ የመሰከረው ሀቅ ፍጹም የማይታበል እውነት ነው። ሕወሓት ትናንትናም ሆነ ዛሬ ጦር የሚያዘጋጀውና የሚሰብቀው ለሁለት ዓላማዎች ብቻ ነው፦

• አማራን በማንነቱ ማጥፋት፣ ማውደም እና የበላይነቱን መልሶ መጫን፤
• የአማራ አጽመ-ርስት የሆኑትን ወልቃይትን፣ ጠገዴን፣ ጠለምትን፣ ሁመራን፣ ኮረምን፣ አላማጣን፣ ዋጃን፣ መሆኒንና መላውን የራያ ወረዳዎች በጉልበት ወርሮ «ታላቋን ትግራይ» መመሥረት።

ነገር ግን ዛሬ ላይ የገጠመን ትልቁ የትርክት ክህደትና የፖለቲካ ቁማር—የዚሁ ምስክርነት ባለቤት የነበሩት አንዳርጋቸው ፅጌ ራሳቸው፣ ዛሬ አቋማቸውን በ360 ዲግሪ ገልብጠው— ሕወሓት «ጥያቄዎቹን ከአብይ ተወግዶ ሰላምና መረጋጋት በሚፈጠርበት ሰአት ላይ በውይይት የሚፈታ አጀንዳ ነው የሚል አቋም ወስደዋል» በማለት የሕወሓትን የዳግም ወረራናና የርስት ፍላጎት በይፋ ሲቀበሉ እና የሰሜን እዝ የታረደበትን የክህደት ቢላዋ በፋኖ አንገት ላይ ለመድገም ሲጣደፉ መታየታቸው ነው።

አማራ በየግንባሩ የመሳደድ፣ የማፈናቀልና የመጨፍጨፍ የሕልውና አደጋ ተጋርጦበት ባለበት ተጋላጭ ወቅት፣ አጋጣሚውን ተጠቅመው የትናንት የክህደት ታሪኩን የዘነጉለትን የሕወሓትን የልብ ትርታ በመከተል የወልቃይትንና የራያን አጽመ-ርስት አሳልፎ ለመስጠት መጣደፍ፣ በሺዎች የሚቆጠሩ ሰማዕታት ደም የፈሰሰበትን ታሪካዊ ርስት እንደ «የሰሊጥ መሬት ፍላጎትና የኢኮኖሚ ጥቅም ሽኩቻ» አድርጎ ለማንኳሰስ መሞከር የለየለት የታሪክ ክህደት እና የወያኔ ተስፈኞች ተላላኪነት ማረጋገጫ ነው። ትናንት «ስምምነት አድርገው በተኙበት ያርዳሉ» ተብሎ የተመሰከረባቸውን ኃይሎች ዛሬ «የአማራ አጋር» አድርጎ ለማቅረብ መሞከር፣ የዐማራን ሕዝብ አውቆ ወደ ማረጃ ቤት የመንዳት ያህል ከባድ የፖለቲካ ወንጀል ነው! ከዚህ ላይ ገና ከጅምሩ ሕወሓትን ይቃወማሉ የተባሉ የፋኖ አመራርችና ተዋጊ ሀይሎች በተጠና መንገድ ተመርጠው መገደላቸውን እና ከትግሉ ሜዳ ገለል እንዲሉ መደረጋቸውን ሳንረሳ ማለት ነው።

፫. የርዕዮተ-ዓለም ቀውስ፦ የጥቅም ስሌት ከሞራልና ከመርህ በላይ ሊሆን አይችልም!

በታሪክ እንደታየው—የራሱ መዋቅራዊ የጥፋት አጀንዳ ያለውን ርእዮተ-ዓለማዊ ገዳይን ለጊዜያዊ የፖለቲካ ጥቅም «አጋር» ማድረግ መጨረሻው የከፋ ውድቀት እና የራስን አንገት ለሳንጃ ማመቻቸት ነው። የዛሬው የ«ጽምዶ» አራጋቢዎች የሚያቀርቡትን ዓይነት «የጋራ ጠላትን ለማጥፋት ጊዜያዊ ስልታዊ ጥምረት መፍጠር ያዋጣል» የሚለውን የሞኝ ስሌት በታሪክ ትልቅ ማረጋገጫ ያለው የሚከተለውን የዓለም አቀፍ የታሪክ ማስረጃ እንመልከት፦

