Obituary · A Son’s Tribute

Hirut Befikadu: The Woman Who Gave Africa Its Voice

She helped give the Organisation of African Unity its public voice, built the institution’s first Women’s Division, and carried Africa’s case from Addis Ababa to Beijing and into the shattered districts of wartime Sierra Leone. She was a mother of three — and a figure of quiet instruction to a great many more.

By Endex  ·  Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  22 June 2026

The Tribune’s Chief Editor writes of his mother.

She belonged to the small, formidable company of Ethiopians who did not merely live through the making of modern Africa but helped to assemble it — patiently, precisely, one briefing and one document at a time. For the better part of thirty-four years, Hirut Befikadu served the Organisation of African Unity, the body founded in Addis Ababa in 1963 to speak for a continent finding its own voice. It fell to her, more than to almost anyone, to make that voice intelligible to the world.

The Voice of a Young Continent

Hirut joined the OAU in its earliest, improvised days, having begun her working life at the newly established Ethiopian Tourism Organisation in 1963. Within a year she had moved to the fledgling continental secretariat, where the work was relentless and the stakes were continental. Assigned to the Information and Protocol Division, she rose to lead it, serving for seventeen years as Head of Information.

The task was unforgiving. A new organisation, charged with shaping Africa’s political, social and economic course, had to be explained — persuasively, accurately, and often under pressure — to journalists and researchers who gave her no rest. To answer them she first had to know, which meant a discipline of constant reading that never left her. She travelled the length and breadth of the continent, and there was scarcely a country she did not visit in the service of introducing the OAU to Africa and the wider world. In the veteran Ethiopian journalist Gedamu Abraha she found a mentor who helped her master the craft.

The Platform at Beijing

If the Information Division made her name, it was the Women’s Division that became her legacy. Hirut was charged not only with establishing the OAU’s Women’s Division but with leading it. When Africa prepared its case for the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, it was Hirut who coordinated the drafting of the “African Platform for Action”, distilling the views of women gathered from across the continent, and who helped organise the participation of nearly ten thousand African women delegates at the conference. It was, by any measure, one of the largest acts of continental coordination on behalf of African women in the organisation’s history.

Addis, Asmara and Florence

She had been formed for such work long before she chose it. Educated at the Sandford English School in Addis Ababa, at Haile Selassie Secondary School in Asmara, and at Kokebe Tsibah — where she was one of the first two young women to graduate — she went on to read social and political science at Haile Selassie I University, among its first graduates after it became a university, and took a master’s degree in international relations at the University of Florence.

Hers was a household steeped in the wider world. Her father, German-educated, served as a provincial governor, as chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ultimately as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom; her mother, too, was educated in Europe. The eldest of six children, Hirut moved from city to city and country to country, and where she could not follow her parents she lived with an aunt rather than break her schooling.

Her ancestry ran the length of the country. She was descended from Hakim Workneh Eshete, the pioneering Ethiopian physician and statesman, and from Ras Gobena Dacche, the formidable nineteenth-century general — a lineage joining the north of Ethiopia to the south, as her own life and labour would. And hers was a family that seemed to bring forth remarkable women in every generation: the great educator Adey Befikadu; her sister Rosemary; the late journalist Elenee Mekuria; and the late Rachel Mekuria, who pioneered broadcasting education in Ethiopia, headed the Educational Television Production Division and served as board president of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Hirut belonged to that company, and enlarged it.

She came to believe there was something to learn from every person she met — a conviction earned, not inherited.

Two influences marked her above all. There was a meticulous, beautifully turned-out father who could not abide disorder, from whom she inherited an eye for elegance and an ear for language. And there was her maternal grandmother, Qetselawork Tulu, whose intelligence and resilience she revered — a woman who had married an England-educated doctor, moved to India, and worked at his side as a nurse. A shy child, Hirut taught herself courage through drama, public debate and the university debating club, until the girl who had once shunned attention made her living by commanding it.

