Ethiopian Tribune

Seven Times Lucky? Ethiopia’s Seventh General Election and the Art of Democratic Choreography

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:12:09 +0000

Read Time:12 Minute, 11 Second

On a continent where elections are frequently described as historic milestones before a single ballot is cast, Ethiopia’s seventh national poll has managed to be simultaneously predictable and remarkable predictably stage-managed, and remarkably revealing about the condition of the state.

By E. Frashie | Addis Ababa Correspondent

1 June 2026

ADDIS ABABA — By half past six on Monday morning, the queues outside polling stations across Addis Ababa had already assumed that particular character of Ethiopian civic patience: long, unhurried, and quietly dignified. For a government anxious about legitimacy, the photographs of citizens lining up before dawn were worth more than any campaign poster. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed understood this perfectly. His first act of the day was not to vote, that came later, but to appear before a carefully curated selection of domestic media outlets for an address that, in its confident sweep and selective omissions, told the electorate precisely what it was and was not supposed to think.

The speech was, by any measure, a performance. Ethiopia, Abiy declared, had foiled the machinations of ‘historical enemies’ who had hired internal proxies to spread propaganda and convince the public that democracy was impossible. The voters, in their wisdom, had rejected this counsel and turned out in their numbers. So far, so standard. But listen more carefully to the subtext and a more pointed message emerges: those who question this election, whether they be opposition politicians, international human rights bodies, or foreign journalists, are enemies or their instruments. The word he chose :- Banda, the Amharic for traitor or colonial lackey, carries particular historical freight in a country whose founding myth is built on resisting foreign interference. It is a word deployed with precision. It is also a word designed to foreclose argument rather than invite it.

“The word Banda carries particular historical freight. It is deployed with precision designed to foreclose argument rather than invite it.“

Set against the morning’s operational reality, the rhetorical architecture of the speech becomes still more instructive. While the Prime Minister spoke of the Ethiopian people’s heroic civic spirit, the National Election Board of Ethiopia was simultaneously informing journalists at the Skylight Hotel, the nerve centre of the day’s monitoring operations, and, it should be noted, also the base of the African Union observer mission, that no fewer than 143 polling stations in Amhara and Oromia had failed to open at all, on grounds of security. An undisclosed further number had been forced to close early. Voting in Kersa, Kutaber, Gilolopa, and Gosache had been interrupted. How many voters were thereby disenfranchised, NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu did not say. The number remains, as of this writing, undisclosed.

This is not a trivial omission. Ethiopia is a country of some 135 million people, roughly half of whom are under eighteen. The registered voter roll stands at just over 50 million a figure that critics have already disputed, arguing that large swaths of the country affected by ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, Gambella, and Tigray were effectively excluded from meaningful participation before the day began. Prior to polling day, NEBE had already announced that elections would not be held in 38 districts of Tigray and eight constituencies in Amhara. The figure of 143 closed stations on the day itself adds a further layer of practical exclusion that the official narrative of orderly, nationwide voting rather conspicuously declines to accommodate.

THE NUMBERS GAME

The scale of the exercise is not in dispute. Over 52,000 polling stations. Nearly 200,000 election workers. Forty-seven registered political parties. More than 10,900 candidates. These are impressive figures, and NEBE cited them with justifiable pride. Less prominently featured was the analytical context supplied by Chatham House’s Ahmed Soliman and Abel Abate Demissie, who assessed the contest as likely to be among the least competitive of the seven national elections held since multiparty democracy was nominally introduced in 1991. The Prosperity Party won 96 per cent of parliamentary seats in 2021. It is running unopposed in several dozen constituencies in 2026. The opposition fragmented across more than forty parties, starved of funds, and in several documented cases denied permits to hold rallies comparable to those the ruling party staged at Meskel Square enters this election not as a credible alternative government in waiting, but as democratic scenery.

WION’s correspondents on the ground noted a heavy military presence alongside the familiar picture of enthusiastic queues. That combination visible participation alongside visible security force deployment captures something essential about the texture of this election. Citizens are voting. Whether they are doing so in conditions that meet any recognised standard of free and fair is an altogether different question, and one that the official choreography of the day is not designed to answer.

“The opposition enters this election not as a credible alternative government in waiting, but as democratic scenery.“

There is also the matter of what was happening to journalism whilst all of this was unfolding. Reporters Without Borders placed Ethiopia 145th out of 180 countries in its 2025 Press Freedom Index company it shares, in that neighbourhood of the rankings, with Eritrea, North Korea, and Iran. Addis Standard, the country’s most consequential independent digital outlet, had its operating licence withdrawn ahead of the election. The Reporter, the largest-circulation newspaper, had been warned to align its editorial output with government narratives. The irony of an election designed to demonstrate democratic vitality being observed by a press corps operating under these conditions is one that the Prime Minister’s morning address did not find time to address.

UHURU’S CAREFUL ARITHMETIC

Into this environment arrived former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, leading the African Union Election Observation Mission of 73 short-term observers drawn from 37 African countries. The mathematics of oversight are, at minimum, thought-provoking: 73 observers for a country of 135 million people voting across 52,000 polling stations represents a coverage ratio that would tax even the most optimistic statistician. The AUEOM deployed at the formal invitation of the Government of Ethiopia a detail the AU’s own arrival statement saw fit to mention in its opening sentence, which is a choice.

Kenyatta, speaking to state media approximately three hours before this dispatch was filed, delivered himself of the following assessment: from the polling stations visited, and from reports received from observers elsewhere in the country, voting ‘seems to be going on smoothly.’ Stations had opened ‘on time.’ NEBE staff ‘seem to know what they’re doing,’ and ‘everything seems orderly.’ He expressed hope that ‘the people of Ethiopia will be able to do their civic duty.’

That is three uses of the word ‘seems’ in under forty seconds, from a man who met NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu the previous day and commands a continent-wide observation network. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a restaurant critic writing that the food ‘appeared to be cooked.’ The phrasing is not accidental. Kenyatta is an experienced political operator who knows exactly what his words will be used for by state media, and exactly what weight they can and cannot bear. He has preserved his position for the preliminary statement scheduled for 3 June, when the mission will say something more considered. But the government clip of him saying ‘seems orderly’ will be on Ethiopian state television long before that.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development has also deployed its own 26-member observer team, led by former Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe. Their preliminary statement is likewise due on 3 June. Both missions are based, with a symmetry too neat to be entirely coincidental, at the Skylight Hotel the same venue where NEBE staged its official monitoring operations.

WHAT THE CIVIL SOCIETY OBSERVERS FOUND

Rather more pointed in its same-day assessment was the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organisations for Elections, which deployed 3,149 observers 2,258 stationary and 891 mobile across the country. Their midday report, released whilst voting was still under way, documented a catalogue of procedural concerns that the government’s smooth-running narrative does not easily absorb.

The most significant finding concerned ballot box handling. At 26 stations monitored by CECOE roughly one per cent of those covered observers were unable to verify that boxes had been demonstrated to be empty before being sealed and opened for voting. This is not a bureaucratic footnote. An unsealed or unverified ballot box is the most elementary mechanism for the pre-stuffing of ballots, and the failure to perform the emptiness demonstration in public is a procedural violation that election law exists precisely to prevent. Beyond this, CECOE documented polling stations established in prohibited locations, unauthorised individuals assisting voters, restrictions on observer access, the distribution of unstamped ballot papers, the exchange of materials between stations, and the presence of individuals inside voting centres who had no business being there. Access was denied to CECOE observers at seventeen stations altogether.

“An unsealed ballot box is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the most elementary mechanism for pre-stuffing and the failure to demonstrate its emptiness is a violation election law exists to prevent.“

CECOE was careful to note that the vast majority of stations proceeded without incident, and that overall the day was peaceful. This is accurate and ought to be said. It is also the kind of qualification that the government will amplify and the irregularities will be footnoted. The Tribune notes, for the record, that peace and procedural integrity are related but distinct concepts. A peaceful election conducted with systematic procedural violations is not the same thing as a credible one.

THE PROCLAMATION AND THE QUEUE

By evening, a further data point had arrived. NEBE announced, citing Proclamation No. 1162/2019, Article 49, Sub-Article 4, that voting hours would be extended until every voter already standing in line by 6pm had cast their ballot. The legal basis is sound and the decision, on its face, is admirable, no citizen who made the effort to queue should be turned away. But the extension also tells a secondary story about the reliability of the digital voter registration system, which NEBE itself acknowledged had caused delays and longer queues throughout the day. When an e-registration platform deployed across a country of 135 million people generates queues long enough to require a legal extension of polling hours, questions about the system’s fitness for purpose are not unreasonable.

The Prime Minister, in his morning address, had spoken of Ethiopia’s aspiration to become a nation that breeds tech unicorns and meets most of its demands through domestic production. The voter registration app developed by NEBE, reportedly downloaded by over 5.5 million citizens experienced sufficient difficulties on election day to contribute to nationwide delays. The distance between the aspiration and the operational reality is a recurring theme in Abiy’s Ethiopia, and it surfaced again, quietly, in the queues outside polling stations across the country.

THE VISION AND THE VOID

It would be uncharitable and analytically incomplete to dismiss Abiy’s morning address as mere propaganda. Parts of it were more substantive than that. His call to elected officials to serve with ‘clean hands and clean hearts’ rather than focussing on the ‘ego of winning’ was, at minimum, an acknowledgement that the gap between electoral victory and effective governance is real. His framing of the next five years as demanding ‘more effort, deeper thinking, and greater unity than ever before’ suggested a man who understands, or at least affects to understand, that governing Ethiopia in 2026 is an enterprise of considerable complexity.

His promise that the Prosperity Party would ‘gracefully accept whatever election results emerge’ was received with the scepticism it merits, given that the party is running unopposed in multiple constituencies and won 96 per cent of seats at the last election. Accepting results one has pre-arranged is not, strictly speaking, a test of democratic grace. But the rhetorical commitment is on record, and the Tribune will hold it there.

The international media picture assembled around this election is less equivocal than the official one. Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, and WION all reported the contest within a framework of expected Prosperity Party dominance, significant regional exclusions, fragmented opposition, and meaningful questions about process integrity. The FIDH and the World Organisation Against Torture expressed serious concern at the civic environment in which the election was conducted, citing active armed conflict in Amhara and Oromia as backdrop. Human rights observers noted that the government’s tolerance manifest in pardons issued and exiles welcomed back had been interpreted by some armed groups as weakness, a framing Abiy himself deployed, though he drew different conclusions from it.

One further detail from the day’s events deserves to be recorded, and not only in passing. An election facilitator, unnamed in the NEBE briefing, lost his life in a motorcycle accident in Enamorena Enayer, Gurage Zone, whilst carrying out his duties. He will not feature in the preliminary statements due on 3 June, nor in the Prosperity Party’s victory address when it comes. The Ethiopian Tribune records his name as unknown and his loss as real.

The AU observer mission will speak on Wednesday. The results, NEBE has indicated, are expected within ten days. Abiy Ahmed will almost certainly be returned to office with a majority that renders the word ‘landslide’ barely adequate. The procedural irregularities documented by CECOE will be assessed, weighed, and in all probability found insufficient to alter the outcome. The 143 stations that never opened will remain a footnote. The voters of Kersa and Kutaber and Gilolopa and Gosache will be asked, in due course, to wait for a re-run.

Ethiopia’s seventh general election is, by the metrics its government prefers, a success. The stations opened. The queues formed. The ballots were cast. Uhuru Kenyatta said it seemed orderly. On a continent where elections have been far worse, this is not nothing.

Whether it is enough is a question that the Ethiopian people not the Prosperity Party, not the African Union, not the international wire services will be left to answer for themselves. They have, as Abiy noted with evident satisfaction, been doing so since early morning. The Tribune will be watching when the answers come.

E. Frashie is a correspondent and analytical writer for The Ethiopian Tribune.

The Tribune’s editorial policy requires attribution of all factual claims. Sources consulted for this dispatch include NEBE official briefings, translated transcripts of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s election-day address and AU observer Uhuru Kenyatta’s statement to state media, reports by Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, Africanews, WION, CECOE midday observer release, FIDH, Chatham House, and Reporters Without Borders.

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The Ritual Before the Storm: Ethiopia’s 2026 Election and the Impossible Choice

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:05:05 +0000

Read Time:17 Minute, 51 Second

By The Editorial Team, The Ethiopian Tribune

June 1st, 2026 the date every observer of Ethiopian politics has circled on their calendar, approaches with the inevitability of a ceremony whose outcome has already been inscribed. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ruling Prosperity Party will retain power. The question everyone is asking is not whether this will happen, but whether it matters.

The Election Nobody Really Believes In

There is a peculiar consensus forming across the analytical landscape of Ethiopia’s 2026 general election, one that cuts across ideological lines and institutional affiliations. From Professor Merera Gudina, the long-time opposition leader and chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress, to Kjetil Tronvoll, the peace and conflict researcher at Oslo New University College, to Martin Plaut, the political analyst who has tracked Ethiopian politics for decades: the diagnosis is consistent. This election is what one might charitably call a “formal affair” and what one might more accurately describe as electoral theatre masquerading as democracy.

The numbers on the surface look respectable enough. The National Election Board of Ethiopia has registered 47 political parties and received nearly 11,000 candidates. Millions of Ethiopians are entitled to vote. These figures, published and circulated by the regime, are designed to impress international observers and satisfy donors weary of investing in states that cannot at least pretend to democratic procedure. They tell a story of competition, of choice, of civic participation.

But then comes the asterisk. The ruling Prosperity Party holds 457 of 547 parliamentary seats. Political analysts are predicting that when the votes are tallied on June 1st, Abiy will secure a majority of over 90 per cent a landslide that bears the fingerprints not of democratic debate but of structural predetermination. What the election offers, in other words, is not genuine political competition but the theatre of competition: all the ritual without any of the uncertainty.

This distinction matters precisely because the regime needs the election to look like a contest in order for it to function as legitimacy. The ballot box is not an instrument of democratic choice; it is an instrument of democratic presentation. It tells Ethiopians, and more crucially, tells the international community, that the state consults its citizens, that power is subject to their ratification, that the system has not abandoned the forms of democratic governance even if it has abandoned their substance.

The Three Structural Obstacles: Why This Election Cannot Succeed Even on Its Own Terms

If one accepts the regime’s implicit framing that the goal is to hold an election that appears credible, inclusive, and national then the enterprise fails before it begins. Three interlocking structural problems ensure this failure.