የ1927ቱ የአንደኛው የቻይና ግንባር ማክተሚያ (The Shanghai Massacre)፦ በወቅቱ የቻይና ኮሙኒስት ፓርቲ በማዕከላዊ መንግሥት ላይ የነበሩትን አምባገነን የጦር አበጋዞችን (Warlords) ለመጣል ሲል፣ መዋቅራዊ ጠላቱ ከነበረውና ሥር ከሰደደው ብሔረተኛው ኩኦሚንታንግ (KMT) ፓርቲ ጋር «የመጀመሪያው የጋራ ግንባር» በሚል ስልታዊ ጥምረት ፈጥሮ ነበር። ነገር ግን የጋራ ጠላታቸው እንደተዳከመ እና ጥምረቱ ለብሔረተኞቹ አስፈላጊነቱ ሲያበቃ፣ በጥምረቱ ሰበብ የኮሙኒስቶቹን አደረጃጀት፣ የስምሪት ምሥጢር እና ድክመት በቅርበት በሚገባ ያጠናው የብሔረተኛው ጦር መሪ ቺያንግ ካይ-ሼክ፣ በ1927 በሻንጋይ ከተማ ውስጥ ትናንት አብረውት በጋራ የተሰለፉትን አጋሮቹን ላይ ድንገተኛ፣ የከሃዲነት እና አረመኔያዊ ጥቃት ሰነዘረ። በጥቂት ቀናት ውስጥ በሺዎች የሚቆጠሩ የኮሙኒስት ታጋዮችን እና አመራሮችን በአሰቃቂ ሁኔታ ጨፈጨፋቸው። ይህም ለረጅም ዓመታት ለዘለቀው እና በሚሊዮኖች ለሚቆጠሩ ዜጎች እልቂት ምክንያት ለሆነው የቻይና የእርስ በእርስ ጦርነት ቀጥተኛ መነሻ ሆነ።

ይህ የታሪክ ጥቁር ጠባሳ ዛሬ ላይ ለዐማራ ሕዝብ ሕልውና ተጋድሎ የሚያስተምረው አንድ ትልቅ መሠረታዊ ሀቅ አለ፦ ከመዋቅራዊ ጠላት ጋር የሚደረግ «ጽምዶ» መጨረሻው ጠላት ራሱን አደራጅቶ አንተን በምቾት እና ያለ ምንም ተከላካይ የሚጨፈጭፍበትን ወጥመድ በገዛ እጅህ ማዘጋጀት መሆኑን ብቻ ነው። አሁንም በየግንባሩ ጦር እየሰበቀ ያለውን፣ አማራን ማጥፋት እና መሬቱን መዋጥ መዋቅራዊ መታወቂያው ያደረገውን የዘወትር ገዳይ (ሕወሓትን) ለጊዜያዊ ጥቅም «አጋር» ማድረግ—ገዳዩን በራስ እጅ አጠናክሮ ራስን ለቀጣይ ይበልጥ ለከፋ እልቂት ማዘጋጀት ነው። ሕወሓት አሁናዊ የዘር ማጥፋት ወንጀሉን እና ፍላጎቱን በይፋ ሳይተው፣ የሐሰት ትርክቱን ሳያፈርስና ወርሮ የያዛቸውን ታሪካዊ ርስቶች (ራያን) በይፋ ሳይመልስ የሚደረግ ማንኛውም «ጽምዶ»—የርእዮተ-ዓለም ክህደት፣ የታሪክ መደለዝ እና የአማራ ሰማዕታት ደም ንግድ ነው!

፬. የመዋቅራዊ ትግል ባህሪ እና የታሪካዊ ማኅበረሰቦች ተሞክሮ፦ የአማራ ትግሕ የመውጫ መንገድ

ከሁሉም በላይ መታወቅ ያለበት መሠረታዊ እውነት ቢኖር፦ የአማራ ሕዝብ ስቃይና የዘር ማጽዳት አደጋ በደርግ ዘመን ጀምሮ የተቃኘ፣ በሕወሓት የእቅድና የትርክት መዋቅር የፀና እና በየስርዓቱ ተቋማዊ ድጋፍ ያለው እንጂ በአብይ አህመድ ዘመን ብቻ የጀመረ አይደለም፤ አብይ ከስልጣን ስለወረደም ብቻ አያበቃም!