Sierra Leone

Her continental service did not end with the OAU. For six years she served as spokesperson and policy adviser to the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) — a charge entrusted to her by Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, who knew her conviction and chose her for it. She carried her gift for clear, careful information into one of West Africa’s hardest conflicts, and into its most desperate hours. When hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers were seized and held hostage by rebel forces for seventy-five days, she was among those who laboured to win their release — and it was her voice, in the end, that carried the news of their freedom to the world. In the United Nations’ own record of those years she appears again and again, steadying the account through the mission’s most dangerous passages — the same discipline of fact she had practised in Addis Ababa, now exercised under fire.

A Mother, and a Mentor

In retirement she described herself simply as a community volunteer. It was characteristically modest. I write these lines not only as this newspaper’s editor but as her son — one of the three boys she raised, who like everyone who loved her called her Abaye — and so I may say what an obituary alone would not: that the rigour and grace she carried to a continent she carried first, and most fully, into her own home.

Her husband of a lifetime, the engineer Getachew Abebe, had gone before her; she leaves their three sons — Samuel, Daniel, and the one who writes these words. But the family she leaves is larger than that — the colleagues she trained, the women whose place at the table she helped to secure, and the many of us who took her, without hesitation and without blood, as a mother of our own.

She loved a difficult task and hated defeat. Africa was, for thirty-four years, her difficult task. She did not run from it. She faced it — and she gave it words.

When the family last gathered around her, in November 2024, she surprised us, as she always could. Late in a life that had never stopped facing forward, she took delivery of her first car — and chose an electric one, because the future, to her mind, was a thing to be embraced rather than feared. We were delighted, and we made her promises about the cleaner, braver world we meant to help build. It was entirely like her: the woman who had introduced a young continent to the world, still reaching, even then, toward what came next.

Samuel, her firstborn, reached her after her first surgery and was with her as she recovered. Daniel and I were to follow in July. We did not reach her in time. These last months had taken from her, one after another, others she loved; and in the end, it seems, she chose to go on to those who had gone ahead of her — her husband among them — rather than wait for us. We would have crossed any distance for that visit. We make it now, in these words.

Today the words are mine, and they are not enough. Rest now, Abaye. We were proud beyond saying to be yours.

❦

Hirut Befikadu — Hirute Silassie. Pioneering officer of the Organisation of African Unity. Died 22 June 2026.

Analysis · Democracy & Accountability

The System in Which Parties Lose

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

By E. Frashie

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

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

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

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

The test Przeworski set

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

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

The arithmetic of unanimity

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

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

Turnout and its meaning, by regime type

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

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

What turnout conceals

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

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

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

The universal criteria

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

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

Elections without democracy

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

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

The price of accountability

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

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

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

A note on sources

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

The Ethiopian Tribune

Democratic Accountability · Human Rights · The Horn of Africa

Fiammetta’s Daughter

Be’alu Girma gave Ethiopia a woman who spoke the truth the state could not forgive. Forty years on, a journalist named Trinity sits in a cell for the same offence.

BY E. FRASHIE

When Be’alu Girma wrote Oromay, he did the one thing a careful man inside a propaganda ministry ought never to do: he gave his sharpest, truest lines to a woman the state had already decided was the enemy. Fiammetta Eritrean, luminous, bound by loyalties the campaign could not absorb says aloud what the novel’s narrator, himself a regime information officer, cannot allow himself to think. She names the distance between the slogans and the conduct. She sees the contempt the centre holds for the periphery it claims to be liberating. And because Be’alu has made the reader love her before he lets her speak, the indictment arrives before the defences can be raised. That was the craft, and it was unforgivable. Be’alu Girma was taken in 1984. He was never returned.

The device has outlived the man. Place the hardest truth in the mouth of someone the audience has been taught to distrust or to adore and the truth slips past the guard. It is the oldest reason tyrannies fear novelists. It is the newest reason they fear women with telephones.

Forty years on, the grammar is intact. Only the instrument has changed.

