Sustainability – Ethiopian Tribune

Yehager Kasma: The Women Who Anchor the Nation

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 04:37:22 +0000

Read Time:3 Minute, 58 Second

Editor’s Foreword

The Analyst Who Came Back to Thank the Women

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

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

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

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

A nation is held by its anchor, not driven by its quarrels. The anchor is the wisdom of its women, and we abandon it at the cost of the Nation’s future.

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

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

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

Read the full essay

yehager_kasma_mgh.pdf

›Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD), “Yehager Kasma: The Women Who Anchor the Nation.”

— The Editor
The Ethiopian Tribune

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POVERTY PACKED ITS BAGS

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:21:18 +0000

Read Time:5 Minute, 39 Second

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE · SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM

POVERTY PACKED ITS BAGS

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

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

The Eviction of an Abstraction

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

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

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

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

The One Clean Window

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

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

The Mendicant-in-Chief

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

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

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

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

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

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

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune

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The System in Which Parties Lose

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:19:09 +0000

Read Time:10 Minute, 40 Second

Analysis · Democracy & Accountability

The System in Which Parties Lose

On the June morning a British prime minister with a landslide majority prepared to surrender power, Ethiopia certified a contest that almost no one lost. A study in what turnout figures conceal — and what democracy actually demands.

By E. Frashie

On the morning these words were set down, Sir Keir Starmer — barely two years into a Labour government returned with a Commons majority of around 172 seats, among the largest in modern British history — was widely reported to be arranging the choreography of his own departure. British newspapers said he had concluded, after consultations with cabinet colleagues, party donors and union leaders, that his position was no longer tenable, and would set out a timetable for an orderly exit. Across the Atlantic, the President of the United States had pre-empted him, announcing on his own platform that the British leader “will resign” — a breach of protocol that commentators in London called a final humiliation.¹

What undid Starmer was not the loss of a general election. He still holds his majority in the Commons; no one has out-voted him at the national ballot. What undid him was a cascade of lesser verdicts. Catastrophic local-election results in which Labour shed more than eleven hundred council seats. The surge of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, now a fixture at the head of the polls. A by-election won decisively by a rival from his own benches, Andy Burnham. And, finally, the cold arithmetic of more than ninety Labour members of parliament concluding that he could no longer hold together the coalition that had carried them to power.

It was his authority that drained away, not his honesty. He stands accused of no personal wrongdoing; the scandal that shadowed his final months — the appointment, since reversed, of an envoy with ties to a convicted sex offender — bruised his judgement rather than his conduct. But a leader’s mandate is a perishable thing, and in a working democracy a spent mandate is fatal to the office-holder even when it is survivable for the office. Hold that image — a prime minister with a parliamentary supermajority forced out by the judgement of voters and the nerve of his own party — and turn to Addis Ababa.

Democracy, the political scientist Adam Przeworski wrote, is a system in which parties lose elections. By that test, what Ethiopia declared this month was not a democratic event but its photographic negative.

The test Przeworski set

Three traditions in political theory tell us what an election is for, and the distance between them is where this month’s result lives. The minimalist school, descending from Joseph Schumpeter, reduces democracy to a method: a genuine competitive struggle between rival elites for the people’s vote. The procedural school, built on Robert Dahl’s idea of polyarchy, sets out the institutional guarantees that make such a struggle real — free and fair and recurring elections, freedom of expression, alternative sources of information, the freedom to organise, an inclusive franchise, and officials who actually wield the power they are elected to.

But it is Adam Przeworski who gives the sharpest single line. Democracy, he argued, is distinguished by one feature above all others: the institutionalised uncertainty of its outcomes. It is the system in which incumbents can lose, and sometimes do. The test is not whether a vote is held, nor even how many turn out for it, but whether the result was ever genuinely in doubt — and whether, having lost, the powerful actually surrender what they held. By that measure Westminster, for all its present squalor, was staging a democratic event this week. Addis Ababa was not.

The arithmetic of unanimity

The National Election Board of Ethiopia certified the 7th General Election with an average turnout of 96.2 per cent of registered voters, ranging from 94 per cent in the Somali and Afar regions to 99 per cent in Harari.² Against that near-universal participation sat a near-universal verdict. The Prosperity Party took 523 of the 528 declared regional-council seats in Oromia, 257 of 277 in Amhara, and clean or near-clean sweeps almost everywhere else. In the federal House of Peoples’ Representatives the pattern repeated: 167 of 173 declared seats in Oromia, the great majority in every other region, with opposition parties and independents reduced to a scattering of single mandates.

Set that pair of figures — almost everyone voting, almost everyone endorsing one party — against the most recent national elections in the established democracies, and the anomaly announces itself.

Turnout and its meaning, by regime type

Band	Turnout logic	Typical turnout	Winner’s seat share	Example (latest)
Competitive multiparty	Civic duty and mobilisation	55–66%	Fragmented; alternation	UK 59.7% · US 63.7% · India 65.8%
Exceptional mobilisation	High-stakes surge	80–85%	Coalition, no sweep	Germany 82.5%
Compulsory-voting democracy	Participation by law	88–92%	Still fragmented	Australia · Belgium
Electoral authoritarian / dominant-party	Administrative mobilisation	90–99%	Near-total sweep	Rwanda 98.2% · Ethiopia 96.2%

Latest national elections. Turnout uses differing denominators across systems and is indicative, not exact.³

The competitive democracies cluster in the low-to-mid sixties: the United Kingdom at 59.7 per cent in 2024, the United States at roughly 63.7, India — the largest electoral exercise on earth — at 65.8. Only an extraordinary mobilisation lifts a free system into the eighties, as Germany reached 82.5 per cent this year. The sole established democracies that routinely clear ninety are those where the law compels attendance, as in Australia and Belgium; and there the high turnout still yields fragmented parliaments and alternating governments. Ethiopia compels no one to vote. The company its figure keeps is elsewhere: Rwanda, where President Kagame was returned last year with 99 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 98 per cent.

What turnout conceals

The reason the comparison cuts is that turnout means opposite things in different systems. In a competitive democracy, participation is explained by the economists’ paradox of voting — a single ballot is almost never decisive, so people vote out of duty, habit and the sense that the contest matters — and by institutional design: compulsory voting, proportional representation, automatic registration, all of which lift the figure. In a dominant-party state, very high turnout measures something different again: the mobilising reach of the administration, the party and the public payroll, the social cost of being seen not to vote, and, in some cases, the elasticity of the figure itself. The same number, read in the two settings, carries contrary meanings.

Ethiopia’s own electoral history makes the point more forcefully than any foreign comparison can. The freest contest in the country’s modern record — the election of 2005, when the opposition made real gains before the crackdown that followed — produced the lowest turnout of the era, around 82.6 per cent. The least competitive — the 2010 election, which returned the ruling front and its allies to all but two of 547 federal seats — was held on a turnout above 93 per cent.⁴ The more genuine the choice on offer, the fewer came; the more foregone the conclusion, the larger the crowd. Read in that order, the figures stop flattering and begin to confess.

The freest election in Ethiopia’s modern history produced its lowest turnout. The least free produced near-unanimity. Enthusiasm does not explain numbers that move in that direction.

The universal criteria

There is no single global registrar of democracies, but three bodies function as the working consensus, and on Ethiopia they converge. The V-Dem Institute, whose framework is built directly on Dahl’s polyarchy, classifies Ethiopia as an electoral autocracy — a state that holds multiparty elections but lacks the freedoms of expression and association that make them meaningful — with an Electoral Democracy Index score of 0.263 on a scale to one. Freedom House rates the country Not Free, and names it explicitly among a small group of states that have fallen from Partly Free to Not Free on the strength of manipulated elections since 2005. The Economist Intelligence Unit places it in the lowest of its four bands, the authoritarian regimes.

These are not the verdicts of Ethiopia’s domestic opposition, who might be discounted, but of three independent international monitors applying published criteria to the same facts. They reached their classifications before this month’s vote. The 96.2 per cent does not unsettle that picture; it illustrates it.

Elections without democracy

The scholarship has a name for the species. Andreas Schedler called it “electoral authoritarianism” — the regime that no longer cancels the vote but instead rigs the conditions around it, deploying what he called a menu of manipulation: disqualifying inconvenient candidates, controlling the media and the count, harnessing the resources of the state, and manufacturing the appearance of consent. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way mapped the same terrain as “competitive authoritarianism,” where elections are real enough to matter yet tilted enough that the opposition cannot win. In this literature a landslide on a near-total turnout is not the refutation of the diagnosis. It is the diagnosis.

The tell is never the polling day alone. Electoral integrity, as Pippa Norris insists, must hold across the whole cycle — the drawing of boundaries, the registration of voters, the eligibility of candidates, the freedom of the campaign and the press, the casting, the counting and the resolution of disputes. A flawless count behind a curated ballot is not a free election; it is a well-run formality. The question to ask of Ethiopia’s 96.2 per cent is not whether the sums add up, but whether anyone was ever permitted to make them come out differently.

The price of accountability

Which returns us to London, and to the spectacle that prompted these reflections. By one reading it is a portrait of dysfunction: a governing party devouring its own leader; a prime minister with a historic majority driven out within two years; the sixth occupant of Downing Street to depart in a single decade; a foreign president crowing over the wreckage. Stability it is not.

But the churn is the accountability. The reason a British prime minister can be felled by council results and a restless backbench is that the mandate is real, and therefore revocable. Power in that system is held on terms, and the terms can be enforced — messily, humiliatingly, but enforced. The Ethiopian prime minister faces no such hazard, not because he is more loved than his British counterpart, but because the mechanism that could translate disaffection into consequence has been hollowed of its content. The 96.2 per cent is the measure of that hollowing. A leader who cannot lose is a leader who need not listen.

So the two events of this June week belong together. In one country, an election that produced near-perfect agreement and changed nothing. In another, results that produced no clear winner of anything and brought down a government. Unanimity is not the higher form of democracy; it is, more often, the sign of its absence. Where parties cannot lose, the people have not yet been given the one power that makes the rest worth counting. By Przeworski’s plain test, the messy capital had the democratic week. The orderly one merely held a vote.

A note on sources

Reporting on the British leadership crisis follows The Observer, the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press, 20–22 June 2026. At the time of writing a formal statement was widely expected but not officially confirmed; Downing Street pointed to the prime minister’s earlier insistence that he remained focused on the job.
Official figures from the National Election Board of Ethiopia’s declaration of the 7th General Election. Turnout is reported against registered voters, the NEBE denominator.
Comparative turnout: UK House of Commons Library (2024); University of Florida Election Lab and US Census Bureau (2024); Election Commission of India (2024); the Federal Returning Officer, Germany (2025). Denominators differ across jurisdictions; the bands, not the decimals, carry the argument.
Classifications: V-Dem Democracy Report 2025/2026 (Electoral Democracy Index 0.263; ‘electoral autocracy’); Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025/2026 (‘Not Free’); Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (‘authoritarian regime’). Ethiopian historical turnout: IFES Election Guide. Theory: Schumpeter (1942); Dahl (1971); Przeworski (1991); Schedler (2002); Levitsky & Way (2010); Norris (2014).

