How regional war, electoral consolidation, diaspora uprising, and conflicting visions of national identity threaten to unravel the Horn of Africa’s oldest continuous state

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune columnist

The crisis engulfing Ethiopia in May 2026 cannot be understood as a collection of discrete problems requiring separate solutions. Rather, what is unfolding is a systemic collapse operating simultaneously across multiple registers:-military, political, ideological, and civilisational. These crises are not incidental to one another; they are structurally interconnected, each amplifying the others in ways that threaten to push Ethiopia past a point of reversibility.

At the military register, Sudan’s accusations regarding drone operations and training camps have created a situation in which border escalation has shifted from possibility to probability. Intelligence agencies across multiple countries now accept as baseline reality that Ethiopian territory is being used to facilitate military operations within Sudan, whether through formal government decision or through tolerated proxy activity. The physical evidence—satellite imagery of the Benishangul-Gumuz camp, recovered drone components, convoy tracking data remains technically ambiguous but strategically significant. Neither country has incentive to permit clarity to emerge. Sudan benefits from internationalism of the conflict. Ethiopia benefits from maintaining plausible deniability. This ambiguity, far from creating space for negotiation, instead creates space for escalation: both sides can claim vindication, both sides can justify further military preparations, and both sides can point to the other’s actions as justification for their own.

More fundamentally, the regional realignment orchestrated by Cairo has positioned Ethiopia at the intersection of pressure from three directions simultaneously. From the west, Sudan’s armed forces, supported by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are consolidating control of the Blue Nile region and preparing for potential cross-border operations. From the north, Eritrea once an ally, now reimagined as an adversary has repositioned itself as a node in a regional coalition opposed to Ethiopian interests, supplied by Iran, financed by Saudi Arabia, and coordinated militarily with Cairo. From the east, Somalia increasingly falls under Egyptian influence, presenting a potential third pressure point. These are not coincidental alignments. They represent a deliberate strategic architecture constructed by Cairo and validated, through its silence or acquiescence, by Washington.

At the political register, the machinery of electoral authoritarianism operates with ruthless efficiency. Opposition leaders are imprisoned on dubious charges. Independent journalists are disappeared from streets and held incommunicado. Media outlets are raided. Civil society organisations face restrictions. All of this occurs whilst the government insists upon its commitment to democratic governance and invites international election observers to witness what is, in reality, a managed electoral process designed to produce predetermined outcomes. The elections scheduled for 1 June 2026 function not as a mechanism for determining government but as a mechanism for legitimising continued Prosperity Party monopoly on power. International observers, faced with a process that is technically procedurally correct but substantively constrained, will likely issue sufficiently ambiguous reports that will allow the government to claim vindication whilst allowing critics to point to the absence of genuine competition. The elections will thus serve simultaneously as a demonstration of commitment to democracy and as a mechanism for consolidating authoritarianism a feat that is possible precisely because electoral procedures and democratic governance have become decoupled from one another.

What makes the political crisis particularly acute is that it is occurring at precisely the moment when the government faces its greatest military vulnerability. The federal army is stretched across multiple insurgencies Oromia, Amhara, parts of Somali region and now potentially facing significant military pressure on the western border with Sudan. The government’s response to this vulnerability is not strategic reassessment but rather tightening of internal control: imprisoning opposition leaders who might challenge resource allocation decisions, silencing media who might scrutinise military spending or strategy, constraining civil society that might ask uncomfortable questions. This is a classic pattern of authoritarian response to weakness: when external pressures increase and internal capacity decreases, the instinct is to consolidate power rather than to build coalition or seek alternative approaches.

At the ideological register, competing visions of what Ethiopia is and what it should become have moved from background context to foreground crisis. The vision articulated by the Prosperity Party centres on technocratic modernisation, pan-Ethiopian identity (as opposed to ethnicity-based federalism), and the pursuit of development through infrastructure projects such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This vision has real appeal to significant portions of Ethiopia’s urban professional classes and to international investors and development institutions. But it has also generated profound alienation among other constituencies who view the Prosperity Party’s approach as a means of centralising Amhara-dominated control, marginalising regional interests, and undermining federalism as a mechanism for protecting minority and ethno-linguistic rights. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, despite its defeat in the civil war, continues to command loyalty among portions of the Tigray population and operates as a pole of alternative political possibility. The Oromo Liberation Front, though excluded from electoral competition and designated a terrorist organisation, continues to attract support among segments of Oromia’s population. And now, emerging as a new force, are movements seeking to reconnect Ethiopia to visions of earlier historical configurations whether through Tigrayan intellectuals and activists articulating expanded conceptions of Tigrayan or “Geez” civilisational identity, or through Eritrean diaspora movements exploring the possibility of reunification under democratic rather than authoritarian auspices.

The Agaezi National Union Party’s perspective, articulated from within diaspora and intellectual circles, represents one such competing vision. The ANU’s analysis emphasises what it terms the “Geez Civilisation” and argues that the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia constituted a catastrophic historical fragmentation engineered through foreign intervention and facilitated by TPLF-EPLF collaboration that should be characterised as treason against the greater Geez national project. From this perspective, the TPLF’s inclusion of Article 39 rights to self-determination and eventual secession in Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution represents a continuation of the fragmentary logic that enabled Eritrea’s separation. The ANU argues that restoring access to the Red Sea, preventing further territorial fragmentation, and rebuilding a unified Geez civilisation should be central to Ethiopia’s strategic vision. This analysis explicitly rejects what it characterises as “landlocked, periphery and minority secessionist” visions and calls for a “public national constitution (not party or government based memorandum)” that prioritises national unity and territorial integrity over ethno-linguistic federalism.

The significance of this perspective lies not in whether it commands majority support it does not but in the fact that it represents a genuine intellectual and political current within Ethiopian and diaspora circles that is gaining articulation and visibility at precisely the moment when competing visions of Ethiopian identity and statehood are being contested most sharply. That multiple, incompatible visions of what Ethiopia should be, how it should be governed, and what its territorial and civilisational boundaries should be, are all being advocated simultaneously, and that none of these visions appears capable of achieving hegemonic consensus, suggests that the political crisis extends beyond the question of whether the June 1 elections are free and fair to the more fundamental question of what constitutional and political framework Ethiopians themselves desire.

The Eritrean dimension of this crisis presents one of the most historically significant developments in the region in decades, yet it remains poorly understood by international observers and inadequately covered by international media. The realignment of Eritrea from Ethiopian ally to regional adversary has occurred gradually over the past three years, but it has accelerated dramatically in 2025 and 2026. The mechanism of this realignment is straightforward: Eritrea’s government, faced with the delegitimation that peace with Ethiopia produced the loss of the external enemy that had justified internal militarisation and authoritarianism has chosen to reposition itself as a regional player aligned with Egypt and opposed to Ethiopia. This choice has been validated through material incentives: Saudi Arabia has provided financial support, Iran has established supply line access through Eritrean territory, and the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea has signalled American acceptance of this alignment.

Yet simultaneously, and largely invisible to international analysis, the Eritrean diaspora representing approximately one-third of Eritrea’s entire population has mobilised around the Eritrean Blue Revolution, a pro-democracy movement that has begun to explore the possibility of reunification with Ethiopia under a federal democratic arrangement. The symbolism of the blue flag, representing the federation era of 1952 to 1961, is significant: it suggests that a democratic future might involve not continued independence but rather a reimagined federal relationship with Ethiopia, one that would operate under democratic governance rather than under Eritrean or Ethiopian authoritarianism. This possibility, were it to gain traction, would fundamentally alter the regional configuration that both Cairo and Asmara are currently constructing.

The convergence of Ethiopian pro-democracy movements and Eritrean pro-democracy movements in shared space particularly in Addis Ababa, where the January 2026 Eritrean Blue Revolution gathering occurred represents a potential axis of political transformation that both the Prosperity Party and the Eritrean regime have incentive to prevent. That imprisoned Ethiopian opposition leaders and disappeared Ethiopian journalists represent precisely the sort of political constraint that preempts such convergences is not coincidental. The government’s crackdown is not simply about winning the June 1 elections; it is about preventing the emergence of a political configuration that could threaten fundamental regime interests through the combination of internal democratic movements and diaspora mobilisation.

The Tigray situation presents perhaps the most acute existential threat to Ethiopian territorial integrity and government legitimacy. The region that was the epicentre of a civil war killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions remains, eighteen months after the nominal cessation of hostilities, in a state of political limbo. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, unable to obtain a party licence to participate in the June 1 elections, operates in a legal and political grey zone. The population remains largely displaced, unable to return to homes, unable to participate in normal economic activity, unable to engage with the political process. The interim administration that the federal government imposed remains administratively incompetent and politically alienating to large portions of the Tigray population. TPLF intelligence networks, dispersed and degraded but not eliminated, continue to operate. And reports suggest coordination between TPLF elements operating from Sudan and Eritrean military forces through the arrangement variously referred to as “Army 70” or the “Tsimdo arrangement.”

The ANU perspective on Tigray is particularly significant here. The ANU argues that Tigrayan identity should be understood as part of the greater Geez civilisation and that Tigrayan interests should be served through reconnection to a unified, unitary national state rather than through autonomy within a federated framework. From this perspective, the TPLF’s assertion of Tigrayan interests through federalism and ultimately through secession (which the ANU characterises as the logical endpoint of ethno-linguistic federalism) represents a betrayal of the greater Geez civilisational project. This analysis suggests that a reconstituted Ethiopia, rebuilt on the foundation of Geez civilisation and committed to territorial integration and Red Sea access, would better serve both Tigrayan and broader Ethiopian interests than would continued federalism or outright separation.

