THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE  ·  THE SEWASEW COLUMN

The Devil Keeps a Subscription

In which our columnist takes a telephone call, loses an argument about football, and surrenders his page to an older, better-travelled correspondent

by Sewasew Teklemariam

I telephoned the Editor-in-Chief on Tuesday to stage an intervention. For three weeks the man has been unwell, and the presenting symptom is football — not the watching of it, but the marrying of it.

When Egypt met Argentina he sent me a video of himself, both arms aloft, roaring for Salah as though Liverpool’s finest were a cousin visiting from Bahir Dar. Ninety minutes later Argentina remembered they were Argentina, and the roar came back to me at one in the morning as a single, grief-stricken emoji.

By the weekend he had converted to Spain. On Sunday, France — vive la France, said the voice note, in an accent that would make Paris file a complaint with the African Union. On Monday I received footage of him wearing, I regret to report, an approximation of enthusiasm for England. The man contains multitudes, and every one of them is eliminated in the group stage.

“Endex,” I said, “you cannot love four teams at once. That is not passion. That is a hostage situation.”

He was not listening. He was already forwarding me something else: a shaky clip, filmed by his own trembling hand, of a small electric aircraft perched by Tower Bridge — a Virgin drone taxi, four seats, the promise of a one-way hop from Heathrow to Manchester for four hundred quid. He had, in his excitement, gone digging and unearthed a 1952 advertisement for Ethiopian Airlines, and he held the two images up to the light together like a man comparing a photograph of his youth to the face in the mirror. He was, to be precise, giddy. He was a boy on Meskel morning.

I tried to be cruel to him, because that is my function. “This is not new,” I said. “Dubai has been running the things for a year. Rwanda flies drones as air ambulances — blood over the hills to a clinic before the road even wakes up. Uganda too. The great forward-leaping United Kingdom is, if anything, late. Why are you weeping over a taxi?”

There was a silence on the line of the kind that changes the subject of a column. And then he told me why.

“Because if I think of home,” he said, “we have no team the world will trouble itself to name. We have drones — oh, we have drones in abundance — but ours are flown to photograph the mightiness of a corridor, or to settle an argument in the north from four kilometres up. A man back home is not permitted the small, clean joy of a goal that decides nothing, or a flying toy that means nothing, because at home nothing is ever allowed to mean nothing. Everything must mean the land. The blood. The ethnicity. So when I see a child’s contraption carry four strangers over a river, I let myself be a child for ninety seconds. It is the last citizenship no one has got around to revoking.”

I put down the telephone and found I could not write my usual column. Something older wanted the page. So this week I have given it away — to a correspondent with an exceedingly long memory and impeccable references. I have changed nothing. I only transcribe.

A Letter from Lucifer

You kept the book.

Of all the offences I have watched a nation commit, that is the one for which I cannot forgive you, Ethiopia. You kept the book. When the rest of the earth let Henok slip out of its canon, out of its memory, out of its very alphabets, you alone held him — in Ge’ez, on skin, in the cold dark of your churches, for two thousand years. Do you understand what you were guarding all that while? You were guarding the transcript of my family’s trial.

Two hundred of them came down. You have the number; you kept it. Down onto the shoulder of Hermon, where they took the daughters of men to wife and taught them the arts I still consider my finest export — the smelting of metal into blades, the beating of ornaments, the painting of a face, the reading of a sky, the whole curriculum of wanting more than you were given. And of that union came the giants, who ate the harvest, and then the herds, and then the men, and at the last turned upon one another until the ground itself lodged a complaint with Heaven.

And one scribe walked up — one man, Henok, who walked with God until God was all there was — and he filed, on behalf of the eaten earth, a petition for justice against those of us who had come down from above. Justice, from below, against the powers of the air. I have never entirely recovered from the impertinence of it.

Once you were the blameless ones — that was Homer’s word for you, not mine, though I would have chosen it. I have held Aksumite coin in the bazaars of India. I watched your sails cross to Arabia and put a king upon Himyar. I stood by when Mani set your name beside Rome and Persia among the four great powers of the world, and I remember Kush, and I remember Sheba going up to Jerusalem to test a rumour with riddles. You were the hand stretched out unto God before any other nation thought to raise one. I knew you when you were a rumour that frightened empires. Do not imagine I have come to mock. I have come, if anything, in something close to reverence.

Because the book has come true a second time, and you built the machine yourselves. My Watchers descend again — only now they are Turkish and Iranian and Chinese steel, and they come down out of the same sky onto the same highland, and they teach the same forbidden art, which is the art of ending a person from a great and sanitary distance. And the giant that this union begets is no longer a body. It is a corridor. It is a project. It is a development that consumes the neighbourhood, and then the district, and then the name off the map, and photographs itself doing so, and calls the eating progress. You have automated the sixth chapter of Genesis. I did not have to lift a finger.

And Henok’s cry — the part that so unsettled me, the petition that went up and was heard — you have kept that too. But, being an industrious people, you have improved it. The complaint no longer ascends to any throne. It ascends to a committee. It is received. It is minuted. It is, at a distance calibrated to the millimetre, forever arriving — the inquiry that will convene, the commission that will report, the reconciliation that awaits only the right moment, which is by careful design every moment but this one. A grave will lie remarkably quiet for years if you promise it an investigation. Your ancestors petitioned the Ancient of Days. You petition a subcommittee. It is the single most elegant theological advance since my own departure from the office, and you accomplished it without any help from me.

Yet the masterpiece — the thing I would hang on the wall, if Hell troubled itself with walls — is what you have persuaded a man to do with a single mortal life. He wakes with one, exactly one, and you have talked him into spending the whole of it upon the question of where his grandfather stood. Not upon the flying machine. Not upon the goal that means nothing. Not upon the book. Upon the land, the blood, the tribe — announced from the podium, litigated in the minibus, wept over at the funeral, argued through the night until the throat is raw; a nation talking itself hoarse about its ancestors precisely so that it need never once look up and notice the Watcher circling above its own roof.

So, yes. I am joyful. Why on earth would I not be? You perform my liturgy more faithfully than my own choir ever managed, and you do it in vestments, and you believe it is worship of something else.

But your Editor-in-Chief has cost me something, and I will be honest with you, for whatever else you have been told of me, I am precise. That foolish man with his flying taxi. That grown editor bellowing for a country not his own over a ball that settles nothing whatever. That is the one commodity I have never been able to manufacture and never been able to abide — a gladness that belongs to no faction. He was not being an Amhara when he cheered. He was not being an Oromo, or a Tigrayan, or a Somali, or a Sidama. He was being a child, and a child’s delight is the last free country left on the earth — the one border I have never learnt to close. Every other joy I can route through a tribe and tax at the frontier. Not that one. It arrives untaxed, from nowhere, meaning nothing, and it undoes an evening of my work.

So keep the football. Keep the silly taxi. Keep — and it costs me to say it — keep the book. For as long as one of you still remembers how to be gladdened by a thing that means nothing at all, Henok’s petition stands unheard-of-as-yet but not withdrawn, and my long trial is not yet won.

I would burn that book, you understand, if I could reach it. You keep it in Ge’ez, on skin, in the dark, behind a curtain, guarded by men who cannot read the empires it frightened. Clever of you. I taught you nothing. That, from the very beginning, has been the whole of my difficulty with your country.

— transcribed, and not one word invented, by S.T.

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  independent since 2012

Editorial Foreword

The Spear We Helped to Forge

A foreword to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay on South Africa’s anti-immigrant violence and the shared history that makes it unbearable to watch.