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The Republic of the Ivory Smile

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:17:31 +0000

Read Time:10 Minute, 6 Second

The Ethiopian Tribune · Comment

The Republic of the Ivory Smile

How a ruling class fell in love with its own reflection eyebrows, dental work, designer labels and all while the city it governs was bulldozed out from under the poor

By Sewasew Teklemariam

There is a face that now greets the Ethiopian viewer at the top of every evening bulletin, and it is not, by any reasonable measure, an Ethiopian face. It has been sanded, lightened, contoured and lacquered into something that belongs to no particular country and therefore, conveniently, to no particular people. The eyebrows have been shaved clean off and redrawn in a stern geometric arc that nature never issued at birth. The hair rises in a glossy synthetic tower, imported by the kilo and sold to the public under that marvellous euphemism, “human hair” as if the adjective alone could launder the artifice. The wardrobe would not look out of place in a Gulf shopping concourse. And beneath all of it, somewhere, is a presenter reading the news to a republic in which most citizens are quietly counting out the day’s injera.

Let me be precise about what this column is and is not. It is not a sermon against vanity. People have wanted to look attractive since the first Ethiopian caught her reflection in the Awash, and a young woman who enjoys her lipstick owes no apology to me or to anyone else. I am not in the business of policing the faces of working women. The argument is narrower, and I think more uncomfortable: the look has stopped being personal and become a uniform. And a uniform always carries a message.

The Mask and the Message

Watch the screen long enough and you notice the message is identical from channel to channel. It says: I am not from here. It says modernity is a coat of paint, and the more of it you wear, the more modern you must be. The makeup too often applied by artists who appear to have learned their craft from a phone screen rather than from any studio is not there to flatter a face. It is there to abolish one. The point is the erasure: the elimination of pore, line and blemish, and with them every visible trace of the ordinary Ethiopian who is presumably watching from a one-room rental with the power off.

The drawn-on eyebrow is the small, perfect emblem of the whole enterprise. You remove the thing you were given, and then you draw, in its place, a stylised version of the thing you removed harder, blacker, more severe, entirely artificial. If you wanted a single image for the governing aesthetic of this country, you could do a great deal worse. Tear out the original. Paint over the gap. Insist the painting is an improvement.

Tear out the original. Paint over the gap. Insist the painting is an improvement.

Dressed for the Wrong Job

There is also the matter of the wardrobe, which deserves its own complaint. A newsreader is not a wedding singer. The job, the actual job, is to be trusted, and trust has a dress code, and that dress code is restraint. When the person delivering news of a massacre in Arsi or a famine warning in the lowlands is turned out as though for a perfume advertisement, something in the contract between broadcaster and public quietly tears. The seriousness leaks out of the room. The viewer is no longer being informed by a journalist; he is being performed at by a brand. A profession that once carried the dignity of bearing witness is reduced, set by set, to a styling exercise. The clothes are not a trivial thing. They are the visible announcement that the channel has decided it is in the business of looking impressive rather than telling the truth.

The Men and Their Ivory Smiles

For a long time this was treated, lazily and a little cruelly, as a women’s affliction the makeup, the hair, the hemlines. It is no longer possible to pretend so. The men have joined the parade, and the men have gone further, because the men have power, and power likes to be photographed.

Observe the new political class when it assembles for a ribbon-cutting. The teeth, first of all: rows of veneered, factory-white incisors, an “ivory smile” so uniform across the cadre that one begins to suspect a single dentist somewhere is quietly building an empire. Then the labels the watch worn at the precise angle that ensures it is noticed, the suit with the conspicuous European name, often enough a counterfeit one, which is its own small poem: a fake badge of a foreign house, worn as proof of having arrived. The whole costume says one thing, and says it loudly: Look at me. I am a fine specimen. I am a man of modernity.

This is the visual grammar of Prosperity the party and, with grim aptness, the promise. It is a politics conducted almost entirely on the surface, in which to appear prosperous is taken as sufficient evidence of having delivered prosperity. The cadre does not point to the factory he built or the family he lifted out of want. He points to his own teeth. The smile is the manifesto.

The Influencer Front

And the painted face does not stay in the studio. It has been issued a phone and a ring light and sent to war.

There is now a standing army of them the YouTube and TikTok brigades, the “content creators,” the lifestyle vloggers and the makers of patriotic shorts and they fight on a very particular front. Their weapon is the colour grade. Watch one of their dispatches from the new Addis: the footage has been run through a LUT until the sky is a Dubai turquoise and the asphalt gleams like wet obsidian; the drone lifts off the boulevard in one unbroken, swooning shot; the same ivory dentures we met earlier flash on cue; and beneath it all swells an AI-generated anthem, assuring you the country has arrived. It is beautiful. That is the entire point. It is engineered to be beautiful, and beauty, deployed at scale, is an argument that asks for no evidence.

The scholars have lately given the technique a name: aesthetic propaganda. Unlike the old sort, in which the state ground out its own leaden bulletins, this is produced in a distributed swarm by ministries, by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Addis Ababa City Administration posting glossy drone reels, and then by thousands of supporters who clip them, re-cut them, score them and fire them back out. When a foreign celebrity wanders through the American streamer IShowSpeed pulled some ten million views in a single day on Addis’s remade streets, and the Ghanaian creator Wode Maya has made a small vocation of the genre the machine seizes the footage and elevates it into the official story, conveniently scrubbed of the Western lens that usually frames the continent in dust.

None of this is accidental, and the government has stopped pretending it is. In May it convened an African Social Media Influencers Summit at the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum, bussed the visiting creators out to the corridor sites and the new artificial-intelligence institute, and announced aloud, in plain Amharic and English that it was seeking “partnerships with digital influencers and content producers on national priorities.” The carrot is the junket, the per-diem, the access. The stick sits just behind it: the same authorities have invested in monitoring and sentiment tools to identify which influencers matter, gauge the spread of criticism, and answer it with counter-campaigns or, when the mood sours, an internet shutdown. Sing the corridor’s praises and you are flown to a museum. Mention the people it displaced and you may find your region has mysteriously lost its signal.

For there is, of course, a rival broadcast the TikTokers who never received the memo, who use the very same intimate medium to talk about inflation, unemployment and the development corridors that uproot communities in the name of growth. They are why the state is nervous. The lacquered reel and the furious phone-video are now fighting over the same fifteen seconds of a citizen’s attention and only one of them has a drone, a LUT and a government summit behind it.

Sing the corridor’s praises and you are flown to a museum. Mention the people it displaced and you may find your region has lost its signal.

Turn the Camera Around

Here is where the column stops being amusing.

While the screen the television set, and now the phone has been broadcasting these polished faces and their colour-graded boulevards, the actual faces of Addis Ababa have been loaded onto the backs of lorries and driven to the edge of the city. The “corridor” the Prime Minister’s signature project to reupholster the capital in the image of a Gulf emirate has, by Amnesty International’s account, forcibly evicted thousands of residents across Addis Ababa and at least fifty-eight other towns. In the Bole and Lemi Kura sub-cities alone, the organisation documented at least 872 people pushed from their homes in the space of a single month. Families were given between twenty-four and seventy-two hours’ notice. Most received no compensation. Many held no paperwork the state was willing to recognise, and so, in the bureaucratic logic of the bulldozer, they had never quite existed.

So consider the arithmetic of a single television frame. In the foreground: a presenter whose face has been engineered to look as though it comes from a wealthier country, reporting from a studio in a city being physically rebuilt to look like a wealthier country. Off-camera, beyond the new boulevard and the imported palms, are the people who used to live where the boulevard now runs. The same aesthetic governs both the cosmetic and the civic. Both begin by removing what is genuinely there: the eyebrow, the old town, the inconvenient poor. Both replace it with a glossier, foreign-looking simulation. And both then instruct the public to admire the result as progress.

The ivory smile and the bulldozer are not two stories. They are one.

They are what happens when a state confuses looking modern with being just when the entire energy of a governing class is poured into the management of appearances, because appearances are the one thing it has learned how to manufacture.

The Unretouched Face

I have nothing against beauty, and still less against ambition. A people has every right to want nice things, straight teeth and a handsome capital. The objection is to the lie embedded in the performance: the suggestion that a foundation two shades too light is the same as dignity, that a counterfeit French label is the same as wealth, that a widened road is the same as a home.

There is a real Ethiopian face. It is older and more tired than the one on the bulletin, and a good deal more beautiful, because it has not been instructed to apologise for existing. You will not, as a rule, find it in the studio. You will find it on the bus to the periphery, watching the city it built recede behind the new glass, wondering when, exactly, the country decided it preferred the painting to the original.

Turn the camera around. That is the face worth broadcasting.

Sources: Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: End mass forced evictions” (14 April 2025); Global Voices, “Ethiopia’s Urban Renewal Projects and the Turn Toward Aesthetic Propaganda” (March 2026); the Ethiopian News Agency and allAfrica on the African Social Media Influencers Summit (May 2026); Global Voices Advox, PesaCheck and AFP Fact Check on AI-generated political media; the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre on state digital-monitoring tools; and Addis Insight on Ethiopia’s TikTok dissenters. Corridor displacement figures are Amnesty’s documented minimums for the specified sub-cities and time-frame; the true totals are widely held to be considerably higher.

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The Wall of Silence

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:50:01 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 51 Second

The Wall of Silence — The Ethiopian Tribune

Europe · The Horn of Africa

The Wall of Silence

A prince of the old Solomonic line carried the case of Ethiopia’s persecuted Orthodox Christians into the European Parliament. The institution has the power to act — and a long practice of looking away.

By E. Frashie

The whole of southern Germany had stopped moving. Storms had taken down the railways, and the keynote speaker was late — he had changed trains four times and called it, when he finally reached the lectern, a small miracle that he had arrived at all. There is a metaphor in this that the afternoon did not need spelling out: a man had come to Brussels to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing. Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate apologised for the delay, thanked the room, and proceeded to lay before it a charge sheet that the institutions of the West have spent the better part of a decade declining to read.

The hearing had been convened in the European Parliament under the intergroup on freedom of religion or belief, and organised by the European Centre for Law and Justice, a faith-aligned legal advocacy body whose report on the subject — bluntly titled The Silent Suffering of the Amhara People in Ethiopia — was first published two years ago and has now been revised. The choice of witness was deliberate. Asfa-Wossen Asserate is a grand-nephew of Haile Selassie and a descendant of a Solomonic line that traces its claim to Aksum; he is also a German-based historian and author whose father was among the sixty senior officials executed on the Black Saturday of November 1974, while the prince, then a student, was stranded abroad. He has spent fifty years in exile. He is, in other words, the rare witness whom even an indifferent chamber finds difficult to wave away.