Whether this vision is appealing to the Tigray population itself remains an open question. What is clear is that the Tigray population is deeply alienated from the federal government, deeply traumatised by the civil war, and increasingly engaged with both internal Tigrayan political movements and external Eritrean political movements through kinship networks and historical connections. The possibility of Tigray mobilising around a pro-TPLF political programme, combined with Eritrean mobilisation around the Blue Revolution, combined with broader Ethiopian pro-democracy mobilisation, presents a scenario in which convergent political movements could simultaneously challenge Prosperity Party dominance and Eritrean regime consolidation. That this possibility seems to preoccupy government strategists is evident from the intensity of the crackdown on political opposition and independent media.

The international context that frames these domestic crises is one in which the United States appears to be accepting, or at least not actively resisting, Egypt’s strategy for regional hegemony. The Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea, justified on Red Sea strategic grounds, implicitly endorses Eritrea’s alignment with Egypt and Sudan against Ethiopia. The absence of American pressure on Egypt to cease its regional encirclement strategy suggests American acquiescence. The failure of the United States to use its leverage with the Ethiopian government to insist upon minimum standards of democratic conduct freedom for opposition leaders, protection for journalists, genuine electoral competition suggests an American calculation that Ethiopia’s strategic position is sufficiently weak that the United States need not invest diplomatic capital in defending Ethiopian democratic governance. From a realpolitik perspective, this may be rational: if Ethiopia is going to be constrained by Egyptian regional hegemony in any case, why expend diplomatic capital fighting battles that cannot be won?

But this calculation appears to discount several possibilities that could alter regional dynamics significantly. The first is the possibility of successful convergence between Ethiopian and Eritrean pro-democracy movements, creating a unified force substantially more difficult for Egypt to manage than either separate movement would be. The second is the possibility that genuine democratic transformation in either Ethiopia or Eritrea could trigger cascading transformation in the other, creating a fundamentally altered regional configuration. The third is the possibility that the very intensity of external pressure on Ethiopia could trigger internal mobilisation in ways that the government cannot control. The fourth is the possibility that the June 1 elections, rather than producing the legitimation that the government seeks, instead produce a legitimacy crisis that international observers cannot finesse through ambiguous language.

The question of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam sits beneath much of this regional tension, though it is rarely explicitly discussed in coverage of the immediate crises. The dam fundamentally alters water flows in the Nile system, reducing downstream availability for Egypt and Sudan. For Egypt particularly, the GERD represents an existential threat to national survival in ways that international law, diplomatic negotiation, and technical solutions have thus far failed to address. Egyptian strategic responses have thus necessarily taken the form of regional containment: preventing Ethiopia from emerging as sufficiently powerful to resist Egyptian pressure. Supporting Sudan’s armed forces, aligning with Eritrea, leveraging Somalia through military presence in AUSSOM, developing partnerships with Saudi Arabia to constrain Iranian influence in the region all of these strategic moves can be understood as components of a broader strategy to ensure that Ethiopia remains constrained and unable to fully exploit the advantages that the GERD provides.

It is from this perspective that the ANU’s emphasis on Red Sea access becomes strategically significant. If Ethiopia were to gain reliable access to Indian Ocean shipping through either Eritrean or Sudanese Red Sea ports, its economic and strategic position would be transformed. This is precisely what Cairo wishes to prevent. Egypt’s regional strategy is thus fundamentally about ensuring that Ethiopia remains landlocked, economically dependent, and politically constrained unable to pursue independent strategic interests, unable to fully exploit the GERD’s potential, unable to emerge as a regional power. The ANU’s vision of a reconstructed Ethiopia with access to the Red Sea through reunification with Eritrea, or through some other territorial reconfiguration, thus represents precisely the strategic nightmare that Egyptian planners most fear.

The convergence of these multiple crises military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea, political crisis manifested in electoral authoritarianism and opposition imprisonment, ideological contestation over what Ethiopia is and should be, the Tigray political limbo, the GERD strategic tension with Egypt, and now the emergence of diaspora movements that could potentially alter regional dynamics creates a situation of genuine systemic instability. None of these crises appears susceptible to solution through the mechanisms currently being pursued. Military preparations in Sudan and Eritrea will not produce Ethiopian capitulation; they will produce Ethiopian military mobilisation and further regional escalation. Electoral management and opposition imprisonment will not produce political legitimacy; they will produce legitimacy deficits and post-election contestation. Continued ambiguity regarding the training camps and drone operations will not produce de-escalation; it will produce further miscalculation as both sides act on differing interpretations of the evidence. The attempt to govern Tigray through interim administration without genuine political incorporation will not produce stability; it will produce continued alienation and continued risk of renewed conflict.

The question that now faces Ethiopia and the international community is whether the convergent nature of these crises will be recognised and addressed holistically or whether, through habit and institutional inertia, the international community will continue to treat them as separate problems a military conflict with Sudan, an electoral process in Ethiopia, a political situation in Tigray each requiring separate solutions and separate diplomatic tracks. If the latter approach continues, then the trajectory toward regional war becomes increasingly probable. If a more holistic approach were pursued one that recognised that military escalation in Sudan/Eritrea, political legitimacy deficits in Ethiopia, diaspora mobilisation for democratic transformation, and competing visions of Ethiopian identity are all components of a single systemic crisis then alternative pathways might become visible.

Such pathways might involve: genuine space for opposition political competition in advance of the June 1 elections; a serious negotiated settlement for Tigray that involves genuine political representation rather than interim administration; a diplomatic track focused on de-escalation in Sudan that does not require Ethiopian capitulation but does require acknowledgment of underlying security concerns; serious engagement with the Eritrean Blue Revolution and with Eritrean pro-democracy movements as legitimate actors in regional politics rather than as marginal movements to be suppressed; and a fundamental reconsideration of the GERD’s regional implications and the development of a framework that addresses Egyptian water security concerns without requiring Ethiopian subordination.

Whether such a holistic approach is possible remains deeply uncertain. The political actors involved—Prosperity Party leadership in Ethiopia, SAF leadership in Sudan, Eritrean regime leadership, Egyptian strategists all have incentive structures that favour continued escalation or continued management of current tensions rather than fundamental transformation. The international community, particularly the Trump administration, appears to have accepted, explicitly or implicitly, an outcome in which Egyptian regional hegemony is established and Ethiopian power is constrained. And the cascading nature of the crises means that each moment that passes without fundamental reorientation increases the probability that some triggering event a military escalation that spirals out of control, an electoral outcome that is contested violently, a Tigray political crisis that reignites will push the region past a point of reversibility.

What remains clear is that the June 1 elections cannot function as a resolution of Ethiopia’s political crisis. Whether they succeed in producing a compliant parliament that legitimises Prosperity Party rule, or whether they fail in this objective and instead produce contested results and post-electoral violence, the underlying problems will remain unaddressed. The military pressure from Sudan and Eritrea will not abate. The diaspora movements for democratic transformation will not disappear. The Tigray political limbo will not resolve itself. The competing visions of Ethiopian identity and national purpose will not achieve consensus. And the regional configuration orchestrated by Cairo, validated by Washington, and now being operationalised by Sudan and Eritrea will continue to constrain Ethiopian options and continue to amplify regional instability.

The tragedy of the moment is not that the outcome is predetermined but that the mechanisms for addressing the systemic nature of the crisis recognition of interconnection, willingness to pursue transformation rather than incremental management, openness to alternative regional configurations appear largely unavailable to the political actors most capable of producing them. Instead, what is likely is a continuation of tactical escalation and crisis management, with periodic moments of acute danger when miscalculation produces unintended military escalation, until some catastrophic event forces a fundamental recalibration of the entire regional system.

Whether that recalibration comes through democratic transformation, military defeat, or some other mechanism remains unknowable. What is knowable is that the current trajectory, if maintained, appears increasingly likely to produce outcomes substantially worse than the crises currently being managed.

About Post Author

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By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Foreword

It is with considerable gratitude that the Ethiopian Tribunepresents the final instalment of Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part analytical series on the Abraham Accords and their implications for Ethiopian sovereignty, geopolitical positioning, and national strategy. Over the past months, this series has established itself as the most rigorous and unflinching examination of the architecture reshaping the Gulf–Red Sea–Horn region combining legal-historical analysis, strategic assessment, and an uncompromising focus on the conditions required for Ethiopian agency.

This final instalment, “Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame,”moves beyond architecture into operational reality. It addresses what Parts 1–3 have prepared: the political, military, and diplomatic conditions under which Ethiopian sovereignty is recovered; the enduring legal foundations on which that recovery stands; the closing strategic window that demands urgent action; and the binary choice that now confronts the Ethiopian state and people.

What This Instalment Addresses

Internal Constraints and Public Accountability. Hailu opens with an ultimatum addressed directly to the Ethiopian people and the Ethiopian government emerging from the June 2026 election. Sovereignty is not produced as a by-product of external alignment; it is produced by populations that demand it and discipline themselves to defend it. The “monkey habit of ethnic entrepreneurship” the operational mechanism by which external opportunities are squandered through factional competition remains the binding constraint on Ethiopia’s four singular interests. The path forward runs through civic discipline, not elite pronouncement.

The Legal Foundation: Residual Rights and Continuous Chain. Part 4 reasserts the legal record established in Part 3 with load-bearing clarity: Italy never held absolute sovereignty; Resolution 390(V) explicitly preserved Ethiopian sea access irrespective of Eritrean political status; the OAU’s uti possidetis principle, applied to its founding moment with Eritrea as Ethiopian territory, locks Eritrea in as Ethiopian territory; the 1993 abandonment was performed ultra vires by an unmandated transitional government; and the Algiers Agreement, by addressing only the land boundary, preserves rather than extinguishes Ethiopian residual rights.

