ኢትዮጵያ – Ethiopian Tribune

The Twig and the Phantom Carrot

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:14:57 +0000

Read Time:5 Minute, 33 Second

The Ethiopian Tribune

Column · The Week in Root Vegetables

The Twig and the Phantom Carrot

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

By Sewasew Teklemariam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wall of Silence

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:50:01 +0000

Read Time:8 Minute, 51 Second

The Wall of Silence — The Ethiopian Tribune

Europe · The Horn of Africa

The Wall of Silence

A prince of the old Solomonic line carried the case of Ethiopia’s persecuted Orthodox Christians into the European Parliament. The institution has the power to act — and a long practice of looking away.

By E. Frashie

The whole of southern Germany had stopped moving. Storms had taken down the railways, and the keynote speaker was late — he had changed trains four times and called it, when he finally reached the lectern, a small miracle that he had arrived at all. There is a metaphor in this that the afternoon did not need spelling out: a man had come to Brussels to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing. Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate apologised for the delay, thanked the room, and proceeded to lay before it a charge sheet that the institutions of the West have spent the better part of a decade declining to read.

The hearing had been convened in the European Parliament under the intergroup on freedom of religion or belief, and organised by the European Centre for Law and Justice, a faith-aligned legal advocacy body whose report on the subject — bluntly titled The Silent Suffering of the Amhara People in Ethiopia — was first published two years ago and has now been revised. The choice of witness was deliberate. Asfa-Wossen Asserate is a grand-nephew of Haile Selassie and a descendant of a Solomonic line that traces its claim to Aksum; he is also a German-based historian and author whose father was among the sixty senior officials executed on the Black Saturday of November 1974, while the prince, then a student, was stranded abroad. He has spent fifty years in exile. He is, in other words, the rare witness whom even an indifferent chamber finds difficult to wave away.

He had come to testify to an erasure, and a collapsed rail timetable had nearly erased him from his own hearing.

His thesis was delivered in the flat, exhausted register of a man who has made the argument before. Ethiopia, he said, is not enduring a civil war but several at once, governed throughout by what he called an ethnic-elite lens that has hollowed out its institutions, its press and its courts. The portion he had come to document was the fate of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church — an institution he dated to the first century, older than the Roman and the Byzantine traditions, custodian of the Books of Enoch and Jubilees and of manuscripts that survive nowhere else on earth. For eight consecutive years, he charged, a coordinated campaign has been waged against Orthodox communities in parts of Ethiopia, and above all in Oromia.

The case, as he made it

The specifics were grim and familiar to anyone who reads the Horn closely: churches burned to their foundations, some of them ancient repositories of manuscript heritage; priests, monks, deacons and nuns killed; crucifixes torn from the necks of worshippers, children among them, in footage that circulates widely and produces no arrests. The victims, the prince noted, are predominantly Amhara, but include Tigrayan, Gurage and Oromo Christians — a point worth holding onto, because it complicates any attempt to file the violence under ethnic politics alone. He reserved his sharpest language for what he described as the state’s capture of the Church itself: the displacement of its canonical leadership, the installation of compliant bishops, and the dismantling of an autonomy that had survived emperors and Marxists alike. An institution that endured the Derg, in his telling, is now being asked to survive the peace.

On the gravest numbers, candour requires the distance the prince himself volunteered. His tally of nearly forty thousand casualties from federal air and drone strikes on Amhara across five months — some fourteen thousand of them dead, with further claims of mass rape, abduction and detention — was drawn, he conceded from the podium, from a single American monitor with few specialists on the country. Those figures sit far above anything in the independently documented record and should travel only with that caveat attached. The corroborated core of his case is narrower and no less damning. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has logged repeated mass killings of Orthodox Christians in the Arsi zone through this year; and in the final days of May, as the nation queued to vote, assailants moved through Arsi again, killing at least thirty-five worshippers and burning the Teleta Saint Gabriel church, a structure that had stood for a hundred and one years. The federal government blames the Oromo Liberation Army and the prime minister offered his condolences; the OLA denies responsibility and accuses forces aligned with the state. The attribution is contested. The dead are not.

An institution that endured the Derg is now being asked to survive the peace.

He widened the lens before closing. He cited the patriarch, Abune Matias, who in early May had pleaded with the country’s leaders not to be ruthless with God’s people. He noted that thousands of schools across Amhara stand damaged or destroyed and that, by the monitors he trusts, only about a fifth of the region’s children now attend one. And he turned, pointedly, to the singer Teddy Afro, whose record Ethiora — briefly the second-ranked album on a global chart — pleaded for reconciliation across faith and tribe, and whose premises were raided and whose managers were jailed for it. A confident state, the prince implied, does not fear a hymn to brotherhood.

Six things he asked for

The prince’s demands to the institutions of the West

The United Nations — an independent Human Rights Council inquiry into the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Oromia, with particular attention to the Arsi massacres, the church burnings and the displacement of clergy.
The United States — to invoke the International Religious Freedom Act and designate Ethiopia a Country of Particular Concern.
The European Union — targeted sanctions on the officials within the government who have enabled, coordinated or shielded the perpetrators.
The African Union — to end its institutional silence and acknowledge that a member state is committing crimes against its own religious minorities.
The international criminal bodies — to begin the systematic documentation of evidence for prosecution, naming the prime minister and his senior security and political officials.
The global media and civil society — to break the wall of silence, sustain coverage, and amplify the voices of those living in fear.

The institution he was addressing

It is the fourth and sixth of these that the afternoon implicitly tested, because they were addressed to the very rooms in which he stood. Brussels is not wholly deaf to the subject: in January the Parliament passed its annual human-rights resolution and, for the first time, named “Christianophobia” as a global pattern. But a resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs. The gap between the two is the whole of his complaint. The European Union has the legal machinery for targeted sanctions and the diplomatic standing to make an African Union member uncomfortable; what it has lacked, on Ethiopia, is the will to spend either.

He ended where such testimony always ends, with the roll-call of the previously ignored. The world expressed its remorse after Rwanda, after Sinjar, after Srebrenica, he said, and remorse that arrives after the fact is not justice; it is paperwork. The Church he had described has outlasted the fall of Aksum, the medieval invasions and the Derg’s Marxist persecution across two thousand years. It would be a particular shame, he suggested, for it to be extinguished now, in plain sight, under the gaze of a world that possesses both the knowledge and the instruments to prevent it. Whether that world reaches for them, or reaches once more for the language of regret, is the only question the hearing actually posed — and the one it adjourned without answering.

A resolution is a sentence, and the prince had come to ask for verbs.

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Carrots, Sticks, and the Coming Fire

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:38:08 +0000

Read Time:18 Minute, 3 Second

America is trying to prevent another catastrophic war in the Horn of Africa. The evidence suggests it is already too late, unless it is prepared to do something far more difficult than lifting sanctions on a dictatorship.

By E. Frashie · Ethiopian Tribune · Geopolitical Correspondent

The Economist put it plainly in its latest edition: America almost certainly wants to prevent a war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the Trump administration appears to be using both carrots and sticks to avert it. The carrot is the lifting of Biden-era sanctions on Eritrea’s military and ruling party. The stick is a private but repeated warning to Addis Ababa that Washington will not countenance any forcible seizure of Red Sea access. The diagnosis is correct. The prescription, unfortunately, does not match the disease.