He had come to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed rail timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing.

His thesis was delivered in the flat, exhausted register of a man who has made the argument before. Ethiopia, he said, is not enduring a civil war but several at once, governed throughout by what he called an ethnic-elite lens that has hollowed out its institutions, its press and its courts. The portion he had come to document was the fate of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church — an institution he dated to the first century, older than the Roman and the Byzantine traditions, custodian of the Books of Enoch and Jubilees and of manuscripts that survive nowhere else on earth. For eight consecutive years, he charged, a coordinated campaign has been waged against Orthodox communities in parts of Ethiopia, and above all in Oromia.

The case, as he made it

The specifics were grim and familiar to anyone who reads the Horn closely: churches burned to their foundations, some of them ancient repositories of manuscript heritage; priests, monks, deacons and nuns killed; crucifixes torn from the necks of worshippers, children among them, in footage that circulates widely and produces no arrests. The victims, the prince noted, are predominantly Amhara, but include Tigrayan, Gurage and Oromo Christians — a point worth holding onto, because it complicates any attempt to file the violence under ethnic politics alone. He reserved his sharpest language for what he described as the state’s capture of the Church itself: the displacement of its canonical leadership, the installation of compliant bishops, and the dismantling of an autonomy that had survived emperors and Marxists alike. An institution that endured the Derg, in his telling, is now being asked to survive the peace.

On the gravest numbers, candour requires the distance the prince himself volunteered. His tally of nearly forty thousand casualties from federal air and drone strikes on Amhara across five months — some fourteen thousand of them dead, with further claims of mass rape, abduction and detention — was drawn, he conceded from the podium, from a single American monitor with few specialists on the country. Those figures sit far above anything in the independently documented record and should travel only with that caveat attached. The corroborated core of his case is narrower and no less damning. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has logged repeated mass killings of Orthodox Christians in the Arsi zone through this year; and in the final days of May, as the nation queued to vote, assailants moved through Arsi again, killing at least thirty-five worshippers and burning the Teleta Saint Gabriel church, a structure that had stood for a hundred and one years. The federal government blames the Oromo Liberation Army and the prime minister offered his condolences; the OLA denies responsibility and accuses forces aligned with the state. The attribution is contested. The dead are not.

An institution that endured the Derg is now being asked to survive the peace.

He widened the lens before closing. He cited the patriarch, Abune Matias, who in early May had pleaded with the country’s leaders not to be ruthless with God’s people. He noted that thousands of schools across Amhara stand damaged or destroyed and that, by the monitors he trusts, only about a fifth of the region’s children now attend one. And he turned, pointedly, to the singer Teddy Afro, whose record Ethiora — briefly the second-ranked album on a global chart — pleaded for reconciliation across faith and tribe, and whose premises were raided and whose managers were jailed for it. A confident state, the prince implied, does not fear a hymn to brotherhood.

Six things he asked for

The prince’s demands to the institutions of the West

The United Nations — an independent Human Rights Council inquiry into the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Oromia, with particular attention to the Arsi massacres, the church burnings and the displacement of clergy.
The United States — to invoke the International Religious Freedom Act and designate Ethiopia a Country of Particular Concern.
The European Union — targeted sanctions on the officials within the government who have enabled, coordinated or shielded the perpetrators.
The African Union — to end its institutional silence and acknowledge that a member state is committing crimes against its own religious minorities.
The international criminal bodies — to begin the systematic documentation of evidence for prosecution, naming the prime minister and his senior security and political officials.
The global media and civil society — to break the wall of silence, sustain coverage, and amplify the voices of those living in fear.

The institution he was addressing

It is the fourth and sixth of these that the afternoon implicitly tested, because they were addressed to the very rooms in which he stood. Brussels is not wholly deaf to the subject: in January the Parliament passed its annual human-rights resolution and, for the first time, named “Christianophobia” as a global pattern. But a resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs. The gap between the two is the whole of his complaint. The European Union has the legal machinery for targeted sanctions and the diplomatic standing to make an African Union member uncomfortable; what it has lacked, on Ethiopia, is the will to spend either.

He ended where such testimony always ends, with the roll-call of the previously ignored. The world expressed its remorse after Rwanda, after Sinjar, after Srebrenica, he said, and remorse that arrives after the fact is not justice; it is paperwork. The Church he had described has outlasted the fall of Aksum, the medieval invasions and the Derg’s Marxist persecution across two thousand years. It would be a particular shame, he suggested, for it to be extinguished now, in plain sight, under the gaze of a world that possesses both the knowledge and the instruments to prevent it. Whether that world reaches for them, or reaches once more for the language of regret, is the only question the hearing actually posed — and the one it adjourned without answering.

A resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs.

◊ ◊ ◊

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Surviving Is Not Governing

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

Read Time:9 Minute, 39 Second

Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

Surviving Is Not Governing

On chaotic equilibrium, the four singular interests, and the constitutional reckoning Ethiopia cannot defer

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

16 June 2026

There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes not from silence but from the opposite from having said, again and again, what is true and necessary, and watching the words dissolve into a political atmosphere too saturated with noise to absorb them. It is the fatigue of the serious analyst in a season that rewards the demagogue. Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu knows it well. In the note he sent us alongside this, his concluding instalment in a series of nine essays published in these pages over the past six months, he described the experience with a candour that struck this editor as the most honest thing written about Ethiopian public discourse in recent memory:

“I am gradually learning that our politics often generates more noise than traction. One writes and writes, hoping to be heard, yet too often the words disappear into the ether. In time, the process itself can become a kind of addiction, a relentless attempt to persuade, explain, and warn, even when the echoes seem to return unanswered.”

We publish those words here, in this foreword, because they deserve to be read as part of the record not as an admission of defeat, which they are not, but as a diagnosis, offered by the same disciplined mind that has spent half a year mapping Ethiopia’s converging crises with the tools of systems science, geopolitical analysis, and institutional economics. MGH writes as a nationalist, he tells us, but not a partisan; and that distinction has been the animating principle of everything this series has produced. The distinction is rarer than it should be. It has made his work essential.

This final essay, “Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?”, is the series at its most ambitious and, in places, its most sombre. It arrives in the immediate aftermath of the 1 June snap election an exercise conducted under telecommunications blackout in parts of the country, with scores of polling stations that never opened and it reads that domestic reality against a regional storm the analysts did not price in: the US–Israel war on Iran, launched on 28 February, that has refused to end cleanly and has now, as these words go to press, produced a Geneva settlement that enriches and validates Tehran while sidelining Jerusalem and overruling the very coalition on which Ethiopia’s most ambitious external bets were quietly staked.

The argument MGH assembles is, characteristically, not about the headline but about the structure beneath it. He draws on the mathematics of dynamical systems strange attractors, dissipative structures, Lorenz, Prigogine not as ornament but as analytical instrument, using the science to interrogate the fashionable claim that Abiy Ahmed’s method constitutes the “mastery” of chaotic equilibrium. His verdict is precise and unsparing: surviving is not governing; and a strange attractor not anchored to the nation’s constitutive interests does not hold a state together it merely postpones the moment it flies apart. The Middle East permacrisis, he argues, supplies the illustration at scale: two of the most powerful men alive tried to ride the chaos and lost control of it. The temptation being marketed to Addis Ababa is identical. The margin for error is far smaller.

“A detonator mistaken for a microphone.” On the public record, the Office of the Prime Minister folded the Arsi massacre into a statement dominated by the seventh national election—treating the dead as a footnote to a campaign. That is not analysis. It is denial wearing the costume of statesmanship.”

At the heart of the essay and, the Tribune believes, at the heart of the Ethiopian moment—is Arsi. The systematic attacks on Orthodox Christian communities in East Arsi Zone, escalating since October 2025 and surging around the election itself, are not, MGH argues, a regional incident to be managed by press line. They are what he calls the super-coupler: the violence that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one, assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single insurgency Ethiopia faces, and places before the state a test it cannot pass with a messaging strategy. A burned church cannot be split the difference of in a negotiation. And the institution most capable of unmaking a government the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, with its pan-ethnic reach and its centuries of accumulated moral authority is watching.

The essay does not confine itself to catastrophe. MGH opens a genuine developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed crediting the inheritance he kept from the Meles era, the agricultural programmes that earned international recognition, the completion of GERD, the private investment arriving at scale and he refuses the lazy comfort of imagining the opposition as the remedy. His assessment of the diaspora’s self-defeating fervour, of the ethnic entrepreneurship institutionalised by the 1995 constitution, of the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build, and of the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies these are the most searching pages of the series, and they demand the kind of re-reading that our noisy public square is least equipped to offer.

The prescription is the same one this series has returned to with the discipline of a compass: the four singular interests Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine legislated and made invariant, anchored not in the operator’s survival but in the survival of the state. And beneath that, the founding text itself. You cannot fix the basin around civic unity, MGH writes, while operating under a constitution that makes ethnicity, not citizenship, the fundamental unit of the state. It is the constitution, stupid and has been, all along.

A WORD OF APPRECIATION

The Ethiopian Tribune owes Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu a debt that a foreword can only begin to acknowledge. Since January 2026 he has contributed to these pages nine major essays spanning the Abraham Accords and the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn security architecture, the June election and the developmental state question, national unity and Red Sea sovereignty, and now this concluding synthesis. Each piece arrived rigorously sourced, analytically independent, and written with the kind of moral seriousness that is the rarest commodity in Ethiopian public life. He wrote not to be agreed with, but to be useful. That, in this political season, is an act of considerable courage.

He writes now that his sabbatical is drawing to a close, and that other pressing responsibilities will soon demand his attention. He takes comfort, he says, in knowing he has said what he felt compelled to say. We take comfort, for our part, in knowing that these essays exist that they are on the record, available to the patient reader who returns to them when the noise has subsided, as noise always does, and the questions MGH has been asking remain exactly as unresolved as they are today. History will adjudicate his analysis; we do not doubt the judgement will be generous.

He closes his note to us with a wish: that we were more reflective, more strategic, more clear-eyed in our judgements, and above all—kinder to one another. It is a wish this Tribune shares, and one we commend to every reader. MGH continues to pray for healing, understanding, and reconciliation. So do we. We are grateful to have had him in our pages, and we shall remain so.

ABOUT THIS ESSAY: A SUMMARY FOR THE READER

“Can Abiy Govern in Chaotic Equilibrium?” is the ninth and concluding instalment in MGH’s series for the Ethiopian Tribune, and it operates on three simultaneous registers: the geopolitical, the systemic, and the constitutional.