1. The Representation Gap: When Democracy Becomes Mathematically Impossible

The DW reporting on the 2026 election identifies something that should be more prominent in the international commentary: millions of Ethiopians will remain unrepresented. This is not new. The 2021 elections suffered from the same affliction. Several regions face structural issues that leave parliamentary seats vacant, raising concerns, amply justified, that these representation gaps will repeat.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means that the parliament elected on June 1st will not, in fact, represent the entire nation. It will be structurally unrepresentative from the moment the speaker takes the gavel. The chamber itself will contain absences literal empty seats that correspond to regions deemed too unstable, too contested, or too hostile to the regime for elections to occur.

This is not a marginal issue. It is a fundamental delegitimisation of the electoral enterprise. A parliament cannot claim to be the embodiment of national will if entire regions are absent from its deliberations. Yet the regime has calculated that maintaining power in a partially representative chamber is preferable to either allowing genuine competition or expanding the franchise to include populations that might vote differently.

The acceptance of this outcome reveals something important about regime priorities: governing consent matters less than governing control. A fully representative parliament might challenge the executive’s authority. A partially representative one cannot.

2. The Security Collapse: 46 Districts and the Physical Impossibility of a National Election

Days before the June 1st vote, the National Election Board made an announcement that should have commanded far more international attention than it did. Elections would not take place in 46 electoral districts across the conflict-affected Amhara and Tigray regions. Eight districts in northwestern Amhara would be suspended due to clashes between militia groups and the army. Thirty-eight districts in Tigray would see no voting due to tensions between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Let that sink in. Nearly a tenth of the country’s electoral districts will not hold elections. This is not a minor logistical problem; it is an admission that the federal state does not control its own territory. The National Election Board is not merely postponing voting in these areas, it is acknowledging that the state cannot project sufficient authority to conduct even a basic democratic procedure.

This is particularly acute in Tigray, where the war between 2020 and 2022 claimed at least 600,000 lives. A peace agreement was signed in 2022, but the underlying tensions remain volatile. The TPLF, the dominant party in Tigray, was banned as a political party in 2025 following the war. Yet the party’s old guard has reinstituted the regional parliament and elected TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael as its speaker—a power play that directly threatens the very peace agreement the regime claims to be administering.

In Amhara, Fano militias are engaged in active conflict with the Ethiopian National Defense Forces. These are not hypothetical threats; they control key cities and roads. The state’s inability to secure these territories means voting simply cannot occur. Some militia groups have issued explicit statements opposing the elections, and analysts assess that they may attempt to disrupt the electoral process in areas where they maintain control.

What emerges from this landscape is stark: Ethiopia does not have a unified national territory within which a genuinely national election can occur. The state is fragmenting in real time, and the June 1st election is occurring within the shell of state authority rather than as an expression of it.

3. The Political Competition Deficit: Fragmentation by Design

The third structural obstacle is perhaps the most deliberate. Opposition parties are either highly fragmented or systematically sidelined. Voters have very few real alternatives, and the parties themselves are trapped in what might be called an “electoral authoritarianism bind.”

Consider the situation of the Oromo Federalist Congress, one of the primary opposition parties. As Professor Merera Gudina explained in his recent interview with Addis Standard, the OFC is participating in the 2026 election with a grand total of six candidates. This is not a strategic choice born of optimism about electoral prospects. It is a capitulation to legal constraint: Ethiopian law prevents a party from boycotting two consecutive elections without facing deregistration.

The OFC thus faces an impossible choice: participate nominally (and thereby lend legitimacy to an election designed to exclude them) or boycott (and thereby lose their legal status). They have chosen the former, accepting that participation with six candidates amounts to little more than a fig leaf. They get to say they contested the election; the regime gets to say it welcomed their participation. The outcome is predetermined either way.

The Coalition for the Unity of Ethiopia, an alliance of several opposition parties, has taken a different tack. Rather than accept the participation-or-deregistration binary, they have conditioned their participation on structural changes: an end to the war, the release of political prisoners, greater political freedom, and talks with the genuine opposition. These are, of course, precisely the conditions the regime will not meet. The CEU is thus engaged in conditional participation—appearing to contest the election while knowing their conditions will not be satisfied.

What this fragmentation means is that voters are presented with either the ruling Prosperity Party or a collection of opposition parties that range from nominally present (OFC with six candidates) to conditionally participating (CEU, hedging their bets) to effectively sidelined. There is no genuine alternative power centre, no competing vision of governance that could challenge the ruling party’s monopoly.

This is not accidental. It is the product of deliberate regime strategy. Over the past six years, the Prosperity Party has tightened its control over the electoral space through a combination of legal restrictions (the deregistration threat), security pressure (harassment of opposition figures), and control of state institutions (the National Election Board, which the regime effectively dominates).

The Regional Fragmentation: Where Guns Trump Ballots

But electoral obstacles, representation gaps, and political fragmentation tell only part of the story. Beneath and beyond the formal electoral structure lies a deeper reality: Ethiopia is fragmenting along regional and factional lines that the June 1st election cannot address and will likely exacerbate.

Tigray: A Banned Party Governing a Region

The TPLF situation encapsulates the paradox. The party is banned from running candidates in the national election. Yet it exercises de facto control over the Tigray region, having reinstated its regional parliament and reasserted its authority after the 2022 peace agreement nominally sidelined it.

This is not a stable equilibrium. The federal government refuses to recognise the TPLF’s re-assertion of regional authority, viewing it as a violation of the peace agreement. The TPLF views its restitution as the democratic restoration of its authority—after all, it is the dominant political force in Tigray. The tension between these two positions remains unresolved, and analysts assess that TPLF efforts to regain full control of the region could trigger renewed war with the federal government.

The June 1st election will not resolve this tension. Indeed, it will likely harden it. Voting will not occur in 38 districts in Tigray. The TPLF will be absent from parliament. The federal government will interpret the election as a mandate to marginalise the TPLF further. And in Tigray itself, the population will have been excluded from both the regional and national elections, deepening the sense that the state does not regard them as fully part of the political community.

This is not a local problem. Tigray is a region of over 5 million people. The unresolved relationship between the TPLF and the federal government remains one of the most volatile fault lines in Ethiopian politics.

Amhara: Militia Control and the Erosion of State Authority

In Amhara, the situation is somewhat different but equally alarming. Fano militias control key cities and roads. They are engaged in active combat with the Ethiopian National Defense Forces. Some have issued explicit statements opposing the elections.

Unlike in Tigray, where the issue is a banned party reasserting control, in Amhara the issue is non-state armed groups operating outside any legal or electoral framework at all. They do not seek parliamentary representation (or have sought it and been excluded). They exist in a state of open conflict with the federal authority.

The eight electoral districts suspended in Amhara are suspended precisely because they are in areas where Fano controls territory. The state cannot project sufficient authority to conduct voting, let alone govern once the votes are cast. This represents not merely a failure of the electoral system but a failure of the state’s monopoly on legitimate force.

Oromia: The OLA Dimension

Similarly, the Oromo Liberation Army remains active in Oromia, engaged in conflict with the ENDF. While the OLA is not mentioned as prominently in the DW reporting as Fano or the TPLF, their presence underscores the broader picture: across multiple regions, armed groups operate outside the framework of the June 1st election. The ballot box is irrelevant to them because they do not recognise the state’s legitimacy or authority.

The Economic Subtext: Why the Election Happens Even Though It Cannot Work

All of this—the structural obstacles, the regional fragmentation, the opposition’s bind—occurs within a context of severe economic crisis. High inflation persists. Currency collapse is ongoing. Youth unemployment is driving mass emigration. The promised dividend of Abiy’s early reforms—economic growth that would bring stability and development—has failed to materialise.

This context is crucial because it explains why the regime insists on holding an election it cannot lose. The election is not designed to solve economic problems or to gather genuine input on policy. It is designed to generate a mandate—a 90 per cent majority that the regime can cite when imposing unpopular economic measures, when requesting continued military expenditure, when fending off donor pressure, when justifying continued restrictions on opposition activity.

The election, in other words, is a response to economic crisis, not a solution to it. It is a way of converting dissatisfaction into legitimacy, of transforming grievance into mandated governance.

Ordinary Ethiopians are acutely aware of this disconnect. A 26-year-old voter cited in the DW reporting captured it succinctly: “Elections are always good,” he said, but “too little attention is being paid to the problems of people struggling with inflation.” The young man expressed deep concern about the exodus of Ethiopians to other countries due to lack of jobs—a hemorrhaging of human capital that no electoral outcome on June 1st will reverse.

The regime’s response to economic crisis is thus not policy reform but democratic theatre. The ballot box becomes a way of managing dissent, of channelling grievance into an orderly process that produces predetermined outcomes.

The Four Futures: Where Does Ethiopia Go From Here?

Professor Merera Gudina, in his Addis Standard interview, outlined four possible futures for Ethiopia, each plausible within the current political and security context.

The first is continued crisis: shrinking political space, rising cost of living, youth unemployment, and chronic instability. This is perhaps the most likely scenario if nothing changes structurally. The June 1st election would do nothing to address these underlying drivers.

The second is national and international pressure the scenario in which the ruling party comes to its senses and sits down for genuine, all-inclusive political dialogue to build national consensus. This requires a fundamental shift in regime strategy, a willingness to share power in something more than the rhetorical sense. It seems unlikely, though not impossible.

The third is uncoordinated insurgency: various disjointed armed factions simultaneously push into the capital, creating a chaotic breakdown similar to Syria. The proliferation of armed groups operating outside state control, Fano in Amhara, OLA in Oromia, a potentially re-mobilised TPLF in Tigray, makes this scenario less hypothetical than it might appear.

The fourth is total disintegration: if the state tries to maintain unity purely through military force without political compromise, the country risks fracturing completely, as the Soviet Union did. This is the nightmare scenario, but it becomes more plausible as regional authority erodes and the state’s capacity to project power diminishes.

Which scenario is most likely? That depends partly on decisions the regime has not yet made, and partly on the behaviour of actors outside the regime’s control. But the June 1st election does not fundamentally alter the probability of any of these outcomes. If anything, by foreclosing the possibility of negotiated settlement and legitimising a 90 per cent majority for continued exclusion, the election may accelerate the timeline toward one of the less benign scenarios.

The International Dimension: Legitimacy for Whom?

It is worth noting that the regime’s insistence on holding the election, despite its manifest inability to meet the basic standards of democratic procedure, reflects partly its need for international legitimacy. The election is being conducted partly for the international audience for donors, for the United Nations, for regional partners.

The United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia’s strongest ally in the Gulf, has been a particularly important source of support. Yet the UAE itself has been accused by UN experts and international observers of covertly supplying weapons, drones, and money to the paramilitary RSF militia in Sudan, which is engaged in a devastating conflict. This creates a troubling dynamic: Ethiopia is seeking legitimacy from an external power that is itself fuelling regional destabilisation.

The broader regional context growing tensions between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan, all shadowed by proxy dynamics and external intervention means that the June 1st election occurs not in isolation but within a destabilising regional matrix. Abiy’s ability to consolidate power domestically is partly dependent on maintaining external validation, even as external actors pursue their own regional agendas that may not align with Ethiopian stability.

What Credibility Requires, and Why This Election Cannot Achieve It

The DW video reporting on the 2026 election posed a straightforward question: can this election be considered credible, inclusive, and truly national?

The answer, based on the evidence, is no. Not because of administrative incompetence or marginal failures, but because the structural conditions for a credible, inclusive, and national election do not exist.

A credible election requires genuine political competition. This election offers only the semblance of competition, with opposition parties either reducing their participation to symbolic gesture (OFC, six candidates) or hedging their bets with conditions they know will not be met (CEU). The 90 per cent majority is predictable precisely because alternatives are foreclosed.

An inclusive election requires that all regions participate and that all populations have representation. This election will exclude 46 districts and leave entire regions with vacant parliamentary seats. Millions of Ethiopians will have no say in who governs them.

A national election requires that the state exercise sufficient authority to conduct voting across its territory. Ethiopia does not currently exercise this authority. Armed groups operating outside the electoral framework control significant territory. The state is fragmenting, not consolidating.

To be balanced: one can understand the regime’s logic in proceeding with the election despite these obstacles. They argue that it is better to hold an election, however imperfect, than to abandon the democratic form entirely. They point to the formal procedures, the registered parties, the electoral board’s independence (which, to be fair, operates with some degree of autonomy even if the regime dominates its appointment). They note that voters are participating, that interest is evident.

But procedural legitimacy is not the same as democratic legitimacy. An election can follow proper procedures while still representing a diminishment of democratic practice. And an election can be formally held while fundamental conditions for democratic choice remain absent.

After June 1st: The Ritual Ends, the Real Contestation Begins

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about the June 1st election is that it does not settle anything. It postpones. It ritualises. It generates a mandate that the regime can cite for the next five years. But it does not address the underlying drivers of contestation: regional fragmentation, economic crisis, the presence of armed groups operating outside state control, the unresolved status of the TPLF, the delegitimisation of opposition parties.

When the votes are tallied and Abiy claims his 90 per cent majority, the real contestation will resume. Fano will continue operating in Amhara. The TPLF will continue reasserting authority in Tigray. The OLA will remain active in Oromia. Economic conditions will continue to deteriorate. Young Ethiopians will continue emigrating. The regime will cite the election as a mandate to continue present policies, and opposition voices will grow more marginalised.

The election is not the beginning of a new political cycle. It is the culmination of one cycle and the prelude to another one in which elections matter even less and in which the real contestation occurs in the spaces where the ballot box has no relevance.

Conclusion: The Impossibility of Democratic Ritual in a Fragmenting State

Ethiopia is attempting something that has become increasingly difficult to sustain: the maintenance of electoral rituals in a state that is fragmenting along regional and factional lines. The June 1st election will proceed. The Prosperity Party will win. Abiy will be re-elected with a supermajority. And none of this will resolve the fundamental challenges facing the state.

The election is not a failure of democracy. It is the operation of electoral authoritarianism: the use of elections not as a mechanism for democratic choice but as a mechanism for democratic presentation. It is credible to international audiences that do not look too closely. It is inclusive of the parties the regime deems acceptable. It is national in symbolic scope, even if practical execution falls far short.