There are betrayals that wound precisely because of what came before them. When a stranger turns on you, the injury is simple. When someone you once armed and sheltered does, the injury carries the whole weight of the history you shared. It is this second, heavier grief that runs beneath Professor Girma Berhanu’s latest essay for this newspaper, and it is why we commend it to our readers with particular care.

The Professor of the University of Gothenburg, and a contributor whose scholarship has enriched these pages across many months, on subjects ranging from the Amhara question to the health of Ethiopian democracy turns here to the mob violence that has once more engulfed African migrants in South Africa. Ethiopians have been among the dead. He asks us to hold two facts in the same hand: that our compatriots are being burned, beaten and driven from their livelihoods; and that it was Ethiopia, six decades ago, that helped teach the men of Umkhonto we Sizwe how to fight.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a matter of record one this newspaper has itself reported at first hand, through the testimony of an Ethiopian officer who trained fighters of the Spear of the Nation for the armed struggle. When Professor Berhanu describes the young Nelson Mandela receiving military instruction on Ethiopian soil in 1962, he is naming a debt that South Africa’s own liberation history acknowledges. The essay’s force lies in the distance between that debt and the present cruelty.

Readers will know that the Tribune has devoted sustained coverage to this crisis from “Pass Freely and Without Hindrance” to “The Deadline and the Debt” and our analysis of the countermeasures now open to African states. Professor Berhanu widens the frame from policy to conscience. He is not content to catalogue the violence; he asks what African solidarity was ever for, if it dissolves the moment the shooting stops and the invoices arrive.

We are grateful, as ever, for his continued generosity to our readership, and proud to carry his voice. A synopsis follows; the essay may be read in full via the link below.

— The Editors, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Professor Berhanu builds his essay in three movements.

He opens on the violence itself: the recurring waves of mob attacks on foreign African nationals, justified in the language of stolen jobs and illegal residence, and the human wreckage they leave behind the dead, the looted shops, the displaced families. He notes that some governments, Nigeria among them, have moved to evacuate their citizens and even to document their losses for future compensation, while Ethiopia, he argues, has too often stood by. From this he draws the essay’s two organising questions: what concrete measures could end the violence, and how might African states and institutions be mobilised to hold South Africa to account?

The central section is a work of historical retrieval. Here he sets out Ethiopia’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle: the military training of the ANC’s armed wing, including Mandela’s own instruction in 1962; the diplomatic and political campaigning against the apartheid regime; the seat of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; the moral leadership of Emperor Haile Selassie; and the deeper symbolism of Adwa in 1896 and of an Ethiopia that never fell. Solidarity, he reminds us, was not a slogan but a policy paid for in scarce resources and, elsewhere on the continent, in lives.

He then turns to the anatomy of the violence in present-day South Africa: the structural drivers of unemployment, inequality and poverty; the scapegoating of migrants against the weight of the evidence; and government responses he judges long on condemnation and enforcement yet short on prevention. Most pointedly, he sets out the paradox that animates the piece that a wealthy minority, insulated by private security and now courted for expedited asylum abroad, escapes the street-level fury that instead falls upon the poorest and least protected. Civil society, he argues, must carry much of the work that policing alone cannot.

The essay closes where it began with Ethiopia, and with a charge against the Ethiopian state, whose apparent indifference to its citizens abroad Professor Berhanu names as a second tragedy laid atop the first. The victims, he insists, deserve justice; their families deserve compassion; and Africa deserves better than a future in which those who once stood together against oppression are divided by fear.

The Ethiopian Tribune

Comment · Comparative Analysis

The Language of the Palace

The Prime Minister has found his ideal witness — a traveller who films the wilderness and now sits in the palace. China’s Golden Week shows what the performance leaves out.

By Leeshan Kuratey

There is a moment, near the end of the Prime Minister’s tourism interview with NBC, when the performance briefly shows its wiring. He has spent the better part of an hour being expansive — five economic pillars, a global tourism market he sizes at $12.6 trillion, Bale and Jimma rendered as undiscovered Edens — and then, asked for a closing message, he arrives at the Ethiopian taxi driver. The driver, he complains, collects a passenger at Bole and at once begins reciting woes: there is no work, times are hard, we are suffering. He does this, the Prime Minister says, to manufacture sympathy and extract a small tip, and so effectively that by the time the visitor reaches the hotel he will not leave his room. Then comes the tell. In other countries, Abiy observes admiringly, the very route along which a tourist is driven is arranged so that he does not see anything ugly.

Hold that sentence. It is the most honest thing said in the interview, and its subject is not the taxi driver.

But before we weigh what the Prime Minister says, it is worth looking at whom he chose to say it to, because in a set piece the casting is part of the argument. The interviewer is not a diplomatic correspondent or an economist. He is a travel presenter named Henok, and his presence in that chair is the first performance in a programme made of them.

The Man in the Tent

Henok’s ascent is its own small parable. He built a public profile by appealing to strangers to fund his journeys into the remote countryside, pitching the wilderness as latent revenue — the next money-making destination, waiting to be filmed and sold. The pledges came, and with them a berth at a television channel whose independence is, to put it gently, contested, and which functions in practice as a promotional register for the mood the state wishes to project. The output is instantly recognisable: the drone sweeps, the tripod-steadied panoramas, the long hours of footage compressed into a single glossy episode, the presenter framed against the horizon, eating with his entourage, arriving by four-by-four.

There is nothing wrong with a keen traveller; the country could use a hundred honest ones. But let us be exact about the genre, because his admirers are not. This is not natural history in any Attenborough sense — there is no science under it, no institution behind the lens holding it to a standard, no argument being tested against the world. It is a man of large enthusiasm and visible self-regard performing the discovery of a country for an audience primed to applaud the discoverer. The wilderness, in this telling, is chiefly the backdrop against which the traveller gets to be seen being intrepid. It is self-portraiture with scenery.

And that is precisely the man the campaign required — which is why the striking fact about the interview is not that Henok is in it, but where he is sitting. He has been brought in from the tent to the courtyard, seated, as the Prime Minister points out, inside the Entoto Bete Giorgis museum, itself a showpiece of the Gebeta-Lesheger beautification programme. The wilderness auteur has been installed in the palace, and the palace has notes for him. We will come back to the notes.

A Holiday, Engineered

To judge whether any of this amounts to a tourism strategy or merely a tableau, you need a control case — somewhere that decided, deliberately, to build a domestic tourism economy and managed it. Golden Week is that case, and it was no accident. In September 1999, at a moment of stimulus urgency after the Asian financial crisis, China’s State Council stitched statutory holidays to adjacent weekends to manufacture week-long national breaks, expressly to prise open a domestic tourism market. The first National Day Golden Week, in October 1999, produced 28 million domestic trips and 14.1 billion yuan in tourism revenue. By this year’s “Super Golden Week” the eight-day total reached 888 million trips and 809 billion yuan — about $113.6 billion. The scale is almost not worth arguing with.

But — and here is the part the Ethiopian adaptation quietly skips — Golden Week was never merely a holiday and a photo opportunity. It was demand engineering laid over a mobility base the Chinese state was building in the same years: railway, motorway and aviation capacity all expanding together. The calendar told a billion people they were free to move; the infrastructure meant they actually could. Concentrated leisure time is the spark. The functioning road is the engine. Remove the engine and the spark merely illuminates a stationary car.

And even China’s version strains — a nitpicker is obliged to say so. Overcrowding set in by the mid-2000s; the May Day Golden Week was scrapped in 2008 and only restored in 2019; and this year, for all the record 888 million trips, average spending per trip ran about three per cent below pre-pandemic 2019. Commentators called it “Golden Weak.” I raise it because it bears on the argument: the most successful piece of domestic-tourism engineering in modern history is a story of relentless capacity-building and constant correction — the precise opposite of a performance.

