አስተያየት · ግልፅ ደብዳቤ

ለእውነተኛው የአማራ ፋኖ ታጋዮች የቀረበ ጥብቅና አስቸኳይ ግልፅ ጥሪ፦ የባርነት ካምፑን ሰብራችሁ ወጥታችሁ የሕዝባችሁን ክብርና ነፃነት አስከብሩ!

ዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ ቀደም ሲል በ«ፅምዶ» ጥምረት ዙሪያ ካቀረቡት ትንታኔ በመቀጠል፣ በጎንደርና በመላው አማራ ለሚገኙ የፋኖ ታጋዮች ከአፋብን አመራርና ከፅምዶ አሰላለፍ ራሳቸውን እንዲለዩ ግልፅ ጥሪ ያቀርባሉ።

ዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ · መስከረም 2019 ዓ.ም.

ከ፦ የታሪካዊና የህልውና ትግሉ ተቆርቋሪ (ዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ)

ለ፦ በጎንደርና በመላው አማራ ምድር መሬት ላይ ላላችሁ እውነተኛ የፋኖ አበጋዞችና ታጋዮች

የተከበራችሁ የአማራ የሕልውናችን አጥርና በተለይም የጎንደር ወታደራዊ አቅም ማዕከል የሆናችሁ ታጋዮች፤

ከዚህ በፊት የ«ፅምዶ»ን አደገኛነት በተለይም «ፅምዶ ፋኖን ለሕወሓት ተራ እግረኛ ቅጥረኛ ወታደር ያደርገዋል፤ ከዚህ አሰላለፍ ወጥታችሁ የድርጅት ነፃነታችሁን አስከብሩ፤ ወይም ይህንን ማድረግ ካልቻላችሁ በአስቸኳይ ከዚህ አፋብን ከሚባል መዋቅር ራሳችሁን በማግለል በራሳችሁ ዕዝና ነፃ ድርጅት ቁሙና መልሳችሁ ያጣችሁትን የሕዝብ ተቀባይነት አግኙ» የሚል ተደጋጋሚ ጥሪ ማድረጋችን ይታወቃል።

ይሁን እንጂ እናንተ አንድም እርምጃ ሳትወስዱ፦

መስከረም 10 ቀን 2019 ዓ.ም. የድርጅታችሁ መሪ ተብዬው ዘመነ ካሴ መቀሌ ላይ ሆኖ የፅምዶን ፀረ-አማራ የትብብር ኃይሎች መግለጫ ሲያነብ በትግራይ ቴሌቪዥን ከእናንተ እኩል ተመልክተናል!

መስከረም 17 ቀን 2019 ዓ.ም. የድርጅታችሁ የፖለቲካ ዘርፍ ኃላፊ ሄኖክ ኪዳኔ በሰጠው የሚዲያ ማብራሪያ፣ በራያ ዘብና በተከዜ ዘብ ዙሪያ በተነሳለት ጥያቄ ላይ፦ «የራያ ዘብም ሆነ የወልቃይት ዘብ ከሥርዓቱ ጋር ትጥቅ ይፈታል፤ የሚያስጠይቀው ወንጀል ካለ በወንጀል ይጠየቃል» ብሎ የማንነታቸውን፣ የርስታቸውንና የሕልውናቸውን አስጠባቂ የአማራ የቁርጥ ቀን ልጆችን ትጥቅ አስፈትቶ በወንጀል ተጠያቂ ለማድረግ የተዘጋጁ መሆኑን በግልጽ ተናግሯል!

የዚህ ንግግርና የፖለቲካ አቅጣጫ ዋና ትርጉም

የሄኖክ ኪዳኔ ንግግር ዋና ዓላማ በግልጽ እንደወረደ ሲተረጎም፦ ሕወሓት በአማራ ሕዝብ ላይ በተለይም በሸዋ፣ በጎንደር (ወልቃይት/ጠገዴ/ጠለምት) እና በቤተ-አማራ ወሎ (ራያ) ሕዝብ ላይ የፈጸመውን የዘር ማጥፋት ወንጀል ለማጠብና ከወንጀሉ ነፃ አድርጎ፣ የወልቃይትና የራያን አማራ ሕዝብ ትጥቅ አስፈትቶ ለጠላት አሳልፎ ለመስጠት የተዘጋጀ የፖለቲካ ወጥመድ ነው! ይህም በተደጋጋሚ ማስጠንቀቂያ የተሰጠበት አሁን ግን በይፋ የተገለጠ አስነዋሪ ሴራ መሆኑን መላው ሕዝብ ተገንዝቦታል።

ወልቃይት፣ ጠገዴ፣ ጠለምትና ራያ የይስሙላ የወሰን ውዝግብ ሳይሆኑ የአማራ ሕዝብ፣ የአማራ ህልውናና የጎንደርና የወሎ ቤተ-አማራ የፖለቲካና የወታደራዊ አቅም ማዕከላዊ ደም ስሮች ናቸው!

ጎንደር የታሪክ፣ የጀግንነትና የነፃነት አምባ እንጂ የጠላት ማስፈጸሚያና የባርነት ካምፕ ሆና አታውቅም!

ጎንደር የታሪክ፣ የጀግንነትና የነፃነት አምባ እንጂ የጠላት ማስፈጸሚያና የባርነት ካምፕ ሆና አታውቅም! ታዲያ እናንተ የዚህ ታሪካዊ ውርደትና የወልቃይት/ራያ ርስት አሳልፎ ለመስጠት የሴራ እቅድ አካል ሆናችሁ በዝምታ የምትቀጥሉት እስከመቼ ነው?

የሚቆረቆርላችሁን ማህበረሰብ ምክር ጆሮ ዳባ ልበስ ብላችሁ እንዳሳለፋችሁ ይታወቃል። ቢያንስ ግን አሁን የራሳችሁ የምትሏቸው መሪዎቻችሁ ከእናንተ ዓላማና የትግል ግብ ውጭ እየተንቀሳቀሱ መሆኑን በተግባር እያያችሁ ነው! የሊሐቃኑን ምክር ለመስማት ቢከብዳችሁ እንኳ ያላችሁበትን ሁኔታ አይቶ የሚንቃችሁ የጠላት ስብስብ እንዳለ ካወቃችሁ ሊያነቃችሁ ይገባል።

ትብብር በሚል የዳቦ ስም የፅምዶ የባርነት ካምፕ ውስጥ ተደፍቃችሁ እስከመቼ ተራ ቅጥረኛ የሕወሓት ወታደር ሆናችሁ ታደፍጣላችሁ?