But a state that relies on electoral ritual rather than democratic substance is building on unstable ground. The ballot box cannot generate legitimacy where the underlying conditions for democratic governance do not exist. And in Ethiopia’s case, those conditions. genuine political competition, territorial control by the state, a unified national community willing to accept the outcomes of democratic processes are increasingly absent.

The real question is not whether the 2026 election will change Ethiopia’s trajectory. It will not. The real question is whether the election, by foreclosing legitimate channels of political contestation and legitimising continued exclusion, will accelerate the movement toward one of Professor Merera’s less benign futures. On the evidence available, one cannot rule that out.

The ritual before the storm, in other words, may be hastening the storm’s arrival.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication focused on Horn of Africa geopolitics, democratic accountability, and human rights. This analysis draws on interviews conducted by Addis Standard (Professor Merera Gudina), reporting by Deutsche Welle (Martina Schwikowski), and assessments by international analysts including Kjetil Tronvoll and Martin Plaut.

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ባለው አስከፊ ሁኔታ ስለምርጫ ማሰብ አይቻልም

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:53:26 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 49 Second

በቀለ ገሠሠ (ዶ/ር)

፩ኛ/ መንደርደሪያ፣

ብዙ ዓለማት ዞረን ዐይተናል። እግዚአብሔር አምላካችን ኢትዮጵያን የፈጠራት ሁሉን ነገር አሟልቶ ነው። የምድሯን ስፋትና ለምነት፣ የወንዞችና ሃይቆችዋን ብዛት፣ ንጹህ አየር፣ ደጋግ ህዝብ፣ ወዘተ ስንመለከት እጅግ በጣም ሃብታም አገር መሆን ነበረባት።

አልታደለችምና ዛሬ የምትገኝበትን የባሰ ሁኔታ ስንመለከት እጅግ በጣም እናዝናለን።

ጎሣን ከጎሳ ያጋጫሉ። የአማራ ህዝብ የትግሬ፣ የኦሮሞና የማንም ጎሣ ጠላት ሆኖ አያውቅም። ደጋግና እንግዳ ተቀባይ ህዝብ ነው። በማንኛውም ሥርዓት ሥር ጥሮ ግሮ ከመኖር በስተቀር ያገኘው አንዳችም ልዩ ጥቅም አልነበረም። ዛሬ ግን በገዛ ቀዬው እንኳን እንዳይኖር፣ አርሶ ነግዶ ልጆቹን እንዳያሳድግ ዘመቻ ሲካሄድበት ይታያል። ትምህርት ቤቶች ይዘጋሉ፣ የእምነት ቦታዎች ይደፈራሉ።

እነዚህን ከባድ ችግሮች እንደመቅረፍ ፈንታ ስለውሸት ምርጫ ሲወራ መስማት በጣም ያሳዝናል፣ ያሳፍራል።

፪ኛ/ የነፃ ምርጫ አስፈላጊነት፣

የኢትዮጵያ ህዝብ ነፃ አገራዊ ምርጫን ሲጠማ ነው የኖረው።

የዲሞክራሲ ሥርዓት ምሶሶ ነፃ ምርጫ እንደሆነ ግልፅ ነው። ነፃ ምርጫ ከሌለ አምባገነንነት ይንሰራፋል፣ በውድ አገራችን ሲፈጸሙ የቆዮት አረመኔያዊ ጭፍጨፋዎች፣ ማፈናቀሎችና ዝርፊያዎች በዲሞክራሲ ሥርዓት እጦት ምክንያት ነው።

፫ኛ/ የነፃ ምርጫ ቅድመ ሁኔታዎች፣

እውነተኛ ምርጫ ለማካሄድ፣

ሰላም ምስፈን አለበት፣
ነፃ የምርጫ ቦርድ መቋቋም አለበት፣
በየምርጫው ኬላ ላይ ገለልተኞች የሆኑ አገራዊና የውጪ ታዛቢዎች መገኘት አለባቸው።

፬ኛ/ አሁን ምን መደረግ አለበት?

መጀመሪያ ሁሉ-አቀፍ የሽግግር መንግሥት መቋቋም አለበት። ከፋፋዩ ሕገመንግሥ መለወጥ አለበት።
ወንጀለኞች ለፍርድ መቅረብ አለባቸው።

ከዚያ በኃላ ነፃና ፍትሐዊ ምርጫ ማካሄድ፣
ሰላም ማውረድና
እድገት ላይ ማተኮር ይኖርብናል።
እግዚአብሔር ይርዳን፣ ይታረቀን።

Given the Dire Situation, Thinking About Elections is Impossible

By Bekele Gessesse (PhD)

1. Introduction

We have travelled and seen much of the world. Almighty God created Ethiopia with everything she could possibly need. When looking at the vastness and fertility of her land, the abundance of her rivers and lakes, her clean air, and her generous people, she should have been an incredibly wealthy nation.

Unfortunately, she has been unlucky, and it is deeply saddening to witness the worsening conditions she finds herself in today.

They pit one ethnic group against another. The Amhara people have never been enemies of the Tigrayan, Oromo, or any other ethnic community. They are a kind and hospitable people. Under any regime, they have never received any special privileges, asking for nothing more than to live by working hard and honestly. Today, however, we see a campaign being waged against them, preventing them from even living in their own localities, or farming and trading to raise their children. Schools are being closed, and places of worship are being desecrated.

Instead of resolving these severe crises, it is deeply disheartening and shameful to hear talk of a sham election.

2. The Necessity of Free Elections

The people of Ethiopia have long thirsted for a free national election.

It is clear that free elections are the cornerstone of a democratic system. In the absence of free elections, tyranny flourishes. The barbaric massacres, displacements, and plundering that have been carried out in our beloved country are the direct result of a lack of a democratic system.

3. Preconditions for Free Elections

To conduct a genuine election:

Peace must be established across the country.

An independent electoral board must be set up.

Neutral national and international observers must be present at every polling station.

4. What Must Be Done Now?

First and foremost, an all-inclusive transitional government must be established. The divisive constitution must be amended, and criminals must be brought to justice.

Only after these steps are taken can we: Conduct a free and fair election, Restore peace, and Focus on development.

May God help us and grant us His reconciliation.

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The Geography of Delusion: Why Abiy Ahmed’s Imperial Vision Threatens Ethiopia, Not Saves It

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:30:51 +0000

Read Time:9 Minute, 8 Second

By Sewasew Teklemariam

When The Economist warns that a prime minister’s “ambitions threaten both his country and the Horn of Africa,” it is customary to pause. The weekly publication does not deal in exaggeration. Yet what strikes one most acutely is not the warning itself, but the speed with which international analysis has converged on a verdict: Abiy Ahmed’s imperial gambit is not merely dangerous, it is economically irrational, strategically indefensible, and increasingly divorced from the operational realities of statecraft in a region where power remains deeply constrained by geography, law, and the interests of very capable neighbours.

The Prime Minister has, for nearly two years now, positioned Red Sea access as an “existential matter,” declaring Ethiopia “a million per cent certain” it would not remain landlocked. In his February address to Parliament, he spoke of an organic, natural separation between Ethiopia and the Red Sea that must be corrected. The rhetoric has escalated: a senior military official suggested that a population of 130 million simply grants Ethiopia the right to take what it needs from neighbours possessing far smaller populations. War, in the coded language of Addis Ababa, has become diplomatic negotiation.

But beneath the grandiose framing lies a more elementary problem. Abiy is gambling with the legitimacy of his regime and the future of his country on a strategic premise that does not survive basic economic or geopolitical scrutiny.

The Economic Absurdity

Start with the basics. Ethiopia’s economy is in freefall. The currency has collapsed. The Eurobond market is closed. Foreign exchange reserves are depleted. The government faces mounting pressure to defend the Ethiopian birr, placate an electorate experiencing currency devaluation as a daily assault on purchasing power, and fund security operations across multiple fronts. In such circumstances, a rational leadership pursues diplomatic breakthroughs that deliver measurable economic gains at manageable political cost.

A population of 150 million cannot live in a geographic prison. Therefore, we must spend military resources we do not possess to seize territory from our neighbours.
The logic of Abiy Ahmed’s Red Sea strategy, simplified

Instead, Abiy has chosen the inverse. He has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Somaliland a breakaway region whose independence violates African Union doctrine and infuriates Somalia, a theoretically important partner. In exchange for diplomatic recognition of Somaliland (fundamentally destabilising to East African state order), Ethiopia would receive a 20-kilometre strip of coastline on a fifty-year lease. This is not a port; it is a liability. The arrangement is so transparently against Somalia’s interests that it has triggered a profound regional crisis, with Kenya and Djibouti now forced to choose between their relationship with Addis Ababa and their relationship with Mogadishu.

The Somaliland gambit has collapsed in real time. Somalia, far from capitulating, has moved closer to Kenya, Egypt, and Eritrea precisely the coalition Abiy’s strategy was ostensibly designed to prevent. And why would it succeed? A breakaway region with no international recognition cannot offer what Ethiopia truly needs: stable, affordable, permanent access to a major port through a framework of law and interstate comity. Yet the Somaliland episode cost Abiy his diplomatic equilibrium in the Horn and poisoned relationships he had spent years cultivating.

The mathematics of Red Sea access are unforgiving. Djibouti handles roughly 70 per cent of Ethiopia’s trade. Kenya’s port of Mombasa could absorb substantially more. Port fees have fallen as competition has intensified. The notion that Ethiopia faces an existential constraint on maritime access, absent war, is not merely overstated—it is false.

The Strategic Trap

But the economic irrationality pales beside the strategic one. Abiy appears to believe that the combination of Ethiopia’s population, military capability, and geographic position grants him the prerogative to forcibly alter borders in the Horn of Africa. This is precisely the doctrine that empowered Putin in Crimea and Netanyahu in Gaza: that the strong may reshape the map at the expense of the weak, provided the international order is sufficiently distracted to avert its gaze.

The problem is that the Horn of Africa is not a nullity. It is a region of considerable strategic consequence a crossing point between Asia and Africa, a chokehold on global maritime commerce, and a theatre where multiple great powers have invested heavily. When Abiy declared in October 2025 that “no one would come to Eritrea’s aid if war breaks out,” he was making an assumption not a statement of fact. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States all have profound interests in Red Sea stability. None of them wishes to witness a destabilising war fought over a territorial claim framed in language that evokes historical claims that, if generalised, would blow apart the entire state system of Africa.

Abiy is increasingly sounding and acting like another world leader whose imperial ambitions and aggression have already caused immense pain and suffering: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Tafi Mhaka, Al Jazeera

Eritrea’s response has been swift and confident. Yemane Gebre Meskel, the Information Minister, dismissed Abiy’s threats as “incessant saber-rattling” from a leader pursuing not peace but “duplication of verbal gymnastics.” The language is pointed: Eritrea, having fought a brutal war for independence, is not a territory to be picked at leisure. Its defensive posture is formidable. Its relationships with regional powers particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia are solid. And crucially, Eritrea can rely on international law in ways that Ethiopia cannot. The 2002 Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission ruling is binding. Eritrea’s territorial waters are internationally recognised. The jurisprudence is against Abiy.

The Prime Minister has begun warning, in closed-door meetings with his Prosperity Party, that Ethiopia might need to take “severe measures” against Eritrea if diplomatic means fail. He has referenced Gaza as a potential model for resolving contested territory. This is the language of a leader who has increasingly internalised a doctrine of force not as a last resort, but as a legitimate instrument of state policy. It is a language that alarms every regional actor capable of constraining Ethiopian behaviour.

The Domestic Contradiction

There is a further contradiction, perhaps more ominous than the others. Abiy has framed the Red Sea quest as a matter of national unification. In practice, it has become a vehicle for centralisation of power without accountability. The security apparatus has expanded. Ethnic tensions, which the rapprochement with Eritrea initially seemed to ameliorate, have been revived and instrumentalised. The upcoming election is being overseen by a “task force” reporting directly to the Prime Minister, not to constitutional authorities. The federal government’s spending on state subsidies has dropped from 60 per cent of the budget in 2018 to 20 per cent in 2026 a radical reconfiguration of federalism that concentrates resources and authority in Addis Ababa.

Abiy has cultivated the perception that sea access is the key to Ethiopia’s prosperity and greatness. In reality, it has become a smokescreen. The people of Ethiopia face currency collapse, fuel shortages, unemployment, and a security environment corrupted by emergency governance. The regime has instrumentalised nationalist sentiment the idea that sea access is Ethiopia’s “natural right” to justify the accumulation of power without the constraints of federalism, competitive elections, or institutional checks.

A senior analyst of Horn of Africa politics observed recently that “states facing internal division rarely succeed in aggressive foreign policies; the domestic centre must hold for any peripheral expansion to be credible.” Ethiopia’s centre, by contrast, is fragmenting. The Tigray conflict left perhaps 600,000 dead. The Oromo Liberation Front remains in the field. The Benishangul-Gumuz region faces systematic insecurity. Regional governments have been stripped of fiscal autonomy. In such conditions, the prospect of a major war with Eritrea would not vindicate Ethiopian greatness—it would expose profound weakness.

The Voices from Beyond

What are the international commentators saying? The verdict has been remarkably consistent. The Economist frames Abiy’s vision as autocratic centralisation masquerading as national renewal. Al Jazeera has compared his rhetoric and methods to those of other aggressively expansionist leaders. Democracy in Africa has warned that Ethiopia’s “imperial ambitions are making the Horn of Africa chronically dangerous.” The observer research community has flagged a pattern: Abiy voices his commitment to peaceful resolution, whilst military media outlets and senior generals speak the language of inevitable war.

Egypt’s response has been characteristically ambiguous. In February 2026, Cairo reportedly offered to mediate Ethiopian access to Red Sea ports in exchange for concessions on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Within days, Egyptian officials denied the offer entirely. The gesture, even in its denial, conveyed a message: the international community recognises the strategic reality: Ethiopia cannot force its way to the sea, but it can access ports through negotiation. The supposed “existential” constraint is a political fiction.

Regional analysts have been equally damning. Dr Suleiman Walhad observed that “history has shown repeatedly that states facing internal division rarely succeed in aggressive foreign policies.” The Red Sea strategy, he argued, is “stillborn” destined to fail because Ethiopia lacks the domestic cohesion necessary for a credible imperial project. Ethiopia is not the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian imperium. It is a multinational, deeply federalised state with a history of ethnic tensions, weak institutions, and an economy in distress.