The Case, Stated Fairly

Abiy is not wrong about everything, and a column that pretends otherwise is worth nothing. His core logic is sound: unlike an export, a tourist arrives and spends inside the country — no shipping, no letters of credit, the consumer coming to the shoe rather than the shoe being sent to the consumer. Private capital is genuinely following the state’s lead, and I will not pretend it isn’t: at Wenji, Gorgora and Arba Minch, private resorts are rising beside the government’s, and the Kuriftu project at Arba Minch — 53 villas on 52,000 square metres, more than 300 jobs promised — is, by the accounts, a real and better-built thing than its predecessors. The perception gap is real too: the diaspora arrival who braces for famine and finds Bahir Dar is a genuine phenomenon, and a country’s image can lag its reality by a decade.

His claimed results, if accurate, are considerable. He puts this year’s arrivals above four million, domestic trips at 50.16 million, tourism foreign exchange above $5.2 billion, international conferences at 204, and GDP growth at 10.2 per cent. I write “if accurate” deliberately — and not only because these are his figures, mangled here and there in the telling, none independently before me. It is also that where independent counts exist, they do not match: analyses of the 2025 rebound put arrivals nearer 1.5 million and revenue around $2 billion, less than half the numbers the Prime Minister recites. Treat his figures as claims entered into evidence, not findings.

The Ground the Claims Stand On

A tourism economy is only as strong as the road to the destination, and here the interview parts company with its own government. Only last year the Ministry of Tourism published a revised policy that quietly concedes almost everything the interview denies: that the sector has failed to deliver its expected economic contribution; that progress on new destinations has been minimal; that tourist sites remain inaccessible; that marketing has been ineffective; and that no conducive business environment yet exists. That is not an opposition pamphlet. It is the state auditing itself — and then, on NBC, performing the opposite.

Begin with the road. A study covering just 40 per cent of the country — the Trade Minister’s own figure — identified 290 illegal checkpoints: not service posts but extraction points, run by municipal officers, revenue officials and local militia to tax the movement of goods. Drivers hauling cement the 300 kilometres from the Lemi factory towards Dessie have reported being charged at a dozen of them. In a single fortnight last year, transporters’ associations counted dozens of truckers abducted on Amhara routes alone. Even the Addis–Djibouti corridor, which carries over 95 per cent of the country’s import–export trade, is not spared. The complaint the taxi driver makes to the tourist — that moving through this country is hard and dear — is not a sob story. It is a field report.

And here is a detail the Prime Minister might have checked before reaching for the driver as his villain: his own Ministry of Tourism has already put airport drivers through image-training, in partnership with a ride company, to school them in the first impressions they give visitors. The state trained the man. Then the head of state, on air, blamed him.

The collapse is most legible where the tourists used to be. At Yeha, site of a temple older than the Aksumite kingdom, the visitors who once came in numbers are simply gone, the hotels shuttered, the young leaving. In Aksum, a hotel that opened in 2020 with scores of rooms, a pool and a spa now sits mostly empty, bookings cancelled by guests frightened of the next round of fighting. And in Lalibela, roughly half of the 37 hotels in the local association have received foreclosure notices — thirty days to settle ballooning debts or forfeit to creditors, chief among them the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. Here is the detail I cannot get past: the same reporting that carries the foreclosure notices also carries the Tourism Ministry’s assurance that the country welcomed around a million tourists in nine months, up nine per cent. The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The security picture is why. Foreign offices in Washington and London still warn against travel to the very regions that hold the crown jewels; the wars in Tigray and Amhara devastated Lalibela and Gondar directly. Nor is the paralysis only rural. In the capital, the beautification that supplies the campaign’s most flattering footage has driven displacement and sent rents climbing in a city where most housing is already classed as slum — and the tourism bet is visibly misfiring even there, with hotels raised for a projected boom now standing empty, some repurposed into hospitals. As critics of the programme have put it, Ethiopia is becoming a country divided by mobility: the rulers travelling above, the ruled trapped below.

Beneath the resorts sits an architecture of failed lending. Late in 2024, Parliament approved 900 billion birr — about $7.4 billion — in bonds, of which 845.3 billion goes to settle the non-performing loans state enterprises owe the Commercial Bank; three of them — Electric Power, Railways and Sugar — had between them run up something on the order of $15 billion in bad loans. The country defaulted on its sovereign debt at the end of 2023. None of this was an accident. As the economist Eyob Tesfaye has argued, public infrastructure came to serve as the language of power — feasibility studies and financial prudence giving way to speed, symbolism and political command; the label of the developmental state borrowed without the institutions that once made it credible; the banking system bent to politics until deposits were funnelled into projects with little prospect of return. What the interview sells as a pillar, this reading takes for spectacle raised over eroding foundations.

For a parable of what this state builds, read the Federal Anti-Corruption Commission on irrigation. Arjo Didesa, in Oromia, was launched fifteen years ago at 755 million birr, to be finished in eighteen months; thirteen years on it has swallowed close to seven billion. Megech, in Amhara, began at 2.4 billion birr — and how much it has since consumed depends on which official body you believe, the Commission’s figure and the auditors’ differing by a margin that is itself a scandal (the Commission cites some 18 billion birr; other audits put the swollen cost nearer 6.4). Either way, the aggregate is the number that should have stopped the interview cold: thirteen large-scale schemes meant to irrigate more than 550,000 hectares have, after nearly 61 billion birr, managed under 44,000 — about eight per cent. The Prime Minister visited Megech and called the river diversion an “important stage.” He is fluent, we might say, in the language of the important stage.

These are not separate failures; they compose a single, self-reinforcing loop. Grand corruption inflates and diverts, loading the state with debt; the debt forces maintenance to be deferred; the neglected roads turn dangerous and are colonised by the roadblock tax; the transit fees feed inflation and erode trust; and the tourism now marketed as salvation withers precisely in the regions where the loop runs hottest. You cannot photograph your way out of a loop.

What “Performative” Actually Means

Now the notes. Near the end, the Prime Minister delivers his verdict on the genre in the chair opposite him: Ethiopia, he says, needs not one Henok but many, and the presenter’s labour must be recognised. Those who would criticise the tourism-influencers, he adds, are simply fools. Read the scene for what it is. A man who built a brand performing the discovery of the countryside has been seated in a restored palace and told, by the head of state, that the nation needs more of him — while the same head of state, minutes earlier, admired the foreign practice of routing visitors past anything unsightly. The personal performance and the party’s performance have fused. The traveller performs intrepid discovery; the state performs benevolent custody; and the two of them, in a museum built by the beautification programme, agree that the outstanding problem is the attitude of a man earning tips at the airport.

That is the precise sense in which the whole exercise is performative — not merely showy, but constitutively about the surface rather than the substrate. Critics have a name for it: performative nationalism, a choreographed display of unity and prosperity staged against the lived reality of millions who cannot cross their own country. Golden Week engineered the substrate and let the appearance follow. This programme inverts the order: build the resort, restore the palace, fly the drone, seat the wanderer in the museum — and then locate the remaining gap in the disposition of a taxi driver.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it. The calendar cannot summon the movement the militia is taxing — and no amount of footage, however lovingly edited, can shoot around a country the government’s own policy admits it has failed to make reachable.