Geopolitically, the essay reads Ethiopia’s domestic crisis against the US–Israel war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 and, after months of a resilient Iranian resistance that held the Strait of Hormuz shut and weaponised what MGH calls “linkage” binding the Lebanese and Gulf theatres so that neither could be settled alone ended in a Geneva deal signed on 19 June that enriched Iran, sidelined Israel, and overruled the latent coalition of Israeli technology, Emirati capital, and American security cover on which Ethiopia’s Red Sea ambitions had been quietly staked. The lesson MGH draws is not one of misfortune but of method: sovereignty cannot be outsourced, and a bet placed on other people’s coalitions is clientage with better branding.

Systemically, the essay subjects to forensic examination the fashionable claim that Abiy’s method constitutes the mastery of chaotic equilibrium. Using the mathematics of dynamical systems—strange attractors, bifurcation thresholds, Lorenz’s butterfly, Prigogine’s dissipative structures—MGH identifies three things true of strange attractors that the flattering version omits: the basin is set by the system’s parameters, not chosen by the operator; sensitive dependence cuts both ways; and an attractor is not a goal, merely a description of where a system goes when no one is choosing where it should go. A state can orbit a basin of permanent low-grade civil war indefinitely. That, too, is a chaotic equilibrium. It is also a catastrophe.

Constitutionally, the essay returns, as the whole series has returned, to the founding text. The 1995 constitution does not merely permit ethnic mobilisation; it rewards it, vesting sovereignty in “nations, nationalities and peoples” and inscribing secession into the first principles of the state. Under those equations, the attractor the system is mathematically drawn toward is ethnic entrepreneurship—the monkey-habit that produces Fano, sustains the TPLF, gives the OLA its grammar, and hands Asmara its proxies. The four singular interests—Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based development anchored in democracy, and GERD as engine—are the invariants that could anchor a different attractor. But they must be legislated, not improvised. It is, as MGH has said from the beginning, the constitution, stupid.

Along the way, the essay examines: the convergence of three insurgencies (Fano, OLA, TPLF) with a sovereign default still unresolved two and a half years on; the role of Turkey as the straddler who profits from managed disorder; Eritrea as the patient spoiler whose bargaining position improves with every month the regional storm continues; the Arsi massacres as the super-coupler that welds the ethnic fracture to the religious one and assembles a coalition of grievance larger than any single armed movement Ethiopia faces; the developmental ledger on Abiy Ahmed—credits and debits both; the formal logic of divide-and-rule as modelled by Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier; the historical engineering of ethnicity under the TPLF-led EPRDF; the cultural grammar of mistrust that makes horizontal solidarity so difficult to build; the political economy that makes rival ethnic elites collaborators rather than enemies; the weakness of an opposition that embodies rather than transcends the fracture; and the self-defeating fervour of a diaspora that holds a financial lever over an exchange-rate-starved state and never picks it up.

It is dense work, and it is important work. The Tribune commends it to every Ethiopian who believes the country can still choose the other dish.

READ THE FULL PUBLICATION

The complete essay including all footnotes, the full bibliography of sixty sources, and the extended analysis of the four singular interests as a controlling invariant, is available for download at the link below. Readers are encouraged to share it widely.

↓ Download the Full Publication. ↓

chaotic_equilibrium.pdf Download

ethiopiantribune.com/publications/chaotic-equilibrium

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Carrots, Sticks, and the Coming Fire

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

Read Time:18 Minute, 3 Second

America is trying to prevent another catastrophic war in the Horn of Africa. The evidence suggests it is already too late, unless it is prepared to do something far more difficult than lifting sanctions on a dictatorship.

By E. Frashie · Ethiopian Tribune · Geopolitical Correspondent

The Economist put it plainly in its latest edition: America almost certainly wants to prevent a war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the Trump administration appears to be using both carrots and sticks to avert it. The carrot is the lifting of Biden-era sanctions on Eritrea’s military and ruling party. The stick is a private but repeated warning to Addis Ababa that Washington will not countenance any forcible seizure of Red Sea access. The diagnosis is correct. The prescription, unfortunately, does not match the disease.

What the magazine’s framing does not capture — and what the accumulated weight of reporting from Asmara, Port Sudan, Cairo and Addis Ababa now makes difficult to deny, is that the Horn of Africa is not drifting towards war. It is being steered there. The architecture of that steering has been under construction for the better part of two years. It has a name. It has sponsors. It has already produced facts on the ground that no amount of American diplomatic ingenuity, in its current form, is configured to reverse.

This is an account of what is actually happening, who is responsible, and what, if anything, might yet prevent it.

The coalition nobody wants to name

The word is Tigrinya for ‘yoke’ or ‘coupling’ two things bound together by necessity rather than by affection. In the political vocabulary of the Horn in 2026, Tsimdo has come to name something considerably more consequential: a convergence of former enemies who have set aside the memory of atrocity to prosecute a shared campaign against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Its architecture is striking. At its centre sit the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the hardline faction under Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, which reconstituted its pre-war 2020 regional council in May 2026, appointed Debretsion as regional president, and formally ended any residual commitment to the Pretoria Agreement that concluded the 2020–22 Tigray war and the government of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, whose forces fought alongside Ethiopia against the TPLF in that same war and were credibly accused of massacre, systematic sexual violence, and deliberate starvation of the civilian population. That these two parties are now strategic partners is the central geopolitical fact of the Horn in 2026, and it demands explanation.

The explanation lies in exclusion. The Pretoria Agreement, brokered in November 2022, did not include Eritrea. Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement a humiliation he has neither forgotten nor forgiven. His calculation since then has been methodical. By early 2025, Africa Intelligence, the French intelligence letter whose sourcing runs directly to principals and their entourages, reported that Isaias had convened a summit in Asmara with TPLF officials in January of that year and personally guaranteed to protect the TPLF in the event of renewed conflict with Ethiopia. By July 2025, the same publication reported that Eritrea had assumed effective operational control of the Tigray-Eritrea border a corridor that, once open, allows Eritrean military assets and supplies to flow into Tigray beyond the reach of Addis Ababa. These are not assessments. They are reported facts.

Around this Eritrean-TPLF core, additional actors have been drawn. Elements of the Amhara Fano militia which fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF during the Tigray war have reportedly entered into local tactical arrangements with TPLF commanders in border areas of Wollo. The Oromo Liberation Army, active in the south, has intensified its attacks since federal forces redeployed northward. The Sudanese Armed Forces, though consumed by their own civil war, have historically provided rear-base facilities to TPLF fighters in eastern Sudan, and a coordination meeting in Port Sudan has brought together Ethiopian opposition groups with Eritrean and pro-SAF Sudanese participants. Chatham House confirmed in May 2026 that Tigrayan fighters have fought alongside the SAF against the RSF Ethiopia’s own proxy in Sudan’s civil war. The two conflicts have fused.

Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement. His response has been to construct, from that exclusion, the most formidable external threat to Ethiopian federal authority since the Derg.

Egypt is the coalition’s external financier and strategic coordinator. Gebru Asrat, the former TPLF president of Tigray and now a fierce critic of Debretsion’s faction, told The Reporter Ethiopia in an interview published this weekend that the TPLF ‘is working with Shabia, Egypt, and the Sudanese,’ and that Egypt ‘is the primary coordinator of them all.’ He added: ‘If a conflict erupts, it will become a regional war.’ Egypt’s motivation is not obscure. Cairo has been unable to reverse the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam through diplomacy, multilateral pressure, or American mediation. It has concluded that strategic encirclement making Ethiopia’s security environment so costly as to force concessions is the viable alternative. The Tsimdo coalition is, among other things, Egypt’s GERD policy conducted by other means.

The Ethiopian National Defence Forces have formally briefed the foreign diplomatic community in Addis Ababa that any attempt to operationalise the Tsimdo initiative would face military retaliation. That briefing is not a diplomatic signal. It is a countdown.

Washington’s gamble and why it is failing

The Trump administration’s dual-track, as The Economist characterises it, has a coherent surface logic. Rehabilitate Eritrea through sanctions relief, thereby giving Isaias an economic incentive to disengage from Tsimdo. Warn Ethiopia off military adventurism by signalling that Washington will not back a forcible push for sea access. Use Egypt with whom Trump enjoys a personal rapport with President Sisi , as the mediating channel. Each element of this logic is wrong in a different way.

The sanctions relief is structurally unconditional. The Biden-era sanctions imposed in November 2021 under Executive Order 14046 targeted Eritrea’s Defence Forces, the ruling PFDJ party, its intelligence chief, and linked commercial entities, specifically for their role in atrocities during the Tigray war. No accountability has been rendered for those atrocities. No withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Tigray has occurred the opposite has occurred, with Eritrean forces now functioning as the TPLF’s security guarantor inside Tigray rather than its executor. Isaias has not acknowledged the American overture in any public statement. His Independence Day address on 24th May 2026 contained extensive criticism of the global order and of Trump’s foreign policy without a single reference to the sanctions relief being negotiated on his behalf in Cairo. He is not interested in appearing as a Washington client. He is interested in the economic relief, the international rehabilitation, and the continued freedom to operate on the ground in Tigray.

The mediation channel is the most consequential flaw. The meetings between US Envoy Massad Boulos and Isaias were brokered by Egyptian President el-Sisi a man whose government is the primary external coordinator of the coalition America is supposedly trying to dismantle. Foreign Policy’s April 2026 assessment was unsparing: the initiative ‘reflects a deepening lack of strategy.’ Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture, apparently without grasping the role it is being asked to play.

The stick aimed at Ethiopia is real but blunt. American officials have repeatedly communicated to Addis Ababa that Washington opposes any attempt to acquire sea access by force. But the economic leverage behind that warning has been weakened by the Trump administration’s own cuts to development assistance, and Abiy’s post-election mandate the Prosperity Party’s June 2026 electoral landslide, conducted without Tigray, without credible Fano engagement, and without meaningful opposition has given him a domestic political argument for dismissing external pressure as interference. He has done precisely that before: his 2021 open letter to President Biden accused Washington of an ‘orchestrated distortion of events and facts on the ground.’ There is no reason to expect a different response now.

Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture. The mediator is the arsonist. The channel it is using to broker peace is the same channel through which the war is being financed.

Egypt’s overextension the variable no one is pricing

There is, however, a structural variable that the Horn’s various war-planning establishments have inadequately priced, and it runs through Cairo.

Egypt’s domestic position in 2026 is considerably weaker than its aggressive regional posture suggests. Suez Canal revenues have collapsed: Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping since late 2023 produced at least a 60 per cent decline in canal traffic, and President Sisi acknowledged in March 2026 a cumulative loss of ten billion dollars in canal receipts since the decade began, describing Egypt as standing at a ‘historical crossroads.’ Inflation exceeds 15 per cent. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at approximately 83 per cent. The Egyptian pound has depreciated to 55 to the dollar. Fuel prices have been raised by 17 per cent, and Sisi felt compelled to address his citizens’ ‘negative feelings’ about the measure in a nationally broadcast address. The Arab Center DC was direct in its April 2026 assessment: ‘Involving the armed forces in external affairs is a luxury that the Egyptian economy cannot afford.’