The Reckoning Ahead

What, then, is driving Abiy’s increasingly reckless positioning? Part of it is personal: the Prime Minister is seeking to build a legacy. He entered office as a reformer, declared “Never again” about ethnic conflict, and received the Nobel Peace Prize a prize that now sits uncomfortably beside a record of internal repression and regional aggression. The Red Sea gambit offers a chance to reframe himself as a great power builder, a leader who restored Ethiopia to its rightful place on the world stage.

Part of it is structural: the Ethiopian regime depends on cultivating a sense of perpetual nationalist grievance. The idea that Ethiopia is “imprisoned” geographically, that it has been cheated of its natural inheritance, that only a strong leader can correct historical injustices this narrative justifies emergency governance and defers accountability for economic failure.

And part of it is psychological: Abiy appears to have come to believe his own mythology. He has surrounded himself with military officials and party loyalists who tell him what he wishes to hear. Contradiction between his public commitment to peaceful resolution and military preparations for war, between his anti-authoritarian reputation and his centralisation of power, between his claims of economic visionary leadership and the currency collapse happening in real time, no longer registers as a problem to be resolved. It is simply the price of greatness.

But greatness purchased through the destabilisation of the Horn of Africa, the alienation of neighbouring states, and the further concentration of power at home is not greatness at all. It is a familiar tragedy: a leader of initial promise succumbing to the delusions of power, wagering his country’s future on a strategic fantasy, and discovering—too late—that geography and law are more durable than rhetoric and will.

The international community is watching. So, increasingly, are Ethiopians.

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The New Addis: How Vanity Meets Vulnerability

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:10:13 +0000

Read Time:11 Minute, 41 Second

Abiy Ahmed’s corridor megaprojects seduce the global influencer class while 43 per cent of Ethiopians sink below the poverty line—a politics of aesthetic modernisation masquerading as development

By E. Frashie

On a sweltering May afternoon in Addis Ababa, American streaming sensation Darren Watkins Jr. known to millions as iShowSpeed, walked barefoot through the newly paved Merkato district, livestreaming his gratitude to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for the city’s “incredible transformation.” In January, global influencer Dylan Page arrived to similar fanfare, greeting Arsenal supporters and narrating the elegance of renovated riverside promenades to his international audience. Neither mentioned the 3,250 households displaced by a single corridor project. Neither addressed the fact that 43 per cent of Ethiopians now live below the poverty line.

The contrast is not incidental. It is the very architecture of the Prosperity Party’s political strategy what we might call the aesthetics of austerity: the deliberate cultivation of a modernised, globally legible urban facade, deployed to obscure the material deterioration of the nation itself.

The Narrative of Transformation

By any measure of infrastructure ambition, Addis Ababa’s corridor development project is formidable. Since 2019, the city administration has overseen the transformation of 88 kilometres of urban space, constructing walking paths, cycling lanes, playgrounds, museums, and riverside parks. The Economist recently observed that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s re-election in June 2026 is certain, but noted with considerable ambivalence that Ethiopia’s future is less so. This tension political inevitability coupled with systemic uncertainty sits at the heart of the urban modernisation project.

The government frames these corridors as more than infrastructure. They are, in the official lexicon, symbols of national dignity and pan-African aspiration. In August 2025, the Prime Minister described the completed Addis International Convention Centre–Goro–VIP Airport corridor as evidence of “a different vision and a renewed work culture” shaping Ethiopia’s urban transformation. The rhetoric is intoxicating: pedestrian walkways as democracy, green spaces as equity, modern boulevards as the infrastructure of freedom.

But the statistics are stark. A single corridor, the Piassa-Mexico-Sarbet-Gotera-Wollo Sefer stretch, cost the city $325 million to construct, displacing 3,250 households and 14,000 residents. The project required an expenditure of approximately €11.5 million per kilometre for 48 kilometres of street upgrade. For perspective: that same investment could have funded over 1,100 kilometres of federal road projects. Yet only five out of one hundred woredas in Addis Ababa enjoy continuous water supply.

The Influencer Machine

The arrival of international influencers represents a calculated element of the regime’s image management. In May 2026, the government hosted the inaugural African Social Media Influencers Summit in Addis Ababa, attracting 61 digital creators from 30 countries with a combined following of 321 million. An additional 120 Ethiopian content creators brought another 150 million followers into the equation, a total reach exceeding 470 million users.

The strategic logic is transparent: deploy the informal authority of the global creator economy to narrate Addis Ababa as Africa’s premier destination for top-tier international digital creators. In the language of the summit organisers, these influencers would serve as cultural ambassadors, reshaping global narratives about the continent. Data presented at the summit claimed that skewed global narratives cost Africa up to $4.2 billion annually, framing the influencer campaign not merely as tourism promotion but as continental economic necessity.

What was remarkable about the summit was what it omitted. The government provided these influencers with 24/7 VIP security during their stays, granted them curated access to gleaming new infrastructure, and ensured their livestreams and social media posts featured polished urban vistas. No creator was invited to the neighbourhoods of Kasanchiz, where residents are still seeking compensation for forced evictions. None were brought to Arat Kilo or Piassa, where the demolition of historic buildings erased cultural heritage for the sake of commercial corridors and glass towers.

The regime is, in essence, outsourcing legitimacy. By facilitating content creation from prestigious global creators, the government transforms the city’s modernised districts into a form of soft power a visual argument that this is what development looks like. The influencers, most of whom lack depth of knowledge about Ethiopia’s political economy or displacement crises, become unwitting validators of a gentrification project sold as continental pride.

Gentrification for the Global Elite

The second audience for Addis Ababa’s transformation is less visible but far more economically significant: wealthy expatriates, diplomats, and—increasingly, Middle Eastern capital seeking refuge from regional instability.

Marketing materials for Addis Ababa’s luxury real estate market are explicit about this segmentation. Bole, traditionally the expatriate district, now features mid-luxury and high-end developments explicitly marketed to high-net-worth individuals, expatriates, and businesses. Three-bedroom luxury apartments command rents of $1,000 to $3,000 monthly, with prices per square metre reaching 240,000 to 420,000 Ethiopian Birr at a time when the World Bank estimates the monthly minimum for subsistence living at 1,500 to 3,000 Birr.

The corridor projects have been instrumental in creating this market. By displacing low-income residents from historically mixed neighbourhoods and replacing them with commercial centres, glass towers, and upscale amenities, the government has effectively engineered demographic change. It is gentrification by state decree—not the organic process of market forces, but deliberate policy. One former urban planning official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described it bluntly: “You destroy one’s house in anticipation of better houses for someone else. It’s portrayed as development, as improvement. You take someone’s property and give it as an economic opportunity for the other one. What happened to the displaced person? Nothing, a very small amount of money.”

Critics on the ground have deployed a pointed neologism: Gazanchis the wholesale removal of a people in the name of cosmetic progress. The term draws a parallel to Gaza, evoking the forced displacement of a population to make way for elite luxury. In this rendering, Addis Ababa’s transformation is not merely urban development but spatial and economic ethnic cleansing, effected through planning rather than military force, but with outcomes equally devastating for the displaced.

The Poverty Crisis: The Suppressed Narrative

What makes the influencer campaign and the gentrification project particularly troubling is the catastrophic context against which they unfold.

Ethiopia’s poverty rate has surged from 33 per cent in 2016 to 39 per cent in 2021, and is projected to reach 43 per cent by the end of this year—a reversal of two decades of progress. The World Bank attributes this deterioration to internal and external challenges: the Tigray war, persistent droughts, pandemic aftershocks, and the macroeconomic reform shock that followed the government’s decision to float the Ethiopian Birr in late 2024.

The Birr’s devaluation has been catastrophic for ordinary households. The currency fell by approximately 90 per cent in the weeks following its float, introducing runaway inflation. Food prices have surged far beyond the purchasing power of static wages. Basic commodities coffee, sugar, meat, have become luxury items for much of the urban working class. A recent analysis noted that the cost of living has evolved from a chronic strain into an existential threat. Inflation officially moderated to 9.7 per cent by February 2026, but by April it had returned to double digits at 11.7 per cent. Food inflation climbed to 13.5 per cent—a figure that bears almost no relationship to the lived experience of families making impossible choices between paying rent, buying food, and medicating illness.

This economic devastation has been accompanied by an aggressive fiscal consolidation demanded by international creditors. The government has expanded tax bases, tightened enforcement, and reduced tax deductions precisely when ordinary citizens were experiencing income contraction. The effect is perverse: for a population spending the vast majority of disposable income on food, aggressive tax policies function as a form of penalty on survival.

Meanwhile, the government allocates hundreds of millions of dollars to corridor projects, $10 billion to a palace complex, and enormous sums to hosting international summits for influencers—events explicitly designed to showcase a city that most Ethiopians cannot afford to live in.

The Government’s Defence: Order and Progress

To be fair, the government’s position merits articulation. Officials argue that the corridor projects represent necessary modernisation, that they create employment, improve public health through better urban mobility, and position Ethiopia as a continent-leading force in urban transformation. They point to improved road infrastructure, reduced travel times, and the creation of public spaces that strengthen social cohesion. The government contends that the corridor model is being emulated across 75 cities nationwide, suggesting genuine demand for this approach to urban development.

Defenders note that private investment in luxury real estate generates tax revenue, creates construction jobs, and enhances the city’s global standing. They argue that attracting diaspora investment and wealthy expatriates is not merely symbols but substance, it brings foreign currency, technical expertise, and international connections that benefit the broader economy. The international influencer summit, from this perspective, is not vanity but smart branding: in an age of social media, image-shaping is consequential economics.

On the matter of displacement, officials acknowledge that relocation has been necessary but argue that affected residents receive compensation and that resettlement housing will ultimately benefit them through improved neighbourhoods. They further contend that growth will create jobs and trickle-down benefits that today’s gentrification is tomorrow’s shared prosperity.

Why This Argument Fails

These defences contain an element of truth but mistake correlation for causation and confuse elite dynamism with shared development.

First, the timing is ruinous. Launching a $325 million corridor project and a billion-dollar palace renovation at the moment when poverty is approaching 43 per cent and food inflation is double-digit is not bold governance; it is tone-deafness elevated to policy.

Second, the comparative opportunity cost is devastating. €11.5 million per kilometre of city beautification, whilst five out of every hundred urban neighbourhoods lack basic water supply, is not a resource allocation choice made in good faith toward development. It is a choice that prioritises the visibility of modernity over its substance.

Third, the research on gentrification in the Global South is clear: when middle-income and low-income residents are displaced and replaced by wealth that does not derive from within the local economy, the aggregate effect is not job creation but labour-market bifurcation. Newly constructed luxury apartments employ security guards, housekeepers, and service workers at minimal wages. The commercial spaces are franchised to international corporations. The benefits flow upward and outward, not to the displaced.

Finally, on the matter of compensation and resettlement: Amnesty International’s investigation in April 2025 documented that the government has forcibly evicted at least 872 people in Bole and Lemi Kura alone, without prior consultation, compensation, or provision of alternative housing. The government’s assertion that affected residents will ultimately benefit rings hollow when families are displaced with weeks’ notice, provided minimal compensation, and offered no genuine pathway back into the transformed neighbourhoods.

The Political Utility of Facades

The deepest critique of the corridor project is not economic but political. Gleaming infrastructure and international influencer endorsement serve a political function: they allow the regime to claim dynamism, modernity, and visionary leadership at precisely the moment when institutional legitimacy is eroding.

As The Economist noted, Abiy Ahmed’s re-election is certain, yet his re-election lacks democratic substance. Opposition boycotts, the exclusion of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, restrictions on campaign space, and the arrest of journalists mean that the June 2026 election will, like 2021, be a landslide victory composed largely of uncontested seats. The regime faces no genuine electoral threat.

But political certainty is not the same as legitimacy. It is achieved through institutional engineering, not consent. The corridor projects therefore serve a compensatory function: they provide the appearance of effective governance and national progress at a moment when actual governance has failed to deliver security, justice, or shared prosperity. They tell a story to international investors, to diaspora Ethiopians, and to the regime’s own supporters that this is what we have built, even if what most Ethiopians experience is deteriorating livelihoods.

The influencer campaign is the most naked expression of this strategy. By turning the city into a stage for global digital creators, the regime ensures that the international narrative about Ethiopia is written not by journalists investigating poverty and displacement, but by paid or incentivised cultural entrepreneurs who have neither the knowledge nor the motivation to investigate the regime’s record. The message sent to the world is simple: Ethiopia is modern, dynamic, and open for business. The message suppressed is more complicated: millions of citizens cannot afford to eat.

Conclusion: Architecture as Deceit

There is nothing inherently wrong with urban modernisation. Cities require investment, infrastructure, and vision. But infrastructure investments carry moral weight. They represent choices about whose lives matter, whose security is prioritised, and whose displacement is acceptable.

The Addis Ababa corridor project, viewed through the lens of this moral calculus, represents a choice: the choice to invest billions in boulevards, parks, and commercial spaces for a minority of wealthy residents whilst 43 per cent of Ethiopians live in poverty. It is the choice to stage-manage the city for international influencers and diaspora investors whilst displaced residents live in emergency shelters. It is the choice to narrate modernity through architect’s renderings rather than through the substantive improvements in water, healthcare, education, and security that ordinary Ethiopians require.

Abiy Ahmed will be re-elected in June. His government will continue to promote Addis Ababa as Africa’s premier city. International influencers will continue to livestream from polished corridors, their 470 million followers watching in admiration. Meanwhile, the real story of Ethiopia:-one of deepening poverty, insecurity, and institutional dysfunction will continue to be written in displaced neighbourhoods, households choosing between medicine and food, and young people seeking any route out of the country.

The city’s gleaming new face is not a sign of progress. It is a mask. And it is masks, not substance, that sustain faltering regimes.