ይህ ሀቅ የአማራ ሕዝብን የሕልውና ተጋድሎ የስልጣን ሽግግር ብቻ ከሚፈልጉ ሌሎች አምባገነንነትን ከሚቃወሙ ኃይሎች ይለየዋል። በመሆኑም የአብይ አገዛዝ ከስልጣን መወገድ የትግላችን አንዱ ጊዜያዊ ውጤት እንጂ የትግላችን ስትራቴጂካዊ ግብ ተደርጎ መወሰድ የለበትም። ስትራቴጂካዊ ግባችን ፀረ-አማራውን መዋቅር፣ የሐሰት ትርክትና የዘር ማጥፋት ስጋት ከመሰረቱ መደምሰስና አማራዊ የሕልውና ዋስትናን ማስከበር ነው።

ዛሬ በአብይ አህመድ የኦሮሙማ አገዛዝ፣ በኦነግ/OLA እና በሕወሓት የተደገሰለትን የተደራረበ የህልውና አደጋ ለመቀልበስ፣ የአማራ ሕዝብ መውሰድ ያለበት ታሪካዊ ምሳሌ የሰርቢያውያንን የመጀመሪያ ታሪካዊ ተጋድሎ (The First Serbian Uprising – 1804) ነው። ሰርቢያውያን እንደ አማራ ሁሉ የሀገሪቱ መሠረትና ግዙፍ ማኅበረሰብ ሆነው ሳለ፣ በየአካባቢው በተደራጁ የታጠቁ አምባገነን ኃይሎችና የክልል የጦር አበጋዞች መዋቅራዊ የዘር ማጥፋት፣ የማፈናቀልና የካርታ ወረራ አደጋ ተደግሶባቸው ነበር።

ሰርቢያውያን ከዚህ ታሪካዊ አደጋ የዳኑት ከከሃዲዎች ጋር «ጽምዶ» በመፍጠር ወይም በተኩስ ማቆም ስም ታሪካዊ ርስታቸውን አሳልፎ በመቸብቸብ አልነበረም። ይልቁኑ በታሪክ ካራጆርጄ (Karađorđe) በሚባለው ቆራጥ መሪ ዙሪያ በመሰብሰብ፣ በየአካባቢው ተበታትነው የነበሩትን ሃይዱክስ (Hajduks) የተባሉትን የሕዝብ የሲቪል መከላከያ ኃይሎች (ልክ እንደ ወቅቱ የፋኖ አደረጃጀቶች) ወደ አንድ ወጥ፣ በጥብቅ ወታደራዊና ፖለቲካዊ ዲሲፕሊን የሚገዛ ማዕከላዊ ዕዝ በመቀየር ነው።

በአሁኑ ወቅት ለአማራ ሕዝብ የሚያስፈልገው ታሪካዊ መስመር ይህ ነው፦

• አማራዊ ዓላማና ራዕይ ያለው፣ በጥብቅ ዲሲፕሊን የሚመራና በጠራ ድርጅታዊ መዋቅር የተገነባ የጋራ ማዕከላዊ ዕዝ፤
• እንደ ካራጆርጄ ዓይነት ከራሱ በላይ ለሆነ ታሪካዊ ዓላማ የቆመ፣ ቆራጥና ጀግና አታጋይ መሪ መፍጠር ብቻ ነው።

፭. «ግብዝ መሪና ዕውር ተከታይ»፦ የጥምረት ስም (ጽምዶ) እና የቀጠናው ቁማር

የፖለቲካ ሳይንስ እና የስትራቴጂ ጥናት እንደሚያስተምሩት፣ በአንድ የነፃነት ትግል ውስጥ ሊከሰት የሚችል ትልቁ አውዳሚ አደጋ «ግብዝ መሪና ዕውር ተከተይ» (The Cynical Leader and Blind Follower) የሚፈጥሩት ጥምረት ነው። እዚህ ላይ መታወቅ ያለበት መሠረታዊ እውነት ቢኖር፦ የዚህ «ጽምዶ» አጀንዳ አራጋቢ የሆኑት የፋኖ የበላይ መሪዎች ዕውር አይደሉም! በተቃራኒው፣ እነሱ የራሳቸውን ሥልጣንና የግል ጥቅም ብቻ አስልተው፣ የአማራን ሕዝብ ደምና ታሪካዊ ርስት ለቀጠናዊ ፖለቲካ ቁማር አሳልፈው የሸጡ፣ በሰማዕታት አጥንት ላይ የሚነግዱ አደገኛ ግብዞች ናቸው።