እስከመቼ ከወጣችሁበት የትግል ዓላማ፣ ከጎንደር የጀግንነት ሌጋሲና ከራያና ከወልቃይት የአማራነት ጥያቄ ጋር ተጣልታችሁ ታዘግማላችሁ?

እስከመቼ ደጀን ከሆናችሁ ማህበረሰብ ጋር ተራርቃችሁ ትዘልቃላችሁ?

ይህ አፋብን የሚባል ፀረ-አማራ ስብስብ ለተከዜ ዘብ የማይራራና ትጥቅ አስፈታለሁ እያለ ሲፎክር ማን ማለት እንደሆነ ልብ ማለት ይገባል፣ እናንተም በተከዜ ዘብ መነጸር የምትታዩ የአማራ ዘቦች ናችሁ! ስለዚህ እንደ ሄኖክ ኪዳኔ አገላለጽ በፀረ-ሕወሓት ትግል ላይ በመሳተፋችሁ ትጥቅ ትፈታላችሁ፣ ብሎም የወንጀል ተጠያቂ ትሆናላችሁ ማለት ነው! ምክንያቱም አብዛኞቻችሁ የምትታወቁት ሕዝባችሁን ለመታደግ በፀረ-ፋሽስት ሕወሓት ትግል ላይ በመሰለፋችሁ ነው። ስለሆነም የአፋብን የትግል መስመር ፀረ-አማራ ብሎም የሕወሓት የሴራ ወጥመድ አስፈጻሚ መሆኑን በግልጽ ካያችሁ፣ ያላችሁበት የትግል ማዕቀፍ የጠላቶቻችሁ ወጥመድ መሆኑን ፍንትው አድርጎ ያሳያል።

ጥሪያችን

እውነታውን ተቀበሉ! የከፈላችሁትን ከባድ መስዕዋትና የመጣችሁበትን የትግል መስመር አስቡ! የወጣችሁለትን ታሪካዊ የትግል መስመር መሳቱን በድጋሚ መርምሩ፣ ከሐሰት ፕሮፕጋንዳ ራሳችሁን በማራቅ በዙሪያችሁ ያለውን የሕዝብ ትርታ አድምጡ! ተከዜ ዘብ በሕወሓት የሚመጣውን አውዳሚ ጦርነት ገድቦ የያዘ ለአማራ ሕዝብ ብሎም ለናንተ ቁጥር አንድ ጠባቂያችሁ ነው! ስለሆነም ከደጀኑና ከጠባቂው ማህበረሰባችሁ ጋር ተጣልታችሁ የጠላቶቻችሁን የፖለቲካ ቁማር መጫወቻ ካርድ ከመሆን በጊዜ እንድትቆጠቡ እና በጎንደር ጠቅላይ ግዛት ዕዝ ሐምሌ 5 ቀን 2018 ዓ.ም. ያወጣችሁትን መግለጫ መሠረት በማድረግ ግልጽ አማራዊ አቋማችሁን እንድታስፈጽሙ በጥብቅ እናሳስባለን! ከፋሽስት ወራሪ ሕወሓት ነፃ የሆኑ የአማራ ርስቶች በአማራነት በደምና በአጥንት የተገነባ የነፃነት ምድሮች እንጂ በፅምዶ ደላሎች ስምምነት የሚደራደሩበት የንግድ እቃ አይደሉም!

የአማራ ሕልውና፣ የፍትሕና የርስት ጥያቄ በፀረ-አማራና በፀረ-ኢትዮጵያ ደላሎች ቁማር አይሸጥም! ነፃነትን የሚያፃና ታጋይ ሁኑ!!

ድል ለአማራ ሕዝብ!

ፍትሕ፣ እኩልነትና ነፃነት ለኢትዮጵያ ሕዝብ!

ዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ

የአዘጋጁ ማስታወሻ፦ ይህ ግልፅ ደብዳቤ በአስተያየት ዓምድ ስር የቀረበ ነው። በደብዳቤው የተገለጹት አቋሞችና የቀረቡት መረጃዎች ሙሉ ኃላፊነት የጸሐፊዋ ብቻ ሲሆን የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቡንን አቋም አይወክሉም። በደብዳቤው የተጠቀሱ ወገኖች ምላሽ ለመስጠት ቢፈልጉ ዓምዳችን ክፍት ነው።

SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM · COMMENTARY

Seven Brothers in Arms, One Blackout, and a Press Told Where Not to Look

A week after Ethiopia’s armed opposition announced its intention to topple Abiy Ahmed, the world’s newsrooms have filed story after story. At home, the regulator has filed a ban.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

26 September 2026 · Meskerem 16, 2019 E.C. · The Ethiopian Tribune

It was a Sunday-night broadcast, as these things so often are. On 20 September, Zemene Kassie of the Amhara Fano National Movement — whose fighters spent 2020 to 2022 marching beside the federal army against Tigray — sat before the cameras of Tigrai TV and read a joint statement on behalf of seven armed movements. They declared that they bore “the historic responsibility of overthrowing this regime”. They called themselves the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival. The name is long; the ambition is short: remove the Prime Minister and install a transitional government.

Within three days, Tigrayan forces had taken the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire. Within four, flights to Lalibela were suspended as fighting reached the approaches to the rock-hewn churches. By Friday, the telephones of Tigray had fallen silent. Ethiopia, which spent nearly four years assuring everyone that the Pretoria Agreement had closed the book, found the book reopened — by the world’s press, if not by its own.

The world has noticed

Consider the ledger. Reuters broke the alliance story on 21 September and has since filed on the airport seizures, on Lalibela, on the overnight detention of veteran Tigrayan commanders, and on the blackout. That copy has travelled by syndication from US News in America to CNBC Africa, the Sowetan in Johannesburg, Business Recorder in Karachi and ThePrint in Delhi. Al Jazeera has published at least seven pieces in six days, from the founding statement to a question-and-answer explainer and an opinion column warning that this front may go the way of 2021’s short-lived nine-group coalition. AFP’s reporting from Afar, sourced from humanitarian workers on the ground, has run in Euronews, the Oman Observer and the Taipei Times.

The Associated Press produced a five-point explainer. CNN asked what had changed. NPR warned of a return to full-scale war. DW declared the battle lines redrawn. Foreign Policy led its daily World Brief with Ethiopia. The BBC reported panic-buying in Mekelle and noted that the region’s cash machines have not worked for months. Asharq Al-Awsat, Türkiye Today, Anadolu, Kenya’s KBC and Azerbaijan’s AnewZ all carried the story to their own audiences.