The Ethiopian Tribune | Analysis from the Horn of Africa

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Minister of Rhetoric: Berhanu Nega and the Collapse of Education Policy Into Bureaucratic Theater

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 22 May 2026 06:12:04 +0000

Read Time:9 Minute, 18 Second

Minister of Rhetoric: Berhanu Nega and the Collapse of Education Policy Into Bureaucratic Theater

Minister of Rhetoric:

Berhanu Nega and the Collapse of Education Policy Into Bureaucratic Theater

Ethiopian Tribune Editorial Analysis

Since Professor Berhanu Nega assumed the Ministry of Education in October 2021, Ethiopia has produced elegant policy documents at an accelerating pace. The World Bank-backed General Education Quality Improvement Programme for Equity (GEQIP-E) has been championed. The Ethiopia Education Transformation Programme (EETP) was launched. The 2021 curriculum was rolled out with considerable fanfare. Yet beneath this rhetoric of reform lies a cavernous gap between policy ambition and classroom reality. World Bank assessments and peer-reviewed research paint a sobering picture: under Nega’s stewardship, Ethiopia’s education system continues to hollow out at critical implementation nodes—from teacher capacity to curriculum deployment to learning outcome measurement. The distance is not merely wide; it has widened.

The Learning Crisis: What the Data Actually Shows

The World Bank’s learning poverty assessments provide the hardest metric. According to the Bank’s latest brief on Ethiopia, 90 per cent of children at primary-school age are not proficient in reading, adjusted for out-of-school children. This figure is 5 percentage points worse than the average for comparable sub-Saharan African nations—a comparative indictment of the stewardship of education policy under Nega’s tenure.

Between 2020 and 2023, enrolment fell by 24 per cent, with primary gross enrolment ratios declining by 29 percentage points. More alarming: completion rates collapsed. Between 2017 and 2024, the primary completion rate fell by 21 percentage points among girls and 25 percentage points among boys. These are not marginal shifts; they represent a systemic contraction of educational access and completion that has accelerated during Nega’s watch as minister.

The conflict-driven school closures and infrastructure destruction, particularly in Tigray, have accelerated these declines. Yet the baseline prior to recent insurgencies was already weak. This is not a sector recovering from temporary disruption; it is a sector struggling with chronic implementation failure beneath rhetorical reform—the signature of Nega’s ministerial approach.

Teacher Training: Quantity Over Competence Under Nega’s Programmes

The GEQIP-E programme, overseen by Nega’s ministry, has trained 102,117 teachers. These numbers appear impressive in isolation. But peer-reviewed research reveals the depth of the problem beneath the statistics. A 2024 study in the African Journal of Disability examined teacher education effectiveness for inclusive education and found critical gaps: “the Ethiopian teacher education system reveals a significant lack of provision of sufficient knowledge to empower teachers to understand inclusion.”

Teachers report inadequate exposure to practical, hands-on experiences. Across pedagogical reforms—from constructivist teaching to inclusive practices—the story repeats: training exists but competence lags. A study of teachers implementing the Constructivist Teaching and Learning Approach found that lack of commitment, resource scarcity, inadequate training, and misalignment between teacher and student preferences remained unaddressed despite Nega’s programme rollout.

The root issue is structural, and it has persisted and worsened under Nega’s leadership. Teacher training in Ethiopia lacks a dedicated independent commission to enforce standards and accountability. Quality assurance mechanisms remain weak. Regional education bureaus operate with different expectations than federal ministries. World Bank economists involved in programme design acknowledged this friction: “At the federal level we were using result-based financing, but the arrangement between the federal and regional education bureaus was more of activity financing.” In plain language: under Nega’s stewardship, the system measures activity, not results.

Curriculum Implementation: Nega’s Reforms Without Delivery

Ethiopia launched the 2021 curriculum, which Nega championed as a transformative overhaul. The Ethiopia Education Transformation Programme (EETP), rolled out in 2023 under his ministry, promised alignment with this curriculum alongside the World Bank’s new Ethiopia Education Transformation Operation for Learning (ETOL, 2025–29).

Yet implementation has stalled at multiple chokepoints—a hallmark of Nega’s tenure. A 2023 peer-reviewed analysis examining curriculum development against standards found that “Schwab’s signs of crisis in the curriculum field”—including theory-driven policy detached from practice, moribund implementation capacity, and failure to generate coherent societal outcomes—”were prevalent in the Ethiopian education system.” The researchers concluded: “The past and current systems remain unproductive in cultivating good citizenship and in revealing societal and cultural values for socioeconomic development.”

Technical and vocational education training, a critical pathway for employment, faces particularly severe implementation barriers under Nega’s watch. A 2024 Bahir Dar study found that TVET teacher preparation suffers from weak admission criteria, irrelevant curriculum, theory-focused rather than practice-oriented training, limited resources, ineffective quality assurance, poor leadership, and educator gaps in both practical skills and pedagogical knowledge. The system is producing certified teachers, not competent ones—a failure of design and oversight.

The Data Problem: Opacity as Policy Under Nega

The World Bank’s institutional evaluation highlighted a structural blind spot that has deepened under Nega’s ministry: “In Ethiopia and Kenya, data are dated or not accessible to the public.” Ethiopia participates in no international or regional learning assessments—no TIMSS, PIRLS, or SEA-PLM. National examinations are administered at grades 4, 8, 10, and 12, but the assessments remain inaccessible to independent researchers and policymakers—a governance failure for which Nega’s ministry bears responsibility.

This opacity is not accidental. Without independent, public learning data, programmes cannot be debugged in real time. Failures remain hidden or anecdotal. Reform happens in the abstract. One metric illustrates the governance problem sharply: in October 2022, only 3.3 per cent of grade 12 examination takers scored high enough to enter public university. This is not a teacher shortage; it is a system failure at scale that might warrant forensic investigation but instead is absorbed into the machinery of bureaucratic theater that Nega’s ministry oversees.

Conflict, Poverty, and the Structural Headwinds Nega Has Failed to Navigate

The World Bank’s latest poverty assessment adds a structural headwind that has worsened under Nega’s tenure: poverty is expected to climb to 43 per cent by 2025, reversing two decades of progress. Rural poverty is particularly severe. By 2021, 86 per cent of rural adults had not completed primary education. Nutrition deficits are endemic: nearly half of rural households had at least one stunted child.

The Tigray conflict destroyed 88 per cent of school infrastructure in affected zones. Enrolment halved. The average walking distance to school increased from 2.2 to 4.8 kilometres. With ongoing insurgencies from the Oromo Liberation Army and Amhara Fano militias, conflict has spilled into Ethiopia’s two most populous regional states. As of March 2024, the Education Cluster estimated 8.85 million out-of-school children due to emergencies—numbers that have not been meaningfully addressed by Nega’s reform agenda.

This is the context in which Nega has presided over education policy: deepening poverty, ongoing conflict, and systemic capacity gaps. Instead of confronting these structural dysfunctions, his ministry has produced rhetoric without results.

The Signature of Nega’s Leadership: Policy Theater Over Execution

The pattern is clear from international evidence. When the World Bank’s economist supervising GEQIP-E noted that federal result-based financing did not translate into regional result-based execution, they identified the precise fracture that has defined Nega’s tenure: the system measures outputs (teachers trained, schools equipped) whilst evading outcomes (learners proficient).

Implementation failure in education has characteristic signatures that Nega’s ministry exhibits across the board. Teachers are trained but unprepared for diverse classrooms. Curriculum is designed but not sequenced for classroom use. Assessments exist but remain hidden from public scrutiny. Programmes expand—the O-Class pre-primary initiative reached 2.3 million children under his watch—but learning outcomes remain flat or decline. This is the bureaucratic theater: motion without movement, investment without impact.

This is not failure of intent. It is failure of institutional capacity, accountability architecture, and execution discipline at regional and woreda levels. It is the failure of a minister who has presided over the gap between what federal policy designers promise and what schools on the ground can deliver—and has done little to narrow it.

Conclusion: Rhetoric Without Accountability

Under Berhanu Nega’s stewardship, Ethiopia has produced elegant education policy documents. The EETP, ETOL, the 2021 curriculum, and sector development programmes represent substantial intellectual effort and international coordination. Yet the translation from policy to classroom has collapsed—and the minister has presided over that collapse without meaningful course correction.

The question is not whether reform is ambitious. The question is whether the minister and the institutions under his control possess the will and capacity to enforce it. Current evidence suggests they do not. Teachers trained without competence benchmarks. Curricula designed without classroom fidelity checks. Programmes measured on activity, not learning. Data withheld from public scrutiny. A minister who speaks of transformation whilst presiding over decline.

Until Nega’s ministry establishes independent teacher service standards, public learning assessments, regional accountability mechanisms, and genuine result-based financing tied to learning outcomes rather than budget disbursement, his reform agenda will remain a bureaucratic ritual. Children in rural schools will continue to graduate without basic literacy. The 90 per cent learning poverty figure will persist as the defining failure of his tenure.

The Tribune’s charge is to ask uncomfortable questions. Here is ours: If after five years under Minister Berhanu Nega, 90 per cent of primary-age children are not proficient in reading, is the system genuinely broken, or is the minister genuinely negligent? The World Bank’s assessments suggest the latter. The distance between policy ambition and classroom reality has widened, not closed—on his watch. That gap is where Ethiopian children’s aspirations are being lost.

Sources: World Bank Learning Poverty Brief; World Bank Poverty and Equity Assessment for Ethiopia (2024); UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report (2026); World Bank RISE Ethiopia Impact Study; peer-reviewed research from African Journal of Disability, Bahir Dar Journal of Education, Cogent Education; UN Education Cluster assessments; Wikipedia biography of Berhanu Nega (ministerial tenure); published reporting on education policy outcomes.

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National Unity and Red Sea Sovereignty: Legislation as the Price of the Nation

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:45:29 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 15 Second

By Professor Mefkereseb Goytom Hailu

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

The fortnight of 11–16 May reshuffled the diplomatic surface of the Ethiopian moment faster than any comparable interval since 2018. An IMF benediction on macroeconomic reform. A presidential visit from Paris bearing investment and geopolitical hedging. The specification by this publication of a reported five-point US-mediated rapprochement framework touching Eritrea, ports, borders, and mutual disengagement. All of it compressed into five days.

The warm lighting of this fortnight creates a risk that the Ethiopian polity executive, parliament, citizenry will mistake tactical diplomatic movement for the resolution of a strategic question. That mistake would be fatal. This essay argues why, and it does so in language that refuses the comforts of ambiguity.

Mefkereseb Goytom Hailu makes a single, uncompromising claim: Ethiopia, as a nation, does not exist without Unity and Red Sea Sovereignty. Not as policy objectives. Not as negotiating positions. As constitutive facts the foundations on which everything else depends. The argument runs deeper: that the four singular interests of Ethiopian strategy (Unity, Red Sea Sovereignty, broad-based democratic economic development, the GERD) are not separate items to be traded against one another, but a single architecture in three layers. Foundations → Means Engine. None is severable without collapsing the whole.

What the next House of People’s Representatives must do, therefore, is not to manage this architecture through diplomatic channels. It is to legislate it. To write it into the supreme law of the federation in language that no transient diplomatic arrangement, no change in external alignments, no shift in an incumbent’s calculus can erode. Not through a memorandum of understanding. Not through an executive agreement. Through standing constitutional mandate that anchors the four interests to the Ethiopian state itself, not to the particular leaders who happen to occupy office at any given moment.

The essay that follows sets out both the urgency of that work and the technical constitutional package required to accomplish it. It does so in the language of constitutional law, of federal architecture, of strategic analysis, and of something harder to translate: the register of someone who has spent his analysis on this question and has arrived, in this moment, at clarity about what matters.

This is the seventh and concluding piece in Mefkereseb’s series on Ethiopian strategy, geopolitics, and constitutional foundations. Readers are invited to engage with the full argument. The work is unfinished. The work is doable. The work cannot be subcontracted. And as the author makes clear the choice to begin it is closing quite rapidly.

The full essay, “National Unity and Red Sea Sovereignty: Ethiopia Must Pay the Price Now,” appears at the following address:

redSeaMandateLegislated_viaElection.pdf Download

The Editors
16 May 2026

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Hunger in Addis Ababa: The Work of an Ethnic Apartheid System

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:42:00 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 4 Second

By Professor GIRMA BERHANU

For more than half a century, Ethiopians have endured cycles of drought, famine, and mass starvation. A German scholar who devoted his career to studying Ethiopia’s long history of devastating famines once observed that one factor driving the catastrophic death toll — particularly in the northern regions — was cultural: a profound sense of dignity and pride that made people ashamed to beg, even as they faced death.

An American senator who visited the famine-stricken areas, including the notorious camps at Korem, was arrested by the eerie silence of the dying. He watched men, women, and children standing patiently in line for food distribution and remarked with quiet awe, “What grace, what discipline.” He reflected that in his own country, people reduced to such desperation might erupt in chaos. Ethiopians, by contrast, absorbed their suffering in silence — with a composure that was both humbling and heartbreaking. This silence persists, but the geography of catastrophe has shifted.

What we are witnessing today is something historically without precedent: famine and starvation unfolding inside Addis Ababa itself — not in remote villages or drought-scorched highlands, but in the streets of the capital. And it is happening with a cruelty all its own. The dying do not look like the famished of humanitarian crises past. They are well-dressed, composed, outwardly dignified — good-looking men and women walking slowly toward death in pressed clothing, in broad daylight, past skyscrapers and manicured city parks. Far from being a natural disaster, this is a man-made one.

As part of this ongoing investigation, I sought access to the institutions that absorb this hidden catastrophe. I approached hospitals across Addis Ababa and conducted interviews with the directors of morgues where unidentified bodies are held. The findings are staggering: at a single hospital, a minimum of ten bodies collected from the city’s streets arrive every day. Many are never claimed. The municipality buries them in silence — as invisibly as they died.

This study is an indictment. It seeks to strip away the gleaming façade of a city marketed as a symbol of African modernity and expose the system behind the spectacle: an ethnic apartheid structure that has engineered extreme inequality into a mechanism of death. In today’s Addis Ababa, the divide between the privileged and the dispossessed is no longer merely economic — it is the difference between living and dying. This is the city that the skyscrapers were built to hide.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY

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The Red Sea Calculus: Macron’s Statecraft, IMF Confidence, and the Resurgent Horn

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:39:35 +0000

Read Time:13 Minute, 38 Second

How a U.S.-mediated Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement is reshaping geopolitics, diplomatic leverage, and regional order

An International Observer Analysis

Editorial Foreword

In the span of a fortnight, the Ethiopian political and diplomatic landscape has undergone a transformation that few observers predicted and fewer still fully understand. The arrival of French President Macron on 13 May, the preceding visit of IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, and the nascent framework for an Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement all negotiated under U.S. auspices and conditional on sanctions relief and long-term port access—represent not merely tactical diplomatic adjustments but a recalibration of power, vulnerability, and strategic choice in the Horn of Africa. This analysis examines the geometry of these events, their underlying logic, and the unresolved contradictions they harbour.