What the magazine’s framing does not capture — and what the accumulated weight of reporting from Asmara, Port Sudan, Cairo and Addis Ababa now makes difficult to deny, is that the Horn of Africa is not drifting towards war. It is being steered there. The architecture of that steering has been under construction for the better part of two years. It has a name. It has sponsors. It has already produced facts on the ground that no amount of American diplomatic ingenuity, in its current form, is configured to reverse.

This is an account of what is actually happening, who is responsible, and what, if anything, might yet prevent it.

The coalition nobody wants to name

The word is Tigrinya for ‘yoke’ or ‘coupling’ two things bound together by necessity rather than by affection. In the political vocabulary of the Horn in 2026, Tsimdo has come to name something considerably more consequential: a convergence of former enemies who have set aside the memory of atrocity to prosecute a shared campaign against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Its architecture is striking. At its centre sit the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the hardline faction under Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, which reconstituted its pre-war 2020 regional council in May 2026, appointed Debretsion as regional president, and formally ended any residual commitment to the Pretoria Agreement that concluded the 2020–22 Tigray war and the government of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, whose forces fought alongside Ethiopia against the TPLF in that same war and were credibly accused of massacre, systematic sexual violence, and deliberate starvation of the civilian population. That these two parties are now strategic partners is the central geopolitical fact of the Horn in 2026, and it demands explanation.

The explanation lies in exclusion. The Pretoria Agreement, brokered in November 2022, did not include Eritrea. Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement a humiliation he has neither forgotten nor forgiven. His calculation since then has been methodical. By early 2025, Africa Intelligence, the French intelligence letter whose sourcing runs directly to principals and their entourages, reported that Isaias had convened a summit in Asmara with TPLF officials in January of that year and personally guaranteed to protect the TPLF in the event of renewed conflict with Ethiopia. By July 2025, the same publication reported that Eritrea had assumed effective operational control of the Tigray-Eritrea border a corridor that, once open, allows Eritrean military assets and supplies to flow into Tigray beyond the reach of Addis Ababa. These are not assessments. They are reported facts.

Around this Eritrean-TPLF core, additional actors have been drawn. Elements of the Amhara Fano militia which fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF during the Tigray war have reportedly entered into local tactical arrangements with TPLF commanders in border areas of Wollo. The Oromo Liberation Army, active in the south, has intensified its attacks since federal forces redeployed northward. The Sudanese Armed Forces, though consumed by their own civil war, have historically provided rear-base facilities to TPLF fighters in eastern Sudan, and a coordination meeting in Port Sudan has brought together Ethiopian opposition groups with Eritrean and pro-SAF Sudanese participants. Chatham House confirmed in May 2026 that Tigrayan fighters have fought alongside the SAF against the RSF Ethiopia’s own proxy in Sudan’s civil war. The two conflicts have fused.

Isaias was present at the creation of the Tigray war but absent from its settlement. His response has been to construct, from that exclusion, the most formidable external threat to Ethiopian federal authority since the Derg.

Egypt is the coalition’s external financier and strategic coordinator. Gebru Asrat, the former TPLF president of Tigray and now a fierce critic of Debretsion’s faction, told The Reporter Ethiopia in an interview published this weekend that the TPLF ‘is working with Shabia, Egypt, and the Sudanese,’ and that Egypt ‘is the primary coordinator of them all.’ He added: ‘If a conflict erupts, it will become a regional war.’ Egypt’s motivation is not obscure. Cairo has been unable to reverse the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam through diplomacy, multilateral pressure, or American mediation. It has concluded that strategic encirclement making Ethiopia’s security environment so costly as to force concessions is the viable alternative. The Tsimdo coalition is, among other things, Egypt’s GERD policy conducted by other means.

The Ethiopian National Defence Forces have formally briefed the foreign diplomatic community in Addis Ababa that any attempt to operationalise the Tsimdo initiative would face military retaliation. That briefing is not a diplomatic signal. It is a countdown.

Washington’s gamble and why it is failing

The Trump administration’s dual-track, as The Economist characterises it, has a coherent surface logic. Rehabilitate Eritrea through sanctions relief, thereby giving Isaias an economic incentive to disengage from Tsimdo. Warn Ethiopia off military adventurism by signalling that Washington will not back a forcible push for sea access. Use Egypt with whom Trump enjoys a personal rapport with President Sisi , as the mediating channel. Each element of this logic is wrong in a different way.

The sanctions relief is structurally unconditional. The Biden-era sanctions imposed in November 2021 under Executive Order 14046 targeted Eritrea’s Defence Forces, the ruling PFDJ party, its intelligence chief, and linked commercial entities, specifically for their role in atrocities during the Tigray war. No accountability has been rendered for those atrocities. No withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Tigray has occurred the opposite has occurred, with Eritrean forces now functioning as the TPLF’s security guarantor inside Tigray rather than its executor. Isaias has not acknowledged the American overture in any public statement. His Independence Day address on 24th May 2026 contained extensive criticism of the global order and of Trump’s foreign policy without a single reference to the sanctions relief being negotiated on his behalf in Cairo. He is not interested in appearing as a Washington client. He is interested in the economic relief, the international rehabilitation, and the continued freedom to operate on the ground in Tigray.

The mediation channel is the most consequential flaw. The meetings between US Envoy Massad Boulos and Isaias were brokered by Egyptian President el-Sisi a man whose government is the primary external coordinator of the coalition America is supposedly trying to dismantle. Foreign Policy’s April 2026 assessment was unsparing: the initiative ‘reflects a deepening lack of strategy.’ Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture, apparently without grasping the role it is being asked to play.

The stick aimed at Ethiopia is real but blunt. American officials have repeatedly communicated to Addis Ababa that Washington opposes any attempt to acquire sea access by force. But the economic leverage behind that warning has been weakened by the Trump administration’s own cuts to development assistance, and Abiy’s post-election mandate the Prosperity Party’s June 2026 electoral landslide, conducted without Tigray, without credible Fano engagement, and without meaningful opposition has given him a domestic political argument for dismissing external pressure as interference. He has done precisely that before: his 2021 open letter to President Biden accused Washington of an ‘orchestrated distortion of events and facts on the ground.’ There is no reason to expect a different response now.

Washington has been recruited into Egypt’s encirclement architecture. The mediator is the arsonist. The channel it is using to broker peace is the same channel through which the war is being financed.

Egypt’s overextension the variable no one is pricing

There is, however, a structural variable that the Horn’s various war-planning establishments have inadequately priced, and it runs through Cairo.

Egypt’s domestic position in 2026 is considerably weaker than its aggressive regional posture suggests. Suez Canal revenues have collapsed: Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping since late 2023 produced at least a 60 per cent decline in canal traffic, and President Sisi acknowledged in March 2026 a cumulative loss of ten billion dollars in canal receipts since the decade began, describing Egypt as standing at a ‘historical crossroads.’ Inflation exceeds 15 per cent. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at approximately 83 per cent. The Egyptian pound has depreciated to 55 to the dollar. Fuel prices have been raised by 17 per cent, and Sisi felt compelled to address his citizens’ ‘negative feelings’ about the measure in a nationally broadcast address. The Arab Center DC was direct in its April 2026 assessment: ‘Involving the armed forces in external affairs is a luxury that the Egyptian economy cannot afford.’