The Government Policy Track: Alignment and Divergence. Hailu conducts a rigorous reading of four substantial policy-track articles published in the Horn Review between November 2025 and April 2026 the most extensive Ethiopian articulation of maritime sovereignty since 1991. He identifies six critical strengths: maritime recovery is reframed as a state imperative; the legal record on Italy’s non-sovereignty is established with rigour; Resolution 390(V)’s protective function is correctly characterised; the 1962 incorporation is defended as restoration rather than annexation; the 1993 referendum is named for its constitutional illegitimacy; and the “depoliticisation” of landlockedness is correctly diagnosed. He simultaneously identifies four critical weaknesses: the AU’s complicity in 1993 goes unnamed; settlement options are hedged toward conciliation where assertion is required; Eritrean independence is accepted as settled while challenging only its conditions; and Saudi engagement reproduces a supplicatory frame. The interpretation is stark: if the government fails to extend the policy track beyond these stops-short, the inference becomes unavoidable that the government may not have been serious about recovering sovereign sea access in the first place.

The Mature Strategy: Political, Diplomatic, and Military Tracks. Hailu then presents the strategic synthesis required across three concurrent tracks. Politically: a civic mandate anchored across multiple regional constituencies and won on a programmatic platform that includes explicit positions on the four singular interests, giving the resulting government legitimacy to pursue sovereign sea access as a national project. 

Diplomatically: offence, not defence converting the Hexagon’s southern arc into a central strategic partnership; engaging bridge actors from positions of leverage rather than supplication; and confronting the AU and UN multilateral forums with the legal record of Italian-claim contingency, OAU complicity in 1993, and the ultra vires character of the TPLF-led abandonment. Militarily: credible deterrence and prepared option conventional capability, asymmetric capability, and doctrinal preparation sufficient to seize and hold the Doumeira–Beilul corridor through the “attack, hold, and negotiate” formula.

The Convergence Point: 2027–28. The military strategist’s calendar (the closing window) and the politician’s calendar (the construction curve of civic compact, macroeconomic depth, and global-capital integration) converge at 2027–28. At that point, if political, diplomatic, and military preparation is sustained, Asmara faces a choice between negotiated settlement that preserves Eritrean political existence on terms that include Ethiopian sovereign access, or confrontation that the strategist has prepared to win. This is the moment of maximum Ethiopian leverage.

Eritrea’s Path: Coexistence or Parasitism. Hailu addresses the Eritrean question with historical honesty and strategic clarity. Both populations were brutalised; the 1993 separation was not popular consent but rebel-group imposition; Eritrea’s current garrison-state offers its own population no future. The post-operation settlement envisaged preserves Eritrean separate political existence while establishing economic relationship with Ethiopia that addresses Eritrea’s developmental crisis. The objective is sovereign Ethiopian access to the sea alongside sovereign Eritrean access both nations benefiting from the recovery of a coastline that was never legitimately surrendered.

The Binary Choice. The instalment concludes with the operative ultimatum: if the conditions are met civic mandate, sustained diplomatic offence, military preparation, macroeconomic stabilisation, and leverage-based engagement with regional partners then sovereignty is recovered and the four singular interests become attainable. If any condition is abandoned, the geopolitical architecture amplifies the internal fractures; GERD becomes a factional prize; the coastline remains permanently lost; and Ethiopia’s demographic trajectory produces fragmented territory governed by competing oligarchies that external patrons exploit. The choice is binary and operational: bananas for the few and dismemberment for the many, or sovereignty for the nation and prosperity for the generations that follow.

The Election Analysis Ahead

Dr. Hailu has indicated his intention to return with a companion article examining the June 2026 election as the constitutional moment at which the political track is operationalised. That analysis examining the election’s conduct, possible outcomes, the programmatic test for every candidate, and the meaning of a Pan-Ethiopian mandate promises to be as rigorous and uncompromising as the series that precedes it. The Tribune looks forward to bringing that perspective to its readers with the same analytical independence and strategic clarity that has defined this four-part examination.

This series stands as the most comprehensive independent analysis of Ethiopian sovereignty, Horn of Africa geopolitics, and the Abraham Accords architecture available to English-language readers. It is offered to the Ethiopian public and to scholars of the region as a contribution to the urgent and necessary conversation about what sovereignty means, what conditions make it attainable, and what price is paid when it is abandoned for the comfort of dependency.

—The Editors —

Read the Full Article

Part 4/4: Assab, Sovereignty, and the Endgame

Available as PDF via the link below

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How South Africa Forgot Those Who Fought for Its Freedom

By E. Frashie Ethiopian Tribune columnist

I. Introduction: A Nation Haunted by Historical Amnesia

South Africa today is witnessing a meticulously organised resurgence of xenophobic violence. The evidence is chilling in its precision.

At least five Ethiopians have been killed in Johannesburg in recent weeks, with four of the victims shot within 48 hours. On one occasion, three were shot inside a McDonald’s in the Johannesburg Central Business District, victims between 30 and 45 years of age who were having breakfast when the gunman entered and opened fire. CCTV footage reveals execution-style shootings. Police investigations stall. Vulnerable communities live in persistent fear.

Yet this same nation once depended fundamentally on the solidarity, sacrifice, and military expertise of Africans beyond its borders none more symbolically powerful than Ethiopia, the country that trained Nelson Mandela and sheltered the ANC’s armed struggle throughout its most perilous decades.

Among those who shaped that history stands a man whose contributions to South Africa’s liberation should be carved into the moral foundation of the post-apartheid state: Asnakew Sisay Tegegne — known to liberation fighters as ‘The General.’ Today, Ethiopians who might have looked to this legacy for protection are instead being hunted on the streets of Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. This is not merely a security crisis. It is a profound betrayal of history.

II. The Forgotten Ethiopian Who Trained the ANC

Born in 1954 in Azezo, Gondar, Asnakew Sisay grew up in a household steeped in patriotism and Pan-African conviction. His father, Shambel Sisay Tegegne, was a decorated officer under Emperor Haile Selassie. His mother was known for community service and moral leadership. From this soil emerged a young man who believed that African liberation was indivisible — not a series of isolated national struggles, but a unified continental imperative.

The Making of a Commando

• Military and intelligence training

• Strategic studies in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency

• Hand-to-hand combat instruction

• Resistance organising and clandestine operations

• Years of political imprisonment as a teenager for anti-colonial activism

By the late 1970s, as liberation movements across southern Africa intensified their campaigns, he was selected to train liberation fighters from across the continent a position of extraordinary responsibility and trust.

Training the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe Fighters

In Zambia, at military camps including the Gondar Military Camp, Asnakew became one of the key instructors for:

• Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC

• SWAPO fighters from Namibia

• Southern Sudanese liberation groups

• Somali resistance units

He trained more than 2,000 fighters in close-quarters combat, topography and infiltration techniques, survival skills, sabotage methodology, and political education the ideological foundation without which armed struggle becomes mere violence.

He worked closely with Chris Hani, who served as chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe and was tasked to establish ANC military bases in Tanzania and Zambia during the liberation struggle. To the fighters, Asnakew became known simply as ‘The General.’ To Latin American comrades operating in southern Africa, he was ‘Comandante.’ To Ethiopia, he remained a son carrying the torch of Pan-Africanism into exile.

III. Ethiopia’s Gift to South Africa Now Erased from Memory

When Mandela was released in 1990 and apartheid formally collapsed in 1994, Asnakew returned home. He never sought international acclaim. He never demanded public recognition or monuments. He continued serving Ethiopia in civil society, education, and national development work, operating with the quiet dignity characteristic of those who fought not for glory but for principle.

But South Africa’s political memory grew selective.

Today, many South Africans particularly the youth mobilised by contemporary xenophobic movements — do not know:

• That Mandela received military and political training in Ethiopia

• That Ethiopian officers shaped the ANC’s military doctrine and operational strategy

• That Ethiopia sheltered, armed, fed, and educated anti-apartheid fighters for three decades

• That Ethiopian taxpayers funded liberation movements long before the international community offered support

This amnesia is not accidental. It is politically convenient for those who wish to scapegoat immigrants without acknowledging the continent’s historical bonds of solidarity.

IV. The Rise of Black Apartheid: Vigilantism Repackaged as Populism

In the vacuum created by economic despair and political fragmentation, a new class of populist actors has emerged. Operation Dudula, a vigilante group that has evolved into a political party, mobilises its base around the slogan ‘Put South Africa First,’ using rhetoric that blames migrants for unemployment, crime, and service delivery failures.

Operation Dudula morphed from an online social media campaign propelled by the #PutSouthAfricansFirst hashtag into a xenophobic movement with real-world consequences. The digital-to-physical pipeline is direct: online incitement produces offline violence.

These populist actors do not speak of Ethiopia’s sacrifice. They do not acknowledge Mandela’s training in Addis Ababa. They do not invoke the memory of Asnakew Sisay. Instead, they tell economically desperate South Africans:

• “Foreigners are taking your jobs.”

• “Immigrants are criminals and drug dealers.”

• “We must reclaim our communities from outsiders.”

This rhetoric is carefully calibrated. It does not explicitly call for murder — but it creates what activists call ’emotional permission’ for violence to flourish. It normalises the idea that foreigners are legitimate targets for vigilante action.

The Political and Social Media Infrastructure of Violence

According to Witwatersrand University’s Xenowatch, xenophobic attacks resulted in 669 deaths, 5,310 looted shops, and 127,572 displacements between 1994 and March 2024. The rate of incidents has accelerated sharply in recent months.

According to Human Rights Watch, there were 59 reported incidents of xenophobic discrimination in 2024 and 2,946 individuals displaced as a result. But these figures capture only reported incidents. The true toll is substantially higher, as many attacks go undocumented, victims lack access to reporting mechanisms, and police investigations are routinely stalled or discontinued.

Social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube have failed to adequately moderate xenophobic hate speech, with campaigns like Operation Dudula first emerging online before catalysing real-world outbreaks of violent protests, vigilantism, arson, and murder.