The French Visit: Signalling Investment and Strategic Partnership

Emmanuel Macron’s arrival in Addis Ababa on Wednesday, 13 May marked his third official visit to Ethiopia since 2018. The visit was neither improvisational nor ceremonial. It embodied a deliberate Franco-European reassertion in an arena increasingly dominated by American, Chinese, and Gulf state actors.

Macron travelled with a high-powered delegation of business executives Carrefour, Meridiam, and France’s development finance apparatus (AFD) signalling that the visit would translate diplomatic goodwill into commercial reality. The trilateral meeting at the African Union with UN Secretary-General António Guterres and AU Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf was framed as a consultation on global governance, but it carried an implicit message: France remains a significant player in the Horn, invested in both the African institutional order and Ethiopia’s role within it.

Tangibly, the visit concluded with the announcement of a €63.9 million loan facility for Ethiopia’s green energy and digitalisation programme. More significantly, in February 2026, France and Ethiopia had formalised a strategic defence partnership focused on maritime capacity-building. During his December 2024 visit, Macron had expressed explicit French support for Ethiopia’s pursuit of peaceful Red Sea access, a statement of no small diplomatic consequence in a region where every utterance about port access is weighed as a signal of alignment.

What does this signal? That France is hedging: deepening ties with Addis Ababa whilst maintaining its broader European security interests. Ethiopia’s strategic value as host of the African Union, Africa’s second-most populous state, and an emerging actor in energy and infrastructure makes it indispensable to any credible European engagement in Africa. Macron’s visit thus represents not a capitulation to American geopolitics, but a parallel track: France will compete for influence through investment and institutional partnership even as Washington pursues its own Red Sea calculus.

The IMF Moment: Macroeconomic Confidence and the Limits of Reform

Days before Macron arrived, on 11 May, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva concluded a working visit to Addis Ababa. Her presence, and more importantly her public commendations, carried particular weight. The IMF does not travel to commend it comes to monitor, negotiate, and condition.

Georgieva praised Ethiopia’s “impressive progress” on its ambitious economic reform programme despite “ongoing global economic pressures, including the impact of the Middle East conflict.” This language acknowledging external shocks whilst crediting domestic stewardship is carefully calibrated. It signals to creditors, investors, and international finance that Ethiopia is a defensible risk.

Ethiopia’s macroeconomic trajectory is projected at 9.2 per cent real GDP growth in 2026. Inflation, after the monetary and fiscal tightening of preceding years, is expected at 11.8 per cent. The external creditor framework remains precarious, but the IMF’s continued engagement and the implicit willingness to move towards a formal programme agreement suggests that Washington (which shapes IMF strategic priorities) views Ethiopia as a state worth stabilising.

The Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda (HERA) Ethiopia’s macroeconomic stabilisation framework has become the lingua franca between Addis Ababa and the international financial architecture. HERA’s success depends not merely on domestic fiscal discipline, but on external peace and the absence of military adventurism. The IMF’s confidence, therefore, was a signal that the international community believes Ethiopia capable of both: economic discipling and strategic restraint.

Yet a shadow hangs over this confidence. Ethiopia’s regional isolation driven by tensions with Eritrea, Egypt, and rising instability in Sudan continues to impose indirect costs on growth and fiscal sustainability. The IMF message, read carefully, is thus: “Reform is proceeding, but it remains vulnerable to regional shocks. Manage that risk.”

The Hidden Architecture: U.S.-Mediated Ethiopia–Eritrea Rapprochement

But the most consequential development of these recent days is neither Macron’s symbolic visit nor the IMF’s fiscal benediction. It is the framework emerging from U.S. diplomatic engagement to reset Ethiopia–Eritrea relations a framework that, if operationalised, would reshape both countries’ strategic positioning and expose deep contradictions in regional power dynamics.

The Five-Point Framework

According to diplomatic channels and official communications, the U.S. State Department operating through Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos and with Egypt’s mediation has tabled a comprehensive rapprochement framework comprising five core elements:

1. Sanctions Relief for Eritrea. The Trump administration is preparing to lift the 2021 Executive Order 14046 sanctions regime that targeted Eritrean military, ruling party (PFDJ), and senior officials for atrocities committed in the Tigray war (2020–2022). This action, publicly reported in April 2026 and formalised through Treasury OFAC, is tied explicitly to Red Sea strategic concerns the Iran–Houthi nexus in Yemen and the need for accessible coastal partners.

2. Fifty-Year Port Access for Ethiopia. Under negotiated terms, Ethiopia would secure long-term, exclusive or preferential access to the Port of Assab on the Red Sea, with a duration of fifty years. This addresses what Ethiopian leadership has termed an “existential” need landlocked status, but operationalises it through a commercial and diplomatic arrangement, not territorial acquisition or force.

3. Border Demarcation and the Revival of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission. The long-dormant Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (established under the 2000 Algiers Agreement but never fully implemented) would resume its mandate to survey, demarcate, and adjudicate the contested 912-kilometre border. This addresses a structural source of tension and military posturing.

4. Mutual Disengagement from Destabilising Acts. Both states would commit to ceasing military provocation, troop mobilisation along the border, and material support to proxy forces (Eritrea’s backing of Amhara militias and Tigray factions; Ethiopia’s counter-mobilisations). This is codified transparency and confidence-building.

5. Opening of Travel and TradeCorridors. Normalisation of diplomatic relations, reopening of shared borders for civilian transit, and negotiation of bilateral trade agreements to economically bind the two states and reduce incentives for conflict.

Underlying Logic and Strategic Drivers

The framework rests on a simple calculation: by offering Eritrea sanctions relief (and implicit pathway to international rehabilitation) and Ethiopia guaranteed port access (addressing its maritime anxiety), the U.S. can solve a bilateral impasse whilst simultaneously consolidating American strategic presence along the Red Sea corridor. Egypt, mediating the arrangement, has its own calculation: a more stable Eritrea reduces Cairo’s encirclement burden and preserves Eritrean alignment with Egypt in the broader Ethiopia–Egypt tension over Nile dam policy.

For Ethiopia, the logic is stark: fifty years of Assab access through negotiated lease or concessional arrangement solves the maritime problem that has haunted policy for three decades without requiring military adventure, which would catastrophically disrupt HERA and invite international isolation. For Eritrea, sanctions removal means economic relief, international rehabilitation, and the ability to resist internal challenges without the stranglehold of financial apartheid.

For the United States, the payoff is threefold: it positions itself as the architect of Horn stability (enhancing credibility with both Ethiopia and regional actors), it secures Eritrean cooperation on Red Sea security (port access, intelligence sharing, potential military positioning), and it preempts Russian and Chinese alternative engagement in Asmara a state whose strategic location makes it a contested arena.

The Unresolved Questions: Naval Bases, Sudan’s Chaos, and Egyptian Encirclement

Yet even as this framework circulates in diplomatic channels, three critical issues remain unresolved, lurking beneath the surface of what appears to be a near-settlement.

(A) The Naval Base Question

Ethiopia’s strategic doctrine includes not merely commercial access to the Red Sea but the establishment of a permanent naval capability a naval base from which to project power and protect maritime interests. Assab access, whilst enormously valuable, addresses the commercial problem. It does not necessarily solve the naval one.

Eritrean sovereignty is ostensibly respected in the rapprochement framework, but the question of whether Eritrea would permit Ethiopian military installation on its territory and under what terms remains unspecified. France’s strategic partnership on maritime capacity-building is relevant here. As Ethiopian naval capabilities grow, the question of where those vessels base themselves becomes acute. If Assab is commercial-only, Ethiopia must look elsewhere: Djibouti (already hosting French, American, Chinese, and Japanese military contingents and likely capacity-constrained), Somaliland (diplomatically controversial), or some third venue.

This unresolved detail could unravel the entire framework. If Ethiopia interprets port access narrowly as commercial and lacks military berth, resentment will fester. If Eritrea is pressured into allowing a naval base and sees it as the camel’s nose under the tent a pathway to Ethiopian domination trust collapses.

(B) Sudan’s Implosion and Regional Spillover

The Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement is being negotiated in a region already aflame. Sudan’s civil war (ongoing since April 2023, between the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces) has displaced millions, destroyed livelihoods, and created a ungoverned space on Ethiopia’s western border.

Eritrea has aligned itself with Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) in this conflict partly ideologically (shared authoritarianism), partly strategically (mutual interest in containing Ethiopian influence). Egypt, likewise, has backed the SAF as the guarantor of Sudanese unity and the preservation of the Nile status quo. The U.S. sanctions relief for Eritrea, thus read by regional actors, appears to underwrite this Eritrean–SAF alignment.

Yet if Sudan’s civil war spreads into Ethiopia if Sudanese military factions exploit Ethiopia’s preoccupation with Eritrea and infiltrate the Blue Nile region, or if RSF forces (backed by the UAE) move into Sudanese territory bordering Abay the rapprochement framework could shatter instantly. Ethiopia would face a two-front crisis: Eritrean tensions to the north and Sudanese-originated chaos to the west.

The framework assumes stability in Sudan. That assumption is increasingly indefensible.

(C) Egypt’s Encirclement Strategy

Egypt’s role as mediator is not altruistic. Cairo views Ethiopia as a competitor for regional dominance, a threat to its water security (via the GERD), and a power that must be constrained through a network of surrounding alliances: Sudan (SAF), Eritrea, Somalia, and now potentially Somaliland. Egypt has spent the past two years upgrading Eritrean naval facilities, deploying troops to Somalia’s peacekeeping missions, and cultivating security partnerships across the Horn.

By brokering the Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement, Egypt aims to accomplish multiple ends simultaneously: to appear statesman-like and diplomatically skilled (useful for managing Trump administration perceptions); to prevent an immediate Ethiopia–Eritrea war that would destabilise the Red Sea and complicate Egyptian shipping; and to ensure that any “stability” in the region preserves Egypt’s ability to apply future pressure on Ethiopia through Eritrea, Sudan, and other proxies.

Critically, Egypt has not abandoned its demand that the U.S. pressure Ethiopia to restart GERD negotiations. In January, el-Sisi thanked Trump for offering to mediate on the Nile issue. Ethiopia continues to refuse. The Eritrea rapprochement thus sits within a larger negotiating space where Egypt uses the prospect of Horn stability to leverage Nile concessions.

For Ethiopia, this means that even if the Eritrea framework succeeds, it does not resolve the Egypt problem. The encirclement continues. Eritrean peace, thus, buys time but not final security.

Structural Contradictions and the Credibility Problem

The emerging framework contains a fundamental contradiction that no diplomatic artistry can fully resolve: it requires Eritrea and Ethiopia to trust each other after decades of enmity, whilst simultaneously being brokered by powers (Egypt, the U.S.) whose medium-term interests may diverge from the stability the framework purports to guarantee.

Eritrea’s government, under Isaias Afwerki (aged 81, with succession reportedly opaque), has built its legitimacy on perpetual mobilisation against external threat. Sanctions have been part of that narrative: proof of Eritrea’s independence and defiance. Lifting sanctions removes that rallying cry and exposes Eritrea to internal pressures economic dysfunction, indefinite national service, and generational grievance. Isaias will extract maximum strategic value from sanctions removal (rehabilitation, investment, reduced isolation), but he may resist the transparency and confidence-building measures the framework demands.

Ethiopia, for its part, has been burned by diplomatic frameworks before. The 2018 peace with Eritrea, brokered by the UAE, collapsed immediately after the Tigray war (2020–2022) a war Eritrea participated in whilst remaining outside the 2022 Pretoria Agreement that formally ended the conflict. The memory of that betrayal colours current Ethiopian reading of any Eritrean commitment.

Thus the credibility question: Why should either side trust the other this time? The answer, in diplomatic language, is institutional embedding the revival of the Boundary Commission, trade arrangements, and regularised diplomatic contact. But institutions are only as strong as the power balance they reflect. If Ethiopia perceives itself as strengthened (by Assab access and growing naval capacity) whilst Eritrea remains weak (sanctions lifted but economically dependent), the framework risks becoming a mechanism through which Ethiopia consolidates advantage, stoking Eritrean resentment. Conversely, if Eritrea uses sanctions relief to rearm and maintains its destabilising activities (arming Amhara militias, occupying border territory), Ethiopia will abandon the framework and return to confrontation.

The Broader Geopolitical Recalibration

These diplomatic developments Macron’s visit, the IMF confidence, and the nascent Ethiopia–Eritrea framework reflect a broader recalibration in how external powers engage the Horn of Africa.

The Iran US conflict, now in its third month following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has made Red Sea security an American strategic priority. The Suez Canal and Bab el-Mandeb now carry the weight of global supply chains in ways they did not before the conflict began. This has elevated Eritrea (coastal, strategically positioned) and Djibouti (hosting multiple foreign military bases) to powers of outsized geopolitical importance.

France, meanwhile, views East Africa as an arena of European relevance. The investments announced during Macron’s visit are not mere commerce; they are assertions of France’s continued stake in African development and its refusal to cede the region entirely to American or Chinese primacy.

Ethiopia, at the centre of these currents, is being courted by multiple powers each offering partnership on terms that advantage their own interests. The IMF confidence, France’s investment, and the U.S. rapprochement framework are all real, but all are conditional. Ethiopia’s challenge is to extract maximum benefit from each whilst maintaining strategic autonomy and not becoming a pawn in games (GERD negotiation, Red Sea security, Egyptian rivalry) that exceed its control.

Conclusion: A Conjuncture Without Conclusion

The confluence of Macron’s visit, the IMF´s benediction, and the emerging Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement suggests a moment of diplomatic possibility. After years of escalating rhetoric and military posturing, the prospect of negotiated resolution with external financial and political incentives is not trivial.

Yet the framework remains incomplete and fragile. The naval base question is unresolved. Sudan’s chaos threatens to engulf the region. Egypt’s encirclement continues, and its use of the rapprochement as leverage on the GERD question cannot be dismissed. Eritrea’s internal fragility and Ethiopia’s historical scepticism add layers of uncertainty.