The political threat is more dangerous still. Since his 2013 coup removed Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammed Morsi, Sisi has governed on the premise that his security apparatus has permanently suppressed the organisation. That premise is fraying. Egypt’s Interior Minister warned publicly in January 2024 against the Brotherhood’s efforts to revive propaganda activities and recruit members via social networks. By the summer of 2025, Brotherhood-affiliated movements had organised sixteen demonstrations outside Egyptian embassies worldwide each filmed and circulated virally under the slogan ‘Besiege their embassies until they lift the siege on Gaza.’ The Institute for National Security Studies documented in January 2026 that these campaigns explicitly linked Egypt’s human rights record to its role in maintaining the Gaza blockade, finding a receptive audience among younger Egyptians disillusioned by the violence they have watched, uninterrupted, on their telephone screens.

The Gaza dimension is critical. The Palestinian cause has historically been the Muslim Brotherhood’s most effective mobilising tool the one issue capable of moving Egyptians who are otherwise exhausted by political risk. A Gaza settlement that advances genuine Palestinian reconstruction will not, as some in Washington assume, simply release pressure. It will redirect Arab League attention and Gulf financial energy toward Palestinian statehood, diminishing Egypt’s role as the indispensable Arab mediator and removing the diplomatic centrality that has given Sisi his regional leverage. An Egypt whose Suez revenues have not recovered, whose population is under compound economic stress, whose Gulf patrons are questioning its commitment after its failure to provide military support during the US-Iran confrontation, and whose Brotherhood opposition is being re-energised by precisely the conflict that Sisi has used to justify his authoritarianism that Egypt is a less reliable strategic coordinator of a multi-front anti-Ethiopia coalition than the one that constructed Tsimdo in 2024 and 2025.

None of this constitutes an immediate Egyptian collapse. Sisi’s security institutions remain intact and the military remains the ultimate guarantor of regime survival. But it does mean that Egypt’s capacity to sustain the Tsimdo architecture indefinitely is diminishing, and that the strategic calculation Isaias made when he aligned himself with Cairo may be premised on an Egypt that will not exist in the form he is counting on.

Every missile launched near Bab el-Mandeb raises shipping insurance premiums, reroutes vessels, and drains Cairo’s coffers. Egypt is financing a coalition against Ethiopia while its economy haemorrhages. That is not a sustainable strategic position.

The Abiy problem and the case for transition

The Economist’s ‘carrots and sticks’ framing implicitly assumes that Abiy Ahmed is the addressable interlocutor on the Ethiopian side that calibrated American pressure can alter his strategic behaviour. That assumption deserves scrutiny.

Abiy’s public rhetoric on Red Sea access has not been walked back despite direct warnings from Washington. His description of Ethiopia’s landlocked status as a ‘mistake’ that would be ‘corrected,’ his invocation of sea access as an ‘existential’ and ‘natural right,’ his government’s subsequent conditioning of negotiations on Eritrea halting its activities in Tigray these are not rhetorical flourishes from a leader who intends to be dissuaded by private diplomatic communications. Foreign Affairs noted in its June 2026 analysis that Abiy’s reelection ‘paves the way for advancement of his Red Sea ambitions,’ which have ‘already triggered an alliance among Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt, risking a broader regional conflict.’ His snap election conducted without Tigray, without meaningful opposition produced a mandate that carries none of the political plurality the country’s crisis demands.

Ethiopian analysts across the political spectrum have reached a conclusion that Western analysis has been reluctant to state plainly: Abiy’s government has reached a structural dead end. A provisional transitional authority, they argue, is the only mechanism through which a genuine national dialogue one that includes armed groups, opposition parties, and regional administrations currently excluded from the state-led process can be convened. The argument is not merely about governance legitimacy. It is about strategic capacity. An interim government without Abiy’s accumulated personal antagonisms with Isaias, without his rhetorical investment in Red Sea adventurism, and without the Prosperity Party’s structural inability to accommodate ethnic federalist demands, would be in a position to negotiate the one settlement that might actually hold.

That settlement would need to address, above all, the Eritrea question. Isaias’s grievance is specific and documented: he was excluded from Pretoria. The country whose forces bled alongside Ethiopian federal troops in the Tigray war was given no seat at the settlement table, no acknowledgement of its military contribution, and no security guarantee against Ethiopian ambitions on its coastline. An interim Ethiopian government that offered Eritrea a structured bilateral framework not formal confederation, which Eritrean sovereignty politics render impossible, but genuine economic integration, guaranteed transit access, and a mutual security architecture that makes Eritrea’s Red Sea ports economically indispensable to Ethiopia rather than militarily coveted would remove the single greatest strategic incentive Isaias currently has for sustaining Tsimdo.

This is not a comfortable prescription. It requires the international community, and Washington in particular, to acknowledge that the leader it has been engaging as the legitimate interlocutor of a democratic election is also the single greatest obstacle to the regional settlement that would prevent a catastrophic war. That is a difficult truth. It is, however, the truth.

The diplomatic exit from the coming war is not a ceasefire between Abiy and Isaias. It is Abiy’s departure and the construction of a transitional government prepared to treat Eritrea as a partner in regional architecture rather than a threat to be managed and Egypt as an adversary rather than a mediator.

Who fights with what and who bleeds first

The military balance, stripped of its diplomatic overlay, is this: Ethiopia has numerical and technological superiority on paper, and loses it in practice against the specific conditions that a northern front war would impose.

The Ethiopian National Defence Force is one of Africa’s largest standing armies, with active personnel estimates ranging from 130,000 to over 300,000, backed by drone systems that proved decisive in the Tigray war, artillery, and air assets. But the ENDF’s record in the Tigray war also revealed serious command vulnerabilities, over-reliance on mass mobilisation rather than tactical precision, and a capacity to sustain enormous casualties without achieving political resolution. The 2020–22 war killed between 300,000 and 600,000 people and ended not with federal victory but with a negotiated settlement that has now dissolved entirely.

Eritrea’s Defence Forces, estimated by the International Crisis Group in February 2026 at below 200,000, are battle-hardened, deeply familiar with the northern Ethiopian terrain, and critically positioned behind the escarpment geography south of Asmara that would force any Ethiopian offensive to attack uphill into prepared positions. The 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war killed between 70,000 and 100,000 soldiers in precisely this geography and produced nothing. The Tsimdo coalition would simultaneously open fronts in Oromia, where the OLA has intensified attacks as federal forces have thinned southward, and maintain the western flank through SAF-controlled eastern Sudan. Ethiopia cannot fight a three-front war without a degree of economic and political cohesion that it does not currently possess.

Ethiopia’s war-financing position is the most critical constraint. The country carries a defaulted Eurobond, is under IMF structural adjustment, and is running down foreign exchange reserves at a pace that leaves limited headroom for a sustained military campaign. The UAE, which provided the drone technology decisive in the Tigray war, is itself caught between its backing for Abiy and its investment in Sudan’s RSF the SAF’s adversary in Sudan’s civil war, the SAF being the TPLF’s backer in eastern Sudan. Abu Dhabi cannot be assumed as an unconditional Ethiopian military partner in a war whose geometry places it on opposite sides of the Sudan conflict simultaneously.

