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Much has been written about violence, persecution, and instability in the country, and rightly so. Blood has been spilled, churches attacked, civilians displaced. But violence, for all its horror, is rarely the final stage. It is usually the blunt instrument that accompanies something more methodical: the slow dismantling of institutions that once stood between power and the individual. In Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the world’s oldest continuous Christian institutions, is beginning to look less like a protected faith community and more like a structure being patiently taken apart, beam by beam.
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Ethiopia, the new year does not feel like a beginning. It feels like a continuation a long, unbroken thread of crisis, mismanagement, external meddling, and narrative manipulation. The fireworks have barely faded, yet the country already finds itself back on the docket of global concern, its name invoked not with solidarity but with suspicion.
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Yet The Economist’s reporting and critical academic analysis converge on a troubling reality: the project’s commercial soundness collides violently with Ethiopia’s political fragility. The fundamental counter-argument is stark: large-scale infrastructure cannot manufacture stability it requires stability to succeed. As Ethiopian scholars bluntly observe, “growth without peace is a mirage.” Ethiopia’s recent history validates this warning. The two-year Tigray war, alongside persistent conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, and elsewhere, has devastated infrastructure, displaced millions, and eroded the investor confidence that megaprojects depend upon. Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project recorded 1,105 political violence events in Ethiopia during 2023 alone, resulting in more than 5,428 reported fatalities.
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firms like VR Capital and Farallon Capital Management, rejected even this lucrative deal. Instead, they are demanding terms that would pay them over 50% more than bilateral government creditors receive. Most audaciously, they seek a share of Ethiopia’s future export revenues with no cap, a provision that could grant them unlimited profits while shackling our economic future.
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The recent withdrawal of Eritrea from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development marks yet another chapter in the Horn of Africa’s chronicle of fractured regionalism. But to view this solely through the lens of Asmara’s perpetual isolationism would be to miss the forest for the trees. This departure, announced with characteristic terseness and wrapped in accusations of institutional bias, is fundamentally intertwined with Ethiopia’s escalating discourse on Red Sea access, a matter that strikes at the core of our national interests and regional stability.
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