Diplomacy followed the headlines. The UN Secretary-General pronounced himself gravely concerned, named the three captured airports, and warned against a broader and more devastating conflict. The African Union Commission chairperson urged immediate de-escalation and direct talks, and dispatched Olusegun Obasanjo once more. The EU insisted differences be settled by dialogue. London condemned attacks by Tigrayan forces in Afar and southern Tigray, rejected the alliance’s stated aim of removing the federal government, and redrew its travel map. Washington’s ambassador said he was disappointed in the TPLF leadership, and the US Embassy barred its own staff from Tigray and Afar.

By this column’s count — a snapshot, not a census — at least twenty international outlets on four continents have reported the crisis in a single week. The appendix below lists them.

The world is reading about Ethiopia’s war. Ethiopians, increasingly, are reading about it in the world’s newspapers.

Darkness — and who switched it off

On the night of 24 September, telecommunications across Tigray went down. NetBlocks recorded a sub-national shutdown; Ethio Telecom services were cut entirely, while Safaricom’s smaller network limped on. It would be satisfying — and, given this government’s record in 2020–22, entirely plausible — to lay the blackout at Arat Kilo’s door. The evidence of this week does not allow it. Reuters, citing four people with knowledge of the matter including a diplomat, reports that it was the TPLF that ordered both operators to cut service, possibly to deny federal drones the mobile network. NetBlocks itself says its data cannot establish who pulled the plug. Neither the Prime Minister’s office nor the operators have commented.

Sewasew records the correction because this publication does not trade in convenient villains. But let no one mistake the point. People who lived through two years of severed lines, blocked cash and famine-like conditions are once again in the dark — and, with cash machines already dead, now cut off from the digital payments that had replaced them. A blackout ordered by self-declared liberators is exactly as dark as one ordered by the state.

Nor is the dark confined to phone masts. Reuters reports that Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede, the former commander of Tigrayan forces and former head of the interim administration, was detained overnight along with three other veteran officers who had voiced doubts about a return to war. An Alliance for Survival, it seems, does not extend survival to dissent within its own ranks.

Meanwhile, at home

The day after the announcement, the Ethiopian Media Authority suspended Tigray Television indefinitely, citing incitement and threats to national security. It went further: every digital, broadcast and print outlet in the country was forbidden to use the channel as a source or to reproduce its content, on pain of legal and administrative measures. Pause on that. The founding statement of the most consequential armed coalition in Ethiopia since 2021 was broadcast on that channel. An Ethiopian journalist who wishes to quote it from its source now does so at personal risk.

This did not arrive from nowhere. In February the same Authority revoked the registration of Addis Standard; in April its managing editor, Million Beyene, was taken from the newsroom and held incommunicado for nearly two weeks; in August its editor-in-chief, Yonas Kedir, was detained and beaten and its offices raided. Wazema Radio lost its licence. All nine of DW’s Ethiopian correspondents were suspended last October. Three Reuters journalists were refused accreditation. An AFP reporter was stopped from flying to Tigray in February. Four journalists who covered the Amhara conflict have spent close to three years in detention and, according to CPJ, could face life imprisonment or death. Reporters Without Borders places Ethiopia 148th of 180.

When readers ask why Ethiopian media show no interest in this war, Sewasew must issue a correction. Interest is not the problem. Permission is.

In fairness, the domestic record is not blank, and to say so would insult those still working. The Reporter covered the suspension of flights to Tigray and the Tigray TV ban. Addis Standard, publishing while it contests its revocation in court, reported the alliance’s formation. Ethiopia Observer carried the UN statement. Wazema reports by newsletter. Tigrayan outlets such as Kulu Media and UMD Media are documenting the blackout with commendable care about what they cannot verify. But these are narrowing spaces — increasingly online, increasingly in exile, and read by a fraction of the population.

The broadcast mainstream, where most Ethiopians actually get their news, belongs to the state and its allies. Media monitors documented earlier this year how EBC, Fana and their stablemates had settled on a single frame for Tigray: the TPLF as the sole spoiler of peace, the government as patient and dialogue-minded. The army’s claim this week of 272 Tigrayan fighters killed in Amhara arrives in that ecosystem unverified — and no domestic reporter is at liberty to go and check.

The juxtapositions write themselves. On the day the alliance was announced, the state news agency’s English service offered readers Getachew Reda’s counsel that dialogue was the only way to prevent the disintegration of — Sudan. On 24 September, as fighting spread through Afar, the Prime Minister was in Djibouti launching a petroleum infrastructure project; the President was addressing the UN General Assembly in New York. The government will say, fairly, that it has its own National Dialogue. Sewasew will observe that a dialogue is hard to hold when one side of the conversation has been taken off air.

Dialogue, it appears, is an export commodity: prescribed for Khartoum, rationed in Mekelle.

A word of caution about the brothers

Sewasew is nobody’s cheerleader, and readers deserve the other half of the ledger. This is an alliance of former enemies. Fano and the TPLF both claim Western Tigray, which Amhara forces have administered since the last war. At least one listed member, the ONLF, has reportedly denied joining. The federal government alleges Eritrean financing; Asmara denies it; the founding statement does not mention Eritrea at all. And history is not encouraging: the nine-group front proclaimed in November 2021 lost its Afar member within two months and its Benishangul member within a year, before the TPLF signed at Pretoria alone. Analysts at the International Crisis Group say it is not yet clear the groups can fight together at all.

What is clear is the price of failure. The last war cost an estimated 600,000 lives. Every party now reaching for the rifle — in Addis Ababa, in Mekelle, in the Amhara highlands and the Oromia forests — knows that number. None of them will be among the civilians who pay it.

Following the smoke

Tonight the Demera will be lit across the country, and tomorrow is Meskel. We tell our children that Empress Eleni found the True Cross by following the smoke. This week the world followed the smoke — from Mekelle’s airport to the hills above Lalibela — and reported what it found. Ethiopia’s own newsrooms have been told to watch the bonfire in the square and nothing beyond it.

እንኳን ለመስቀል በዓል በሰላም አደረሳችሁ።

May you reach the Feast of the Cross in peace. This year, the words “in peace” are doing a great deal of work.

Appendix · Media Monitor, 20–26 September 2026

A non-exhaustive snapshot of international coverage compiled by the Tribune desk. Syndicated wire copy is grouped under the originating agency. Dates are publication dates as shown by each outlet.

Domestic and diaspora coverage noted this week includes The Reporter, Addis Standard, Ethiopia Observer, Wazema, Kulu Media, UMD Media and The Habesha. Coverage by state broadcasters was not independently audited for this appendix.