The honest military verdict is that Ethiopia would likely hold its major population centres and inflict significant casualties on the TPLF. It would not likely neutralise Eritrea’s military capacity through conventional offensive action. It would not likely close the OLA front in Oromia. And it would not likely sustain the economic and political cohesion necessary for a protracted multi-front campaign before that cohesion gave way either through internal political fracture or through the kind of economic collapse that the IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation implicitly foreshadowed. In a war that neither side could afford to lose and neither could afford to win, Ethiopia is the party with fewer reserves of either kind.

What comes next

Three scenarios present themselves. The first, and most probable, is an attritional multi-front conflict that exhausts Ethiopia’s economic and political cohesion before it exhausts Eritrea’s. The ENDF holds the cities. Tsimdo sustains pressure across Oromia, Amhara, and the western frontier. International pressure eventually produces a second Pretoria-type negotiation. Abiy’s domestic position collapses under military stalemate and economic deterioration, triggering his removal. The settlement that follows will look like what a transitional government might have offered without the war but arrived at after years of catastrophic human cost.

The second scenario is a negotiated transitional resolution before open hostilities consolidate. This requires a set of conditions that do not currently obtain: credible American pressure on Egypt to cease coordinating Tsimdo; an Ethiopian internal political realignment producing a government willing to negotiate with Eritrea on the terms described above; and a Tsimdo coalition sufficiently aware of the war’s cost to accept a political settlement addressing its core grievances. The Economist’s carrots and sticks are trying to generate this scenario without acknowledging any of its structural prerequisites. It remains possible. It is not currently probable.

The third scenario is a rapid Ethiopian military offensive against Tigray before the coalition fully operationalises a pre-emptive strike aimed at presenting Eritrea with a fait accompli. The ENDF’s January 2026 drone strike on Raya Azebo suggests this logic is being actively considered. The risk is that a rapid offensive produces exactly the regional war it seeks to forestall, drawing in Eritrea before Washington’s diplomatic channels can intervene.

What none of these scenarios produces is a winner in any conventional sense. Egypt wins strategically in any scenario that leaves Ethiopia weakened, distracted, and economically shattered but Egypt itself is weakening, and a Sisi administration consumed by economic crisis, Brotherhood revival, and Gulf scepticism is a less reliable paymaster for a prolonged proxy war than the one that began construction of this architecture two years ago. Isaias wins politically in any scenario that prevents Abiy from seizing his coastline but an Eritrean state that has spent its last political energy on a war it did not formally declare is not a state with obvious resources for reconstruction. The TPLF’s hardline faction achieves, at minimum, a return to de facto autonomous governance of Tigray the condition that existed before November 2020 and which the Tigray war failed to permanently alter.

What everyone loses is the possibility of the Horn of Africa as a zone of sustainable regional development. Ethiopia’s aviation hub, its nascent manufacturing base, its IMF stabilisation programme, its capacity to absorb the demographic pressures of 130 million people all of these become considerably harder to sustain inside a regional war. The civilian populations of Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Eritrea, who have endured a decade of compound catastrophe, will pay the price first and longest.

History teaches that wars in the Horn do not end cleanly. The 1998 conflict produced 100,000 dead and a cold war that lasted twenty years. The 2020 war produced 600,000 dead and a peace agreement that lasted three. The next one will not produce a winner. It will produce a landscape in which everyone has lost something irretrievable.

The Economist asked whether America’s carrots and sticks can avert disaster. The honest answer is: not in their current form, not through the current channel, and not without confronting the more uncomfortable truth that the political figure at the centre of this crisis is not the solution to it. Washington’s choices are narrowing. The window for a negotiated transition in Addis Ababa one that addresses Eritrea’s structural grievances and removes the war’s principal political driver will not remain open indefinitely. Once the shooting starts in earnest, it will not be closed by diplomacy. It will be closed by exhaustion, and exhaustion in the Horn of Africa is a condition measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.

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The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:05:37 +0000

Read Time:17 Minute, 2 Second

ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE Election Analysis — June 2026

The Count That Doesn’t Add Up

Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls, the National Election Board is still totting up the figures, the system that produces such lopsided results remains exactly as it was, and a flank of the opposition has pre-emptively disowned a parliament it may yet have the numbers to sit in.

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Ethiopia’s seventh general election was, by the standards its own organisers set, a triumph of scale. Over 50 million registered voters; more than 10,900 candidates from 47 parties; a national holiday declared to encourage turnout. By the standards anyone else might apply, it has been a triumph of something else entirely: the art of taking a very long time to arrive at a very predictable answer.

Voting closed on 1 June. By NEBE’s own admission that evening, counting was still under way in Sidama, Gambella, Amhara and Somali, and final turnout figures had not been consolidated. On 6 June, the Board reported that 825 of 1,138 constituencies had declared results, citing the distance between polling stations and constituency centres and the sheer number of candidates as reasons for the lag. On 9 June a full week after polling day internally displaced people and military personnel cast their votes in a special round that, by NEBE’s own insiders, threatened to delay preliminary results still further. By 10 June, 1,008 constituencies had reached the national verification centre, with 446 of 501 House of Peoples’ Representatives seats and 562 of 638 regional council seats logged for “final scrutiny.” A day later, both NEBE and the African Union observer mission had pencilled in 11 June for the announcement of final results.

None of this should be read as evidence of unusual incompetence. It is, if anything, on brand. In 2005, results were delayed for weeks while complaints of vote-rigging were investigated investigations the opposition’s own representatives called “rigged from the start,” alleging their observers had been “harassed, threatened, barred and killed.” In 2010, the electoral board rejected calls for a re-run despite the ruling coalition and its allies taking 534 of 537 seats, a margin opposition leaders said “could not be accomplished without cheating.” The pattern across two decades is not that Ethiopia’s election commission is slow because it is overwhelmed. It is slow because slowness is the institutional environment in which adjustments, where they occur, are made and because nobody with the power to speed it up has ever had an interest in doing so.

THE MODERNISATION THAT WASN’T

What makes the 2026 cycle different is the sheer quantity of money spent trying to fix exactly this problem. The “Strengthening Ethiopia’s Elections for Democratic Sustainability” programme (SEEDS2) a multi-donor basket funded by Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Government of Ethiopia, administered through the UNDP was built explicitly around “electoral digitalisation.” UNDP signed a $40 million project document with NEBE to build “institutional and logistical capacity.” Japan contributed a further $3 million in equipment and systems “for the upcoming 7th General Election.” Ireland signed a separate €700,000 agreement aimed specifically at helping NEBE “adopt new technologies to lead a transparent and efficient electoral process.” The EU and Germany, via the KfW development bank, funded a parallel programme EURECS+ delivered jointly with UNDP and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, providing “further logistical and procurement support” to NEBE’s operations.

The visible product of all this is Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) the digital platform NEBE unveiled in January 2026 described at launch as “the first time the country is fully integrating digital technology into the election process,” covering voter and candidate registration, election management, and, in the words of the Federal Supreme Court’s president, present at the launch, intended to “enhance transparency and public trust.”