The political threat is more dangerous still. Since his 2013 coup removed Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammed Morsi, Sisi has governed on the premise that his security apparatus has permanently suppressed the organisation. That premise is fraying. Egypt’s Interior Minister warned publicly in January 2024 against the Brotherhood’s efforts to revive propaganda activities and recruit members via social networks. By the summer of 2025, Brotherhood-affiliated movements had organised sixteen demonstrations outside Egyptian embassies worldwide each filmed and circulated virally under the slogan ‘Besiege their embassies until they lift the siege on Gaza.’ The Institute for National Security Studies documented in January 2026 that these campaigns explicitly linked Egypt’s human rights record to its role in maintaining the Gaza blockade, finding a receptive audience among younger Egyptians disillusioned by the violence they have watched, uninterrupted, on their telephone screens.

The Gaza dimension is critical. The Palestinian cause has historically been the Muslim Brotherhood’s most effective mobilising tool the one issue capable of moving Egyptians who are otherwise exhausted by political risk. A Gaza settlement that advances genuine Palestinian reconstruction will not, as some in Washington assume, simply release pressure. It will redirect Arab League attention and Gulf financial energy toward Palestinian statehood, diminishing Egypt’s role as the indispensable Arab mediator and removing the diplomatic centrality that has given Sisi his regional leverage. An Egypt whose Suez revenues have not recovered, whose population is under compound economic stress, whose Gulf patrons are questioning its commitment after its failure to provide military support during the US-Iran confrontation, and whose Brotherhood opposition is being re-energised by precisely the conflict that Sisi has used to justify his authoritarianism that Egypt is a less reliable strategic coordinator of a multi-front anti-Ethiopia coalition than the one that constructed Tsimdo in 2024 and 2025.

None of this constitutes an immediate Egyptian collapse. Sisi’s security institutions remain intact and the military remains the ultimate guarantor of regime survival. But it does mean that Egypt’s capacity to sustain the Tsimdo architecture indefinitely is diminishing, and that the strategic calculation Isaias made when he aligned himself with Cairo may be premised on an Egypt that will not exist in the form he is counting on.

Every missile launched near Bab el-Mandeb raises shipping insurance premiums, reroutes vessels, and drains Cairo’s coffers. Egypt is financing a coalition against Ethiopia while its economy haemorrhages. That is not a sustainable strategic position.

The Abiy problem and the case for transition

The Economist’s ‘carrots and sticks’ framing implicitly assumes that Abiy Ahmed is the addressable interlocutor on the Ethiopian side that calibrated American pressure can alter his strategic behaviour. That assumption deserves scrutiny.

Abiy’s public rhetoric on Red Sea access has not been walked back despite direct warnings from Washington. His description of Ethiopia’s landlocked status as a ‘mistake’ that would be ‘corrected,’ his invocation of sea access as an ‘existential’ and ‘natural right,’ his government’s subsequent conditioning of negotiations on Eritrea halting its activities in Tigray these are not rhetorical flourishes from a leader who intends to be dissuaded by private diplomatic communications. Foreign Affairs noted in its June 2026 analysis that Abiy’s reelection ‘paves the way for advancement of his Red Sea ambitions,’ which have ‘already triggered an alliance among Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt, risking a broader regional conflict.’ His snap election conducted without Tigray, without meaningful opposition produced a mandate that carries none of the political plurality the country’s crisis demands.

Ethiopian analysts across the political spectrum have reached a conclusion that Western analysis has been reluctant to state plainly: Abiy’s government has reached a structural dead end. A provisional transitional authority, they argue, is the only mechanism through which a genuine national dialogue one that includes armed groups, opposition parties, and regional administrations currently excluded from the state-led process can be convened. The argument is not merely about governance legitimacy. It is about strategic capacity. An interim government without Abiy’s accumulated personal antagonisms with Isaias, without his rhetorical investment in Red Sea adventurism, and without the Prosperity Party’s structural inability to accommodate ethnic federalist demands, would be in a position to negotiate the one settlement that might actually hold.

That settlement would need to address, above all, the Eritrea question. Isaias’s grievance is specific and documented: he was excluded from Pretoria. The country whose forces bled alongside Ethiopian federal troops in the Tigray war was given no seat at the settlement table, no acknowledgement of its military contribution, and no security guarantee against Ethiopian ambitions on its coastline. An interim Ethiopian government that offered Eritrea a structured bilateral framework not formal confederation, which Eritrean sovereignty politics render impossible, but genuine economic integration, guaranteed transit access, and a mutual security architecture that makes Eritrea’s Red Sea ports economically indispensable to Ethiopia rather than militarily coveted would remove the single greatest strategic incentive Isaias currently has for sustaining Tsimdo.

This is not a comfortable prescription. It requires the international community, and Washington in particular, to acknowledge that the leader it has been engaging as the legitimate interlocutor of a democratic election is also the single greatest obstacle to the regional settlement that would prevent a catastrophic war. That is a difficult truth. It is, however, the truth.

The diplomatic exit from the coming war is not a ceasefire between Abiy and Isaias. It is Abiy’s departure and the construction of a transitional government prepared to treat Eritrea as a partner in regional architecture rather than a threat to be managed and Egypt as an adversary rather than a mediator.

Who fights with what and who bleeds first

The military balance, stripped of its diplomatic overlay, is this: Ethiopia has numerical and technological superiority on paper, and loses it in practice against the specific conditions that a northern front war would impose.

The Ethiopian National Defence Force is one of Africa’s largest standing armies, with active personnel estimates ranging from 130,000 to over 300,000, backed by drone systems that proved decisive in the Tigray war, artillery, and air assets. But the ENDF’s record in the Tigray war also revealed serious command vulnerabilities, over-reliance on mass mobilisation rather than tactical precision, and a capacity to sustain enormous casualties without achieving political resolution. The 2020–22 war killed between 300,000 and 600,000 people and ended not with federal victory but with a negotiated settlement that has now dissolved entirely.

Eritrea’s Defence Forces, estimated by the International Crisis Group in February 2026 at below 200,000, are battle-hardened, deeply familiar with the northern Ethiopian terrain, and critically positioned behind the escarpment geography south of Asmara that would force any Ethiopian offensive to attack uphill into prepared positions. The 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war killed between 70,000 and 100,000 soldiers in precisely this geography and produced nothing. The Tsimdo coalition would simultaneously open fronts in Oromia, where the OLA has intensified attacks as federal forces have thinned southward, and maintain the western flank through SAF-controlled eastern Sudan. Ethiopia cannot fight a three-front war without a degree of economic and political cohesion that it does not currently possess.

Ethiopia’s war-financing position is the most critical constraint. The country carries a defaulted Eurobond, is under IMF structural adjustment, and is running down foreign exchange reserves at a pace that leaves limited headroom for a sustained military campaign. The UAE, which provided the drone technology decisive in the Tigray war, is itself caught between its backing for Abiy and its investment in Sudan’s RSF the SAF’s adversary in Sudan’s civil war, the SAF being the TPLF’s backer in eastern Sudan. Abu Dhabi cannot be assumed as an unconditional Ethiopian military partner in a war whose geometry places it on opposite sides of the Sudan conflict simultaneously.

The honest military verdict is that Ethiopia would likely hold its major population centres and inflict significant casualties on the TPLF. It would not likely neutralise Eritrea’s military capacity through conventional offensive action. It would not likely close the OLA front in Oromia. And it would not likely sustain the economic and political cohesion necessary for a protracted multi-front campaign before that cohesion gave way either through internal political fracture or through the kind of economic collapse that the IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation implicitly foreshadowed. In a war that neither side could afford to lose and neither could afford to win, Ethiopia is the party with fewer reserves of either kind.

What comes next

Three scenarios present themselves. The first, and most probable, is an attritional multi-front conflict that exhausts Ethiopia’s economic and political cohesion before it exhausts Eritrea’s. The ENDF holds the cities. Tsimdo sustains pressure across Oromia, Amhara, and the western frontier. International pressure eventually produces a second Pretoria-type negotiation. Abiy’s domestic position collapses under military stalemate and economic deterioration, triggering his removal. The settlement that follows will look like what a transitional government might have offered without the war but arrived at after years of catastrophic human cost.

The second scenario is a negotiated transitional resolution before open hostilities consolidate. This requires a set of conditions that do not currently obtain: credible American pressure on Egypt to cease coordinating Tsimdo; an Ethiopian internal political realignment producing a government willing to negotiate with Eritrea on the terms described above; and a Tsimdo coalition sufficiently aware of the war’s cost to accept a political settlement addressing its core grievances. The Economist’s carrots and sticks are trying to generate this scenario without acknowledging any of its structural prerequisites. It remains possible. It is not currently probable.

The third scenario is a rapid Ethiopian military offensive against Tigray before the coalition fully operationalises a pre-emptive strike aimed at presenting Eritrea with a fait accompli. The ENDF’s January 2026 drone strike on Raya Azebo suggests this logic is being actively considered. The risk is that a rapid offensive produces exactly the regional war it seeks to forestall, drawing in Eritrea before Washington’s diplomatic channels can intervene.

What none of these scenarios produces is a winner in any conventional sense. Egypt wins strategically in any scenario that leaves Ethiopia weakened, distracted, and economically shattered but Egypt itself is weakening, and a Sisi administration consumed by economic crisis, Brotherhood revival, and Gulf scepticism is a less reliable paymaster for a prolonged proxy war than the one that began construction of this architecture two years ago. Isaias wins politically in any scenario that prevents Abiy from seizing his coastline but an Eritrean state that has spent its last political energy on a war it did not formally declare is not a state with obvious resources for reconstruction. The TPLF’s hardline faction achieves, at minimum, a return to de facto autonomous governance of Tigray the condition that existed before November 2020 and which the Tigray war failed to permanently alter.

What everyone loses is the possibility of the Horn of Africa as a zone of sustainable regional development. Ethiopia’s aviation hub, its nascent manufacturing base, its IMF stabilisation programme, its capacity to absorb the demographic pressures of 130 million people all of these become considerably harder to sustain inside a regional war. The civilian populations of Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Eritrea, who have endured a decade of compound catastrophe, will pay the price first and longest.

History teaches that wars in the Horn do not end cleanly. The 1998 conflict produced 100,000 dead and a cold war that lasted twenty years. The 2020 war produced 600,000 dead and a peace agreement that lasted three. The next one will not produce a winner. It will produce a landscape in which everyone has lost something irretrievable.