The Inversion

Salsawit Baynesagn Yimer was cast as no one’s enemy. She was, until lately, the state’s own voice. She reported for Walta and for the Fana Broadcasting Corporate two of the load-bearing walls of Ethiopia’s government-aligned media and then, in the manner of her generation, she stepped out from behind the institutions and spoke under her own name, to some eight thousand followers on TikTok and Facebook, about human rights and about faith.

Here is the inversion Be’alu would have recognised at once. Fiammetta was the enemy who told the truth. Salsawit is the loyal voice the state has chosen to treat as the enemy for the identical offence of telling it. The apparatus that trained her, that placed a microphone in her hand, has discovered that the voices it produces are the ones it can least afford to hear.

Fiammetta was the enemy who told the truth. Salsawit is the loyal voice the state now treats as the enemy for the identical offence of telling it.

An Accusation in Arithmetic

On the afternoon of 8 June, police took her from her home in Addis Ababa. She was wanted, they said, for questioning. Ethiopian law allows them forty-eight hours to bring a detainee before a judge. The forty-eight hours passed; then ten days passed; and she had still not been produced in court, and the Federal Police had still named no charge. She had left behind a four-year-old child. By an account carried in the French press and sourced to the APA agency, she was first held in isolation in what was described as a “black cell,” her family barred from seeing her for three days, while a court appearance announced for 16 June simply did not occur.

Strip the case to its figures and it reads as an accusation in arithmetic. One arrest. Forty-eight hours, breached. Ten days and more without a charge. One child. Three days before a sister’s face. One hearing promised and withdrawn. Against all of this the state has entered a single number, and the number is nothing no reason, no charge, no account.

The Name

And now the detail Be’alu, who loved a symbol, could never have left on the table.

Salsawit, in Amharic, means Trinity.

The journalist the state has sealed in a cell without a charge carries, in her name, the central mystery of the Church whose people have been dying in Arsi the massacre her family believes, though the police will not confirm it, is the true reason she was taken. Nor did she go alone in spirit. The two sisters who walked the petition from office to office, and who were offered to the court as witnesses, are named in the legal record: Haymanot and Elbethel. Haymanot means Faith. Elbethel is Bethel the house of God.

One need not read providence into a family’s christening to feel the weight of it. Three sisters, by the plain meaning of their names, are Trinity, Faith and the House of God and it is they who are carrying a court’s paper through a police commission that will not take it, on behalf of the one of them shut away for speaking of a Church the state would prefer went unnamed. A novelist would be accused of laying it on too thick. Reality is under no such obligation.

Three sisters, by the plain meaning of their names, are Trinity, Faith and the House of God.

The Summons They Would Not Take

What those three women met when they tried to serve the court’s summons is the detail that turns a familiar story into a damning one. By the account her lead counsel, Ato Zewdu Bekele, gave to The Reporter, the lawyers had petitioned the Federal First Instance Court at Arada for her unconditional release, on the ground that the forty-eight-hour rule had been broken. The court ordered the Police Commission summoned. And the Commission’s records office refused to accept the summons refused to sign for a court’s own order saying it could not do so unless the head of the Crime Investigation Bureau instructed it. The lawyers went to that head’s office three times. They waited at his door. He could not be found. They tried the commission’s relocated premises; they lodged a complaint with its complaints unit; the paper could not be served.

So they swore an affidavit. Under Article 105 of the Civil Procedure Code, which provides for substituted service where ordinary service is frustrated, they asked the court to deliver its own summons by its own messenger and, failing that, by any means it judged fit. The court agreed, ordered service by its messenger, and set the next hearing for the following morning.

Read that sequence again, for it is the whole indictment in miniature. A state does not merely decline to explain why it holds a journalist. It declines to accept the court’s request that it explain. The silence is no longer passive. It has hands; it shuts a records-room window; it empties an office of the one official authorised to sign.