What Mirchaye (ምርጫዬ) did not touch, it turns out, is the part of the process that actually generates disputes. Registration, candidate vetting, the ballot-order lottery all digitalised, all relatively uncontroversial. Counting, constituency-level tabulation, and the transfer of results to Addis Ababa for “verification” all still conducted in essentially the form they took twenty years ago: paper postings at polling stations, physical transmission to constituency offices, and a national tally centre that receives results in batches over a period of days, occasionally weeks. Opposition parties identified this gap before the vote was even held. In a joint statement issued in January, an eight-party coalition including the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), Hibir Ethiopia and the Wolayta National Movement rejected what they called an “unaudited digital election system,” accusing the Board of “uncoordinated increases in council seats and a lack of transparency.”

There are two ways to read this gap, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is straightforwardly bureaucratic: a decade of donor funding produced visible, demonstrable, photographable modernisation apps, registration drives, ballot lotteries because those are the outputs donors can point to in their own annual reports, while the unglamorous, politically fraught work of building an auditable, end-to-end digital chain of custody for actual vote counts was either never prioritised or actively resisted by an institution with no incentive to make its own discretion harder to exercise. The second reading is less generous: that a tabulation process kept manual, opaque and slow is not a failure of modernisation but its precondition. An auditable digital count would generate a data trail far harder to adjust at the margins than a process whose authoritative record exists only in the moment a regional official reads a number aloud to a colleague in Addis Ababa. Either way, the tens of millions of dollars spent since 2019 modernising Ethiopia’s elections have left the single most consequential five days of the electoral calendar the count almost exactly as they found it.

THE ARITHMETIC THAT NEVER CHANGES

None of this would matter nearly as much under a different electoral system. Ethiopia’s first-past-the-post arrangement, inherited from the 1995 constitution and never seriously revisited despite two decades of promises, converts even modest vote margins into landslide seat counts. In 2021, the Prosperity Party took 96.8% of federal parliamentary seats from roughly 90% of the vote itself a serious overcorrection, but nothing compared to the distortions at constituency level. In Addis Ababa that same year, opposition parties collectively won 32% of the vote and not a single seat. In 2015, the Semayawi Party took 16% of the vote in the capital and, again, nothing. In 2005, opposition parties won around 38% of the national vote and ended up with a small fraction of that share in seats.

The reform conversation is not new, and it has never gone anywhere. After the unrest of 2016, the government promised to revisit the electoral system; no measure followed. Years earlier, during the EPRDF-era political parties’ negotiation forum, the ruling party itself proposed a mixed system, 90% first-past-the-post, 10% proportional which would have required expanding the House of Peoples’ Representatives from 550 to 657 seats and amending the constitution. Even that modest concession was shelved. Academic studies of the system, going back to at least 2017, have concluded that first-past-the-post is “ill-suited to Ethiopia’s current needs and realities” and that a shift toward proportional representation the system used by roughly 130 countries, against fewer than 55 still using FPTP would produce more inclusive, more stable outcomes even under identical levels of political repression.

The reason none of this has moved is not mysterious. A ruling party that can convert a plurality into a supermajority under FPTP has no rational incentive to adopt a system that would convert the same plurality into, at best, a comfortable majority and, at worst, a coalition negotiation. Proportional representation would not, on its own, make Ethiopian elections free or fair, repression, detention and restricted media access would still shape who could compete. But it would make the result of that repression visible in a way FPTP currently launders into invisibility: a Prosperity Party that wins 60% of the vote under PR gets roughly 60% of the seats, prompting awkward questions about the other 40%. Under FPTP, that same 60% becomes 95% of the seats, and the other 40% becomes a rounding error. Donor money has, for fifteen years, flowed toward the parts of Ethiopia’s electoral architecture that are easiest to fund and least likely to threaten this arrangement. The one structural change that would actually rebalance outcomes was never going to be financed by the institution whose entire utility to the ruling coalition depends on its absence.

“WE CAME TO DOCUMENT, NOT TO WIN”

It is against this backdrop that the position taken by the Coalition for Ethiopian Unity becomes legible not as an eccentric or self-defeating gesture, but as possibly the most coherent response on offer. In an interview given after the vote, Mister Silassie Tamerat, Secretary General of both the Coalition and the EPRP, laid out a position that amounts to participation without consent: contesting the election while refusing, in advance, to recognise its outcome.

The Coalition and the EPRP had set out roughly seven preconditions before the vote chiefly concerning media independence, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the fighting in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia. “Absolutely none” were met, Tamerat said; if anything, conditions deteriorated, with media outlets shut down, journalists abducted, and election debates censored or cut from broadcast. The decision to participate anyway was not unanimous. Within the EPRP’s Central Committee, a majority judged that continued participation “exposing the fraudulent electoral process from within” while “protecting the security and survival of our party organisation” outweighed the principle of boycott. MistreSilasie by her own account, was outvoted, and deferred to the decision as a matter of internal democratic discipline.

What followed the vote was the more consequential decision: a declaration that any Coalition or EPRP candidates who won seats would not take them up. The reasoning rests on a distinction between participating in an election and recognising a parliament.

“Entering a parliament that is born from a completely fraudulent and illegitimate process would imply that we recognise the parliament as legally and legitimately established. We do not believe that.”
— MistreSilasie Tamerat, Secretary General, Coalition for Ethiopian Unity / EPRP

She pointed to the precedent of past opposition MPs “stripped of their immunity and thrown into prison simply because they held a dissenting political viewpoint” as evidence that the inside-the-system strategy had already been tried, and had “brought no real change.” Sitting in the chamber and “declaring our people are suffering,” in her words, “does not bring change.”

Asked whether refusing seats amounted to disrespecting the voters who cast ballots for Coalition candidates, Mistre-Silassie’s answer was unambiguous about priorities, if not entirely reassuring on the question of mandate: the Coalition, she said, had announced this position before polling day “even if we won a majority, we had no desire to enter parliament under these conditions” and had entered the race “merely to gather hard evidence,” not to contest for seats. Critics who suggest the rejection is sour grapes over an anticipated loss get short shrift: “We did not enter this process expecting to win… This has nothing to do with winning or losing.”

A COALITION OF ONE MIND, MOSTLY

The recent interview of Mistre-Silassie with Ethiopian insider also surfaced and sought to manage reports of a split within the Coalition. The president of the Amhara Regional United Movement, one constituent member, had told the press the election had been conducted “smoothly and in a good manner” an assessment, Mistre-Silassie noted pointedly, that was “heavily amplified” by state-affiliated media. She was unambiguous in disowning the remark: the individual “was not authorised or delegated by the Coalition,” the Coalition’s “core principles” remained intact, and the organisation was “internally purifying” its ranks rather than fracturing. Any elected candidate who attempted to take a seat under the Coalition’s banner without its blessing, she said, would face “immediate” disciplinary and legal consequences.

It is worth taking at face value Mistre-Silassie’s own account of what worries her most because it is not, by her telling, the regime.