What we are witnessing is not the end of the Horn’s conflicts but rather their reordering in response to global pressures (Iran–US conflict, supply chain disruption, great power competition) and regional constraints (Sudan’s collapse, Egypt’s anxiety, Ethiopia’s landlocked vulnerability). The diplomatic architecture being assembled may prove durable, or it may prove to be a temporary tactical adjustment before the region returns to patterns of hostility that decades of history have entrenched.

What is clear is that the Horn of Africa remains a domain where international actors compete for influence, where regional states navigate between constraint and opportunity, and where the consequences of diplomatic failure renewed war, humanitarian catastrophe, destabilisation of global maritime routes—carry costs far beyond the region itself. How that conjuncture resolves will determine not merely the trajectory of Ethiopia and Eritrea, but the strategic balance of the Red Sea and, by extension, the global shipping order upon which modern commerce depends.

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The Ghosts in the War Room: Institutional Betrayal, Military Collapse, and the Silenced History of Ethiopia’s 16 May 1989 Coup

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:55:00 +0000

Read Time:29 Minute, 26 Second

On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the coup d’état that almost toppled Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian Tribune examines the fatal miscalculations of the officer class, the cascading logic of internal betrayal, and the historiographical void that has erased these generals from national memory.

On This Day: Thirty-Six Years Since the Failed Coup

16 May 1989 (8 Ginbot 1981 EC): The Officers Who Challenged and Fell

The institutions of a dictatorship reveal themselves most clearly at the moment of their rupture. On the morning of 16 May 1989, when a faction of senior military officers gathered in the Ministry of Defence to plot the removal of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian military hierarchy fractured along a line that would prove both revealing and tragic: the distinction between formal authority and actual power.

Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a war room consumed by debate: should the dictator’s aircraft be intercepted before clearing Ethiopian airspace? Should decisive, irreversible action be taken? Or should caution prevail, institutional norms be respected, civilian lives protected? The paralysis that followed that debate became the coup d’état epitaph. Within hours, Mengistu’s aircraft cleared the border. The window of opportunity slammed shut. And a conspiracy that had assembled the rank and authority to seize the state found itself, quite suddenly, fighting for survival instead of power.

What followed was a cascade of failure and fratricide. In Asmara, Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed by their own troops. In Addis Ababa, Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta took their own lives. Thirty or more senior officers were killed, imprisoned, disappeared into the interrogation apparatus, or hunted down and shot whilst fleeing. The coup that was meant to challenge Mengistu’s dictatorship instead became an occasion for the dictatorship to purge its own officer corps with ruthless efficiency.

Yet for three and a half decades, this history has been largely erased from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no sustained historical investigations. The names of the officers who died whether by suicide in the Ministry of Defence, execution by their own soldiers in Asmara, or torture in the interrogation centres of the Derg regime have faded into silence. Only the families of these men carry the memory, and even that memory is constrained by the political interests of successive Ethiopian regimes that have found it inconvenient to memorialise a failed coup attempt.

This silence is not accidental. It is the product of choices: the choice of the post-1991 EPRDF regime to construct a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic, a binary that left no room for the complicated reality of officers who were simultaneously perpetrators within the dictatorship and, in their final acts, challengers to it. But a complete historical reckoning demands more complexity, more honesty, more willingness to grapple with the actual mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes function and ultimately decay.

The coup of 16-18 May 1989 failed militarily, but its historical significance lies precisely in its failure. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control even over its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.

The following essay undertakes a systematic examination of the coup attempt: its strategic miscalculations, the cascading failures in command coherence, the internal betrayals that sealed its fate, and the purges that followed. It offers no heroes, no redemptive narrative. It asks, instead, that we remember these officers not as saviours but as complex historical actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however imperfectly executed, deserves to be part of the permanent historical record.

On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or more officers who died in the coup attempt and its aftermath deserve remembrance. Not to celebrate them, but to complete the historical record. Not to deny their complicity in the Derg regimes brutality, but to acknowledge the full complexity of how authoritarian systems function and how, finally, they come to an end.

The Editorial Board

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Paralysis in the War Room

At the precise moment when Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam’s aircraft crossed Ethiopian airspace on 16 May 1989, the architects of his potential overthrow sat in a Ministry of Defence conference room consumed by a debate that would define the coup’s fatal trajectory. Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a military hierarchy fractured not by ideological conviction but by competing calculations of legitimacy, institutional consequence, and moral restraint.

The strategic divide was stark. One faction emboldened, decisive, willing to absorb the costs of decisive action advocated for the immediate termination of the dictator: either an air strike against the presidential aircraft or a forced landing in Asmara, where Mengistu could be detained and presented as a fait accompli before international and domestic audiences. This was the language of revolution: swift, irreversible, the kind of action that forecloses negotiation and establishes new facts on the ground.

The opposing faction seized upon a different calculus: the protection of civilian lives on the departing aircraft, the preservation of Ethiopian Airlines’ international standing, and an implicit recognition that shooting down one’s own head of state, however, despised carries a reputational cost that transcends the immediate political moment. This was the language of institutional stewardship, of officers conscious of their role as custodians of state apparatus rather than revolutionary architects.

The debate itself is instructive. It reveals a military officer corps that had not yet crossed the psychological threshold required for successful coup execution. Revolutionary movements, whether they succeed or fail share a common prerequisite: the willingness of the conspirators to burn the bridges behind them, to commit acts of such magnitude and moral weight that retreat becomes impossible. The hesitation over Mengistu’s aircraft was not a failure of nerve alone; it was symptomatic of deeper institutional ambivalence about the legitimacy of their own enterprise.

By the time this internal debate reached its conclusion, the window of opportunity had sealed. Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace. The coup, as a coherent political project, was already hollow not yet defeated militarily, but spiritually compromised by its own architects’ inability to commit fully to the violence required to see it through.

The North Moves on False Intelligence: Major General Demissie Bulto and the Asmara Gambit

In Asmara, the commander of the Second Revolutionary Army, Major General Demissie Bulto, operated on faulty intelligence. Receiving early signals from the capital that Mengistu had been successfully removed, he mobilised with a speed and decisiveness that should have been the template for Addis Ababa. Demissie seized the local radio station and broadcast a declaration: the regime had fallen. The regime was history. The revolution was underway.

The tactical logic was sound. With Mengistu apparently neutralised in the capital, Demissie deployed the elite 102nd Airborne Division southward aboard Antonov transports under the command of Major General Kumlachew Dejene. The strike force was meant to consolidate control of critical infrastructure the state broadcaster, telecommunications hubs, airports, the military nerve centres that had sustained Mengistu’s grip. This was the operational implementation of what the war room in Addis Ababa had theoretically imagined: the seizure of state apparatus before the regime could reconstitute itself.

But Demissie and his subordinates were executing a plan based on a fiction. The war room in Addis Ababa had not moved decisively. Mengistu was not neutralised; he was airborne and returning. And by the time this reality became clear in Asmara, the 102nd Airborne was already committed, already in transit, already the vanguard of a coup that had no head, no political leadership, no coherent command structure to support its operational objectives.

This is the anatomy of military collapse under pressure: a coalition of conspirators, each operating on partial intelligence and optimistic assumptions, each believing that the others have secured their sector of the plan. When one component fails when the war room in Addis Ababa paralysed itself over the question of whether to shoot down an aircraft the entire edifice becomes a series of isolated uprisings with no centre of gravity.

The Architecture of Betrayal: Tesfaye Wolde Selassie and the Internal Compromise

Colonel Tesfaye Wolde Selassie, the Minister of State Security, became the coup’s executioner. His betrayal was not merely tactical; it was symptomatic of a deeper institutional reality that the conspirators had failed to address: the security apparatus of the Mengistu regime, despite its brutality and paranoia, maintained layers of counterintelligence so dense and so ruthlessly enforced that penetration at the highest levels was nearly impossible to conceal.

Tesfaye’s role illuminates a fundamental weakness of the coup: it was an officers’ plot without the structural capacity to neutralise the security state. The Derg regime, whatever its military incompetence in the field against the TPLF and EPLF, had constructed an internal security apparatus that was exquisitely sensitive to elite deviance. Every senior officer was monitored, every coalition watched, every meeting of consequence filtered through informants whose survival depended on their vigilance.

Tesfaye’s tip-off to loyalist forces particularly to Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade activated the regime’s immune system. The conspirators, for all their rank and institutional position, had not grasped a fundamental reality about authoritarian militaries: position and loyalty are not synonymous. A general can command troops in theory and still be isolated politically. A colonel controlling the presidential guard can be more consequential than a major general commanding distant garrisons.

This asymmetry of power between titular military rank and actual control over coercive assets destroyed the coup. By the time Mengistu’s aircraft touched down in Addis Ababa, the conspirators in the Ministry of Defence had already lost control of the narrative, the capital’s security apparatus, and any credible claim to legitimacy based on institutional authority. What remained was isolated pockets of resistance, each cut off from the others, each fighting a battle already lost at the level of strategic coordination.

The Deaths in Addis Ababa: Suicide, Execution, and the Collapse of Authority

The suicides of Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta occupy a particular place in the emotional and political archaeology of this failed coup. These were not desperate men acting under threat; they were senior officers who, in the privacy of the Ministry of Defence, chose to end their lives rather than face capture and interrogation. The choice itself speaks to their understanding of what awaited them: not trial, but torture; not imprisonment, but systematic annihilation.

Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, turned his service pistol on himself in the same conference room where, hours earlier, he had presided over the debate about whether to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft. The irony is almost unbearable: the man tasked with exercising command authority over the coup’s execution ended his life in the very space where his paralysis had become institutionalised. His suicide was, in some sense, the final acknowledgement of that institutional failure a recognition that the decision not to act decisively had cascading consequences that could no longer be reversed or reframed.

Amha Desta, the Air Force Commander, followed Merid into death by similar means. The symmetry of their deaths both senior officers, both taking their own lives within hours, both in the Ministry of Defence suggests a shared understanding of their fate and a collective decision that death on their own terms was preferable to the machinery of Mengistu’s interrogation centres.

Major General Fanta Belay, the Minister of Industry, attempted a different strategy: flight. For four days he evaded security forces, hiding deep within the Ministry of Defence compound a bunker of sorts, a man trapped in the very institution he had tried to seize. But physical hiding could not obscure institutional vulnerability. He was discovered, arrested, and days later killed under “mysterious circumstances” inside the Maekelawi central investigation prison. There is nothing mysterious about Maekelawi; it was the Derg’s primary torture centre, a facility whose existence was synonymous with the regime’s capacity for systematic brutality.

Major General Aberra Abebe, the head of military operations and a key instigator, chose armed resistance. He shot and wounded Major General Hailegiorgis Hailemariam, the Minister of Defence, when the latter entered the compound to negotiate with the mutineers. Aberra managed to escape the initial security cordons, scaling the compound wall and vanishing into the capital’s urban landscape. For months he eluded the regime’s manhunt a fugitive general in his own capital, reduced to hiding with relatives, stripped of his institutional position and his ability to exercise command. When he was finally cornered by police at a relative’s house in Addis Ababa, he died as so many of the conspirators did: attempting to escape over another wall, gunned down in flight.

These deaths suicides, executions, killings “under mysterious circumstances,” men shot while fleeing tell a coherent story about the Derg regime’s approach to institutional deviance: there was no mechanism for peaceful resolution, no institutional pathway for the conspirators to surrender with dignity or to expect trial and imprisonment. The regime’s logic was absolute: eliminate the threat, erase the evidence, move forward as though the attempted coup had been merely a temporary disruption of order rather than a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy.

The Purge in Asmara: Fratricide and the Collapse of Command Coherence

In Asmara, the mutiny sustained itself for three days before the logic of defeat became undeniable. But the manner of its final collapse soldiers of the 102nd Airborne Division executing their own commanders reveals something deeper than mere military defeat: it was the complete disintegration of command authority and the triumph of survival instinct over institutional loyalty.

Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed in what the historical record tersely describes as “a hail of gunfire.” The clinical language obscures the reality: soldiers shooting their commanders, junior ranks eliminating officers whose authority they had accepted hours or days earlier. This is not the behaviour of a military unit following orders; it is the behaviour of men attempting to survive by eliminating evidence of their own participation in the coup attempt.

The soldiers of the 102nd Airborne faced a choice with no good options: they could remain loyal to their commanders and face execution as coup conspirators, or they could betray those commanders and attempt to escape culpability by demonstrating their own loyalty to the regime through fratricide. The choice, from a pure survival standpoint, was clear. The result was that the senior leadership of the coup Demissie Bulto, the Brigadier Generals who commanded the divisions and corps, the colonels and lieutenant colonels who formed the officer corps of the northern rebellion were systematically eliminated by the very troops they commanded.

This moment the killing of Demissie and his staff by their own soldiers crystallises the fundamental instability of military conspiracies that do not command overwhelming support from the rank and file. When enlisted men and junior officers must choose between loyalty to their immediate commanders and survival, when that choice is made under conditions of imminent defeat and the knowledge that the regime is about to reassert total control, the outcome is inevitable: the officer corps becomes expendable, a sacrifice made to preserve the lives of men with no choice in the conspiracy.

Major General Kumlachew Dejene, who had flown in with the 102nd Airborne as the operational commander, managed to escape. As communications collapsed and the Asmara operation disintegrated into chaos, he went into hiding. Unlike Demissie and the other senior commanders, Kumlachew possessed the mobility and perhaps the connections necessary to flee the country. He eventually secured asylum in the United States, becoming the sole surviving general of the coup’s upper echelon a survival purchased, perhaps, by his ability to separate himself from the final catastrophe in Asmara and to extract himself before the killing began.

The Cascade of Names: Eighteen Officers Executed in Asmara

The list of eighteen officers executed in Asmara from Brigadier General Afework Wolde Michael, the Chief Emergency Administrator for Eritrea, down through the hierarchy to Captain Getahun Girma, the Special Assistant to the SRA Commander represents the institutional destruction of the Second Revolutionary Army’s officer corps. These were not minor figures; they were the senior administrators and operational commanders of the Derg’s military presence in the north.

Brigadier General Taye Balakir, the Chief of the Revolutionary Police in Eritrea, was executed. Brigadier General Tadesse Tessema, Head of Operations of the SRA, was executed. Brigadier General Worku Chernet, Head of Politics, was executed. The catalogue continues: Brigadier General Nigussie Zergaw (Asmara Air Force Commander), Brigadier General Kebede Mehari (Administration), Brigadier General Tegene Bekele (Operations), each one stripped of rank and institutional position and killed in the final purge.