V. The Human Cost: Ethiopians Under Fire Voices from the Community

The Recent Wave of Killings

An estimated 500,000 Ethiopians live in South Africa. In recent weeks, this population has experienced what they describe as a coordinated campaign of targeted violence.

In Johannesburg alone:

• Ethiopians have been shot in restaurants whilst having breakfast

• Executed on sidewalks in broad daylight

• Killed in their shops during business hours

• Targeted for extortion by vigilante groups

• Left largely unprotected by law enforcement

In Durban, six people of Ethiopian origin were killed in alleged xenophobic attacks over a single week, with victims killed in separate incidents, mostly during daylight hours, by South African nationals. One victim was doused in kerosene and set alight.

Victim Testimony and Community Voices

Yonas Fikru, an Ethiopian businessman in Durban, said he knew all six victims all men in their twenties who used to frequent his shop. He described attackers who “just come, steal and attack. They killed them without stealing anything from them. They just came and killed them.”

Tegegne Aboye, another member of the Ethiopian community in Durban, said locals have attempted multiple times to report incidents to police but “it always falls on deaf ears.” He expressed despair: “We see our brothers getting killed, doused with a three-litre jerrican of kerosene, and no one is helping us when this happens. We haven’t seen anyone sticking up for Ethiopian citizens here.”

The silence from law enforcement compounds the trauma. The Ethiopian Embassy in Pretoria released a statement advising Ethiopians to document and report incidents of violence and attack, and said it has requested the South African government to provide security protections to Ethiopians living in the country and to investigate the recent killings. But diplomatic statements, whilst necessary, cannot substitute for state protection.

School Violence and Children at Risk

The violence has extended into educational spaces. Members of Operation Dudula have stormed schools to forcefully eject children of other African nationals and block them from attending classes. Disturbing anti-immigrant videos circulating on social media show chaotic scenes of fear and tension, with schoolchildren in uniform seen running for safety as confusion rises. In one widely circulated clip, a visibly distressed child could be heard crying as his mother attempted to calm him, with her voice laced with fear and confusion. Moments later, gunshots rang out, sending pupils and bystanders scrambling.

Children some as young as five or six are now experiencing xenophobic violence as a routine feature of their schooling.

The Silence and Inaction of State Institutions

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has expressed grave concern over recent incidents of xenophobic violence perpetrated against nationals of other African countries in South Africa, noting a pattern that includes the 1998 killing of three foreign nationals in Johannesburg, the August 2000 killings in Cape Town, the May 2008 nationwide attacks resulting in over 60 deaths, 1,700 injuries and 100,000 displacements, and ongoing incidents in the 2020s linked to groups such as Operation Dudula.

This is not a new problem. It is a recurring crisis to which the South African state has consistently failed to respond with adequate investigation, prosecution, or prevention.

VI. The Moral Contradiction: Rights Preacher, Injustice Practitioner

South Africa positions itself as a global defender of human rights and continental peacemaker. The country has filed cases at the International Court of Justice. Its government issues statements condemning injustices in other nations. It presents itself as a beacon of post-conflict reconciliation and constitutional democracy.

But inside its own borders:

• Migrants are hunted with impunity

• Refugees are scapegoated for systemic economic failure

• African solidarity the very principle that sustained the anti-apartheid struggle is treated as a quaint historical artifact

• State institutions fail to investigate, prosecute, or prevent organised violence against vulnerable populations

This contradiction is not sustainable. A nation cannot preach justice abroad whilst tolerating systematic injustice at home without fundamentally compromising its moral authority.

VII. Accountability and Justice Denied

In November 2025, a South African High Court judgment confirmed that Operation Dudula perpetrated intimidation, harassment, incitement to violence and hate speech on grounds of nationality, social origin or ethnicity. The court interdicted Operation Dudula and its leaders from demanding that any private person produce identity documents to demonstrate their right to be in South Africa, and from making public statements on social media platforms that constitute hate speech.

This is welcome. But a court order alone does not stop violence. Implementation and enforcement remain uncertain. Advocacy groups note that whilst police have made arrests, those who sought to inflame tensions on social media and the masterminds remain largely untouched. The infrastructure of incitement persists.

VIII. Conclusion: Remembering “The General” in a Time of Forgetting

Asnakew Sisay Tegegne represents the best of Ethiopia’s Pan-African legacy a man who risked his freedom, his safety, and his life so that South Africans could one day live free from the terror of apartheid. He asked for nothing in return except acknowledgment that African liberation is a shared struggle, and that the bonds forged in struggle impose obligations.

Today, Ethiopians in South Africa are being killed in the very country he helped liberate. They are being killed by their neighbours. They are being killed with impunity. They are being killed whilst a state with a constitution that explicitly protects the rights of non-citizens fails to protect them.

This is not merely a tragedy. It is a betrayal of history, of Pan-Africanism, of the very principles that animated the anti-apartheid struggle.

If South Africa wants to genuinely honour its liberation struggle, it must:

• Protect African migrants and refugees with the full force of law

• Conduct prompt, thorough, and impartial investigations into all reported incidents of violence

• Identify, prosecute, and sanction all perpetrators, including those who organise or incite violence

• Reject populist scapegoating and address the real drivers of unemployment and inequality through structural economic reform

• Teach its youth particularly those born after 1994 the true history of African solidarity and continental struggle

• Implement the court order against Operation Dudula with rigour and consistency

And Ethiopia as a nation, as a government, as a diaspora community must reclaim its narrative. It must remind the continent that its sons and daughters, like Asnakew Sisay, paid the price for Africa’s freedom. It must demand that South Africa honour its commitments to human rights and African brotherhood not merely in rhetoric, but in practice.

History remembers those who fought for justice. It must also remember and condemn those who are dying because justice has been forgotten.

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By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

Part 2 of Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s four-part series on the Abraham Accords arrives at a geopolitical moment that demands neither theological certainty nor nationalist bombast, but rather cold strategic assessment. The article’s central proposition is deceptively simple: permissive disorder the condition in which great powers retreat and middle powers compete without constraint has transformed the Red Sea corridor into a contested zone where Ethiopia’s four survival interests (GERD, maritime sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity) are simultaneously elevated in strategic value and endangered by competitive forces beyond Addis Ababa’s control.

The analysis contained here is not a brief for any political faction, nor a rejoinder to another editorial position. It is an effort to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground: the movement of military infrastructure, the manipulation of recognition as a corridor instrument, the fracturing of the Saudi–UAE partnership, and the acceleration of Sudan and Yemen as transmission belts for Middle Eastern rivalry into Horn politics. The author assembles the evidence with a clarity that should trouble anyone whose primary concern is Ethiopian sovereignty and institutional coherence.

Most significantly, the work articulates what we have long argued in these pages: that Ethiopia’s maritime claim to the Doumeira–Beilul coastline is not an emotional or nationalist indulgence. It is a matter of self–defence. A nation of 130 million cannot afford to permit its most strategically sensitive frontier to remain under the control of a garrison state whose survival depends on external patrons. Eritrea’s weakness is not a reason for Ethiopian complacency; it is a launching pad that any hostile power, Egypt, any actor seeking a platform to threaten GERD, can exploit at will.

This is what institutional credibility looks like in a competitive geopolitical system. It is not negotiable with ethnic coalitions or factional bargaining. The Tribune publishes this work because it advances the conversation we must be having: how does a unified Ethiopia navigate a disorder not of its making?

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

The Abraham Accords, validated by Operation Epic Fury (the February 2026 US–Israeli campaign that degraded Iran’s military capacity), have produced a structural reordering of the Horn’s geopolitical landscape. This is not a settled hierarchy but a competitive system in which middle powers exploit great-power distraction to advance their positions through ports, recognition diplomacy, security outsourcing, and sub-state partnerships.

Permissive disorder operates as both opportunity and trap. It widens the menu of external partners and corridor options; it also raises the cost of miscalculation, because no great-power referee exists to mediate escalation. The United States has not abandoned the Horn; it has been restructured through the convergent alignment, producing a partisan presence that amplifies rather than moderates competition. Europe is absent, and Russia and China offer optionality without security guarantees. In this environment, institutional coherence becomes the premium asset.

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

The competitive structure is characterised as overlapping blocs: the convergent alignment (Israel–UAE–India–Ethiopia, operationalised through Somaliland) and the balancing coalition (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Somalia’s federal government, Eritrea). These are not fixed; they are transactional, mediated through commercial entities and security contractors rather than formal treaties.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland (December 2025) demonstrates that recognition has become a policy tool within this architecture—one that re-prices risk and re-ranks partners. For Ethiopia, this precedent is double-edged: it validates the principle of boundary revision in the Horn and creates a framework Ethiopia can invoke for its own maritime claim, while potentially internationalising disputes and deepening proxy alignment logic.

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

Sudan and Yemen are not peripheral. They function as transmission belts through which Middle Eastern competition propagates into Horn corridor politics. Sudan’s civil war demonstrates what happens when a state fragments under permissive disorder: each faction attracts a different external patron, corridor assets become prizes in a proxy war, and state capacity evaporates. Yemen’s Houthi campaign directly determines shipping economics and the strategic salience of African alternatives (Berbera, Assab, Lamu).

For Ethiopia, this is not theoretical. Higher insurance premiums, longer routing, and supply-chain delays compress fiscal space and raise the urgency of corridor diversification. The Berbera option (through the Somaliland MoU) and the Assab option (through sovereign coastline recovery) are not merely desirable; they are necessitated by a Red Sea security environment rendered structurally unstable.

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

Eritrea occupies a position analytically distinct from any other Horn actor. It is not a competitor; it is a vulnerability node—a weak state whose weakness makes it a threat to Ethiopian sovereignty. With a population below four million, an economy among the least productive in Africa, and a political system dependent entirely on the narrative of permanent threat from Ethiopia, Eritrea is a launching pad that any hostile power can lease, co-opt, or exploit.