ትልቁ አደጋ የሚመጣው፣ ከታችኛው መዋቅር ያለውና በታማኝነት የሚዋጋው እውነተኛው ታጋይና ተከታይ፣ የመሪዎቹን ግብዝነትና ሴራ ሳይረዳ፣ «ለጋራ ጠላት መውደቅ ነው» በሚል ስሌት ብቻ በዕውር ድንብር (blindly) የሚከተልበት ሁኔታ ሲፈጠር ነው። ይህ ግብዝ መሪው የሕዝብን ትግል ለጠላት አሳልፎ የሚቸበችብበት፣ ተከተዩ ደግሞ የራሱን ዓይን ሸፍኖ የሚነዳበት ጉዞ፣ የመጨረሻ መዳረሻው ወደ አደገኛ ገደል ብቻ ነው!

ዓይንህን ካልገለጥክ፣ ሌላ አካል የአንተን መንገድ ይወስነዋል!
If you don’t open your eyes, someone else will decide your path

የአማራ ፋኖ የታችኛው መዋቅር ታጋይና የአማራ ወጣት ዓይኑን ገልጦ የነዚህን ግብዝ መሪዎች የጽምዶ ሴራ ካላወገዘና የራሱን መስመር ካልቀረጸ፣ ሕወሓትና የወያኔ ተስፈኞች የሕልውናውን ጥፋት፣ የሕዝቡን አጽመ-ርስትና እጣ-ፋንታ አሳልፈው ለመቸብቸብ የራሳቸውን ውሳኔ ይጭኑበታል።

ይህ የ«ግብዝ መሪና ዕውር ተከተይ» መዋቅር የጽምዶ አራጋቢዎችን አድርባይነትና የፖለቲካ ነጋዴነት በጥቂት አረፍተ ነገሮች የሚያጋልጥ እጅግ የሚመጥን ሳይንሳዊ ማሳያ ነው! አማራ ከራሱ አማራዊ የሕልውና መርህ እና ከታሪካዊ ርስቱ ውጭ፣ መዋቅራዊ ከሆኑና ኢትዮጵያን ለማፍረስ ከተመሰረቱ ፀረ-አማራ ድርጅቶች ጋር የሚፈጥረው አንዳችም አጋርነት አያስፈልገውም። አማራ በራሱ ነፃ የእዝ ቁጥጥር እና በጥብቅ ድርጅታዊ ዲሲፕሊን ላይ ጸንቶ ሲቆም፣ የትኛውንም ጠላት ድል የማድረግ ሙሉ ታሪካዊ አቅም አለው!

ማጠቃለያ፦ ለቦርከና አንባቢዎችና ለፋኖ አመራሮች የቀረበ ጥሪ

• «ጽምዶ» በሐሰት፣ በተቃርኖና በወያኔ ተስፈኞች የስልጣን ጥም የተሰራ የካርዶች ቤት (House of Cards) በመሆኑ በድፍን አማራ ሕዝብ ዘንድ ውድቅ ሆኗል!
• የጽምዶ ደላሎችና የወያኔ ተስፈኞች በአማራ ሕዝብ ስም የመደራደርና የመነገድ አንዳችም የሞራልና የታሪክ ውክልና የላቸውም!
• የፋኖ አመራሮችና ታጋዩ ወጣት ይህንን መርህ አልባ «ጽምዶ» በይፋ በማፍረስ፣ የትግሉን ስትራቴጂካዊና ርእዮተ-ዓለማዊ ነፃነት ማስከበር አለባቸው!
• የአማራ ሕዝብ አሸናፊነት የሚረጋገጠው ከነባርና ከዛሬም ድረስ ገዳዮቹ የዘወትር ጠላቶቹ ጋር በ«ጽምዶ» ስም በመንበርከክ ሳይሆን፣ በራሱ አማራዊ መርህ፣ በጥብቅ ድርጅታዊ ዲሲፕሊንና በታሪካዊ ርስቱ ማስከበር ላይ ጸንቶ ሲቆም ብቻ ነው!

ዶክተር ሶስና ታደሰ

The Ethiopian Tribune — ነፃ የአስተያየት መድረክ