ANALYSIS

Two Fronts, One Army

As Abiy Ahmed forms his new government, he faces a rebel alliance in the field, rumours of disloyalty in his own barracks, and a national dialogue report that offers another way out. What he does to guard against one threat may weaken his defences against the other.

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 September 2026

When the House of Peoples’ Representatives opens its new term in the coming weeks, Abiy Ahmed will do what every Ethiopian prime minister does at the start of a mandate: name a government. The last time he did so, in October 2021, after an election held in the middle of a war, he used the occasion to place twenty institutions under his own office, among them the National Intelligence and Security Service and the Information Network Security Agency. The cabinet he names this time will tell us more than any parliamentary speech about how he reads the danger now facing him. That danger has two faces, and they point in opposite directions.

The threat in the open

Late on Sunday 20 September, Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement, read a founding statement on the TPLF-controlled Tigrai TV. It announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, a coalition of seven organisations: the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (Ugugumo), the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement and the Gumuz People’s Democratic Movement. Its declared purpose is to remove what it calls the Prosperity Party’s personalist and dictatorial regime and to install an inclusive transitional government.

There is no doubt about the coalition’s reach. Its members claim constituencies in six of the country’s twelve regional states, and in Amhara and Oromia they are already at war with the state. Its cohesion is much less certain. Fano fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF in 2020–22, and Amhara and Tigray still both claim Western Tigray. Within a day of the announcement, OLA figures were describing their participation as a procedural consensus, not submission to a unified military command. The founding text commits members to resolve their differences according to the “freely expressed will” of their peoples. Applied to Wolkait, that formula would divide the alliance’s two largest partners.

Addis Ababa’s first responses were predictable. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, told Reuters that the groups had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing. Asmara has denied such accusations before, and no evidence has been published. On Monday the Ethiopian Media Authority prohibited news outlets from using Tigrai TV as a source.

The threat in the barracks

The second threat is harder to see. For some time, claims have circulated on social media that elements of the officer corps are prepared to move against the Prime Minister. Some of these claims are attributed to the exiled Oromo politician Jawar Mohammed. The Tribune has not been able to verify them, and nothing in this analysis depends on their being true. Rumours of disloyalty in the barracks shape a ruler’s behaviour whether or not they are accurate. In a system as personalised as Abiy’s, the perception of a threat is a threat in its own right.

The rumours also carry a politics of their own. In July, according to a ZeHabesha summary of a TikTok discussion, Jawar warned against coalitions formed only to topple Abiy without first agreeing on what would replace him. A transition managed by the army and a victory by an armed alliance are very different outcomes. Those who talk up the first may be positioning themselves against the second.

Nor is the idea alien to Ethiopian history. The Imperial Bodyguard moved against Haile Selassie in 1960. The Derg dismantled the monarchy from within the armed forces in 1974. Senior generals tried to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1989. And in June 2019, on the night of the killings in Bahir Dar, the Chief of the General Staff, Se’are Mekonnen, was shot dead in Addis Ababa. Every Ethiopian ruler has had reason to watch his own officers.

“Every lock he fits against his generals is a weight he hangs on his soldiers.”

The coup-proofing dilemma

Political scientists call it coup-proofing. A ruler rotates his commanders, divides the chain of command, promotes loyalists over the able, and builds parallel forces that answer to him alone. Each measure makes a coup harder, and each makes the army worse at fighting. Abiy must now do both at once: field an army strong enough to hold Amhara, Oromia and the Tigray frontier, while making sure that no part of it is strong enough, or united enough, to turn on him.

The precedent he will least want to hear is 1989. After the failed coup, Mengistu purged his senior officer corps and later had a number of its generals executed. The army that remained was loyal, and it was hollow. Within two years it collapsed before the EPRDF. The lesson is not that Abiy faces the same fate. It is that a regime which answers an open threat and a hidden one with the same instrument, a more tightly controlled army, can win the second contest and lose the first.

What the new government is likely to do

The first and most visible move will be at the top of the security state. Expect changes at the Ministry of Defence and in the general staff, and possibly further agencies brought under the Prime Minister’s office on the 2021 model. Expect, too, another round of promotions. Abiy has used mass promotion before to widen the pool of officers who owe their rank to him personally, and a larger pool of generals is a smaller risk from any one of them.

The second will be legal. The ban on Tigrai TV looks like an opening move, not a final one. The government has declared states of emergency before, nationally in November 2021 and in Amhara in August 2023, and it has designated armed movements as terrorist organisations, including the TPLF in 2021 before the designation was lifted after Pretoria. A designation of the alliance as a whole would make contact with any of its members a crime. That would reach far beyond the fighters, to intermediaries, diaspora organisers and journalists.

The third will be an effort to split the alliance. Its seams are visible, and Addis Ababa knows where they are. The ONLF can be reminded of its 2018 agreement, and the smaller Afar and Benishangul movements can be courted locally with offers of posts and budgets. Tigray’s own divisions give the government room to manoeuvre, as does the existence of Fano factions outside the AFNM. With the OLA, the government has already shown in its separate 2024 agreement with a breakaway commander that it prefers to peel off factions rather than negotiate with movements. Every member that signs a separate peace weakens the claim that the alliance speaks for Ethiopia’s peoples.

The fourth will be to externalise the threat. By naming Eritrea as the alliance’s paymaster, Addis Ababa converts a domestic insurgency into foreign aggression. That is useful for rallying nationalist opinion, and useful for binding an uneasy army to a common enemy. It is also dangerous. Combined with the government’s long-running rhetoric about access to the Red Sea, it builds a momentum towards interstate war that may prove easier to start than to stop.

The fifth will be aimed at those who spread the rumours. If talk of disloyal commanders worries the palace, it will act against the people spreading it. Jawar Mohammed was charged once before, in 2020. Renewed proceedings against him in absentia, pressure on Oromo Federalist Congress figures still inside the country, and action against journalists who amplify the claims are all plausible.

Finally, there will be the language of dialogue. The government will continue to present the National Dialogue as the peaceful route that the alliance has refused. It may repeat the gesture of 2021, when three opposition figures were brought into the cabinet, while keeping every security portfolio in trusted hands. Whether the dialogue amounts to more than language depends on what the new government does with the Commission’s report.

The Commission’s offer

The new government will not start from a blank page. The National Dialogue Commission was due to hand its report to the outgoing parliament before 22 September. It followed a 38-day conference in Addis Ababa at which more than 4,000 delegates debated over 400 agenda items under eight pillars: nation-building; government structure and electoral systems; federal cities; religious affairs; institution-building; social and economic questions; corruption and good governance; and peace-building. The full text has not yet been published, and the Commission insists that its recommendations are advisory, not binding. But the proposals reported to have emerged from it add up to the most coherent alternative yet placed before Abiy to the path of coercion described above.