The Bench

None of this is without precedent, which is precisely the point. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch have logged a steady procession of such arrests through 2025 Sheger FM, broadcast staff held over a woman’s testimony of rape the method always the same: seize first, justify later, or never. Yet the same record carries the reason the affidavit matters. When the police argued last September that the Sheger FM journalists might destroy evidence if freed, a court refused them, and the Federal Supreme Court upheld the refusal. In 2022 that same court granted the Associated Press’s Amir Aman Kiyaro bail over police objection, after four months without a charge. The bench does not always look away. Sometimes it makes the state stand and answer. Whether it will make the Police Commission stand and answer for Trinity is the question a messenger now carries through the streets of Arada.

Be’alu Girma’s Fiammetta had no court. She had no affidavit, no Article 105, no sisters named Faith and Bethel walking her cause from door to door. She had only a novelist who loved her enough to let her speak, and who paid for it with his life. Salsawit Baynesagn Yimer has more than Fiammetta was given: a case number, a legal team that will not stop walking, a family whose very names rebuke the silence, and a public that now knows what the Police Commission would rather it did not.

What she shares with Fiammetta is the one thing the state can neither forgive nor un-make. She spoke. The voice the apparatus built turned out to carry the truth the apparatus most needed buried. They have put it in a black cell. They have not, for all their refusing of papers, found a way to make it stop meaning what it means.

She has not been charged with anything. That is not the mitigation. That is the case. And her name, which they cannot take from her even now, means Trinity.

Sources

Arrest, detention timeline and family account: DW Amharic (16 June 2026); EEPA Situation Report (18 June 2026); Addis Standard (June 2026). Isolation, “black cell” and the withdrawn 16 June hearing: APA-sourced report (June 2026). The 48-hour petition, the Police Commission’s refusal to accept service, the Article 105 affidavit, the sisters Haymanot and Elbethel Baynesagn as witnesses, and the messenger-service order: counsel Ato Zewdu Bekele, interviewed by The Reporter (to 18 June 2026). Comparative cases (Sheger FM; Amir Aman Kiyaro): Committee to Protect Journalists; Human Rights Watch; Al Jazeera. The reported link to the Arsi killings is the family’s stated suspicion and has not been confirmed by the authorities. Oromay and the disappearance of Be’alu Girma are matters of public literary and historical record.

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Comment

The Republic of the Ivory Smile

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

By Sewasew Teklemariam

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

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

The Mask and the Message

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

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

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

Dressed for the Wrong Job

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

The Men and Their Ivory Smiles

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

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

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

The Influencer Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn the Camera Around

Here is where the column stops being amusing.

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

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

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

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

The Unretouched Face

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

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

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

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

The Ethiopian Tribune

Column · The Week in Root Vegetables

The Twig and the Phantom Carrot

Washington reached for the carrot-and-stick playbook, found neither vegetable, and stamped a visa instead. A guided tour of one press release and of the two camps now busily misreading it.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

Let us begin, as one always should with American foreign policy, by reading the document rather than the reaction to it. On Thursday the State Department issued a statement of perhaps three hundred words, the diplomatic equivalent of clearing one’s throat. It announced that Secretary Rubio, exercising his authority under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, would impose visa restrictions on hardline members of the TPLF and their immediate families. For readers who do not keep the immigration code on the nightstand: that subsection lets the Secretary bar any foreigner whose presence he judges inconvenient to American foreign policy. In plainer English still, it is a no-entry stamp.

It is worth dwelling on what this instrument is not, because both Ethiopian camps are about to pretend it is something else. It is not a sanction in the asset-freezing, bank-blocking, villa-confiscating sense. No Treasury list, no frozen accounts, no SWIFT messages going dark. It is a consular officer, somewhere, declining to let a named individual queue at the airport. The statement cites the clash earlier this year between the Tigray Security Forces and the ENDF — the first since the guns fell silent in 2022 — notes the hundreds of thousands freshly displaced, and closes with the two ritual phrases of the genre: that Washington stands with the people of Tigray, and that it reserves “all available tools.” Having, one notes, selected the lightest one in the drawer and quietly shut it on the rest.