The Question of Sequence

Let me be fair to the other side of my own argument. None of this makes the endowment fake — Ethiopia’s variety is real, and Abiy describes it well. None of it makes the private investment imaginary or the perception gap costless; it is entirely possible that arrivals really are climbing, that the conference trade really is growing, that some of these resorts will, in a calmer decade, look like foresight rather than vanity.

The question the interview cannot answer — the question it is arranged not to answer — is one of sequence. China did not ask its citizens to perform prosperity while it built the roads; it built the roads, then let them travel. Ethiopia is being asked to celebrate a tourism boom from inside a mobility collapse, to admire the palace while the corridor is taxed at gunpoint, and to accept a crowdfunded traveller in a courtyard as evidence of a country made whole. Tourism can be a pillar. But a pillar is a load-bearing thing, and you do not test one by photographing it. You test it by putting weight on it — and the weight, in this country, is still stuck at a checkpoint, being told by a frightened driver that yes, unfortunately, the road ahead is worse than it looks.

◆

A Note on Sources

Golden Week: China Daily and CNBC (1999 and 2025 official data). The revised tourism policy’s admission of “strategic failure” (sites inaccessible; marketing ineffective; no conducive business environment): Ministry of Tourism, via The Reporter. Ministry image-training for airport drivers: Ministry of Tourism newsletter. Checkpoints (290 across 40 per cent of the country; corridor >95 per cent; Lemi–Dessie; Amhara abductions): ICTD (citing the Minister of Trade), EHRC and The Reporter. Yeha and Aksum hotel collapse: The Reporter and Reuters reporting. Lalibela foreclosures beside the one-million-arrivals claim: Addis Fortune. Empty Addis hotels converted to hospitals, and the megaproject-as-spectacle reading: analyses of Ethiopia’s megaproject economy, including Eyob Tesfaye in Addis Fortune (argument paraphrased). State-enterprise debt (900bn-birr bond; 845.3bn in CBE NPLs; ~$15bn at EEP/Railways/Sugar; 2023 default): Bloomberg, The Reporter, Birr Metrics. Irrigation (Arjo Didesa; disputed Megech cost; 13 schemes at ~8 per cent of 550,000 hectares): Federal Anti-Corruption Commission and The Reporter. Independent 2025 arrivals estimate (~1.5m; ~$2bn): tourism-branding analysis, set against the Prime Minister’s NBC claims of 4m+ arrivals, 50.16m domestic trips, $5.2bn forex, 204 conferences and 10.2 per cent GDP growth, reproduced here as claims pending independent confirmation. “Performative nationalism” and “rulers above, ruled below” are critics’ framings.

Pass Freely and Without Hindrance

What a borrowed Ethiopian passport asked of the world in 1962 and what South Africa now refuses the continent that once sheltered its liberator.

In 1962 a wanted man with no country of his own boarded an aircraft in Addis Ababa carrying a passport that did not bear his name. The document was issued by the Empire of Ethiopia, stamped with the Lion of Judah, and made out to one David Motsamayi. The bearer was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, commander of a newly founded guerrilla army, fugitive from a state that called him a terrorist, and by the grace of an emperor he had never met a free traveller for the first time in his life.

The passport carried a request, set in the formal cadence of imperial English: that the civil and military authorities of all friendly countries allow the bearer to pass freely and without hindrance, and to afford him every assistance of which he stood in need. Sixty-four years later, those words read like an indictment. For the question that should trouble every South African political elite who has lodged a brief at The Hague while a mob gathers at home is brutally simple: what has become of that request?

The debt that built a nation

Mandela did not arrive in Ethiopia as a curiosity. He came as a delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa, the body that would become, the following year and on Ethiopian soil, the Organisation of African Unity. He addressed that conference directly after Emperor Haile Selassie, and he named Ethiopia for what it was a country that had paid the full price of its own freedom and now extended that freedom to others.

What followed was not symbolism. It was logistics, money and weapons training. At the Kolfe police camp outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopian officers drilled him seven days a week in tactics, sabotage, explosives and the discipline of guerrilla command. He left with five thousand pounds, granted by order of the Emperor, to arm Umkhonto we Sizwe. On the flight in, he had been startled to find a black man in the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft the first he had ever seen and understood, before he had even landed, what an Africa governed by Africans might look like.

Ethiopia was the keystone, but the arch was continental. Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika gave him passage and, later, sanctuary to thousands of exiles. Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia handed him another five thousand pounds for weaponry. Nasser’s Egypt received him; Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal opened their doors. Zambia would host the principal camps of the ANC’s army. And when the imperial era gave way to the Derg, the patronage did not stop: Mengistu Haile Mariam trained Zimbabwe’s ZANLA guerrillas and the fighters of half a dozen liberation movements a debt Robert Mugabe would repay, controversially, by sheltering Mengistu in Harare for the rest of his days.

This is the unglamorous machinery of African solidarity: passports issued, camps built, instructors seconded, money pressed into the hands of men the West had branded criminals. Much of it remains unwritten. The Ethiopian instructors who trained liberation cadres at camps across the region men such as Asnakew Sisay, whose account The Ethiopian Tribune has documented from his own testimony have largely vanished from the official record their students went on to govern. That forgetting is itself part of the story.

The brother at the border, turned away

Now hold that history against the present.

South Africa today presents the world two faces. Abroad, it wears the robes of moral conscience most visibly at the International Court of Justice, where Pretoria lodged a genocide case over Gaza and won the applause of the Global South. At home, in the same season, African nationals are hunted in the streets. Movements such as Operation Dudula have made a political programme of it: the harassment of asylum seekers, the blockading of clinics, the demand that the foreigner overwhelmingly the African foreigner be expelled. Vigilante ultimatums set deadlines. Authorities issue statements and look away.

The word for this is not xenophobia in the abstract. Its victims are specific: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Congolese the nationals of precisely those states that armed, hid, funded and trained the men who broke apartheid. The grandchildren of the liberation are raising the panga against the grandchildren of the liberators. There is no crueller inversion of Mandela’s passport than a South African mob demanding that an Ethiopian ‘go home’.

The failure is not of the young it is of those who failed to teach them

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of an under-educated, ethnocentric youth who never learned the principles the African Union and the United Nations were built to protect the dignity of the refugee, the rights of the migrant, the idea of an African citizenship larger than the tribe. The temptation should be resisted, because it lets the guilty off lightly.

A generation does not forget its own history by accident. It forgets because those entrusted with transmitting it the governing party that calls itself the heir of Mandela, the ministers, the curriculum-setters, the elders who sat in those exile camps found it expedient to let the memory lapse. It is easier to govern a frightened population that blames the foreigner for joblessness than to answer for three decades of unemployment, inequality and collapsed service delivery. The xenophobe is manufactured, and the factory is political. To call South Africa’s angry youth ignorant is true but insufficient; the deeper charge is against the elites who profited from keeping them so.

None of this is to flatten a difficult reality. South Africa’s pressures are real an economy that cannot absorb its own, a state that struggles to manage migration, communities competing over genuinely scarce resources. Those conditions explain the violence. They do not excuse it, and they certainly do not license a government to perform humanitarianism at The Hague while withholding it in Diepsloot. (A note of editorial honesty: the documented core of this crisis is afrophobia — violence against fellow Africans. Claims of a coordinated campaign against the white minority belong to a separate and contested debate, and the Tribune does not conflate the two.)

Coda

The passport that carried Mandela out of bondage asked a single thing of the world: that its bearer be allowed to pass freely and without hindrance, and be given the assistance of which he stood in need. Ethiopia granted it. Tanzania, Zambia, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and a dozen other African states granted it. They did so for a man their own governments could have handed back for a reward.