Egypt’s reported interest in establishing military presence on the Eritrean coast illustrates the threat directly. An Egyptian naval or air facility at Assab, positioned within approximately 500 kilometres of GERD, would place precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles within striking range of Ethiopia’s most consequential infrastructure project. This is why sovereign sea access is, for Ethiopia, a matter of self-defence before it is a matter of economics.

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

Ethiopia’s four singular interests—GERD, Red Sea sovereignty, economic development, and internal unity—provide the analytical framework. GERD benefits from the alignment of winners, but it is not merely a foreign-policy asset; it is the engine of Ethiopia’s structural transformation. Red Sea sovereignty is the self-defence imperative: the 180–200 kilometres of coastline from Doumeira to Beilul must be recovered. Economic development requires converting the mutual economic dividend into tangible outcomes: agri-industrial processing, manufacturing, infrastructure, technology education.

Internal unity is the binding constraint on all three. Permissive disorder does not create Ethiopia’s ethnic fractures, but it amplifies them catastrophically. When external coalitions compete, they prefer counterparties who can deliver concessions quickly; this selects for elite bargaining and reinforces extraction unless institutions impose transparency. If Ethiopia cannot present a unified position at the bargaining table, it cannot protect GERD, cannot recover its coastline, and cannot absorb the investment that the alignment of winners offers.

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

The emerging geopolitical architecture does not mechanically determine Ethiopia’s fate; it raises the payoff to cohesion and the cost of fragmentation. If Ethiopia fragments, each successor entity inherits weaker corridor bargaining power, higher transaction costs, and higher susceptibility to patronage capture. Eritrea’s weakness becomes an invitation to hostile powers. GERD becomes a contested asset. The coastline remains lost. The alignment of winners becomes a patron–client trap rather than a partnership of equals. Conversely, a unified Ethiopia—governed through civic institutions rather than ethnic bargaining—can protect GERD, recover its coastline, absorb investment at scale, and function as the dominant power in the Horn–Red Sea region that its demography, geography, and economic trajectory destine it to become.

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

Part 3 examines the internal dynamics that make institutional coherence possible or impossible.

Author: Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)
Date: 19 April 2026
Series: The Abraham Accords — Part 2 of 4
Topic: Competition and Permissive Disorder in the Gulf–Red Sea–Hor

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By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

A Warning Ethiopia Cannot Afford to Ignore

There are moments in a nation’s life when silence becomes complicity. Ethiopia stands at such a moment. The Ethiopian Tribune has long held that the duty of independent journalism is not merely to inform but to name what is happening with clarity, courage, and moral seriousness even, and especially, when what must be named is deeply uncomfortable.

The article we present in this edition “Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia” is one of the most consequential pieces of political analysis we have published. Its author, Professor Girma Berhanu of the University of Gothenburg, brings to bear rigorous comparative political theory alongside meticulous documentation of on-the-ground realities. The result is a work that demands not merely reading, but reckoning.

Professor Berhanu builds his analysis on Jason Stanley’s framework in How Fascism Works, applying it with unflinching precision to Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. He identifies, one by one, the hallmarks of fascist political practice: the fabrication of mythic history, the systematic destruction of truth, the vilification of intellectuals, the weaponization of identity, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions. His conclusion is not offered tentatively: these are not tendencies that might emerge; they are already defining features of the Ethiopian political order.

We recognise that strong analysis provokes strong responses. We welcome rigorous engagement, challenge, and debate. What we will not accept is the erasure of the evidence or the silencing of those who speak it. The Tribune publishes this work in the conviction that Ethiopia’s future depends on honest diagnosis of its present however painful that diagnosis may be.

We urge every Ethiopian at home and in the diaspora every diplomat, every human rights advocate, every African Union official, and every international observer to read this article in full. The moment for polite understatement has passed.

The Editors

The Ethiopian Tribune Editorial Board

SYNOPSIS

Fascism at Work: Propaganda, Conspiracy, Lies, Hatred, and Incompetence in Ethiopia

By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Overview

This paper offers a comprehensive and urgent analysis of Ethiopia’s contemporary political crisis through the analytical lens of Jason Stanley’s landmark work How Fascism Works. Professor Berhanu argues, without equivocation, that the tactics Stanley identifies as the hallmarks of fascist political practice are not theoretical abstractions in Ethiopia, they are operational realities, increasingly defining the political order under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the ideology of Oromummaa.

Key Arguments

The paper identifies nine structural features of fascist politics all of which the author argues are present in contemporary Ethiopia. These are: the fabrication of a glorified mythic past to legitimize present domination; pervasive and unapologetic propaganda that actively replaces truth with politically convenient falsehood; the structural suppression of intellectuals and critical voices; the cultivation of conspiracy thinking and manufactured paranoia to justify repression; the normalization of ethnic hierarchy and “natural order”; the weaponization of a victimhood narrative by dominant groups; the deployment of law-and-order politics as a mechanism of control; the exclusionary redefinition of national identity; and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions, leaving only a hollowed-out façade.

The Finfinnee Reclamation Framework

A central focus of the paper is the so-called “Finfinnee Reclamation Framework” a discussion draft circulating within the government that the author describes as a blueprint for ethnic domination. The document proposes transferring political authority, economic power, and land rights in Addis Ababa to Oromo stakeholders, invoking international models from Dubai’s “Sovereign Host” approach to Malaysia’s Bumiputera policy as templates for an “Oromo First” agenda. Professor Berhanu argues that this represents a direct assault on Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic federal capital and a flagrant attack on civic equality and shared citizenship. Evidence from the economic decline of Hawassa under the Sidama regional model and the effective “Bantustan-ization” of Harar are presented as real-world warnings of what such policies produce.

Oromummaa, Ethnic Federalism, and Comparative Politics

The paper provides a rigorous examination of Oromummaa as both a cultural framework and a state ideology. While acknowledging that proponents present it as a project of cultural revitalization and emancipation, Professor Berhanu argues that in its operative form under the current government, it exhibits structural features comparable to fascist and ethnonationalist movements: the primacy of a singular collective identity, the construction of existential “enemies,” nostalgic myth-making, the erosion of pluralism, and the subordination of individual and minority rights to ideological cohesion. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction and Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, the paper situates Oromummaa within a broader comparative political theory framework while carefully noting important historical and contextual differences from European fascism.

Ethiopia’s system of ethnic federalism, introduced under the TPLF in the early 1990s, receives extensive critical analysis. The author characterizes it as structurally analogous to the Bantustan model of apartheid-era South Africa a system that has transformed identity into the primary currency of power, normalized inter-ethnic suspicion and rivalry, and created fertile ground for racialized political mobilization, including the construction of a “Cushitic versus Semitic” dichotomy with dangerous ideological resonances.

The Amhara Crisis and Three Tiers of Victimhood

Professor Berhanu advances a three-tiered analytical framework to account for the full scope of the crisis facing Ethiopia’s Amhara population. First-tier victimhood refers to the direct and documented experience of mass killings, displacement, and the destruction of cultural and religious heritage. Second-tier victimhood refers to the manipulation of narrative the construction by ethnonationalist actors of a counter-victimhood discourse that obscures and denies Amhara suffering while reframing perpetrators as victims. Third-tier or “psychic” victimhood refers to the compounding effect of international invisibility: the failure of global media, diaspora networks, and international institutions to adequately recognize, document, and respond to the scale of atrocity. The campaign described by critics as “Amharafrei” an explicit parallel drawn to the Nazi concept of Judenfrei is presented as a deliberate strategy of cultural erasure encompassing historicide, ethnocide, and linguicide.

Significance and Urgency

This paper is not academic exercise. It is, as its author explicitly states, motivated by moral anger and by the conviction that accurate diagnosis of political pathology is a precondition for meaningful response. Its arguments carry direct implications for Ethiopian citizens, the diaspora, opposition figures, civil society, and the international community alike. The convergence of fascist-style political tactics, ethnic federalism’s structural fragmentation, the ideological entrenchment of Oromummaa, and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Amhara regions constitutes, in Professor Berhanu’s assessment, a coherent and escalating political crisis not an isolated series of events.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

The synopsis above conveys the structure and stakes of Professor Berhanu’s analysis, but it cannot substitute for the article itself. The full text develops each argument with scholarly depth, primary documentation, comparative historical evidence, and the kind of analytical precision that the gravity of the subject demands. We urge all readers to access and read the complete article at the link below:-

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Sovereignty, Development, and Democratic Unity in the Age of Transactional Geopolitics

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

In moments when a nation stands at the hinge of history, clarity becomes a civic duty. Dr. Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s sweeping and meticulously argued essay, “The Spirit of Adwa Must Carry Ethiopia Through: GERD and the Red Sea,” arrives precisely at such a moment when Ethiopia’s sovereignty, developmental trajectory, and democratic future are being tested simultaneously at home and abroad.

From its opening pages, the article insists on a truth too often neglected in elite political discourse: Ethiopia’s future belongs to its young. As the author writes, “listen to the younger generation the nation is theirs to inherit.” With nearly 65% of Ethiopians under thirty, this is not a rhetorical flourish but a demographic fact that demands institutional response. Dr. Hailu’s insistence that Gen‑Z and Gen‑α must not merely be consulted but empowered is one of the most consequential interventions in contemporary Ethiopian political thought.

Yet this work is not a generational manifesto alone. It is a panoramic examination of the forces shaping Ethiopia’s sovereignty from the self-financed triumph of GERD, described as “a national narrative converted into steel and megawatts,” to the long arc of geopolitical engineering that rendered Ethiopia landlocked in 1993. The author does not shy away from naming the historical actors involved, nor from articulating Ethiopia’s legitimate and peaceful claim to restored Red Sea access.