The first is electoral: a move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation. Under the present system the Prosperity Party took 438 of the 486 seats decided in June. Under a proportional system, parties that now win nothing would win something, and the arithmetic of armed struggle would change. A movement that cannot win a constituency outright has little reason to lay down its arms for an election. A movement guaranteed a share of seats has more. It is also a reform that peaceful opposition parties and civic movements have pressed for years. Adopting it would reward those who chose the ballot over the gun, and show that non-violent pressure can change the rules.

The second is constitutional. Amending the 1995 constitution is the demand that unites the government’s critics and divides them at the same time. Amhara nationalists want to revise the ethnic federal settlement and Article 39, while Oromo, Somali and Tigrayan movements regard that same article as the guarantee of their existence. Like proportional representation, constitutional reform belongs to the vocabulary of peaceful protest. It was the largely non-violent demonstrations of 2015–18, the movement that brought Abiy to power, that first put the 1995 settlement openly in question. Opening the constitution through dialogue would answer the protesters in the streets, not only the fighters in the field. The alliance has avoided the question, and so, carefully, has the government. It should also be said plainly that a constitutional door opened in the name of dialogue can be walked through in either direction. Before the election, critics alleged that Abiy wanted to amend the constitution to create a presidential system. A reform that entrenched the executive would serve none of the Commission’s purposes.

The third concerns cities: metropolitan governments for the country’s major urban centres. This goes to the heart of the contest over Addis Ababa, in which Oromo nationalists assert a special constitutional interest, and over the control of fast-growing regional towns. Giving cities their own governance, instead of treating them as trophies of whichever ethnic region surrounds them, could take one of the most combustible questions off the battlefield. It would also be fiercely resisted by those who regard Oromia’s claim to the capital as settled and non-negotiable.

The fourth speaks most directly to the events of this week: that the armed movements now gathered in the Alliance for Survival be invited into talks within the framework of the Pretoria agreement. Pretoria was a bilateral deal between the federal government and the TPLF. Fano was not at the table and has never forgiven its exclusion. Extending that architecture to Amhara, Oromia and the other regions would turn a two-party ceasefire into something closer to a national settlement. The Commission has itself argued that armed groups belong in the dialogue. The question is whether a government that has just called the alliance an Eritrean project can bring itself to negotiate with it.

The fifth looks outward: negotiations with Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Egypt. Each relationship is a potential front. With Sudan there is the al-Fashaga border; with Mogadishu, Somaliland and sea access; with Asmara, an unfinished peace; with Cairo, the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Abiy told the BRICS summit this month that Ethiopia would seek sea access only through negotiation. If he means it, regional diplomacy is also domestic security, because a neighbour at peace with Addis Ababa has less reason to finance its enemies. The remaining pillars, from religious affairs and institution-building to corruption and the economy, lack the drama of these five but would matter as much to whether any settlement lasted.

“The best coup-proofing is a settlement that leaves the generals nothing to rescue the country from.”

This is where the Commission’s offer meets the barracks. Coups in Ethiopia have always been presented as rescues: of the nation from a failing emperor, of the revolution from a failing Derg. A government that opened talks with its armed opponents, reformed the electoral system and made peace with its neighbours would leave any ambitious officer without a story to tell. In effect, the Commission has handed Abiy a political alternative to coup-proofing. It is not the only option on his desk. The Reporter reported last week that Washington has lifted the arms embargo it imposed during the Tigray war, which makes the military route cheaper. Whether he takes up the report or shelves it will be decided in the same weeks as his cabinet.

The Mengistu question

Mengistu Haile Mariam hangs over this moment in two ways, and either could describe what Abiy does next. The first Mengistu went to any length in the name of Ethiopian unity. From the Derg’s early slogan, Ityopia Tikdem, “Ethiopia First”, to national call-ups, a war economy and the purge of his own officers, he justified everything as the defence of an indivisible state. A leader convinced that he alone stands between the country and disintegration can persuade himself that almost any measure is warranted. The alliance, by warning that Ethiopia is at risk of breaking apart, has handed him that argument.

The second Mengistu is the one who left. In May 1991, with his army broken and the EPRDF closing on the capital, he flew to Zimbabwe, and his departure hastened the end of the war. Most Ethiopians remember it as flight, not sacrifice, and his motives were his own. But the precedent stands: an Ethiopian ruler concluded that the state would outlast him only if he went. Abiy, too, could decide that national unity is better served by his leaving than by his staying. Such an exit could be negotiated through the very transitional process that the alliance demands and the Commission’s report points towards, and it could be made on his own terms instead of an enemy’s.

“The first path, taken too far, ends on the second — on worse terms.”

This newspaper does not predict which course he will choose, and there is no public sign that he contemplates the second. But the two paths share a premise: that the unity of Ethiopia outranks any individual, including the one in the palace. They differ in who pays. On the first, the price falls on soldiers and civilians; on the second, on one man’s ambition. The lesson of 1991 is that a ruler who follows the first path too far may find himself left with only the second, and on far worse terms than he could have had.

The hidden price

Each of these measures has a cost that will not appear in a communiqué. Emergency powers mean mass detentions, and mass detentions in Ethiopia have tended to fall along ethnic lines. Designation and media bans narrow the space for the reporting that might tell the public what is happening in its name. The drone strikes already recorded by conflict monitors in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia fall on communities, not only on combatants. And an army reorganised for loyalty is an army less able to protect civilians from anyone at all.

What to watch

The signs will come quickly. Watch who is named Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff, and whether more of the security apparatus moves under the Prime Minister’s office. Watch for a state-of-emergency proclamation and for any terrorist designation of the alliance. Watch for unexplained retirements, transfers or arrests of senior officers. Watch for a separate deal with any single member of the alliance. And watch the temperature of Addis Ababa’s language towards Asmara. Above all, watch whether the Commission’s report is published in full, and whether the new government’s first programme adopts any of it or merely thanks the Commission for its work.

In July, Abiy told lawmakers that even if others joined the TPLF, the government did not have “an iota of fear” for Ethiopia’s sovereignty. A government that fears nothing has no need to fortify its own barracks. The cabinet he now presents, and what he does with the report on his desk, will show which of his two fronts he fears more, and whether, in guarding against one, he leaves the other open.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.