“Dealing with the tyranny of the ruling regime is something we expected. What deeply concerns and threatens to break my hope is the severe fragmentation within the opposition itself — fractured, petty, and constantly turning on one another.”
Mistre-Silassie Tamerat

A planned peaceful protest for 30 April for which, under the constitution, only notification rather than permission was required was shelved for “logistical pressures and constraints” after a decision to act collectively rather than unilaterally; it never materialised, nor did any other rally. The EPRP, Mistre-Silassie said, held back its own planned action “to respect the principle of collective coalition solidarity.” The through-line across both the Amhara Regional United Movement episode and the failed protests is the same: a coalition whose member parties cannot reliably act in concert is, for practical purposes, several smaller oppositions wearing one name a condition that costs the ruling coalition nothing and the opposition everything.

THE VERDICT ON THE VERDICT

On the international response, Mistre-Silassie’s framing inverts the usual Mistre-Silassie courtesies. Any observer mission that grants the election legitimacy, she argued, is “actively participating in prolonging the misery and suffering of the Ethiopian people.” She drew a distinction between observers who acknowledged the vote merely “took place” reserving final judgment, as the EU did, for a longer review and any body offering outright congratulations, noting with something close to satisfaction that many embassies briefed by the Coalition on election day had so far stayed silent. “We view that silence as a major diplomatic achievement for our cause.”

She was careful, notably, not to indict NEBE’s staff wholesale acknowledging “certain individual officials” who “genuinely tried their best to ensure a clean process” while insisting the institution as a whole had failed systemically, operating, like every other institution in the country, under “the suffocating influence and control of the ruling regime.” The war is the backdrop against which she places the entire exercise: Tigray “plunged into conflict for a second time,” most of Amhara unable to vote due to active combat, Oromia’s security situation outside major cities “non-existent.” Against that, talk of “free and fair” becomes, in her telling, close to obscene: “citizens are actively dying in a war zone and screaming for the killings to stop rather than asking for voting cards.”

On armed resistance, Tamerat drew a careful line denying coordination with armed groups while declining to condemn them, and issuing what reads as a warning dressed as an observation: “Every single time you violently close the doors to peaceful political struggle, you automatically open the doors to armed resistance… No one picks up a gun and flees to the jungle to die or kill out of choice; they do it out of absolute desperation when all peaceful options are stripped away.”

THE SYSTEM’S MOST DURABLE OUTPUT

Put the three threads together and a single picture emerges, and it is not primarily a picture of fraud in the narrow sense ballot-stuffing, doctored tallies, the things that require forensic proof. It is a picture of a system whose component parts are individually defensible and collectively self-reinforcing. The count is slow because the institution that runs it has never had to make it fast: under first-past-the-post, even a contested, drawn-out tabulation poses no existential risk to the ruling coalition’s seat total, so there is no urgency to fix what donors have spent fifteen years and tens of millions of dollars failing to fix because the fix that would matter, electoral reform, was never on the table to begin with. And the opposition’s response to all of this is not unified resistance but fragmentation: a Coalition that agreed on seven preconditions, watched none of them met, then split three ways over what to do next participate to expose, boycott to preserve legal standing, or some uneasy combination of both, followed by a post-hoc refusal to take the seats that participation might have won.

That fragmentation is not incidental to the system described above. It may be its most reliable product. A ruling party facing a unified opposition demanding proportional representation, an end to detentions, and international observers with teeth would face a genuine cost-benefit calculation. A ruling party facing a half-dozen opposition factions arguing among themselves about whether occupying five parliamentary seats constitutes principled resistance or collaboration faces no such calculation at all. Tamerat’s own diagnosis that internal opposition fragmentation, not regime pressure, is what “keeps her up at night” may be the most analytically honest sentence to emerge from Ethiopia’s seventh general election. Everything else, the slow count included, was entirely predictable.

THE REGION THE ELECTION FORGOT

For TPLF supporters, the chronology of NEBE’s dealings with their party reads less like routine regulation than personal score-settling. Birtukan Mideksa rose to prominence as a leader of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy in the disputed 2005 election conducted under an EPRDF government in which the TPLF was the dominant faction and was subsequently imprisoned, controversially re-arrested after a conditional pardon, and spent years in American exile before Abiy brought her home in 2018 to chair the very board that had once certified the election that led to her imprisonment. When NEBE, under her chairmanship, cancelled the TPLF’s registration in January 2021 weeks after the federal offensive into Tigray began TPLF sympathisers read the timing as more than coincidence: a woman the old TPLF-dominated order had jailed was now the one stripping that same party of its legal existence. The institutional posture has since outlasted her TPLF’s final de-registration came in May 2025 under her successor, Melatework Hailu but the original grievance, whatever its merits, has never gone away in Mekelle.

Its consequences are visible in real time. Tigray did not participate in the 1 June election at all: Debretsion Gebremichael announced in May that no vote would be held in the region, arguing large parts of it remain outside TPLF administration and that Tigray’s territory is “incomplete” pending unresolved disputes itself a legacy of NEBE’s 2021 decision and the deregistration that followed. While NEBE in Addis Ababa spent the second week of June finalising a result that hands the Prosperity Party its expected supermajority, a very different kind of delegation was landing in Mekelle. On 11 June, the African Union’s Olusegun Obasanjo one of the architects of the 2022 Pretoria Agreement flew in with British and Australian diplomats for emergency talks with Debretsion, who has installed himself as Tigray’s regional president following the TPLF’s unilateral revival of the pre-war regional council, a move the federal government has refused to recognise.

The same day, in Al Jazeera, Getachew Reda the former TPLF spokesman who broke with the party, led the interim administration, and now advises Abiy on regional affairs co-wrote with the federal government’s own Pretoria negotiator, Redwan Hussein, a piece warning that the “rump TPLF,” in what they called an Eritrean-backed “Tsimdo alliance,” had “openly abrogated the Pretoria Agreement and is now gearing up for active and open hostility against the federal government.” Whatever one makes of that framing and it is very much the view from the side that now controls Addis Ababa’s narrative on Tigray, not TPLF’s the fact that the AU’s most senior mediator felt the need to be in Mekelle that same week speaks for itself.

The result is a grim symmetry. Ethiopia just completed an election in which the region with the most unresolved grievance against the federal state didn’t vote at all, conducted by an institution whose history with that region’s dominant party is, by the account of that party’s supporters, inseparable from the personal history of the woman who once ran it. The seventh general election may produce a parliament. Whether it produces a country at peace with itself by the time that parliament sits is, as of this week, genuinely an open question.

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Touring the $291 Billion Ethiopia That Got Away

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:43:00 +0000

Read Time:16 Minute, 3 Second

THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

Commentary

The Receipts Don’t Lie:

Touring the $291 Billion Ethiopia That Got Away

By Sewasew Teklemariam

11 June 2026

Somewhere between the import manifests, the audit reports nobody finished reading, and the procurement files marked “pending,” a second Ethiopia quietly failed to materialise — one with fifty-eight mega dams, nearly three thousand universities, and enough hospitals to make “medical tourism to Addis” a real sentence. Sewasew Teklemariam goes looking for it.

T
here is a particular Ethiopian talent for imagining grand things. We have, after all, built the largest dam in Africa, renovated a palace into a park large enough to lose a tour group in, and produced more five-year development plans than most countries have five-year periods. So it should not be difficult, in principle, for us to imagine a country with fifty-eight mega dams instead of one. Or nearly three thousand universities. Or eleven and a half million new homes — enough to comfortably house more than half the population currently queuing for one.