Crucially, the article refuses the false binary that has long distorted Ethiopia’s public sphere: that one must choose between defending national sovereignty and demanding democratic accountability. Dr. Hailu argues instead that sovereignty without democracy is brittle, and democracy without sovereignty is hollow. As he notes, “The conclusion… is democratic accountability through democratic institutions… not the fragmentation of Ethiopia’s sovereign position.”

This is a work of scholarship, but also of civic courage. It confronts the country’s internal fractures ethnic violence, contested territories, democratic regression without surrendering to fatalism or cynicism. It situates Ethiopia’s challenges within global patterns of coercive mediation, transactional geopolitics, and great‑power opportunism. And it offers a strategic doctrine rooted in Adwa: principled resistance, coalition-building, technological ambition, and the disciplined use of national power.

Above all, this article is a call to responsibility directed at leaders, institutions, and especially the young Ethiopians who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions. As Dr. Hailu writes in one of the essay’s most resonant lines, “Stand with Ethiopia on GERD. Stand with Ethiopia on the Red Sea… and ensure that it is the youngest Ethiopians who hold the pen—because it is their story, and it always was.”

The Ethiopian Tribune is proud to present this work. It is not merely an article; it is an invitation to think, to argue, to build and to imagine Ethiopia not as a nation trapped by its past, but as one propelled by its youth, its ingenuity, and its unbroken sovereign will.

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

Readers are encouraged to access and study the full PDF of the article at the following link.

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ትንታኔ፦ የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን የፖለቲካ እና የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳዮች ክፍል

መጋቢት 16 ቀን 2018 ዓ.ም (ማርች 25፣ 2026)

በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ዘርፍ ከፍተኛ ድንጋጤን በፈጠረ ውሳኔ፣ በሎስ አንጀለስ የሚገኝ የዳኞች ቡድን በቴክኖሎጂ ግዙፎቹ ሜታ (Meta) እና ጎግል (Google) ላይ ከዚህ ቀደም ታይቶ የማይታወቅ የሽንፈት ውሳኔ አስተላልፏል። ይህ ብይን የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ኩባንያዎች “ሆን ተብሎ ለተቀነባበረ የዲጂታል ሱሰኝነት” በሕግ ተጠያቂ የተደረጉበት የመጀመሪያው አጋጣሚ ነው። የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት ከሆነ፣ ይህ ውሳኔ እንደ ኢትዮጵያ ባሉ በማደግ ላይ ባሉ አገራት የሚገኙ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣት ተጠቃሚዎችን ጨምሮ፣ መላውን የዲጂታል ዓለም ገጽታ መሠረታዊ በሆነ መልኩ ሊቀይረው ይችላል።

የፍርዱ ይዘት

ሳምንታት ለፈጀው ከፍተኛ የምስክርነት ቃል መስማት ሂደት በኋላ፣ የዳኞች ቡድኑ ሜታ (የኢንስታግራም፣ ፌስቡክ እና ዋትስአፕ እናት ኩባንያ) እና ጎግል (የዩቲዩብ ባለቤት) ሆን ብለው ተጠቃሚን ሱሰኛ የሚያደርጉ የመገናኛ መድረኮችን ቀርፀዋል የሚል መደምደሚያ ላይ ደርሷል። ዳኞቹ እነዚህ የዲጂታል መድረኮች አወቃቀር በሕግ ሰነዶች ላይ ‘ኬሊ’ ተብላ በተጠቀሰችው የ20 ዓመት ወጣት የአእምሮ ጤና ላይ ቀጥተኛ ጉዳት ማድረሳቸውን አረጋግጠዋል።

የከሳሿ የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደ “infinite scrolling” (ገደብ የለሽ የመረጃ ፍሰት) እና የፍላጎት ስልተ-ቀመሮች (algorithms) በአጋጣሚ የተፈጠሩ ሳይሆኑ፣ የሕፃናትን ደህንነት መሥዋዕት በማድረግ ተጠቃሚዎችን ለረጅም ሰዓት ለማቆየት ታስበው የተሰሩ መሆናቸውን በማስረጃ አቅርበው ተከራክረዋል።

የኩባንያዎቹ መከላከያ ውድቅ መደረግ

የሜታ ጠበቆች ጉዳዩን እንደ ግል ችግር በመፈረጅ ኩባንያውን ከተጠያቂነት ለማዳን ጥረት አድርገው ነበር። ኬሊ በግል ሕይወቷ መከራ ቢደርስባትም፣ ኢንስታግራምን መጠቀምዋ ለሥነ-ልቦና ቀውሷ መንስኤ እንዳልሆነ ወይም “ጉልህ አስተዋጽኦ” እንዳልነበረው ተከራክረዋል።

ሆኖም ዳኞቹ በዚህ መከላከያ አልተረቱም። ይልቁንም ኩባንያዎቹ ራሳቸው ያደረጓቸውን የውስጥ ጥናቶች ጨምሮ፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች ልክ እንደ ቁማር የአንጎልን የደስታ ስሜት (dopamine) ቀስቃሽ በሆነ መልኩ መገንባታቸውን የሚያሳዩ ማስረጃዎችን በመጥቀስ ውሳኔያቸውን አጽንተዋል።

በዛሬው ዕለት በዓለም አቀፍ የቴክኖሎጂ ኢንደስትሪ ላይ እንደ መብረቅ የተሰማው የሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት ውሳኔ፣ ሜታ እና ጎግልን ብቻ ሳይሆን እንደ ቲክቶክ (TikTok) ያሉ ሌሎች ግዙፍ መድረኮችንም ስጋት ላይ ጥሏል። የ20 ዓመቷን ኬሊን የካሳ ጥያቄ መሠረት በማድረግ የተሰጠው ይህ “ታሪካዊ” ብይን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ለተጠቃሚዎቻቸው የአእምሮ ጤና ያላቸውን የሕግ ተጠያቂነት አዲስ ምዕራፍ ከፍቷል።

የብይኑ መሠረት እና የቲክቶክ ስጋት
ምንም እንኳን የዚህኛው ክስ ትኩረት በሜታ (ኢንስታግራም) እና ጎግል (ዩቲዩብ) ላይ ቢሆንም፣ የፍርዱ መሠረታዊ ምክንያት ግን እንደ ቲክቶክ ያሉ መድረኮችን በቀጥታ የሚነካ ነው። ዳኞቹ ኩባንያዎቹን ጥፋተኛ ያደረጓቸው በሚከተሉት ነጥቦች ነው፦

የአልጎሪዝም አወቃቀር፦ ተጠቃሚው ሳያስበው ለሰዓታት እንዲቆይ የሚያደርጉ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች።ሆን ተብሎ የተሰሩ ዲዛይኖች፦ ልክ እንደ ቲክቶክ “For You Page” ሁሉ፣ ወጣቶችን ከእውነታው ዓለም የሚነጥሉ ማራኪ ግን ጎጂ ይዘቶችን የሚያስቀድሙ አሰራሮች።
የሕግ ባለሙያዎች እንደሚሉት፣ ቲክቶክ በአሁኑ ወቅት በአሜሪካ እና በአውሮፓ መሰል ክሶች እየቀረቡበት በመሆኑ፣ ይህ የሜታ እና ጎግል መሸነፍ ለቲክቶክም “የመጨረሻው ማስጠንቀቂያ” ተደርጎ ተወስዷል።

“የዲጂታል መድኃኒት” ተጠያቂነት

“ይህ ውሳኔ በኢትዮጵያ ያሉ ወላጆች እና ተቆጣጣሪ አካላት የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ አጠቃቀምን እንደ ቀላል መዝናኛ ብቻ ሳይሆን፣ ከፍተኛ ጥንቃቄ እንደሚሻ ‘ምርት’ እንዲመለከቱት ያደርጋል።”

የሜታ ጠበቆች “ኢንስታግራም ለኬሊ ችግር መንስኤ አይደለም” ብለው ቢከራከሩም፣ የሎስ አንጀለሱ ውሳኔ ግን የቴክኖሎጂው ዲዛይን ራሱ “መርዝ” ሊሆን እንደሚችል አረጋግጧል።

ቀጣዩ እርምጃ ምን ሊሆን ይችላል?
ይህ ብይን በመቶዎች ለሚቆጠሩ ተመሳሳይ ክሶች መንገድ ከፋች በመሆኑ፣ ወደፊት ኩባንያዎቹ የሚከተሉትን ለውጦች እንዲያደርጉ ሊገደዱ ይችላሉ፦

• ለታዳጊዎች የሚቀርቡ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ባህሪያትን መቀነስ።
• በየቀኑ የሚፈቀደውን የሰዓት ገደብ ማጥበቅ።
• ለደረሱ ጉዳቶች በቢሊዮን የሚቆጠር ዶላር ካሳ መክፈል።

በሎስ አንጀለስ ፍርድ ቤት በሜታ እና ጎግል ላይ የተሰጠው ውሳኔ ለኢትዮጵያ ትልቅ ደወል ነው። ሆኖም ለኢትዮጵያ ጉዳዩ ይበልጥ ውስብስብ የሚሆነው፣ እነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” የተባሉ ቴክኖሎጂዎች በራሱ በመንግሥት እና በከፍተኛ አመራሮች ዘንድ እንደ ዋነኛ የሥራ እና የፕሮፓጋንዳ መሣሪያ በመወሰዳቸው ነው።

የመንግሥት “ዲጂታል አባዜ” እና የተጋላጭነት ስጋት

ጠቅላይ ሚኒስትር ዐቢይ አሕመድን ጨምሮ ከፍተኛ የመንግሥት ባለሥልጣናት አዳዲስ የቴክኖሎጂ ውጤቶችን (እንደ ቲክቶክ፣ ኤክስ እና ፌስቡክ) በከፍተኛ ሁኔታ መጠቀማቸው ይታወቃል። መንግሥት “ዲጂታል ኢትዮጵያ 2025” በሚል መሪ ቃል ዜጎች ወደ ቴክኖሎጂው እንዲገቡ እያበረታታ ባለበት በዚህ ወቅት፣ የቴክኖሎጂው “አዳኝ” (Predatory) ባህሪ ግን ችላ ተብሏል።

ተባባሪነት ወይስ አጠቃቀም?