Editorial front matter · The Ethiopian Tribune

Low Expectations — The Overlooked Discrimination of Our Time

Girma Berhanu, Professor · Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg

Synopsis

Professor Girma Berhanu argues that low expectations constitute an overlooked form of discrimination — one that operates alongside the more familiar categories of gender, ethnicity, religion, language and disability, yet attracts far less scrutiny. Drawing on the Pygmalion and Golem effects, he shows how expectation shapes not only how people perform but what opportunities they are offered and what image they form of themselves. What makes the mechanism so insidious, he contends, is its invisibility: it works not through open prejudice but through small, often well-meant remarks — “perhaps you should be more realistic” — that accumulate into a message about who belongs where.

The essay moves outward through widening circles. It begins in the personal, with the author’s childhood and his mother’s insistence, tied to the sign of the kirtas, that he was destined to succeed. It then examines the family, the classroom and the debate over Swedish as a second language, before tracing the same logic to its largest scale — the international arena, where dominant powers portray emerging nations as dependent or destined to fail. Throughout, the warning is the self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations that manufacture the very failure they predict, then read that failure back as proof. Berhanu’s prescription is not lowered standards but high expectations matched by genuine support — belief that, as he puts it, sometimes must precede a person’s belief in themselves.

Who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

Editor’s Foreword

We are accustomed to naming discrimination by its familiar categories. Professor Girma Berhanu asks us to attend to one that rarely announces itself and is seldom counted at all: the quiet verdict of low expectation. His argument is that a great deal of what constrains a life is delivered not through hostility but through solicitude — the gentle suggestion that something isn’t really for you — and that these small signals, repeated, harden into walls.

What recommends this essay to the Tribune is not only its care as a piece of educational thought, but the arc it traces. Berhanu begins in the most intimate register — a mother in Ethiopia who read a sign upon her son’s birth and refused, ever after, to let him think small of himself — and follows the same mechanism upward, through households and schoolrooms, until it arrives at the conduct of nations. When powerful states cast African and other emerging countries as incapable of governing, developing or succeeding on their own terms, they are not merely trading in rhetoric. They are practising, on a global scale, the same discipline of diminished expectation that a teacher visits on a child. For a publication concerned with the agency and standing of the Horn of Africa in the world, that continuity is the essay’s real gift.

Berhanu writes as a scholar at Gothenburg and returns to us, as he has before, with the instincts of both. Readers will find the piece personal where argument alone would not persuade, and unsparing where sentiment might have softened. It repays reading not as a lament but as a question put to all of us — parents, teachers, editors, states: who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

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Low Expectations — The Overlooked Discrimination of Our Time

Girma Berhanu, Professor

Low expectations may be understood as a subtle yet pervasive form of psychological and organisational harm that can erode human motivation, dignity, agency, and well-being. This phenomenon can manifest across educational institutions, workplaces, households, and the public sector, where persistently low expectations may contribute to diminished engagement, reduced aspirations, and the weakening of both individual and collective potential. Importantly, low expectations operate not only at the level of individuals and groups, but can also be extended to nations and national populations, including countries that are characterised as developing or underdeveloped. At broader social, economic, and political levels, such expectations may shape how societies are perceived, how their capacities are evaluated, and what opportunities and resources are made available to them.

We often talk about discrimination in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion, language, or disability. At the same time, there is another mechanism that receives far less attention, despite the profound consequences it can have for people’s life chances: low expectations.

Research has long shown that our expectations can influence people’s performance, motivation, and development. The Pygmalion effect describes how positive and high expectations can contribute to improved performance, while the Golem effect points to how low expectations can constrain people’s opportunities to develop and reach their potential. Expectations are, of course, not the only factors behind success or failure, but they can influence what opportunities people are given, what demands are placed upon them, and the perceptions they develop of themselves.

Despite this knowledge, society continues to signal to some people that they are not expected to succeed. Low expectations rarely emerge in a vacuum. They can interact with class, ethnicity, gender, language, and disability, thereby reinforcing existing inequalities. What makes low expectations particularly problematic is that they are often difficult to detect. They are not always expressed through explicit prejudice or intentional discrimination, but through small everyday actions, comments, and decisions.

When Someone Believes in You

To make this argument more personal, I would like to share an experience from my own childhood.

My mother was a great source of support throughout my schooling. In the beginning, I struggled and was not particularly successful at school. I was sometimes hit by a teacher and teased by students who performed better than I did. It hurt, both psychologically and physically. During those years, I had very little objective reason to believe that I would do particularly well in school.

But my mother saw something different.

She and my grandmother used to tell me that I had been born with part of the amniotic membrane still covering my head — what is called kirtas in Amharic and is sometimes referred to in Swedish as a segerhuva. In our cultural imagination, this was regarded as a special sign, almost a gift from God, indicating that the child was chosen and would succeed in life.

Whenever I encountered difficulties, my mother would say: “You are chosen. The kirtas is a sign that you will succeed.”

It may sound like a simple story, perhaps even superstition. But for me, it acquired a deeper meaning. I often felt weak — both physically and intellectually — yet my mother continued to speak of me as someone destined to accomplish something significant. She had a much brighter image of my future than I had of myself.

Eventually, I began to believe what she told me.

Even today, I can hear her voice when I encounter setbacks, both in academia and in my private life. Many years ago, some of my siblings questioned the meaning of my kirtas and suggested that it might instead be explained by the fact that I had been born prematurely. My mother firmly rejected that explanation.

I chose to believe my mother, regardless of what medical researchers might say.

The important point here is not whether the amniotic membrane itself had any particular significance. Scientifically, of course, it did not. But the story gave me something else: an expectation that I could succeed. It gave me the motivation to keep going when life was difficult. Perhaps, then, it was not the membrane itself that made the difference, but the high expectations associated with the story surrounding it.

You are chosen. The kirtas is a sign that you will succeed.

When Others Begin to Define Who You Are

The other day, a young woman told me how her parents constantly compared her with her brother. Through repeated comparisons and demeaning comments, she developed a sense that she was never quite good enough.

This is more than a story about a complicated family relationship. It is also about how people learn from childhood to see themselves through the eyes of others. When a child is constantly told that someone else is better, smarter, or more successful, there is a risk that the child will eventually adopt the same judgement about themselves.

In a similar way, high expectations can become a form of social capital. When a teacher, parent, or other significant adult communicates, “I believe you can do this,” it does not automatically create success — but it can create motivation, perseverance, and a willingness to try again.

That is why expectations matter.

School Is Not a Neutral Place

The same pattern can be found in schools. Many students describe teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, signal that they will not succeed in education. Students report being discouraged from pursuing higher education or ambitious career choices because of their family background, language, gender, or disability.

Often, this does not occur through explicit prejudice. It can be much more subtle:

“Maybe that isn’t really for you.”

“Have you considered something easier?”