The Economist taught a generation of foreign ministries to think in carrots and sticks: punish the bad, reward the good, and watch incentives do the governing. So let us audit the produce. The stick, here, is a visa ban — which is to a sanction what a strongly worded letter is to a subpoena. Call it a twig. And the carrot? Search the three hundred words and you will not find one. There is no inducement to anybody, no reward dangled for good behaviour, no “do this and receive that.” Washington has approached the table brandishing a twig in one hand and, in the other, nothing at all.

This is not carrot-and-stick. This is stick-and-shrug.

And yet two entire political universes have decided that this twig is the most consequential object in the Horn of Africa.

Consider first the view from Arat Kilo, where the press release is being read as vindication delivered by registered post. At last, the reasoning goes, the Americans see it our way: the TPLF are the spoilers, the named party, the wreckers of a peace the government was selflessly nurturing. Cue the victory lap. One hates to interrupt a good lap, but the statement names no federal virtue whatsoever. It does not mention the drone strikes. It does not mention the unilateral extension of the interim mandate in April — the act that actually lit the fuse. It blesses neither the budget cuts nor the fuel blockade nor the years of disputed-territory limbo in which displaced Tigrayans remain parked in camps. Washington restricted one side and described the war’s renewal in the careful passive voice of a man who has no intention of choosing godfathers. To read “we restrict TPLF hardliners” as “we endorse everything Addis Ababa has ever done” requires a selective literacy normally reserved for horoscopes. The federal camp has received a press release and mistaken it for a security guarantee.

Now cross to the other universe, where the same three hundred words are proof of the eternal imperial conspiracy. Washington, it is announced, dances to Abiy’s tune; the visa ban is persecution; one must wear it as a medal. There is something magnificent about a movement that has spent five years denouncing American imperialism reacting to an American visa restriction as though it were a death in the family. As a rule, the hardliner most likely to thunder against Western perfidy is also the one least likely to keep a timeshare in Virginia. But the badge-of-honour reflex is reliable: every sanction becomes a certificate of authenticity, every rebuke confirmation that one is, at last, over the target. And then comes the quiet pivot — if Washington will not have us, Asmara will. The patron rotates; the grievance is monetised; and the visa ban, far from chastening anyone, obligingly supplies the fresh persecution narrative the hardliners required for the next recruitment notice, the one summoning the region’s youth to report to the centres at Adwa.

Here is the joke neither camp will tell at its own expense. A visa restriction is the one diplomatic instrument engineered to miss precisely the people it names. It stings the moderate who hoped to send a daughter to Georgetown; it cannot lay a finger on the hardliner who regards a US entry stamp as collaboration in the first place. So the federal camp celebrates a punishment that changes nothing, the hardline camp mourns a punishment that costs it nothing, and both perform their assigned emotions with a sincerity that would be touching if it were not so expensive for everyone else.

As for the twig-wielder, Washington has rediscovered the great convenience of the gesture that asks nothing of the gesturer. A visa restriction requires no aid budget, no special envoy, no sleepless fortnight in Pretoria, no awkward telephone call to Asmara, and — crucially — no carrot. It is foreign policy as press release: the satisfying click of a tool being reached for, without the inconvenience of the tool actually doing anything.

And the carrot? Still, as they say, in the post — as it was always going to be. Carrots cost something; sticks, even twig-sized ones, are free; and the cheapest foreign policy on the menu is the one in which everybody gets to feel vindicated and nobody is required to change. The federal camp has its vindication. The hardliners have their medal. Washington has its press release. Asmara has its opening. And the displaced in the camps, along with the youth now being summoned to the recruitment centres — the very people in whose name all three hundred words were ostensibly composed — are left, as usual, with the one thing no podium is offering: a reason to laugh, and absolutely nothing to laugh about.

Sewasew Teklemariam writes on the Horn of Africa for The Ethiopian Tribune.