What is striking about this list is not merely its length but its comprehensiveness. These were not marginal officers whose elimination left the military apparatus intact; these were the senior administrative and operational cadres of the northern command. Their elimination in a single purge represented the systematic decapitation of one of the Derg’s major military organisations. The fact that they were killed by their own troops in Asmara rather than by loyalist forces under Mengistu’s direct control suggests something even more destabilising: the regime did not need to send execution squads to the north. The collapse of command authority was so complete that soldiers and junior officers, facing the choice between their commanders’ failure and their own survival, chose survival through fratricide.

The Arrests in Addis Ababa: Institutional Capture and the Machinery of Interrogation

The twelve senior officers arrested by Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade in the Ministry of Defence on 18 May 1989 represent a different category of fate. Unlike their counterparts in Asmara, they were taken alive captured, imprisoned, subjected to the machinery of interrogation and state control that the Derg had perfected over seventeen years.

Major General Hailu Gebre Michael, Commander of the Ground Forces; Major General Worku Zewde, Commissioner of the Police Force; Major General Alemayehu Desta, Deputy Commander of the Ground Forces these were men at the apex of the military hierarchy, officers whose positions placed them at the intersection of power, intelligence, and command authority. Their arrest was not merely a military matter; it was a political event that signified the regime’s absolute control over even the most senior echelons of the officer corps.

The question of what happened to these men after their arrest is less explicitly documented in the historical record than the deaths in Asmara or the suicides in the Ministry of Defence, but the silence itself is instructive. Men of this rank and position, arrested by the Derg regime, were not released. They were not tried in open proceedings. They entered the machinery of the interrogation state and disappeared into it either executed in secret, or maintained in imprisonment until the regime itself collapsed in 1991, or eliminated in the final purges that preceded the EPRDF’s military victory.

The arrest of these twelve officers demonstrated a fundamental asymmetry within the coup attempt: while the conspirators had sufficient military rank to pose a threat to the regime, they did not have sufficient control of the coercive apparatus to neutralise that threat before it materialised. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade a unit of perhaps a few hundred men proved more decisive in determining the coup’s fate than the combined command authority of a dozen generals.

The Cascade of Failure: Why the Coup Collapsed and What It Reveals About the Derg’s Vulnerability

The 18 May coup attempt failed not because of military incompetence in the tactical sense, but because of institutional fracture at the moment of maximum consequence. The conspirators possessed rank, they possessed command positions, they possessed access to military assets. What they lacked was coherence: a unified strategy for the moment of execution, a shared understanding of the costs they were willing to bear, and a command structure resilient enough to sustain operations when the initial plan collapsed.

The fatal decision the decision not to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft reveals the deeper problem. This was not a decision imposed by external circumstances; it was a choice made by the coup’s senior leadership in the Ministry of Defence war room. The choice to preserve civilian lives, to protect Ethiopian Airlines’ reputation, was a conscious prioritisation of institutional norms over revolutionary necessity. In the context of an attempted coup d’état, such prioritisation is fatal. A revolution that cannot commit fully to the violence required to succeed is not a revolution; it is an institutional grievance masquerading as a coup.

Once that decision was made once the window of opportunity passed and Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace the coup was already lost in the only way that mattered: politically. The subsequent military operations in Addis Ababa and Asmara were not the execution of a coherent plan but the unravelling of an already-compromised enterprise. Demissie Bulto in Asmara and the junior conspirators in the capital were executing a plan that had already been abandoned by its senior architects. They were acting on outdated intelligence. They were trying to consolidate a victory that had never materialised.

And yet, the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical significance. The attempt revealed the Derg regime to be profoundly vulnerable not in its external military capacity (which would be challenged more effectively by the TPLF and EPLF in the field), but in its internal cohesion. A significant faction of the senior officer corps, including the Chief of Staff and major operational commanders, had concluded that the Mengistu regime was unsustainable and that military coup was the appropriate response. This was not a fringe conspiracy; this was an institutional challenge to the regime’s legitimacy mounted from within the military hierarchy itself.

The regime’s response systematic execution, torture, the elimination of an entire generation of senior officers was not a sign of strength. It was a sign of desperation: a dictatorship forced to destroy significant portions of its own officer corps to maintain control. Every senior officer killed in the purge that followed the coup was a military asset eliminated, a command position vacated, a potential source of resistance to the regime removed through extrajudicial killing rather than institutional reform or political compromise.

The Unspoken Consequence: How the Coup’s Failure Enabled the Insurgencies

The 18 May coup attempt, though it failed militarily, had a profound and paradoxical effect on the Derg regime’s capacity to resist the insurgencies that would ultimately destroy it. The purge that followed the coup eliminated a significant portion of the officer corps precisely at the moment when the TPLF was consolidating its military position in the north and the EPLF was preparing for the final phase of the struggle for Eritrean independence.

By executing or imprisoning the commanders of the Second Revolutionary Army and the senior staff in Addis Ababa, the Mengistu regime decapitated its own northern command structure. The officers who replaced Demissie Bulto and the other purged commanders were not chosen for their military competence; they were chosen for their loyalty—which is to say, for their demonstrated unwillingness to challenge the regime’s authority regardless of the military consequences. A military force led by politically reliable officers rather than competent commanders is a military force in decline.

Moreover, the regime’s need to deploy units to suppress the coup attempt and to maintain security in Addis Ababa reduced the military resources available for the counterinsurgency effort in the north. Troops that might have been deployed against the TPLF were instead employed in hunting down fugitive generals and suppressing residual pockets of dissent. The regime’s institutional energy, in the months following the coup attempt, was directed inward toward purges, interrogations, the elimination of suspected coup sympathisers rather than outward toward the insurgencies that were systematically expanding their control of territory.

The TPLF and EPLF did not defeat the Derg regime primarily through superior military technology or overwhelming numerical advantage; they defeated it through the regime’s progressive institutional decay and its inability to sustain a coherent counterinsurgency strategy in the face of internal threats. The 18 May coup, though it failed, accelerated that decay. It revealed the regime’s vulnerability, it forced the regime to consume resources in internal purges, and it demonstrated to military officers throughout the hierarchy that challenging Mengistu’s authority however disastrously was at least a conceivable option.

By 1991, when the TPLF entered Addis Ababa, the Derg’s officer corps had been devastated by purges, mutinies, and the cascading effects of seventeen years of civil conflict. The regime that fell was not defeated by an overwhelmingly superior insurgency; it was a regime that had systematically destroyed its own institutional coherence in the pursuit of absolute internal control. The coup of 18 May 1989, in this sense, was not an aberration but a symptom of a decay process that was already well advanced and that would prove terminal.

The Historiographical Void: Why We Have Forgotten Thirty Generals

Thirty-six years have passed. The officers executed in Asmara are dead. The generals who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence are dead. Kumlachew Dejene, the sole survivor of the coup’s senior leadership, resides in American exile. Mengistu Haile Mariam, still living in Zimbabwe, remains unaccountable for the seventeen years of his brutal regime a dictatorship that would eventually claim perhaps 100,000 lives through war, famine, and political terror.

And yet, the names of these officers thirty-six generals and senior officers whose deaths were directly caused by their attempt to challenge Mengistu’s regime have largely vanished from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no official ceremonies of remembrance. There is no sustained historical scholarship examining their institutional roles, their strategic miscalculations, their personal trajectories from senior rank to execution or exile.

This historiographical void is not accidental. It is the product of specific political choices made in the post-1991 era. The EPRDF regime, which succeeded the Derg and governed Ethiopia until 2018, had no interest in memorialising a failed coup attempt by Derg officers. Such memorialisation might have complicated the EPRDF’s narrative of absolute moral clarity a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic. The existence of officers who had attempted to overthrow Mengistu, who had died in that attempt, who might have been portrayed as victims of a dictatorial regime they had tried to challenge, would have complicated that narrative.

Moreover, there is the uncomfortable question of institutional continuity. Some of the officers who survived the coup some of the conspirators who were arrested but not executed eventually made their peace with the post-1991 regime. Some may have entered the EPRDF’s own military hierarchy. To memorialise the coup would have been to force uncomfortable questions about the relationships between the old regime’s officer corps and the new regime’s security apparatus. It was easier, politically and institutionally, to let the names fade.

And so the void persists. Families of the executed officers have their memories, their private grief, their understanding of what was lost. But the public record is thin. The historical scholarship is sparse. The names appear in documents archived in foreign institutions but are absent from the dominant narratives of Ethiopian history that are taught in schools, discussed in media, enshrined in official memory.

What the Coup Reveals About Military Authority and Revolutionary Change

The failed coup of 18 May 1989 illuminates a fundamental reality about military hierarchies under authoritarian rule: institutional position—rank, command authority, access to resources—is not synonymous with power in the moment of revolutionary change. The coup’s conspirators possessed almost all the traditional markers of military authority: they were generals and brigadier generals, they commanded major units, they had access to troops and equipment. Yet they were defeated by a captain commanding a presidential guard unit and a colonel in the security apparatus.

This inversion of hierarchical authority reveals the distorting effects of authoritarian centralisation. In a normal military structure, the Chief of Staff outranks a captain and can issue orders that the captain must obey. But in the Derg regime, as in many authoritarian militaries, the formal hierarchy was subordinate to a parallel hierarchy of loyalty and personal proximity to the dictator. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s control of the Special Protection Brigade mattered more than Major General Merid Negussie’s formal position as Chief of Staff because proximity to Mengistu was the true basis of power.

This is not a new insight in the study of authoritarian militaries. It is a pattern repeated across multiple regimes: from Latin American juntas to Middle Eastern militaries to post-Soviet security states. But it is a pattern that bears repeating, particularly in the context of the coup’s failure. The conspirators appear to have miscalculated the extent to which formal military authority had been hollowed out by the Derg’s system of personalised control. They believed that their rank and command positions would be sufficient to overcome regime resistance. They did not fully account for the fact that Mengistu had spent seventeen years constructing a security apparatus that was explicitly designed to prevent officers from translating formal authority into effective power against the dictator.

The Ethics of Institutional Resistance Under Dictatorship

The coup of 18 May raises a set of difficult ethical and political questions that Ethiopian historiography has largely avoided. These officers men like Merid Negussie, Amha Desta, Demissie Bulto, Aberra Abebe were senior figures in a regime that had committed atrocities. They had commanded forces engaged in counter-insurgency operations that involved aerial bombardment of civilian areas, mass violence, systematic torture. They were not innocent men victimised by a dictator; they were beneficiaries of and participants in a brutal dictatorship.

And yet, they attempted to overthrow that dictatorship apparently motivated, at least in part, by dissatisfaction with Mengistu’s personalised control, his military incompetence against the insurgencies, his destruction of military discipline and institutional coherence. This creates a moral paradox: we can acknowledge the coup plotters as complicit in the regime’s brutality while also recognising their attempt to challenge it as an important institutional act.

This paradox is important because it reflects a deeper truth about authoritarian systems: they typically collapse not through the virtuous resistance of entirely innocent actors, but through the defection of insiders who have been participants in the regime and who have come to believe that the regime is no longer sustainable or defensible. The coup of 18 May was not a popular uprising; it was an institutional challenge mounted by men who had benefited from the regime and who had only belatedly come to the conclusion that its continuation was untenable.

This does not absolve them of responsibility for their prior participation in the regime’s brutality. But it does suggest that any serious historical reckoning with the Derg era must grapple with the internal decomposition of the regime—the process by which even senior officers came to conclude that Mengistu’s dictatorship had become insustainable. That reckoning cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of clear-cut heroes and villains. It must account for the ambiguity of men who were simultaneously perpetrators and, in their final acts, challengers of the system they had helped to sustain.

Conclusion: The Vanished Generation and the Incompleteness of Ethiopian Memory

Thirty-six years after the 18 May coup attempt, the names of the officers who died in that attempt remain largely absent from Ethiopian public consciousness. This is not because their deaths were insignificant; it is because their significance has been obscured by the political interests of successive regimes and the historiographical choices of the scholars who have documented the Derg era.

The coup itself was a failure—militarily, politically, institutionally. The conspirators miscalculated. They hesitated at the crucial moment. They operated on faulty intelligence. They were betrayed by men in their own ranks. And they died by suicide, by execution, by killing in flight, by torture in interrogation centres as a consequence of those miscalculations and that failure.

Yet the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical meaning. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control over even its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.

The families of these officers the wives and children of executed generals, the relatives of men who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence, the dependents of officers who vanished into the interrogation system carry this history in memory even as the public record has largely forgotten it. This remembrance is important, not because it absolves the coup plotters of their complicity in the Derg regime’s brutality, but because it preserves a more complex and honest understanding of how authoritarian systems function and how they ultimately decay.

Ethiopia’s national memory remains incomplete as long as this history remains obscured. A reckoning with the Derg era that acknowledges only the regime’s external enemies the TPLF, the EPLF, the popular resistance to dictatorship while ignoring the internal decomposition symbolised by the failed coup is a reckoning that fails to confront the full complexity of how the regime actually functioned and ultimately collapsed.

On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Amha Desta, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or so other officers who died in the coup attempt deserve to be more than footnotes in foreign archives or entries in genealogical records of private family grief. They deserve to be part of the public historical record not as heroes, but as complex actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however flawed and ultimately disastrous, revealed fundamental truths about the nature of the dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.

That remembrance is not a betrayal of the insurgents who ultimately defeated the Derg. It is, rather, a completion of the historical record an acknowledgement that authoritarian regimes do not collapse through the actions of their external enemies alone, but through the internal contradictions that force even their most privileged functionaries to conclude that the system is no longer defensible. The coup of 18 May 1989 was one such moment of internal reckoning. Its failure was tragic. But its historical significance demands that we remember it honestly, in all its ambiguity and complexity, as part of the larger story of how Ethiopia’s military dictatorship ultimately came to an end.

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The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this essay on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the 18 May 1989 coup attempt in recognition of the officers whose attempt to challenge the Mengistu regime, however imperfectly executed, remains a significant moment in Ethiopia’s institutional and political history. The names of those who died whether by their own hand, by execution, or by fratricide deserve to remain in the public record as a reminder of the human costs of dictatorship and the institutional fragility of authoritarian rule.

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