The Economist asked whether America’s carrots and sticks can avert disaster. The honest answer is: not in their current form, not through the current channel, and not without confronting the more uncomfortable truth that the political figure at the centre of this crisis is not the solution to it. Washington’s choices are narrowing. The window for a negotiated transition in Addis Ababa one that addresses Eritrea’s structural grievances and removes the war’s principal political driver will not remain open indefinitely. Once the shooting starts in earnest, it will not be closed by diplomacy. It will be closed by exhaustion, and exhaustion in the Horn of Africa is a condition measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.

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

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

Read Time:8 Minute, 31 Second

By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

What She Was Covering — and Why It Matters

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

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

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

Tsimdo: The Coalition Abiy Cannot Name Aloud

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

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

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

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

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

A Pattern, Not an Incident

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

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

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

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

The Logic of the Blackout

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

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

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

What the Ethiopian Tribune Holds

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

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

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

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

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The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:05:37 +0000

Read Time:17 Minute, 2 Second

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE Election Analysis — June 2026

The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls, the National Election Board is still totting up the figures, the system that produces such lopsided results remains exactly as it was, and a flank of the opposition has pre-emptively disowned a parliament it may yet have the numbers to sit in.

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Ethiopia’s seventh general election was, by the standards its own organisers set, a triumph of scale. Over 50 million registered voters; more than 10,900 candidates from 47 parties; a national holiday declared to encourage turnout. By the standards anyone else might apply, it has been a triumph of something else entirely: the art of taking a very long time to arrive at a very predictable answer.

Voting closed on 1 June. By NEBE’s own admission that evening, counting was still under way in Sidama, Gambella, Amhara and Somali, and final turnout figures had not been consolidated. On 6 June, the Board reported that 825 of 1,138 constituencies had declared results, citing the distance between polling stations and constituency centres and the sheer number of candidates as reasons for the lag. On 9 June a full week after polling day internally displaced people and military personnel cast their votes in a special round that, by NEBE’s own insiders, threatened to delay preliminary results still further. By 10 June, 1,008 constituencies had reached the national verification centre, with 446 of 501 House of Peoples’ Representatives seats and 562 of 638 regional council seats logged for “final scrutiny.” A day later, both NEBE and the African Union observer mission had pencilled in 11 June for the announcement of final results.

None of this should be read as evidence of unusual incompetence. It is, if anything, on brand. In 2005, results were delayed for weeks while complaints of vote-rigging were investigated investigations the opposition’s own representatives called “rigged from the start,” alleging their observers had been “harassed, threatened, barred and killed.” In 2010, the electoral board rejected calls for a re-run despite the ruling coalition and its allies taking 534 of 537 seats, a margin opposition leaders said “could not be accomplished without cheating.” The pattern across two decades is not that Ethiopia’s election commission is slow because it is overwhelmed. It is slow because slowness is the institutional environment in which adjustments, where they occur, are made and because nobody with the power to speed it up has ever had an interest in doing so.

THE MODERNISATION THAT WASN’T

What makes the 2026 cycle different is the sheer quantity of money spent trying to fix exactly this problem. The “Strengthening Ethiopia’s Elections for Democratic Sustainability” programme (SEEDS2) a multi-donor basket funded by Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Government of Ethiopia, administered through the UNDP was built explicitly around “electoral digitalisation.” UNDP signed a $40 million project document with NEBE to build “institutional and logistical capacity.” Japan contributed a further $3 million in equipment and systems “for the upcoming 7th General Election.” Ireland signed a separate €700,000 agreement aimed specifically at helping NEBE “adopt new technologies to lead a transparent and efficient electoral process.” The EU and Germany, via the KfW development bank, funded a parallel programme EURECS+ delivered jointly with UNDP and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, providing “further logistical and procurement support” to NEBE’s operations.

The visible product of all this is Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) the digital platform NEBE unveiled in January 2026 described at launch as “the first time the country is fully integrating digital technology into the election process,” covering voter and candidate registration, election management, and, in the words of the Federal Supreme Court’s president, present at the launch, intended to “enhance transparency and public trust.”

What Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) did not touch, it turns out, is the part of the process that actually generates disputes. Registration, candidate vetting, the ballot-order lottery all digitalised, all relatively uncontroversial. Counting, constituency-level tabulation, and the transfer of results to Addis Ababa for “verification” all still conducted in essentially the form they took twenty years ago: paper postings at polling stations, physical transmission to constituency offices, and a national tally centre that receives results in batches over a period of days, occasionally weeks. Opposition parties identified this gap before the vote was even held. In a joint statement issued in January, an eight-party coalition including the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), Hibir Ethiopia and the Wolayta National Movement rejected what they called an “unaudited digital election system,” accusing the Board of “uncoordinated increases in council seats and a lack of transparency.”

There are two ways to read this gap, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is straightforwardly bureaucratic: a decade of donor funding produced visible, demonstrable, photographable modernisation apps, registration drives, ballot lotteries because those are the outputs donors can point to in their own annual reports, while the unglamorous, politically fraught work of building an auditable, end-to-end digital chain of custody for actual vote counts was either never prioritised or actively resisted by an institution with no incentive to make its own discretion harder to exercise. The second reading is less generous: that a tabulation process kept manual, opaque and slow is not a failure of modernisation but its precondition. An auditable digital count would generate a data trail far harder to adjust at the margins than a process whose authoritative record exists only in the moment a regional official reads a number aloud to a colleague in Addis Ababa. Either way, the tens of millions of dollars spent since 2019 modernising Ethiopia’s elections have left the single most consequential five days of the electoral calendar the count almost exactly as they found it.

THE ARITHMETIC THAT NEVER CHANGES

None of this would matter nearly as much under a different electoral system. Ethiopia’s first-past-the-post arrangement, inherited from the 1995 constitution and never seriously revisited despite two decades of promises, converts even modest vote margins into landslide seat counts. In 2021, the Prosperity Party took 96.8% of federal parliamentary seats from roughly 90% of the vote itself a serious overcorrection, but nothing compared to the distortions at constituency level. In Addis Ababa that same year, opposition parties collectively won 32% of the vote and not a single seat. In 2015, the Semayawi Party took 16% of the vote in the capital and, again, nothing. In 2005, opposition parties won around 38% of the national vote and ended up with a small fraction of that share in seats.

The reform conversation is not new, and it has never gone anywhere. After the unrest of 2016, the government promised to revisit the electoral system; no measure followed. Years earlier, during the EPRDF-era political parties’ negotiation forum, the ruling party itself proposed a mixed system, 90% first-past-the-post, 10% proportional which would have required expanding the House of Peoples’ Representatives from 550 to 657 seats and amending the constitution. Even that modest concession was shelved. Academic studies of the system, going back to at least 2017, have concluded that first-past-the-post is “ill-suited to Ethiopia’s current needs and realities” and that a shift toward proportional representation the system used by roughly 130 countries, against fewer than 55 still using FPTP would produce more inclusive, more stable outcomes even under identical levels of political repression.

The reason none of this has moved is not mysterious. A ruling party that can convert a plurality into a supermajority under FPTP has no rational incentive to adopt a system that would convert the same plurality into, at best, a comfortable majority and, at worst, a coalition negotiation. Proportional representation would not, on its own, make Ethiopian elections free or fair, repression, detention and restricted media access would still shape who could compete. But it would make the result of that repression visible in a way FPTP currently launders into invisibility: a Prosperity Party that wins 60% of the vote under PR gets roughly 60% of the seats, prompting awkward questions about the other 40%. Under FPTP, that same 60% becomes 95% of the seats, and the other 40% becomes a rounding error. Donor money has, for fifteen years, flowed toward the parts of Ethiopia’s electoral architecture that are easiest to fund and least likely to threaten this arrangement. The one structural change that would actually rebalance outcomes was never going to be financed by the institution whose entire utility to the ruling coalition depends on its absence.

“WE CAME TO DOCUMENT, NOT TO WIN”

It is against this backdrop that the position taken by the Coalition for Ethiopian Unity becomes legible not as an eccentric or self-defeating gesture, but as possibly the most coherent response on offer. In an interview given after the vote, Mister Silassie Tamerat, Secretary General of both the Coalition and the EPRP, laid out a position that amounts to participation without consent: contesting the election while refusing, in advance, to recognise its outcome.

The Coalition and the EPRP had set out roughly seven preconditions before the vote chiefly concerning media independence, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the fighting in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia. “Absolutely none” were met, Tamerat said; if anything, conditions deteriorated, with media outlets shut down, journalists abducted, and election debates censored or cut from broadcast. The decision to participate anyway was not unanimous. Within the EPRP’s Central Committee, a majority judged that continued participation “exposing the fraudulent electoral process from within” while “protecting the security and survival of our party organisation” outweighed the principle of boycott. MistreSilasie by her own account, was outvoted, and deferred to the decision as a matter of internal democratic discipline.

What followed the vote was the more consequential decision: a declaration that any Coalition or EPRP candidates who won seats would not take them up. The reasoning rests on a distinction between participating in an election and recognising a parliament.

“Entering a parliament that is born from a completely fraudulent and illegitimate process would imply that we recognise the parliament as legally and legitimately established. We do not believe that.”
— MistreSilasie Tamerat, Secretary General, Coalition for Ethiopian Unity / EPRP

She pointed to the precedent of past opposition MPs “stripped of their immunity and thrown into prison simply because they held a dissenting political viewpoint” as evidence that the inside-the-system strategy had already been tried, and had “brought no real change.” Sitting in the chamber and “declaring our people are suffering,” in her words, “does not bring change.”

Asked whether refusing seats amounted to disrespecting the voters who cast ballots for Coalition candidates, Mistre-Silassie’s answer was unambiguous about priorities, if not entirely reassuring on the question of mandate: the Coalition, she said, had announced this position before polling day “even if we won a majority, we had no desire to enter parliament under these conditions” and had entered the race “merely to gather hard evidence,” not to contest for seats. Critics who suggest the rejection is sour grapes over an anticipated loss get short shrift: “We did not enter this process expecting to win… This has nothing to do with winning or losing.”

A COALITION OF ONE MIND, MOSTLY

The recent interview of Mistre-Silassie with Ethiopian insider also surfaced and sought to manage reports of a split within the Coalition. The president of the Amhara Regional United Movement, one constituent member, had told the press the election had been conducted “smoothly and in a good manner” an assessment, Mistre-Silassie noted pointedly, that was “heavily amplified” by state-affiliated media. She was unambiguous in disowning the remark: the individual “was not authorised or delegated by the Coalition,” the Coalition’s “core principles” remained intact, and the organisation was “internally purifying” its ranks rather than fracturing. Any elected candidate who attempted to take a seat under the Coalition’s banner without its blessing, she said, would face “immediate” disciplinary and legal consequences.