The trouble is that this country already exists. On paper, anyway. It is sitting in the gap between what Ethiopia has earned over the relevant decades and what Ethiopia has actually built with it — a gap that, by one new reckoning making the rounds this week, comes to roughly $291 billion. That is not a typo, and it is not the GDP of a small continent, although it is in the neighbourhood. It is, instead, an estimate of the cumulative cost of six familiar national habits: importing what we could make ourselves, fighting wars we did not need to fight, tolerating corruption we pretend to be shocked by, drowning good policy in bureaucratic treacle, watching our most expensively educated citizens build other people’s economies, and buying military hardware at a pace that would make a small arms dealer blush.

Each of these habits, the scorecard argues, has an opportunity cost — and opportunity costs, unlike scandals, do not generate headlines. Nobody holds a press conference to announce the hospital that was never built. So this week, we are holding one.

A note on arithmetic, before the indignant emails arrive

Let us be honest about what this exercise is and is not. It is not a forensic audit, and the Tribune is not asserting that a cheque for $291 billion has gone missing from a specific drawer in a specific ministry. The figures are estimates — the kind any economist would call “directionally useful” while quietly reaching for a second coffee. They rest on a set of assumed unit costs: a mega dam at roughly $5 billion (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, give or take, was in that range), a public university at $100 million, a regional hospital at $50 million, a technical college at $25 million, an agro-processing plant at $20 million, a primary school at $1 million, and an affordable house at $25,000.

Multiply those benchmarks against the headline losses — $200 billion in import dependency, $30 billion in conflict, $15 billion in corruption, $20 billion in bureaucratic drag, $6 billion in brain drain, and $20 billion in military expansion — and you get a shopping list. A very long shopping list. The point is not that any of this would have been built in practice; governments do not function as straightforward conversion machines, and nobody is suggesting Ethiopia simply forgot to order 58 dams from a catalogue. The point is to make the abstraction of “billions lost” feel like what it actually is: clinics, classrooms, and roofs.

With that throat-clearing done, let us walk the lot.

Loss #1: Import Dependency — $200 billion, or “the elephant in the shipping container”

This is not merely the largest item on the list. It is the largest item by a margin so wide it makes the other five look like rounding errors stapled to the side of a much bigger problem. Two hundred billion dollars is what Ethiopia has, cumulatively, sent abroad to buy things that — in a country with this much arable land, this much labour, and this much ambition — arguably ought to be made at home: fuel, fertiliser, machinery, textiles, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, even much of the food on shop shelves in Addis.

Run that figure through the scorecard’s conversion table and the country it could have bought is almost embarrassing in its scale: forty mega dams, two thousand universities, four thousand hospitals, eight thousand technical colleges, a thousand industrial parks, two hundred steel factories, and — the showstopper — eight million affordable homes. Eight million houses is not a housing policy. It is a different country.

This is the line item that should make every policymaker wince, because it is also the most fixable. Conflict ends, eventually, one way or another. Corruption can be prosecuted, occasionally. But import dependency is a structural choice, renewed every single day at the port of Djibouti, and every year it goes unaddressed is another small slice of that imaginary eight million homes that quietly evaporates.

Loss #2: Conflict & War — $30 billion, “stamped, sealed, and somehow still ongoing”

Thirty billion dollars buys six mega dams, three hundred universities, six hundred hospitals, and 1.2 million homes — or, in the version of Ethiopia we actually got, several years of destroyed infrastructure, displaced populations, halted investment, and a generation of young people whose CVs now read “conflict-affected region” instead of “industrial park.”

The scorecard’s illustrators, with admirable bluntness, have stamped this category “MATURED” — as if to suggest the bill has come due and is sitting, with interest, in the post. The honest accounting of conflict rarely stops at battlefield expenditure. It includes the factory that relocated to Nairobi rather than risk a second disruption, the foreign investor who quietly removed Ethiopia from the shortlist, and the farmer who planted half a field because the other half was a front line last season. None of that shows up in a defence budget. All of it shows up in this number.

Loss #3: Corruption — $15 billion, marked “WAR” but really just business as usual

Fifteen billion dollars is, relatively speaking, the smallest of the six categories — which says more about the scale of the others than it does about the seriousness of the problem. It is still enough for three mega dams, 150 universities, 300 hospitals, and 600,000 homes.

What makes corruption different from the other categories is its compounding nature. A road built at twice its proper cost is not just an inflated invoice; it is a road that will need resurfacing twice as soon, by a contractor who may also be charging twice the going rate, audited (eventually) by an institution that is itself underfunded because — well, you can see where this goes. Every other line item on this scorecard is, in some sense, a multiplier on this one. Corruption does not just cost $15 billion. It is the tax that makes the other $276 billion harder to claw back.

Loss #4: Bureaucracy & Inefficiency — $20 billion, the silent tax nobody votes on

If corruption is theft with intent, bureaucratic inefficiency is theft by a thousand stamps. Twenty billion dollars — enough for four mega dams, two hundred universities, four hundred hospitals, and 800,000 homes — has been quietly absorbed by delay. The permit that took fourteen months instead of six. The customs clearance that required a second, then a third, then a fourth signature. The investment that arrived with enthusiasm and left, eighteen months later, with a long memo about “the operating environment.”

Bureaucracy rarely makes the news, because nothing happened — and “nothing happened” is precisely the problem. It is the most invisible category on this list and, not coincidentally, one of the most addressable. Unlike a dam or a war, fixing it does not require billions of dollars of new capital. It requires fewer offices, faster signatures, and — dare we say it — fewer offices whose entire function is to slow down the other offices.

Loss #5: Brain Drain — $6 billion, or “the graduation gift Ethiopia keeps sending abroad”

Six billion dollars is the smallest figure here, and it is also the most personal. This is not money lost to a single bad decision or a single conflict; it is the cumulative return on investment that Ethiopia never collects when its doctors, engineers, and scientists — trained, often, at public expense — build their careers, pay their taxes, and raise their families somewhere else.

Six billion dollars converts to one mega dam, sixty universities, 120 hospitals, and 240,000 homes — modest, by the standards of this list, but worth dwelling on for a moment, because this is the only category where the “asset” being lost is not concrete and rebar. It is people. And unlike a dam, a person who leaves does not simply represent foregone GDP; they represent a hospital ward that runs at half capacity, a university department that cannot find a qualified head, a start-up that gets founded in Addis Ababa, but the other one — the one in Texas.

Loss #6: Security, Drones, Missiles & Military Expansion — $20 billion, “necessary, but let’s not pretend it’s free”

The scorecard is admirably careful with its language here, and so shall we be: security is necessary. No nation disarms its way to prosperity, and the Horn of Africa is not, this year or any recent year, a neighbourhood that rewards complacency. But necessity is not the same as costlessness, and $20 billion — four mega dams, two hundred universities, four hundred hospitals, 800,000 homes — is the price tag attached to drone fleets, missile programmes, and an expanding procurement list that, whatever its strategic logic, is also a procurement list.