South Africa is free today because the continent refused to turn its liberator away at the border. The least it owes to Mandela, to the OAU founded in Addis, to the brothers who sheltered him is to extend that same grace to those who now stand, frightened and unwelcome, at its own gate.

Pass freely and without hindrance. It was never only a sentence on a forged passport. It was the founding promise of a free Africa. South Africa, of all nations, should be the last to break it.

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune · Comment

The Deadline and the Debt

As a vigilante ultimatum falls on 30 June, the country whose liberation drew on Adwa turns on the Africans it shelters — while the world is told the wrong people are dying

By E. Frashie

Tomorrow a deadline expires that no law recognises. The movement that set it — March and March, a vigilante coalition that surfaced in 2025 — has spent months marching through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town demanding that every undocumented foreigner quit South Africa by the thirtieth of June. Pretoria has said plainly that the ultimatum carries no standing in law. Yet the standing it lacks in statute it has seized in the street: foreign-owned shops looted across several provinces, families driven from their homes, and a procession of African governments — Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique — mounting emergency airlifts of their own citizens. The Malawians repatriated on 18 June stepped off into a stadium pressed into service as a reception hall.

A date with no standing in law has acquired all the standing it needs in the street.

For Ethiopians the fear is already intimate, though honesty demands precision about its shape. In April, five Ethiopian men were shot dead in central Johannesburg — three of them inside a McDonald’s, four within forty-eight hours. The temptation is to fold those killings straight into the xenophobia ledger, and some have: the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself an Ethiopian, counted them in a public appeal on 14 June. But South Africa’s foreign ministry disputes the framing, attributing the deaths to organised crime — extortion and trafficking networks — and the Daily Maverick, on investigation, could find no credible thread tying those particular murders to the marches. The distinction is not pedantry. A movement that thrives on conflation cannot be answered with conflation; the Tribune will not avenge five men by misnaming how they died. What is beyond dispute is the climate around the living: in Gauteng, a run of attacks on Ethiopian-owned businesses; in Pretoria, Ethiopians describing days spent indoors, threatening messages, machetes carried in the open, and an embassy slow to answer.

Beneath the spectacle of the mob lies a quieter and more durable cruelty, and it is the one the diaspora’s advocates too rarely name. A child born in South Africa to undocumented parents frequently cannot obtain a birth certificate; without it, the country becomes a trap that springs shut at eighteen. The Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town sets out the mechanism with clinical calm: on reaching majority, such a young person cannot be lawfully employed, cannot open a bank account, cannot marry, cannot enrol at a university, and may be detained or deported to a country never seen. It is no predicament peculiar to Ethiopians — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans and the children of every neighbouring state are caught in the same vice — and it does not spare the long-settled: there are men and women who have lived in South Africa for twenty-five and thirty years, schooled and graduated there, and still cannot lawfully take a job for want of a page. There are, by credible estimate, more than a million undocumented children in the country. The Basic Education Laws Amendment Act of 2024 now forbids schools from turning a child away for want of papers — a genuine advance — but it mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood. The wall at adulthood still stands.

It mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood.

That the wall can be lowered is not a fantasy; South Africa has reached for the ladder before. The Zimbabwean Exemption Permit, born of a 2009 dispensation, has for over a decade let some 178,000 Zimbabweans live and work lawfully where they held no passports to show. But the permit’s present is a parable in itself. In 2021 the government moved to scrap it; the courts found the termination procedurally unlawful and ordered consultation; it survives now only on an extension to May 2027 — and Operation Dudula, one of the movements behind this week’s marches, is in court trying to end it. The precedent exists, and it is under siege from the very forces that have fixed tomorrow’s date. That is the true measure of the continent’s free-movement ambitions: a single African passport and a protocol on free movement sit grandly in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, ratified by almost none of the states that would have to honour them. Solidarity, it turns out, is easy to sign and hard to keep.

The reason the wall stands is not mysterious. South African unemployment sits above thirty per cent and youth unemployment beyond sixty, and a frightened polity has been encouraged to read those figures as a foreign theft rather than a domestic inheritance. There is a grievance with a grain in it — South Africa, unlike Ethiopia, reserves no tier of petty commerce for its own nationals, so the foreigner is visible behind every market stall — but that is a quarrel with the absence of a law, not a licence for the street to write one in blood. The landlessness, the joblessness, the equity gap are the unsettled accounts of apartheid, not the handiwork of a Somali shopkeeper or an Ethiopian trader selling breakfast in the central business district. To charge the structural to the stranger is the oldest sleight in politics, and it is being performed again, at scale, with a date attached.

There is a particular bitterness in the stage on which it plays. It was the victory at Adwa in 1896 — Ethiopian in fact, continental in meaning — that proved European arms could be broken on African ground, and it was the Ethiopianism kindled in its wake that fed the current which would produce South Africa’s own movements of liberation. Nor is the kinship only spiritual. The Ndebele who form a substantial nation within Zimbabwe descend from the Nguni who moved north under Mzilikazi two centuries ago; the Tsonga straddle the Mozambican border as though it were a garden fence; and when South Africa’s liberation fighters needed sanctuary, it was Zambia and Tanzania and Mozambique that housed them, and a continent that funded them. The nation now fixing a date for Africans to leave is a nation whose freedom was, in some measure, an African loan — and it is being asked to repay the loan with expulsion. Empress Taytu — whose severing of the enemy’s water supply at Mekele hastened the reckoning at Adwa — is poorly honoured by men demanding papers in Hillbrow. The solidarity ran one way once. Asked to run the other way now, it is found wanting.

That fracture is no longer a matter of theory. When Bafana Bafana lost their World Cup opener to Mexico this month, much of the continent declined to mourn a fellow African side and chose instead to celebrate, filling the networks with Mexican flags and sombreros and saying plainly that a country which treats African migrants as South Africa now does had spent its claim on African goodwill. The team recovered to reach the knockout rounds for the first time in its history before Canada put it out days ago; but the verdict of that opening night will outlast the scoreline. The debt of Adwa is being called in — and it is the very brothers the marchers would expel who are calling it.

There is a crueller asymmetry still, and this one is global. In the same season that Black Africans are hunted through South African townships, the loudest cry of persecution to reach Washington — and to preoccupy President Trump personally — concerns not them but the country’s white minority. The United States has bent its refugee programme, all but sealed against the world’s war-displaced, into a rescue channel for Afrikaners said to face a “genocide” that South Africa’s government, its own farm-killing statistics, and even its principal Afrikaner lobby groups insist is not occurring; some six thousand have been resettled. No such airlift reached the Malawian who, by a credible account, died after police beat him for failing to produce his papers. Washington files the safer white farmer as a refugee while South Africa files the murdered Black migrant as a statistic of organised crime.

The murdered Black migrant is ‘organised crime.’ The safer white farmer is a refugee. Suffering is legible to power only in certain colours.

The thirtieth of June will pass. The police have promised to meet any violence beyond it with force — itself an admission that they expect some. What will not pass with the date is the trap beneath it: the child turning eighteen into statelessness, the trader weighing whether to raise his shutters, the embassy that answers too late. Ethiopia gave this continent a precedent at Adwa — that the African is not to be presumed upon. It falls now to Ethiopia’s diaspora, and to those who report on it, to insist the precedent still holds, and to refuse, even in grief, the consolation of the easy and the untrue.

E. Frashie for The Ethiopian Tribune

Published 29 June 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune · Horn of Africa

The Strategy of Strangulation

An analyst in Oslo says Ethiopia’s war is not coming soon. The chorus of brink-watchers says the fuse is already lit. The unsettling possibility is that both are describing the same powder.