It is worth taking at face value Mistre-Silassie’s own account of what worries her most because it is not, by her telling, the regime.

“Dealing with the tyranny of the ruling regime is something we expected. What deeply concerns and threatens to break my hope is the severe fragmentation within the opposition itself — fractured, petty, and constantly turning on one another.”
Mistre-Silassie Tamerat

A planned peaceful protest for 30 April for which, under the constitution, only notification rather than permission was required was shelved for “logistical pressures and constraints” after a decision to act collectively rather than unilaterally; it never materialised, nor did any other rally. The EPRP, Mistre-Silassie said, held back its own planned action “to respect the principle of collective coalition solidarity.” The through-line across both the Amhara Regional United Movement episode and the failed protests is the same: a coalition whose member parties cannot reliably act in concert is, for practical purposes, several smaller oppositions wearing one name a condition that costs the ruling coalition nothing and the opposition everything.

THE VERDICT ON THE VERDICT

On the international response, Mistre-Silassie’s framing inverts the usual Mistre-Silassie courtesies. Any observer mission that grants the election legitimacy, she argued, is “actively participating in prolonging the misery and suffering of the Ethiopian people.” She drew a distinction between observers who acknowledged the vote merely “took place” reserving final judgment, as the EU did, for a longer review and any body offering outright congratulations, noting with something close to satisfaction that many embassies briefed by the Coalition on election day had so far stayed silent. “We view that silence as a major diplomatic achievement for our cause.”

She was careful, notably, not to indict NEBE’s staff wholesale acknowledging “certain individual officials” who “genuinely tried their best to ensure a clean process” while insisting the institution as a whole had failed systemically, operating, like every other institution in the country, under “the suffocating influence and control of the ruling regime.” The war is the backdrop against which she places the entire exercise: Tigray “plunged into conflict for a second time,” most of Amhara unable to vote due to active combat, Oromia’s security situation outside major cities “non-existent.” Against that, talk of “free and fair” becomes, in her telling, close to obscene: “citizens are actively dying in a war zone and screaming for the killings to stop rather than asking for voting cards.”

On armed resistance, Tamerat drew a careful line denying coordination with armed groups while declining to condemn them, and issuing what reads as a warning dressed as an observation: “Every single time you violently close the doors to peaceful political struggle, you automatically open the doors to armed resistance… No one picks up a gun and flees to the jungle to die or kill out of choice; they do it out of absolute desperation when all peaceful options are stripped away.”

THE SYSTEM’S MOST DURABLE OUTPUT

Put the three threads together and a single picture emerges, and it is not primarily a picture of fraud in the narrow sense ballot-stuffing, doctored tallies, the things that require forensic proof. It is a picture of a system whose component parts are individually defensible and collectively self-reinforcing. The count is slow because the institution that runs it has never had to make it fast: under first-past-the-post, even a contested, drawn-out tabulation poses no existential risk to the ruling coalition’s seat total, so there is no urgency to fix what donors have spent fifteen years and tens of millions of dollars failing to fix because the fix that would matter, electoral reform, was never on the table to begin with. And the opposition’s response to all of this is not unified resistance but fragmentation: a Coalition that agreed on seven preconditions, watched none of them met, then split three ways over what to do next participate to expose, boycott to preserve legal standing, or some uneasy combination of both, followed by a post-hoc refusal to take the seats that participation might have won.

That fragmentation is not incidental to the system described above. It may be its most reliable product. A ruling party facing a unified opposition demanding proportional representation, an end to detentions, and international observers with teeth would face a genuine cost-benefit calculation. A ruling party facing a half-dozen opposition factions arguing among themselves about whether occupying five parliamentary seats constitutes principled resistance or collaboration faces no such calculation at all. Tamerat’s own diagnosis that internal opposition fragmentation, not regime pressure, is what “keeps her up at night” may be the most analytically honest sentence to emerge from Ethiopia’s seventh general election. Everything else, the slow count included, was entirely predictable.

THE REGION THE ELECTION FORGOT

For TPLF supporters, the chronology of NEBE’s dealings with their party reads less like routine regulation than personal score-settling. Birtukan Mideksa rose to prominence as a leader of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy in the disputed 2005 election conducted under an EPRDF government in which the TPLF was the dominant faction and was subsequently imprisoned, controversially re-arrested after a conditional pardon, and spent years in American exile before Abiy brought her home in 2018 to chair the very board that had once certified the election that led to her imprisonment. When NEBE, under her chairmanship, cancelled the TPLF’s registration in January 2021 weeks after the federal offensive into Tigray began TPLF sympathisers read the timing as more than coincidence: a woman the old TPLF-dominated order had jailed was now the one stripping that same party of its legal existence. The institutional posture has since outlasted her TPLF’s final de-registration came in May 2025 under her successor, Melatework Hailu but the original grievance, whatever its merits, has never gone away in Mekelle.

Its consequences are visible in real time. Tigray did not participate in the 1 June election at all: Debretsion Gebremichael announced in May that no vote would be held in the region, arguing large parts of it remain outside TPLF administration and that Tigray’s territory is “incomplete” pending unresolved disputes itself a legacy of NEBE’s 2021 decision and the deregistration that followed. While NEBE in Addis Ababa spent the second week of June finalising a result that hands the Prosperity Party its expected supermajority, a very different kind of delegation was landing in Mekelle. On 11 June, the African Union’s Olusegun Obasanjo one of the architects of the 2022 Pretoria Agreement flew in with British and Australian diplomats for emergency talks with Debretsion, who has installed himself as Tigray’s regional president following the TPLF’s unilateral revival of the pre-war regional council, a move the federal government has refused to recognise.

The same day, in Al Jazeera, Getachew Reda the former TPLF spokesman who broke with the party, led the interim administration, and now advises Abiy on regional affairs co-wrote with the federal government’s own Pretoria negotiator, Redwan Hussein, a piece warning that the “rump TPLF,” in what they called an Eritrean-backed “Tsimdo alliance,” had “openly abrogated the Pretoria Agreement and is now gearing up for active and open hostility against the federal government.” Whatever one makes of that framing and it is very much the view from the side that now controls Addis Ababa’s narrative on Tigray, not TPLF’s the fact that the AU’s most senior mediator felt the need to be in Mekelle that same week speaks for itself.

The result is a grim symmetry. Ethiopia just completed an election in which the region with the most unresolved grievance against the federal state didn’t vote at all, conducted by an institution whose history with that region’s dominant party is, by the account of that party’s supporters, inseparable from the personal history of the woman who once ran it. The seventh general election may produce a parliament. Whether it produces a country at peace with itself by the time that parliament sits is, as of this week, genuinely an open question.

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Touring the $291 Billion Ethiopia That Got Away

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:43:00 +0000

Read Time:16 Minute, 3 Second

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Commentary

The Receipts Don’t Lie:

Touring the $291 Billion Ethiopia That Got Away

By Sewasew Teklemariam

11 June 2026

Somewhere between the import manifests, the audit reports nobody finished reading, and the procurement files marked “pending,” a second Ethiopia quietly failed to materialise — one with fifty-eight mega dams, nearly three thousand universities, and enough hospitals to make “medical tourism to Addis” a real sentence. Sewasew Teklemariam goes looking for it.

T
here is a particular Ethiopian talent for imagining grand things. We have, after all, built the largest dam in Africa, renovated a palace into a park large enough to lose a tour group in, and produced more five-year development plans than most countries have five-year periods. So it should not be difficult, in principle, for us to imagine a country with fifty-eight mega dams instead of one. Or nearly three thousand universities. Or eleven and a half million new homes — enough to comfortably house more than half the population currently queuing for one.

The trouble is that this country already exists. On paper, anyway. It is sitting in the gap between what Ethiopia has earned over the relevant decades and what Ethiopia has actually built with it — a gap that, by one new reckoning making the rounds this week, comes to roughly $291 billion. That is not a typo, and it is not the GDP of a small continent, although it is in the neighbourhood. It is, instead, an estimate of the cumulative cost of six familiar national habits: importing what we could make ourselves, fighting wars we did not need to fight, tolerating corruption we pretend to be shocked by, drowning good policy in bureaucratic treacle, watching our most expensively educated citizens build other people’s economies, and buying military hardware at a pace that would make a small arms dealer blush.

Each of these habits, the scorecard argues, has an opportunity cost — and opportunity costs, unlike scandals, do not generate headlines. Nobody holds a press conference to announce the hospital that was never built. So this week, we are holding one.

A note on arithmetic, before the indignant emails arrive

Let us be honest about what this exercise is and is not. It is not a forensic audit, and the Tribune is not asserting that a cheque for $291 billion has gone missing from a specific drawer in a specific ministry. The figures are estimates — the kind any economist would call “directionally useful” while quietly reaching for a second coffee. They rest on a set of assumed unit costs: a mega dam at roughly $5 billion (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, give or take, was in that range), a public university at $100 million, a regional hospital at $50 million, a technical college at $25 million, an agro-processing plant at $20 million, a primary school at $1 million, and an affordable house at $25,000.

Multiply those benchmarks against the headline losses — $200 billion in import dependency, $30 billion in conflict, $15 billion in corruption, $20 billion in bureaucratic drag, $6 billion in brain drain, and $20 billion in military expansion — and you get a shopping list. A very long shopping list. The point is not that any of this would have been built in practice; governments do not function as straightforward conversion machines, and nobody is suggesting Ethiopia simply forgot to order 58 dams from a catalogue. The point is to make the abstraction of “billions lost” feel like what it actually is: clinics, classrooms, and roofs.

With that throat-clearing done, let us walk the lot.

Loss #1: Import Dependency — $200 billion, or “the elephant in the shipping container”

This is not merely the largest item on the list. It is the largest item by a margin so wide it makes the other five look like rounding errors stapled to the side of a much bigger problem. Two hundred billion dollars is what Ethiopia has, cumulatively, sent abroad to buy things that — in a country with this much arable land, this much labour, and this much ambition — arguably ought to be made at home: fuel, fertiliser, machinery, textiles, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, even much of the food on shop shelves in Addis.

Run that figure through the scorecard’s conversion table and the country it could have bought is almost embarrassing in its scale: forty mega dams, two thousand universities, four thousand hospitals, eight thousand technical colleges, a thousand industrial parks, two hundred steel factories, and — the showstopper — eight million affordable homes. Eight million houses is not a housing policy. It is a different country.

This is the line item that should make every policymaker wince, because it is also the most fixable. Conflict ends, eventually, one way or another. Corruption can be prosecuted, occasionally. But import dependency is a structural choice, renewed every single day at the port of Djibouti, and every year it goes unaddressed is another small slice of that imaginary eight million homes that quietly evaporates.