“Perhaps you should be more realistic.”

Such comments may appear well intentioned. But when they are repeated over time, they can have a powerful normative effect. They communicate more than something about a particular educational programme or career choice. They can communicate a more fundamental message:

“You are not the kind of person who belongs there.”

This is where low expectations can become a form of invisible exclusion.

Swedish as a Second Language — A Question of Expectations

Similar questions arise in discussions about Swedish as a second language. I have encountered students who have felt singled out or humiliated when placed in such instruction, sometimes on grounds that they or their parents have found difficult to understand or accept. This may relate to the student’s linguistic background, family circumstances, or other assessments made by the school.

This issue has long been the subject of discussion and, at times, conflict among students, parents, schools, and researchers.

Here, we need to ask an uncomfortable but important question:

What assumptions do we hold about a student’s abilities?

What assumptions are made about what a student with another first language can achieve? What expectations exist regarding the student’s academic development? And how do these assumptions affect assessments of the student’s opportunities to succeed in mainstream education?

This is not to claim that all students have the same needs or that special support is never necessary. Rather, it is about ensuring that educational decisions are based on the student’s actual needs and circumstances, rather than assumptions about what a student from a particular background is presumed to be capable or incapable of achieving.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The problem with low expectations is that they can become self-fulfilling.

When a person is constantly met with doubt, they may begin to doubt themselves. When they are given fewer challenges, their opportunities to develop their abilities may diminish. When they are not encouraged to pursue further education, they may never apply. And when they repeatedly hear that they do not belong in a particular place, they may eventually stop trying to get there.

In this way, low expectations can produce precisely the outcome they initially anticipated.

This is particularly problematic because society may then interpret the outcome as evidence that the original expectations were correct.

“We knew she wouldn’t be able to do it.”

But did we really know?

Or did our expectations help create some of the conditions that led to the outcome?

Raising Expectations Without Lowering Standards

We therefore need to talk more about low expectations as a mechanism contributing to discrimination and inequality. This does not mean that low expectations should replace other forms of discrimination as an analytical category. Rather, we need to make visible another process through which inequality is created and reproduced.

Treating people with respect does not mean lowering expectations of them. Quite the opposite.

High expectations mean believing that people can develop — while simultaneously providing them with the resources, support, and opportunities they need to succeed.

It is not enough to tell a student, “You can do it.” Schools must also create the conditions that enable the student to do so. High expectations without support can become empty rhetoric. But high expectations combined with pedagogical support, clear goals, and genuine opportunities can alter people’s educational trajectories.

My mother’s story about kirtas may not have been scientific. But it taught me something that I still carry with me: sometimes another person’s belief in you can come before your own belief in yourself.

Perhaps this is also one of the most important purposes of education — to see possibilities in people before they have learned to see those possibilities in themselves.

No one should be limited by other people’s assumptions about what they can or cannot become. It is time to recognise low expectations for what they can be: an invisible wall that limits people’s opportunities, participation, and hope for the future. With regard to nations, international politics, trade, and diplomatic relations, we can also observe how powerful states sometimes portray emerging or less economically powerful nations as incapable of succeeding or developing on their own terms. Such representations may be expressed through dismissive, degrading, or abusive language, including statements by political leaders that characterise African and other countries in highly derogatory ways.

These practices should not be understood merely as individual expressions of prejudice or political rhetoric. When such representations are repeated systematically by powerful political actors and institutions, they can contribute to a broader pattern of symbolic and structural abuse. They may reinforce hierarchies between nations, undermine the perceived legitimacy and agency of emerging countries, and influence how their economies, institutions, and populations are viewed internationally.

From this perspective, low expectations can operate at the level of international relations. Persistent portrayals of emerging nations as incapable, dependent, or destined to fail may contribute to an international environment in which their capacity for autonomous development is systematically underestimated. In this sense, the production and reproduction of low expectations can become part of a broader political agenda that constrains agency, reinforces dependency, and discourages the pursuit of independent economic, political, and diplomatic pathways.

And perhaps the most important question we can therefore ask is not only what do we expect from people? but also:

Who are we enabling people to believe they can become?

Girma Berhanu, Professor

The Ethiopian Tribune

Editorial Front Matter  ·  Foreword & Synopsis

GERD: From Engine of Ethiopia’s Renaissance to Engine of African Peace

An essay by Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) — the twelfth and concluding article in the series

Foreword — The Bridge, and the Wall We Keep Building

For a year this newspaper has carried Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s argument in instalments, and readers have watched it accumulate into something rare in our public writing: a single, sustained case, built stone by stone, about what Ethiopia is and what it might yet become. Eleven essays traced the architecture — the Foundations of unity and a sovereign coast, the Means of broad-based development, and the Engine meant to drive them both. This twelfth and final essay turns to the Engine itself, and to the question the other eleven were circling all along: not whether the dam can be built, but whether we can build the country around it.

It arrives at an unusual moment. This month TIME’s Africa edition put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on its cover and called it the power to unite a continent — a bridge, in the magazine’s image, rather than a wall. Dr Hailu takes that mirror and turns it on us with unsparing candour: strangers see cooperation in the concrete we poured; we see, in one another, one more thing to fight over. The distance between those two visions is his subject, and he refuses every comfortable name for it — settling, in the end, on shame.

A dam can be a wall or a bridge — Ethiopia must choose the bridge.

I will not disguise where the essay lands, for the Tribune does not run it to flatter anyone, least of all ourselves. Its charge falls on all four estates of what the author has called the racket the cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit, and, not least, the pen. Among the writings it names is one this newspaper published only a week ago: Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal in the Tsimdo debate. We printed her argument in full; we now print the essay that faults it and its rival for quarrelling over how to wage a war while sparing not one line for how it ends. That is not inconsistency. It is what an independent press is for: to carry the argument and its judge alike, and to trust readers to weigh both.

What Dr Hailu leaves us with is not a lament but a blueprint five conditions under which a shared nation becomes the lived experience of ordinary people, not one of which asks any Ethiopian to surrender his language, his faith, or his pride in his people. Whether we build it is not for a newspaper to decide. But the question deserves to be put plainly, and few have put it more plainly than this.

Read it as it was written: as a wake-up.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

In the concluding essay of a twelve-part series, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu argues that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam must cease to be a monument and become an engine the physical spine of Ethiopia’s transformation, and then of its peace.

He begins from a mirror held up by outsiders: TIME’s Africa cover, The Power to Unite Africa, which reads GERD as a bridge an anchor of regional electricity trade and African integration where Ethiopians see only one more thing to fight over. That gap, he contends, is not about the dam but about the state behind it. A development engine is not self-executing; it needs a functioning institutional order to turn electricity into factories, factories into cities, and cities into a productive middle class for whom cooperation pays more than fragmentation. This is the “missing bridge” and precisely what a racket built on ethnic fear cannot supply.