By E. Frashie · 29 June 2026

The question that hangs over Ethiopia this June — is war coming? — carries a hidden assumption: that war is a future event, an arrival, something that crosses a border or a date on the calendar. Muhammad Omar, a Horn of Africa analyst speaking to Firstpost Africa from Oslo, quietly declined the assumption. Asked directly whether the tension around Tigray would tip into conflict, he gave an answer that flatters no camp. War, he said, is not coming soon. And then, almost in the same breath, he closed the door he had just opened: it is not about will there be war, but a matter of when and how.

That is not a contradiction. It may be the most honest sentence spoken about Ethiopia in weeks — and it deserves to be taken apart slowly, against the record, rather than swallowed whole.

I. The View from Oslo

Omar’s argument rests on a reading of Abiy Ahmed’s method rather than his intentions. The Prime Minister, he contends, has no need of a Tigray offensive because he is already winning by other means. Tigray is strangulated — his word — without cash, without much medicine, without humanitarian aid, its civil servants unpaid, its regional budget withheld, the off-switches for electricity and the internet still resting in federal hands and not yet thrown. Why march on a region you can quietly throttle? Better, on this account, to let the regions wear themselves down: Amhara against Amhara, Oromo against Oromo, and now Tigrayan against Tigrayan, as the Front splinters between Getachew Reda’s ousted moderates and the Debretsion hardliners who seized the regional administration in May.

The conscription drive, in this reading, is not a war drum but a confession. A movement that still commanded genuine loyalty would not need to round up its young men. That the TPLF — which prosecuted a seventeen-year bush war without forced recruitment — now resorts to coercion is, Omar argues, the plainest measure of how far its popular support has fallen. People are leaving rather than enlisting. The mobilisation, he says, is desperation, not strength.

It is not about will there be war. It is just a matter of when and how.

II. The Evidence Beneath the Claim

Here the Tribune’s own standard requires that we test the analyst against the record, and the record is unkind to comfortable readings. Omar’s portrait of a desperate, coercive mobilisation is, if anything, understated. On 5 May the TPLF reasserted control over Tigray and removed the federally backed interim administration. In June it pushed through a mobilisation proclamation — forty-four pages, reaching back retroactively to the first day of the 2020 war — that makes military service a legal obligation and threatens evaders, and journalists who question the drive, with sentences of fifteen and twenty-five years, and in its gravest clauses with death. Human Rights Watch describes door-to-door round-ups that sweep up children and punish the parents of those who flee; the European Union, on 27 June, called the whole exercise a breach of the Pretoria agreement. Opposition figures inside Tigray have been blunter still, calling the law Eritrean in spirit and a device to salvage a legitimacy already in ruins.

So the strangulation thesis holds. But notice what it actually describes. A region without salaries, medicine or fuel; a leadership compelling its youth into uniform on pain of death; families fleeing across the federal line rather than answer the call-up. If this is peace, it is peace only in the narrow, technical sense that the artillery has not yet opened. Strangulation is not the absence of war. It is war conducted by other instruments — and, more dangerous still, it manufactures the very desperation in which someone eventually decides that the open kind is preferable.

III. The Brink-Watchers

Against Omar stands a chorus that has spent the year insisting the moment is now. The Atlantic Council judged the two states to be on the brink of war again. The Horn Review wrote of a drift toward catastrophe in which open hostilities looked increasingly likely — a war the Ethiopian Defence Forces might be forced to fight on three fronts at once, against Eritrea, the TPLF and the Amhara Fano, inside a framework coordinated from Asmara: the alignment Ethiopian officials have taken to calling Tsimdo. Foreign Policy placed an Ethiopia–Eritrea war among the conflicts most likely to erupt in 2026. At a February parade in the capital, soldiers stood beneath a banner declaring, in Amharic, that Ethiopia would not remain landlocked whether its neighbours liked it or not. The Red Sea, Assab, the sixty kilometres between the Ethiopian border and a rusting, half-disused port — Abiy has named maritime access a question of national survival, and survival is not a register in which compromise comes easily.

And yet the soberest voices in this camp arrive, by a different road, somewhere close to Omar. David Shinn, the former American ambassador, doubts a war will actually break out: the costs are ruinous, and even the present talk of it frightens off the foreign investment Abiy cannot do without. Martin Plaut observes that the great northern mobilisation cannot be sustained for long without leaving the Oromo and Amhara fronts dangerously exposed — a clock runs against Addis Ababa, not for it. The risk analysts at RANE judge a full invasion of Eritrea unlikely this year, and locate the real peril not in anyone’s decision to attack but in an escalation that no one chooses: a clash along the border that runs away from both capitals. That is a different thesis from Omar’s, but it shares his essential intuition — that no rational actor wants this war, and that the danger therefore lies elsewhere.

IV. The Web That Would Catch Fire

Omar’s second argument is the one the brink-watchers should weigh most carefully, because it concerns not whether the war begins but what it becomes. A war in Tigray, he insists, cannot remain in Tigray. Eritrea, having backed the Front, will not wait for the fighting to reach Asmara; it will choose to wage it on Tigrayan ground. Sudan’s army, locked in its own ruin, already has a hand in the same theatre. Behind them stand the Gulf patrons — the Emirates aligned with Addis Ababa, the Saudis and Eritreans inclined toward Sudan’s generals — and behind them the Red Sea lanes already disordered by the war on Iran. Then the newest thread: Israel’s movement toward Somaliland, the reported interest in a naval presence at Berbera, and the Houthi promise to treat any such base as a target. The African Union, in Omar’s flat verdict, is almost powerless, absent from every mechanism that might matter.

On the particulars, an editor must be careful where an analyst, speaking live, was loose: the documented external sponsor of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces is the United Arab Emirates, not the actor Omar named in passing, and the distinction matters for any honest map of patronage. But the architecture he sketches is sound, and it is corroborated daily. Washington has now imposed visa restrictions on hardline TPLF figures even as it edges toward a rapprochement with Asmara; the sea-lanes are contested; the patrons are arrayed. The question Omar leaves hanging is the right one: if the shooting starts, which of these sponsors stays on the touchline?

V. When, Not If

What, then, of the question we began with? The honest answer is that Omar and the brink-watchers are not, in the end, disagreeing about the facts. They are disagreeing about the verb. The kindling is not in dispute — a strangled region, a coerced mobilisation, a maritime grievance dressed as survival, a ring of foreign patrons, a continental body that cannot act. The dispute is only whether the fuse is already burning or merely laid in place.

Omar’s wager is that Abiy prefers the slow method, and that the slow method buys time. It is a shrewd reading of a ruler who has, again and again, profited from letting others bleed. But it underrates the logic of its own central metaphor. Strangulation does not relax tension; it concentrates it. A leadership convinced it faces extinction does not pause to weigh foreign investment or the price of oil; it reaches for the only instrument that still promises survival. Omar himself supplied the trapdoor: if any one of them feels there is an existential threat, then it is possible. In a Tigray stripped of salaries and medicine and ordered to the front on pain of death, the existential threat is not a hypothesis to be debated. It is the daily weather.

So perhaps the question is the wrong one. To ask whether war is coming presumes that war is an event still to arrive, and that someone, somewhere, is deciding whether to summon it. The more exacting question — the one that does not let power hide behind tempo — is whether anyone with the means to stop it actually wishes to. On the evidence of this June, the silence is itself an answer.