Loss #2: Conflict & War — $30 billion, “stamped, sealed, and somehow still ongoing”

Thirty billion dollars buys six mega dams, three hundred universities, six hundred hospitals, and 1.2 million homes — or, in the version of Ethiopia we actually got, several years of destroyed infrastructure, displaced populations, halted investment, and a generation of young people whose CVs now read “conflict-affected region” instead of “industrial park.”

The scorecard’s illustrators, with admirable bluntness, have stamped this category “MATURED” — as if to suggest the bill has come due and is sitting, with interest, in the post. The honest accounting of conflict rarely stops at battlefield expenditure. It includes the factory that relocated to Nairobi rather than risk a second disruption, the foreign investor who quietly removed Ethiopia from the shortlist, and the farmer who planted half a field because the other half was a front line last season. None of that shows up in a defence budget. All of it shows up in this number.

Loss #3: Corruption — $15 billion, marked “WAR” but really just business as usual

Fifteen billion dollars is, relatively speaking, the smallest of the six categories — which says more about the scale of the others than it does about the seriousness of the problem. It is still enough for three mega dams, 150 universities, 300 hospitals, and 600,000 homes.

What makes corruption different from the other categories is its compounding nature. A road built at twice its proper cost is not just an inflated invoice; it is a road that will need resurfacing twice as soon, by a contractor who may also be charging twice the going rate, audited (eventually) by an institution that is itself underfunded because — well, you can see where this goes. Every other line item on this scorecard is, in some sense, a multiplier on this one. Corruption does not just cost $15 billion. It is the tax that makes the other $276 billion harder to claw back.

Loss #4: Bureaucracy & Inefficiency — $20 billion, the silent tax nobody votes on

If corruption is theft with intent, bureaucratic inefficiency is theft by a thousand stamps. Twenty billion dollars — enough for four mega dams, two hundred universities, four hundred hospitals, and 800,000 homes — has been quietly absorbed by delay. The permit that took fourteen months instead of six. The customs clearance that required a second, then a third, then a fourth signature. The investment that arrived with enthusiasm and left, eighteen months later, with a long memo about “the operating environment.”

Bureaucracy rarely makes the news, because nothing happened — and “nothing happened” is precisely the problem. It is the most invisible category on this list and, not coincidentally, one of the most addressable. Unlike a dam or a war, fixing it does not require billions of dollars of new capital. It requires fewer offices, faster signatures, and — dare we say it — fewer offices whose entire function is to slow down the other offices.

Loss #5: Brain Drain — $6 billion, or “the graduation gift Ethiopia keeps sending abroad”

Six billion dollars is the smallest figure here, and it is also the most personal. This is not money lost to a single bad decision or a single conflict; it is the cumulative return on investment that Ethiopia never collects when its doctors, engineers, and scientists — trained, often, at public expense — build their careers, pay their taxes, and raise their families somewhere else.

Six billion dollars converts to one mega dam, sixty universities, 120 hospitals, and 240,000 homes — modest, by the standards of this list, but worth dwelling on for a moment, because this is the only category where the “asset” being lost is not concrete and rebar. It is people. And unlike a dam, a person who leaves does not simply represent foregone GDP; they represent a hospital ward that runs at half capacity, a university department that cannot find a qualified head, a start-up that gets founded in Addis Ababa, but the other one — the one in Texas.

Loss #6: Security, Drones, Missiles & Military Expansion — $20 billion, “necessary, but let’s not pretend it’s free”

The scorecard is admirably careful with its language here, and so shall we be: security is necessary. No nation disarms its way to prosperity, and the Horn of Africa is not, this year or any recent year, a neighbourhood that rewards complacency. But necessity is not the same as costlessness, and $20 billion — four mega dams, two hundred universities, four hundred hospitals, 800,000 homes — is the price tag attached to drone fleets, missile programmes, and an expanding procurement list that, whatever its strategic logic, is also a procurement list.

This is the category most likely to provoke an argument in the comments section, and good — it should. The question worth asking is not whether Ethiopia should defend itself. It is whether every line of the current military budget represents the most efficient possible trade-off between security today and the hospital, university, or industrial park that its cost could otherwise have built. That is a conversation Ethiopia rarely has in public, and perhaps it is time it did.

The Grand Total: A Country of Fifty-Eight Dams

Add it all up — $200 billion, $30 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion, $6 billion, and $20 billion — and the total comes to $291 billion. Converted into the scorecard’s development currency, that is fifty-eight mega dams, 2,910 universities, 5,820 hospitals, 11,640 technical colleges, 1,455 industrial parks, 291 steel factories, 291 fertiliser plants, 1,940 pharmaceutical factories, 5,820 textile factories, 14,550 agro-processing factories, 291,000 primary schools, and 11.6 million affordable homes.

There is no scandal in a list of buildings that were never built. There is no viral clip of a hospital that does not exist.

Read that list slowly. Then read it again, and notice what is missing from it: drama. The $291 billion did not disappear in one dramatic heist. It disappeared the way most large sums disappear — a percentage point here, a delayed shipment there, a contract awarded to a cousin somewhere else, repeated for years, until the rounding errors became a parallel country.

What 11.6 Million Houses Actually Means

Assume, generously but not unreasonably, five people to a household. Eleven and a half million homes, multiplied out, comes to 58 million Ethiopians — more than half the country’s current population — housed. Not “eligible for housing assistance.” Housed.

It is worth pausing on what that would mean beyond the obvious comfort of four walls and a roof. Secure housing is the platform on which everything else in a development plan is supposed to stand: children who sleep in the same bed every night tend to do better in the school down the road; families with a fixed address can open bank accounts, register businesses, and access services that otherwise remain theoretical. Housing is not, despite how it is so often discussed, a welfare line item. It is closer to infrastructure for human beings.

What 14,550 Agro-Processing Factories Actually Means

If the housing figure is about stability, this one is about leverage. Ethiopia already grows the wheat, the coffee, the oilseeds, and the livestock; what it frequently does not do is process them at home before either consuming or exporting them. Agro-processing — turning raw grain into flour and pasta, raw milk into packaged dairy, raw fruit into juice and concentrate — is, on paper, the most immediately achievable form of industrialisation available to the country, because it does not require importing the raw material in the first place.

The scorecard estimates that a network of this size could generate somewhere between seven and fifteen million jobs. Even taking the lower end of that range with the scepticism it probably deserves, it represents an industrial workforce roughly the size of several East African capital cities combined — built not on a hypothetical new export, but on crops that are, this season, already in the ground.

What 291 Steel Factories Actually Means

Steel is the sort of industry that does not photograph well — nobody puts a rolling mill on a tourism poster — but it is the unglamorous backbone on which everything else in this list depends. You cannot build a hospital, a university, a textile factory, or an affordable house without reinforcement bars, structural steel, and the industrial machinery that steel itself is used to manufacture. A country that imports its steel is, in effect, importing the capacity to build anything at all, one shipment at a time.

The scorecard puts the potential job creation here at one to three million, direct and indirect — and “indirect” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, because a domestic steel industry does not simply produce steel. It produces the demand for everything steel touches: construction firms, machine shops, vehicle assembly, and the long, unglamorous supply chain that turns raw ore into a finished building.

What 5,820 Hospitals Actually Means

Ethiopia currently operates fewer than 400 hospitals for a population north of 120 million. Sit with that ratio for a moment — it is the kind of number that, in any other policy area, would be treated as an emergency rather than a baseline. Scaling toward the scorecard’s figure of 5,820 would not merely close that gap; it would overshoot it so dramatically that “medical tourism” — patients travelling to Ethiopia for care, rather than the other way around — moves from aspiration to plausibility.

The more immediate effect, though, is the one that rarely makes it into glossy development brochures: maternal and child mortality, the grim statistics that Ethiopia has spent decades trying to improve through campaigns, vaccination drives, and community health programmes — all of which are working uphill against a hospital network that is, by any reasonable international comparison, dramatically undersized.

What 2,910 Universities Actually Means

Ethiopia has roughly fifty public universities today. Multiplying that by nearly sixty is, on its face, an absurd number — and it is meant to be. Nobody is proposing that Ethiopia literally build three thousand campuses. The figure is a way of expressing, in concrete terms, the scale of human capital that $291 billion represents: the doctors who would staff those 5,820 hospitals, the engineers who would design the dams and industrial parks, the scientists who would reduce, year by year, the country’s dependence on imported everything, and the entrepreneurs who would build the businesses that eventually make this entire scorecard obsolete.

This is, in a sense, the category that closes the loop. Every other item on this list — the dams, the factories, the hospitals — eventually needs someone to run it. The universities are where those people would have come from.

The Real Question

The scorecard’s authors put it simply, and it is worth repeating without much editorial embellishment: the question is not “how much did we spend?” It is “what could we have built instead?”

Broken down by theme, the $291 billion separates into a few clear policy conversations. The $200 billion in import dependency is the single largest lever — and the one most directly within the country’s own control, requiring industrial policy rather than peace negotiations. The $45 billion combined in corruption and conflict is recoverable, in principle, through governance reform and the kind of durable peace that has proven elusive but not impossible. The $26 billion lost to inefficiency and brain drain is addressable through institutional reform and a more serious diaspora engagement policy than the occasional conference panel. And the $20 billion in military expansion is, at minimum, a number that deserves to be debated in public rather than assumed.

None of this is an argument for despair. If anything, it is the opposite. A country that has lost $291 billion to habits rather than catastrophes is a country whose habits can, in theory, change. The dams, the universities, the hospitals, and the eight million homes are not gone — they were simply never built, which is a different and considerably less permanent kind of loss.

The resources were there all along. We just kept sending them somewhere else.

So here is the assignment, dear reader, should you choose to accept it: share this scorecard. Send it to the policymaker who insists the budget has no room for industrial policy. Send it to the economist who treats corruption as a footnote. Send it to anyone who still believes that “we don’t have the resources” is a complete sentence.

Sewasew Teklemariam writes commentary for the Ethiopian Tribune. The figures referenced in this piece are drawn from an illustrative opportunity-cost model based on assumed asset benchmarks (mega dam: $5bn; university: $100m; regional hospital: $50m; technical college: $25m; agro-processing factory: $20m; primary school: $1m; affordable house: $25,000) and should be read as an analytical framework rather than an audited account.

Editor’s Note

Before any of the above reaches a single reader, credit where it is overdue: the scorecard itself the unit costs, the conversions, the unglamorous arithmetic that turns “$291 billion” into “fifty-eight mega dams” is the work of Behailu Shiferaw, whose research did the actual heavy lifting here. Numbers of this scale do not assemble themselves, and the diligence required to build a coherent framework out of import bills, conflict estimates, and procurement figures is the kind of work that rarely gets a byline of its own.

Sewasew Teklemariam’s role, by comparison, was the easy part: take Behailu’s research and make it readable enough that someone might actually finish the article which, if you have made it this far, appears to have worked.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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