መንግሥት እነዚህን መድረኮች ለፖለቲካዊ መልዕክት ማስተላለፊያነት ሲጠቀም፣ ሳያውቀው ወጣቱ ትውልድ በእነዚህ “ሱስ አስያዥ” ስልተ-ቀመሮች (Algorithms) ውስጥ እንዲዘፈቅ በር ይከፍታል። ይህም መንግሥትን የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ያልተፈረመ ስምምነት” ተባባሪ ያደርገዋል።

የፖለቲካ ጉዳት፦ “የአልጎሪዝም ፖለቲካ” እና አለመረጋጋት
በአሜሪካ የተሰጠው ብይን እንደሚያሳየው፣ እነዚህ መድረኮች የተሰሩት ሰውን ስሜታዊ በማድረግ ረጅም ሰዓት እንዲቆይ ነው። በኢትዮጵያ ፖለቲካ ውስጥ ይህ ትልቅ አደጋ አለው፦

የሐሰት መረጃ መስፋፋት፦ ስልተ-ቀመሮቹ (Algorithms) ይበልጥ አነጋጋሪ እና ስሜት ቀስቃሽ የሆኑ የጥላቻ ንግግሮችን እና የሐሰት ወሬዎችን ለተጠቃሚው በማቅረብ ሱስ ያስይዛሉ። ይህ ደግሞ በኅብረተሰቡ ውስጥ ዋልታ ረገጥ ፖለቲካ እንዲነግሥ እና ብሔራዊ መግባባት እንዲጠፋ ያደርጋል።

የወጣቱ ትውልድ መደንዘዝ፦ ወጣቱ በቲክቶክ እና በፌስቡክ ሱስ ውስጥ ሲወድቅ፣ ለፖለቲካዊ ተሳትፎ እና ለሀገራዊ ጉዳዮች ያለው ንቁ ተሳትፎ እየቀነሰ ይሄዳል (Digital Narcissism)።

የኢኮኖሚ ጉዳት፦ ምርታማነት እና የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት
ከኢኮኖሚ አንጻር የማህበራዊ ሚዲያ ሱስ ለኢትዮጵያ ከፍተኛ ኪሳራ እያመጣ ነው፦

የምርታማነት መቀነስ፦ በሚሊዮን የሚቆጠሩ ወጣቶች እና የመንግሥት ሠራተኞች በሥራ ሰዓት በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ የሚያሳልፉት ሰዓት ለሀገር ውስጥ ምርት (GDP) እድገት ትልቅ እንቅፋት ነው።

የውጭ ምንዛሬ ፍሰት፦ ኢትዮጵያውያን በእነዚህ መድረኮች ላይ ማስታወቂያ ሲያወጡ ወይም የቲክቶክ “ስጦታዎችን” (Gifts) ሲለዋወጡ፣ በድብቅም ይሁን በግልጽ ከፍተኛ መጠን ያለው የውጭ ምንዛሬ ከሀገር ይወጣል። ኩባንያዎቹ (ሜታ፣ ጎግል፣ ቲክቶክ) በኢትዮጵያ ተጠቃሚዎች ቢከብሩም፣ ለሀገሪቱ የሚከፍሉት ግብር ወይም የሚያበረክቱት የኢኮኖሚ ድርሻ አነስተኛ ነው።

የሕግ ክፍተት፦ ተኩላው በበግ ለምድ
ኢትዮጵያ የ”ኮምፒውተር ወንጀል አዋጅ” እና የ”መገናኛ ብዙኃን አዋጅ” ቢኖራትም፣ እነዚህ ሕጎች በዋናነት የሚያተኩሩት ይዘት (Content) ላይ እንጂ በቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎቹ “ሱስ አስያዥ ዲዛይን” ላይ አይደለም። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂዎቹ አድናቂ በመሆኑ፣ ኩባንያዎቹን በሕግ ከመጠየቅ ይልቅ “ለዲጂታል ዲፕሎማሲ” ቅድሚያ ይሰጣል።

የሎስ አንጀለሱ ብይን ለኢትዮጵያ የሚሰጠው ትምህርት ግልጽ ነው፤ ቴክኖሎጂን ማድነቅ እና መጠቀም አንድ ነገር ሲሆን፣ የቴክኖሎጂ ኩባንያዎች ዜጎችን (በተለይም ታዳጊዎችን) ለትርፍ ሲሉ ለሱስ እንዳይዳርጉ የመቆጣጠር ኃላፊነት ደግሞ ሌላ ነው። መንግሥት የቴክኖሎጂ አፍቃሪነቱን እና የቁጥጥር ኃላፊነቱን ማመጣጠን ካልቻለ፣ ውጤቱ “ዲጂታል ሱስ የተጠናወተው እና በፖለቲካ የተከፋፈለ” ትውልድ መፍጠር ይሆናል።

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One hundred and twenty years on, we mourn a man twice over, first to death, then to the rather more deliberate vandalism of political convenience.

BY THOMAS ARAYA 

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

“When the telegrapher delivered the news, he got it wrong;

It is not Makonnen who has died, but the poor.”

ETHIOPIAN VERSE, COMPOSED IN MOURNING, 1906

These lines were not written by a courtier angling for a pension, nor by a priest reciting the obligatory liturgy of grief. They were written because an entire country felt the floor give way beneath its feet. One hundred and twenty years ago today, on Megabit 13, 1898 by the Ethiopian calendar, or the 22nd of March, 1906 to those of us consulting a rather more internationally recognised diary, His Highness Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael departed this world at the age of fifty-four. He left behind him a city that wept, an emperor who was inconsolable, and a legacy that has since been subjected to indignities that would make a lesser ghost very cross indeed.

But this is not merely an occasion for the sort of anniversary column that pats the subject on the head and moves swiftly on. The year 2026 demands more than archival reverence. It demands we look, with clear and slightly uncomfortable eyes, at what has been done or more precisely, what has been not done to the memory of the man his people called the General of the Poor.

The Final Journey: From the Burqa to the Tomb

History records Ras Makonnen’s last days with a poignancy that no dramatist could improve upon. In early 1902 (1894 by the Ethiopian reckoning), the great Ras fell gravely ill. His physicians in Harar, a city he had governed with the quiet authority of a man who understood both swords and diplomacy recommended the superior medical facilities of the young capital, Addis Ababa. And so, on the 12th of January, he set out.

It proved, as these journeys so often do, to be more pilgrimage than medical mission. By the 17th, his caravan had reached the Burqa River, where he paused to observe the Feast of the Epiphany, Timkat amidst the holy waters. There, with the ceremonies swirling around him and his condition worsening with rather poor timing, the Ras made the decision that only a man who knows himself can make: he turned back. Not to Harar, exactly, but to the hills of Kulubi, and to the Church he had served all his life. It was there, on the 22nd of March, 1906, that he drew his last breath.

The mourning that followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Emperor Menelik II, his cousin, his comrade, and the man with whom he had stood at Adwa a decade earlier, decreed that the forty-day memorial be observed in the capital. On Monday the 30th of April, the air above Addis Ababa was thick with incense and the chanting of thousands of priests drawn from every monastery and cathedral in the central highlands. The following day, St. George’s Day, a vast encampment of tents rose at Se’i Meda. His ceremonial robes were paraded. His golden crown. The medals he wore with that particular quiet dignity of men who have actually earned their decorations. His horses and mules, draped in gold-leafed trappings, walked riderless through the crowds, a sight, one imagines, that reduced grown soldiers to silence.

The Modern Paradox: A Legacy in Fragments

We arrive now at the present day, and the atmosphere changes considerably. We are in the era of “Medemer” a philosophy championed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that presents itself as the great weaving-together of Ethiopia’s disparate historical threads into something coherent and proud. Under this administration, “Great Man” history has enjoyed something of a renaissance. The Adwa Victory Memorial stands in the heart of the capital, gleaming and enormous. Unity Park occupies the meticulously restored Grand Palace. The rhetoric regarding the “restoration of the military institution” to its former glory flows freely and often.

One might observe, with only the gentlest of ironies, that restoring an institution’s image is considerably easier than restoring the actual bronze images of the men who built it.

And yet. There exists, in Harar, in the very city that Ras Makonnen built, governed, and made the most cosmopolitan corner of the empire a vacant pedestal. In June 2020, amidst the violent unrest that followed the appalling assassination of the beloved musician Hachalu Hundessa, a mob toppled and smashed the bronze statue of Ras Makonnen. It was not an accident. It was not collateral damage. It was a targeted act a symbolic execution of a man who had already been dead for one hundred and fourteen years and might therefore have reasonably expected to be left in peace.

The state’s response to this act of cultural desecration? A silence so complete it had its own echo.

The Selective Memory of the State

PM Abiy Ahmed has, on numerous occasions, positioned himself as the custodian of Ethiopian military tradition the heir to the generals who routed the Italians at Adwa. He invokes their names. He commissions their memorials. He speaks of continuity. It is stirring stuff, and would be considerably more stirring were it applied with any consistency.

Ras Makonnen was not merely one of the generals of Adwa. He was arguably its most consequential diplomat and strategist the man who had spent years in European capitals learning precisely how the continent worked, and deploying that knowledge in service of an empire that most Europeans had blithely assumed would simply capitulate. To honour Adwa without honouring Makonnen is rather like celebrating a Test match whilst quietly pretending that one of the opening batsmen didn’t exist.