E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  Comment

The Mourning Cloth and the Down-Payment

On Anchor Media, Abebe Akalu — teacher, author, and a politician now outside every party he once served — arrived dressed in another people’s grief. What he alleges about the Zayse, and what he says about the Prime Minister’s airport, indicts government and opposition in a single breath.

By Leeshan Kuratey  ·  Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

First broadcast by Anchor Media, 25 June 2026.

A Witness in Borrowed Cloth

He arrived dressed for a festival no one was celebrating. When Abebe Akalu sat with Anchor Media’s host — whom he greets as Mesay, in one of his now-regular appearances, and who introduces him as ever as teacher, author and politician — he wore the ceremonial dress of the Zayse, a small community in the Gamo Zone of Ethiopia’s south. He had not come to mark their new year. He had come, he said, to grieve.

“From today,” he told the programme, “I too am Zayse.” The cloth was an act of mourning and of enlistment at once: he asked viewers, at home and in the diaspora, to join what he called a campaign of solidarity with a people most of them, he suspected, had never been asked to think about. It is a deliberately theatrical gesture, and Akalu is a deliberate man. The costume was the argument — that a community can be erased not only by violence but by the plain fact that no one outside it is watching.

What He Alleges in Gamo

The substance beneath the symbolism is grave, and it should be read as what it is: a set of serious allegations, made by one man on a single programme and not yet independently verified. Akalu alleged that since the eleventh of Sené in the Ethiopian calendar — in mid-June — roughly seventeen people had been killed in and around the Zayse area of Gamo Zuria woreda. He described corpses left unattended for as long as a week, citizens still unburied. He alleged that the dead included a youth of sixteen, and that women were raped — among them, he said, a woman of sixty-eight. The perpetrators, in his account, were government-armed forces; he named the southern regional special police.

These are claims that demand corroboration before any newspaper treats them as fact, and the Tribune does not treat them as fact here. What can be said is narrower, and still significant: that a prominent former opposition official went on air to accuse state security forces of mass killing and sexual violence in a small southern community, and that, by his own account, the allegation had barely surfaced in the national press. The host conceded the point, noting that reports at “this level” had not reached the media.

The Zayse are a small Omotic-speaking community of the Gamo highlands and the Rift Valley lowlands — a people with, as Akalu put it, their own calendar, their own elders, their own faith and festivals. In a federation organised around large ethnic blocs, communities of this size are precisely the ones whose names rarely reach the capital’s bulletins. That structural invisibility is part of Akalu’s point, and it is why the cloth mattered to him as much as the casualty figure.

The Vote That Was a Protest

Akalu set the violence against an electoral backdrop that will be familiar to readers of this paper. In the Zayse constituency, he recounted, voters had returned an EZEMA candidate, Abraham Amoshe, to parliament rather than the Prosperity Party’s nominee. But he was unsparing about what that vote did and did not mean. The Zayse, he argued, had not chosen EZEMA out of love for EZEMA; they had reached for the only alternative within reach in order to register their rejection of Prosperity.

It is a remarkable thing to hear from a man who once served as EZEMA’s secretary general. In the same breath he allowed that his former party “is not seen as separate from Prosperity” — the very charge that drove seven of the party’s founders to resign in 2023. Coming from Akalu, the protest-vote thesis is not the opposition flattering itself; it is a former insider conceding that the opposition has become, in the public mind, a vessel for a grievance rather than a destination for a hope. For a paper that has argued the 2026 turnout measured rejection more than endorsement, his testimony is a primary source where there was previously only inference.

“The Problem Is Not the Election”

From the local, Akalu moved to the systemic, and here his argument sharpened into a thesis. “The election is not the problem,” he said. “The problem is the government’s administration; it is the problem of the system.” The crisis, in his telling, did not subside after the vote, as elections are meant to let crises subside; it intensified. He pointed beyond Gamo — to Dera, to central Ethiopia, where, he said, abductions from public buses had become a daily occurrence and roads were periodically closed by conflict.

His framing is worth stating precisely, because it is more than a complaint. An election, he argued, is something the system stages to consolidate itself — to persuade itself it is planting roots and extending its own lifespan — when the questions the public is actually asking are not electoral at all. “The question is a question of justice,” he said: “a question of peace, a question of bread, a question of the economy” — and, most elemental of all, a question of going out in the morning and coming home at night. A country, he said, now shredded “like a child’s tunic, like a torn rag.” It is a rhetoric of fundamentals: not the franchise, but the conditions under which a franchise could mean anything.

A Deposit on the Next Election

The interview’s most pointed passage came at its close, and it was aimed squarely at the Prime Minister. Akalu recounted a ceremony at the new Bishoftu airport project at which, as he tells it, Abiy Ahmed tied the next general election — the country’s eighth — to the completion of that megaproject, in effect asking the public to return him so that the work might be finished. Akalu’s reaction was not anger but something closer to embarrassment. “I was very ashamed,” he said. “I was very saddened.”

His objection repays unpacking, because it is sharper than ordinary grumbling. A government, he reasoned, builds great works as a matter of course; that is simply what holding power is for. He reached, pointedly, for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam — carried, he noted, across the efforts of three prime ministers — as the model of a national undertaking that needs no electoral bribe attached to it. To dangle an unfinished airport as a qebd, a down-payment, on a future mandate was, to Akalu, to mistake the ordinary duty of office for a personal favour the public should be grateful to repay. You do not, in his logic, take a deposit on an election you have not yet won.

What gives the passage its charge is the posture Akalu adopts. He cast himself, only half in jest, as an elder brother to the Prime Minister — a man whose place is to counsel rather than to oppose. He quoted a farmer’s proverb, that a horse you throttle and drag and tie down will go nowhere, as a parable of coercion: a leader can compel motion and still produce no genuine movement, no true consent. His prescription, accordingly, was not the fall of the government but the opening of its ears. Listen, he urged, to the shout the public is shouting. It is the counsel of a critic who would still rather be heard by power than triumph over it.

The Uses and Limits of a Lone Witness

What makes Akalu an unusually useful witness is also what makes him a difficult one. He is a man who has now stood outside every party he served — from the Unity for Democracy and Justice, through the Blue Party, to EZEMA — and who turns his fire, in a single sitting, on the ruling party, on the opposition that was once his own, and on the security institutions of the state. That breadth is his credibility and his complication at once. A critic with no remaining party has no obvious axe of ambition to grind; he also has no organisation to corroborate his claims, no caucus to share the burden of proof.

So the honest reading is twofold. His structural arguments — that the 2026 vote registered protest rather than consent, that the country’s crisis is one of governance rather than electoral procedure, that development cannot be offered as a substitute for safety — are coherent, serious, and consistent with much that is independently observable. His specific allegations from Gamo — the killings, the rapes, the unburied dead — are grave enough that they must be reported as allegations and pursued as questions, not received as findings. The Tribune will treat them as the former until they can be made the latter.

A word, finally, about the record itself. This column rests on the opening and closing portions of a long conversation; the long middle was not available to us, and we have not reconstructed what we could not hear. What the bookends establish is clear enough — a serial dissident, dressed in another community’s grief, indicting a system he says no election can repair, and asking, with the strange tenderness of a man who still hopes to be useful, only that those in power should listen before the path runs out. “Their journey,” he said of Prosperity, “is short, if it continues like this.” Whether that is prophecy or wish, he has at least made it harder to say that no one was watching the Zayse.

Source: Abebe Akalu in conversation with Anchor Media (broadcast 25 June 2026). Quotations are translated from the Amharic. Allegations described are attributed to Mr Akalu and have not been independently verified by the Tribune.