Drawing on the economics of urbanisation and the arithmetic of a youth cohort of two million a year, Hailu recasts peace and development as a single question, answerable only by a national bargain in which every constituency holds a material stake that war would destroy. He sets out five conditions under which unity is actually made, impartial security, impartial delivery, the material bond, the mixing city, and an honest reckoning, none of which demands that any Ethiopian surrender his identity.

Against this he sets the “paper war” of hermitised intellectuals who argue endlessly over how to fight while never asking how the killing stops, and warns that a nation squandering GERD on ethnic conflict forfeits its seat in the age of artificial intelligence. The choice, he concludes, was never between Ethiopia’s peoples. It is between the country and the racket that farms it: the bridge, or the abyss.

The Ethiopian Tribune

In Depth · Infrastructure & Debt

Running on Half Power

Addis Ababa’s Railways and the Arithmetic of a Broken Promise

By E. Frashie

8 September 2026

A decade after its unveiling as the future of African urban transit, the capital’s light rail now runs on less than half its fleet — and the reasons lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

Every weekday at Autobus Tera, Surafel Tafesework performs the same quiet calculation. A bank officer bound for Megenagna, he would rather take the train — it is the cheapest way across the city — but the platform now fills faster than the trains arrive. He waits up to an hour, he told The Reporter, watching the crowd thicken the way it does at a bus stop. The fare still wins the argument. The waiting is beginning to lose it.

Multiply Surafel by the tens of thousands who ride the light rail each morning and you have the small, daily face of a large, expensive failure. A decade after Addis Ababa’s trains were unveiled as the future of African urban transit, the network runs on less than half its lungs — and the reasons why lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the foreign-currency desk of the National Bank and the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

The tyranny of the spare part

The immediate problem is brutally simple. The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit Service began life with 41 cars; by the account of its own chief executive, Berhan Abebaw (PhD), only 19 are now fit to run. The culprit is not sabotage or mismanagement of the theatrical kind, but something more mundane and more damning: there is no hard currency to buy replacement parts, down to the tyres that wear out fastest. The service has no dedicated workshop of its own, and leans on Ethiopian Railway Corporation engineers dispatched from Dire Dawa and Dewale.

This is not a new wound. As far back as 2023, only eight trains were moving; China stepped in with a spare-parts package worth some USD 23 million, and repair estimates ran past USD 60 million. That the operational count has crept back to 19 is, in a bleak sense, progress. But a USD 475 million system — 85 percent of it financed by a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China — sitting idle for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

A USD 475 million system idled for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

The ledger against the promise

When the line opened in 2015, it was sold as a machine that could sweep up to 60,000 passengers an hour. Today it carries roughly that number across an entire day. The Federal Auditor General has put the project’s accumulated loss at around ETB 16 billion. In the 2025/26 fiscal year, ticket sales brought in just ETB 270 million; the city administration pours in an annual ETB 500 million subsidy simply to keep the fares humane — a Kality-to-Piassa trip costs 20 birr by train against 80 to 100 by taxi.

Officials now wave away the original pledge that the line would service its own debt within ten years. “In any country, urban railway operates with state subsidy,” Berhan says — and he is right, as a matter of transport economics the world over. But that truth was conspicuously absent from the sales pitch a decade ago, and it does not answer the harder question: subsidy toward what return? The commercial ballast that was meant to make the numbers work — transit-oriented development, station retail, leased commercial hubs — has barely materialised beyond a handful of sites like Leghar and Autobus Tera. The light rail today carries only about six percent of the city’s public-transport load, stranded from the Anbessa buses, Sheger buses and minibuses it was never properly stitched into.

The case for the defence

Honesty requires the counterpoint, because the railway story is not simply one of waste. The cross-country Ethio-Djibouti Railway — a USD 4.2 billion line built on USD 2.5 billion of Chinese credit — earns its keep in a currency the balance sheet cannot see. It now moves better than nine in ten of Ethiopia’s port-bound goods and the overwhelming majority of its coffee exports, cutting the Djibouti run from three days by truck to ten or twelve hours by rail, and slashing the demurrage bills that once bled the treasury at the port. A senior corporation official, speaking anonymously, makes the fair point that judging a rail line purely on ticketed profit misses the productivity it lends everything else.

That defence is genuine — and it is also why the financing model matters so much. Even the EDR needed relief: in 2018 China agreed to stretch out its repayment terms, one of several reschedulings of an infrastructure debt to Beijing that now runs past USD 13 billion. A trade lifeline built on a loan that must itself be perpetually renegotiated is an asset and a vulnerability in the same breath.

The northern warning

Nowhere is that vulnerability clearer than on the Awash–Kombolcha–Hara Gebeya line. This USD 1.7 billion, 392-kilometre corridor — financed by Turkey’s Exim Bank and built by Yapı Merkezi — was nearly finished when war engulfed the north in late 2020. Looting, evacuation and two years of paralysis followed, and the contractor took its losses to arbitration in London, in a dispute reported to be worth around USD 2.6 billion all told. The London tribunal, with Professor Tilahun Teshome as sole arbitrator, threw out the bulk of the contractor’s roughly USD 1 billion claim and ordered a USD 29.1 million advance repaid to the corporation — hailed at home as a decisive victory.

It is worth a note of caution: the contractor’s counsel has publicly disputed the “bulk knocked out” framing, and even a favourable award does not make the episode cheap. Years of frozen construction, depreciating assets and contingent liabilities are their own tax on a state-owned enterprise — and Ethiopian Railway Corporation is one of nearly forty such enterprises now folded under Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign fund quietly restructuring their balance sheets away from public view. The line has since been relaunched, with the government hoping Yapı Merkezi will return to finish what the war interrupted.

Who carries it

The recurring lesson, from the light rail to Djibouti to the north, is the one the planners kept postponing: track laid without last-mile links, local maintenance capacity or a revenue base beyond the farebox becomes a liability the moment the currency tightens. The fixes experts keep prescribing — unified ticketing across modes, developed station real estate, domestic manufacture of high-wear parts, and a firewall between operating budgets and legacy construction debt — are neither exotic nor new. They were simply cheaper to defer.

The cost of deferral is not paid in arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera.

The cost of deferral is not paid in the language of arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera, in the extra forty-five minutes, in the taxi fare a bank officer can barely justify, by the several hundred thousand residents who continue to ride a network running, as it has for years now, on half power.

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