Critics and there are many, though they tend to express themselves carefully suggest that the Prime Minister is performing a delicate, perhaps rather cynical, balancing act. The imagery of the imperial military provides historical legitimacy to the current state. But rebuilding the statue of Ras Makonnen in Harar risks irritating the more nationalist elements of his ethnic Oromo constituency, some of whom have chosen to see Makonnen through the reductive lens of “imperial expansionist” rather than as the vastly more complicated figure he actually was.

And here, here is where the irony becomes almost physically painful. Ras Makonnen was himself of Oromo descent. He hailed from the Wollo Oromo lineage. He spoke multiple languages. He embodied, in his own person, precisely the kind of multi-ethnic, integrated Ethiopian identity that the current administration endlessly claims to champion. The man who is being implicitly erased as a symbol of “imperial oppression” was, in his own right, a son of the very people in whose name the erasure is being conducted.

One is tempted to suggest that whoever is advising the government on the history of its own country might benefit from a library card.

The Cost of Silence

The “selective restoration” we observe across Ethiopia today, where certain statues receive fresh gilding whilst others remain broken in storage or simply absent from their plinths, reveals something uncomfortable about how history is being deployed. It is not being used as a foundation for national identity. It is being used as a political utility: polished when convenient, discarded when inconvenient, and never, under any circumstances, allowed to complicate the preferred narrative of the day.

When the government spends millions on the Adwa Memorial in Addis Ababa whilst “forgetting” the broken bronze in Harar, the message is plain enough: the past is welcome at the table only when it behaves itself. History, in this reading, is not a discipline. It is a decoration.

The mourners of 1906 understood something rather more profound. They understood that Ras Makonnen’s claim on the collective grief of Ethiopia was not bureaucratic or tribal. It transcended ethnicity, rank, and geography. He was a protector of the common person, the one the poet called simply “the poor”, in the fullest and most generous sense of that word.

A continuity with large gaps in it is not, strictly speaking, continuity. It is, at best, a very long ellipsis.

A CALL FOR CONSISTENCY

As we mark this one hundred and twentieth anniversary, the Ethiopian Tribune calls for a rejection of this selective amnesia and calls for it without apology. A military institution is not built on new hardware or sharp uniforms. It is built on the unshakeable honour accorded to the men who came before. To leave Ras Makonnen’s statue in pieces is to hand the mob a permanent veto over national history a rather alarming precedent for any government that claims to represent all Ethiopians to set.

If the Prime Minister genuinely wishes to be seen as a restorer of Ethiopian greatness, he must look beyond the capital’s vanity projects and attend to the wounds in his regional cities. Harar is not a footnote. It is where the empire’s most capable mind governed, built, and is now 120 years after his death dishonoured by a silence that speaks volumes.

The poet, writing in the grief of 1906, was correct: when Makonnen died, the poor lost a father. But if we permit his memory to be quietly partitioned away sacrificed to the expediencies of modern ethnic politics then it is not only the poor who have suffered a loss. It is the soul of the Ethiopian nation itself, which has proved, rather too obligingly, that some of its generals can be erased simply by leaving a pedestal empty long enough for everyone to stop noticing.

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By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

The Federal Republic of Megala Finfiney has, over the years, quietly normalised the extraordinary. Coups rebranded as “administrative reshuffles.” Budget speeches delivered entirely in metaphor. Ministers who vanish for months and resurface claiming to have been conducting “field research in remote spiritual zones” a phrase that, in any other country, would trigger a welfare check but in Megala Finfiney earns a ministerial commendation. The republic has absorbed all of it with the weary grace of a people who have simply seen too much.

But nothing, not the coups, not the metaphors, not the spiritual zones prepared anyone for what happened on Thursday 19th of March 2026 morning in Megala Finfiney, when the National Assembly failed to convene because the ruling party’s MPs were sulking.

Not a power cut. Not a security scare. Not a plague of locusts or an act of God, though God, at this point, could hardly be blamed for looking away. The Property Advancement Coalition a party that has governed Megala with the navigational confidence of a goat on a glass staircase, had published its candidate list for the upcoming elections. More than half its sitting MPs discovered they had been dropped. Not reassigned. Not “strategically repositioned for maximum national impact.” Dropped. Like a cracked clay pot from a great height, with no ceremony and no apology.

And so, in a collective act of professional abdication that would embarrass a toddler denied a biscuit, they simply did not come to work. The Speaker waited. The chamber sat empty. The microphones, accustomed to being slapped, were not even granted that dignity. The session collapsed, and the country inflation-battered, corruption-exhausted, perpetually patient, finally lost its sense of humour. Then found it again, sharper and meaner than before.

In the sprawling Merkato of Megala Finfiney, where the price of onions has risen 340% in two years and cooking oil now requires something approaching a mortgage, the reactions arrived fast and without mercy. “They didn’t come to Parliament?” said Almaz, a mother of four. “Good. They haven’t come to our lives either.” Bekele, a taxi driver with the political acuity of a man who has spent two decades stuck in traffic listening to everything, offered his own analysis: “Let them join the TikTok army. At least those boys show up.” University students nearby immediately began workshopping hashtags — #PACChallenge, #SulkingMPs with the creative energy of people who have nothing left to lose and an excellent data plan.

The Federal Bureau of Statistics, an institution that has survived three purges, two fires, and one “accidental” data wipe, had recently published figures that framed the sulk in its full, magnificent context. Inflation at 47%. Youth unemployment at 41%. The cost of a basic food basket up 137%. Corruption complaints doubled. PAC parliamentary attendance already down 36% before the MPs decided to make it a personal statement. The country was struggling. The economy was struggling. The people were struggling. The MPs were struggling with their feelings.

The government, rising to the occasion with characteristic flair, released a statement attributing the absence to “transportation challenges.” The public responded with the kind of sarcasm that deserves its own wing in a national museum. “What transportation challenges?” demanded a shopkeeper. “They have cars, drivers, fuel cards. The rest of us walk.” Another offered an alternative theory: “Maybe their cars refused to start out of shame.” This remains the most plausible explanation anyone has produced.

At the visa-processing queues where thousands of young Megala Finfiney Citizens wait in long, quiet lines for the chance to leave the mood was less comedic and more surgical. “They should go to the Gulf like the rest of us,” said Sami. “Housemaids, drivers, cleaners.” A woman nearby shook her head with the authority of someone who has considered this thoroughly. “They won’t survive. They’re too soft.” A man at the back added that asylum was always an option, before remembering that asylum seekers are no longer welcome anywhere on Earth, and quite possibly not on Mars either.

The opposition leader, MistreAbiyot Yachenfal of the Megala People’s Reform Coalition Party (MPRP), arrived at this catastrophe like a man who had been quietly preparing for it for years. Standing outside his crumbling headquarters with the composure of someone trying very hard not to skip, he delivered a statement of such cheerful devastation that it instantly achieved the status of national comedy. “These MPs were not working even when they were present,” he said. “Their absence is a public service.” He then proposed replacing them with miniature statues specifically, the same statues PAC has been installing throughout its corridor development projects, those grand national vanity exercises named, with escalating abstraction, the Corridor of National Unity, the Corridor of Corridor Planning, and the Corridor of Corridor Maintenance. “Statues don’t demand salaries,” MistreAbiyot Yachenifal explained. “Statues don’t sulk. Statues don’t flee to Dubai.” He paused for effect. “It will be the first time the chamber looks dignified.”

From Brussels, Gifty Ararssa of the Oronana Global Council took a more conspiratorial view. “It is impossible,” she said, with the measured certainty of someone who has been watching this republic for a long time, “for over 200 MPs to sulk simultaneously without coordination. This is organised. This is deliberate. This is…” she leaned forward, “Dubai.” She elaborated. The Prime Minister, she theorised, had taken them for special treatment, consistent with the national tradition of Megalan Finfiney officials disappearing to the Gulf for rest, reflection, and retail. The internet immediately obliged with memes: MPs receiving spa treatments, MPs riding camels, MPs attending a conference entitled “Healing Retreats for Disappointingly Dropped Politicians.” Her closing line entered the canon instantly: “A government that cannot face its people will always face the luxury boutiques of Dubai.”

Architecture students at Megala Polytechnic, inspired by MistreAbiyot’s proposal, submitted a formal academic paper titled “A More Reliable Parliament: Replacing MPs with Sculptural Installations.” Their suggested exhibits included The Honourable Member Who Never Arrived, The Representative of Eternal Absence, and The MP Who Voted Present in Spirit Only. They argued, with footnotes, that statues would improve attendance, reduce corruption, lower salary expenditure, and provide more honesty than the current arrangement. The Speaker has not responded, though observers note he appears to be thinking about it quite seriously.

At a tea stall near the Assembly, a group of pensioners debated the proposal with the gravity of constitutional scholars. “Statues won’t run away,” said one. “Statues don’t need per diem,” said another. “Statues don’t go to Dubai,” confirmed a third. The tea stall owner, who has been serving politicians and their critics for thirty years, offered the summation the moment required: “These MPs turned Parliament into a corridor. If the Prime Minister replaces them with corridor statues, at least the corridors will finally have purpose.”

Weeks earlier, the Prime Minister had declared that the next Parliament “would not look the same.” He was correct. It did not look the same. It did not look at all. Because it did not show up. In Megala, apparently, even prophecy has learned to manage its expectations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

———————//——————

This text is a work of satire created solely for fictional, humorous, and literary purposes. All names, characters, political parties, institutions, and events are entirely invented. Any resemblance to real persons or entities is purely coincidental. This work is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ethiopian Tribune, and no factual claims are made about any real political situation.

About Post Author

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