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE · SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM

THE PARTY OF THE ACCUSED

EZEMA was built by men the terror law condemned to death and to life. Its highest serving official now recites the jailer’s catechism. A case, in dates.

Every political party keeps a founding myth, and EZEMA’s is unusually well documented, because the state wrote most of it down in court. The party was assembled in May 2019 out of men it had condemned. Its leader, Professor Berhanu Nega, had been sentenced to death in absentia in 2009 as the head of Ginbot 7, then a proscribed, Asmara-quartered, armed movement. Its deputy leader, Andualem Aragie, was serving a life sentence handed down in 2012 under the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation — arrested, as it happens, days after he stood at a press conference and denounced that very law as a machine for jailing opponents on fabricated charges. The party of the falsely accused. Hold on to the phrase; we will need it at the end.

The Founders’ Rap Sheet

Consider the dock from which EZEMA descends. Andualem Aragie spent more than two years in Kaliti after the 2005 vote, then helped found a party, then in September 2011 told a press conference that the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation was being used to cage critics on invented charges. Five days later he was caged on invented charges. The court that sentenced him to life declared that he and his co-defendants had set out to dismantle the constitution; the marquee evidence, by the accounts of those present, was a reel of nearly inaudible telephone recordings. Alongside him in that trial sat the journalist Eskinder Nega, handed eighteen years. Both refused to sign confessions admitting Ginbot 7 membership. In 2018 they walked out to crowds chanting hero, the death sentences and the life sentences dissolved by the same government that had written them.

This is not a smear retrieved from an enemy’s archive. It is EZEMA’s own pedigree, the thing the party once asked us to honour: that its leaders had suffered the machine, refused its lies, and emerged to build a citizenship politics above the ethnic fray. A noble story. It makes what followed harder to forgive, not easier.

Same Rifle, Different Epilogue

For listen to the Honourable Girma Seifu now, in 2026, instructing the nation on rebellion. A politician, he says, cannot run a respectable party with one hand and clasp armed insurgents with the other; should anyone lift a weapon against a functioning government, it is the state’s absolute duty to arrest and try him; and neither the Fano nor the Shene carries a cause worth the blood. It is a crisp doctrine. It is also, almost to the syllable, the case the EPRDF made against Ginbot 7 — an outfit with a civil face and an armed wing, quartered in Eritrea, led by the man who is today EZEMA’s founder and the Republic’s Minister of Education. By the standard Girma recites so fluently, the founders of his own house were exactly the criminals the state was bound to crush.

And the wheel has not stopped turning. Eskinder Nega — who shared Andualem’s 2012 terrorism dock — now commands an Amhara Fano militia in the field. The doctrine Girma reads out points straight at his own party’s former co-accused. The line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, in this mature jurisprudence, turns out to be exquisitely simple, and it is not drawn at the rifle. Take up arms and lose, you are Shene. Take up arms, lose, withdraw to Eritrea, and return to a Ministry, you are a Professor. Same rifle, different epilogue.

The Hero’s Prison, Refurbished

He has a defence, and it is the most revealing thing he says. The old arrests, he allows, were vendettas — personal scores settled by the regime’s enforcers; he even reaches for the old line that in a tyrannical country the home of a hero is prison, and applies it, touchingly, to Andualem. So he concedes the machine was unjust. Then, without pausing for breath, he assures us that today’s detainees — held through trials that somehow never quite arrive — are merely meeting their constitutional desert. The machine did not change. Only the seat from which it is narrated changed.

The record is unkind to the distinction. Human Rights Watch warned that the authorities had not moved on from the old habit of arresting first and investigating later; seven members of one opposition party were held in defiance of repeated court orders to release them; the Amhara countryside has filled with mass detentions without due process, alongside the drone strikes and summary killings the monitors keep cataloguing. The hero’s prison is fully booked. Only the management has changed, and the new management used to be the tenants.

One man noticed before the rest of us. Andualem Aragie — the life-sentence survivor, EZEMA’s own deputy leader — walked out of the party in 2023, saying there was no longer any justification to remain under its roof, that its alignment and its image had drifted somewhere he could not follow. When the very man who embodied the hero’s prison can no longer share your house, the house is the story.

The Eviction of an Abstraction

The same talent for definition runs through his day job. For years I laboured under the superstition that when the bulldozers arrive at dawn and a family carries its mattress into the road, a person has been displaced. The Honourable has corrected the record: what was displaced was poverty — not the poor. And he has proof on offer: bring me one, he says, one evicted soul with a title deed, and he will seat you on this chair and resign. It is the boldest wager in Addis, and it cannot be lost, because the house defines the stakes.

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

He did not forge the lock alone. In Sheger, the city that rings the capital, the administration justified its demolitions with the same key: only illegal houses fall, the unlicensed, the unregistered, the ones the city never deigned to recognise. The renter, the man who bought his plot from a farmer and raised his walls a decade ago — these were never legal tenants, and so, by the hour the wall comes down, there is no legal person standing before it to be wronged. He invites you to produce a victim from a camp he had already defined out of existence. It is not a wager. It is a tautology with a chair and a microphone.

The Unelected Tribune

Now to the matter of the man’s own seat. Girma was made head of the Investment Commission, then of the Green Bureau; his chairman was made a Minister and, this spring, Chancellor of Addis Ababa University. Not one of these offices was conferred by a vote. The government’s own human-rights record notes drily that the opposition appointees took their posts although they were not elected. From that unelected chair, the Honourable rules that the public has no standing to question EZEMA’s choices — because, he explains, the public did not elect EZEMA. An opposition that campaigned for votes, lost, joined the winner, and then declared its own conduct a private family matter.

There is a tidy coda. In 2021 EZEMA decried the fairness of the process and withdrew from the second round of the very election whose result it now cites as the mandate it serves. You may keep the grievance or keep the cabinet post; the Honourable keeps both, in different sentences. His proudest hour, he tells us, was refusing to sign a Prosperity contribution cheque and having it carried from his office — a decent act, and a full confession, since he explains it was possible only because he is the one in the chair. He has not described a separation of party and state. He has described himself as the single clean window in a house with no walls.

The Mendicant-in-Chief

Observe, finally, the arithmetic of his contempt. The lesser parties, he sneers, are mendicants, outfits that exist only to queue for the half-million birr the state dispenses through the Electoral Board to anyone with a letterhead and a list of names; serious houses like his fund themselves. But the trough he scorns is the one the law itself dug, and the Board pays by a formula that rewards the padding of rolls — so faithfully that in one recent round eleven of twenty-one parties, the ruling Prosperity Party among them, were caught inflating their numbers, some swearing to as many as nine hundred thousand women and disabled members who reside chiefly on paper. The system does not punish the begging; it subsidises the lie. And the largest handout in the whole pantomime was never collected at the Board’s window. It was carried to his office, unelected and unbidden. The mendicant-in-chief is the man delivering the sermon.

The Ledger

So here is the case, in dates. A party born in the dock, its leader under a death sentence, its deputy under a life sentence, both condemned by a terror law they had publicly denounced — and then, within a decade, that same party governing beside the machine, its leader running the schools, its deputy walking away in protest, its highest serving official touring the studios to explain that eviction is mercy, that opposition is a salaried rest, that the unelected may scold the unfunded, and that the surest way to be remembered as a patriot rather than a terrorist is to be on the winning side when the sentence is read.

“The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell.”

The party of the falsely accused has become the notary of the cell. It signs where the state points, and it has trained itself not to read the charge. Pray, by all means, for the lifting of our ignorance. We are nearly there.

Sewasew Teklemariam · The Ethiopian Tribune

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.