This is the category most likely to provoke an argument in the comments section, and good — it should. The question worth asking is not whether Ethiopia should defend itself. It is whether every line of the current military budget represents the most efficient possible trade-off between security today and the hospital, university, or industrial park that its cost could otherwise have built. That is a conversation Ethiopia rarely has in public, and perhaps it is time it did.

The Grand Total: A Country of Fifty-Eight Dams

Add it all up — $200 billion, $30 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion, $6 billion, and $20 billion — and the total comes to $291 billion. Converted into the scorecard’s development currency, that is fifty-eight mega dams, 2,910 universities, 5,820 hospitals, 11,640 technical colleges, 1,455 industrial parks, 291 steel factories, 291 fertiliser plants, 1,940 pharmaceutical factories, 5,820 textile factories, 14,550 agro-processing factories, 291,000 primary schools, and 11.6 million affordable homes.

There is no scandal in a list of buildings that were never built. There is no viral clip of a hospital that does not exist.

Read that list slowly. Then read it again, and notice what is missing from it: drama. The $291 billion did not disappear in one dramatic heist. It disappeared the way most large sums disappear — a percentage point here, a delayed shipment there, a contract awarded to a cousin somewhere else, repeated for years, until the rounding errors became a parallel country.

What 11.6 Million Houses Actually Means

Assume, generously but not unreasonably, five people to a household. Eleven and a half million homes, multiplied out, comes to 58 million Ethiopians — more than half the country’s current population — housed. Not “eligible for housing assistance.” Housed.

It is worth pausing on what that would mean beyond the obvious comfort of four walls and a roof. Secure housing is the platform on which everything else in a development plan is supposed to stand: children who sleep in the same bed every night tend to do better in the school down the road; families with a fixed address can open bank accounts, register businesses, and access services that otherwise remain theoretical. Housing is not, despite how it is so often discussed, a welfare line item. It is closer to infrastructure for human beings.

What 14,550 Agro-Processing Factories Actually Means

If the housing figure is about stability, this one is about leverage. Ethiopia already grows the wheat, the coffee, the oilseeds, and the livestock; what it frequently does not do is process them at home before either consuming or exporting them. Agro-processing — turning raw grain into flour and pasta, raw milk into packaged dairy, raw fruit into juice and concentrate — is, on paper, the most immediately achievable form of industrialisation available to the country, because it does not require importing the raw material in the first place.

The scorecard estimates that a network of this size could generate somewhere between seven and fifteen million jobs. Even taking the lower end of that range with the scepticism it probably deserves, it represents an industrial workforce roughly the size of several East African capital cities combined — built not on a hypothetical new export, but on crops that are, this season, already in the ground.

What 291 Steel Factories Actually Means

Steel is the sort of industry that does not photograph well — nobody puts a rolling mill on a tourism poster — but it is the unglamorous backbone on which everything else in this list depends. You cannot build a hospital, a university, a textile factory, or an affordable house without reinforcement bars, structural steel, and the industrial machinery that steel itself is used to manufacture. A country that imports its steel is, in effect, importing the capacity to build anything at all, one shipment at a time.

The scorecard puts the potential job creation here at one to three million, direct and indirect — and “indirect” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, because a domestic steel industry does not simply produce steel. It produces the demand for everything steel touches: construction firms, machine shops, vehicle assembly, and the long, unglamorous supply chain that turns raw ore into a finished building.

What 5,820 Hospitals Actually Means

Ethiopia currently operates fewer than 400 hospitals for a population north of 120 million. Sit with that ratio for a moment — it is the kind of number that, in any other policy area, would be treated as an emergency rather than a baseline. Scaling toward the scorecard’s figure of 5,820 would not merely close that gap; it would overshoot it so dramatically that “medical tourism” — patients travelling to Ethiopia for care, rather than the other way around — moves from aspiration to plausibility.

The more immediate effect, though, is the one that rarely makes it into glossy development brochures: maternal and child mortality, the grim statistics that Ethiopia has spent decades trying to improve through campaigns, vaccination drives, and community health programmes — all of which are working uphill against a hospital network that is, by any reasonable international comparison, dramatically undersized.

What 2,910 Universities Actually Means

Ethiopia has roughly fifty public universities today. Multiplying that by nearly sixty is, on its face, an absurd number — and it is meant to be. Nobody is proposing that Ethiopia literally build three thousand campuses. The figure is a way of expressing, in concrete terms, the scale of human capital that $291 billion represents: the doctors who would staff those 5,820 hospitals, the engineers who would design the dams and industrial parks, the scientists who would reduce, year by year, the country’s dependence on imported everything, and the entrepreneurs who would build the businesses that eventually make this entire scorecard obsolete.

This is, in a sense, the category that closes the loop. Every other item on this list — the dams, the factories, the hospitals — eventually needs someone to run it. The universities are where those people would have come from.

The Real Question

The scorecard’s authors put it simply, and it is worth repeating without much editorial embellishment: the question is not “how much did we spend?” It is “what could we have built instead?”

Broken down by theme, the $291 billion separates into a few clear policy conversations. The $200 billion in import dependency is the single largest lever — and the one most directly within the country’s own control, requiring industrial policy rather than peace negotiations. The $45 billion combined in corruption and conflict is recoverable, in principle, through governance reform and the kind of durable peace that has proven elusive but not impossible. The $26 billion lost to inefficiency and brain drain is addressable through institutional reform and a more serious diaspora engagement policy than the occasional conference panel. And the $20 billion in military expansion is, at minimum, a number that deserves to be debated in public rather than assumed.

None of this is an argument for despair. If anything, it is the opposite. A country that has lost $291 billion to habits rather than catastrophes is a country whose habits can, in theory, change. The dams, the universities, the hospitals, and the eight million homes are not gone — they were simply never built, which is a different and considerably less permanent kind of loss.

The resources were there all along. We just kept sending them somewhere else.

So here is the assignment, dear reader, should you choose to accept it: share this scorecard. Send it to the policymaker who insists the budget has no room for industrial policy. Send it to the economist who treats corruption as a footnote. Send it to anyone who still believes that “we don’t have the resources” is a complete sentence.

Sewasew Teklemariam writes commentary for the Ethiopian Tribune. The figures referenced in this piece are drawn from an illustrative opportunity-cost model based on assumed asset benchmarks (mega dam: $5bn; university: $100m; regional hospital: $50m; technical college: $25m; agro-processing factory: $20m; primary school: $1m; affordable house: $25,000) and should be read as an analytical framework rather than an audited account.

Editor’s Note

Before any of the above reaches a single reader, credit where it is overdue: the scorecard itself the unit costs, the conversions, the unglamorous arithmetic that turns “$291 billion” into “fifty-eight mega dams” is the work of Behailu Shiferaw, whose research did the actual heavy lifting here. Numbers of this scale do not assemble themselves, and the diligence required to build a coherent framework out of import bills, conflict estimates, and procurement figures is the kind of work that rarely gets a byline of its own.

Sewasew Teklemariam’s role, by comparison, was the easy part: take Behailu’s research and make it readable enough that someone might actually finish the article which, if you have made it this far, appears to have worked.

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Not Imperial Vision but Sovereign and United Ethiopia

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:40:01 +0000

Read Time:3 Minute, 7 Second

Reading The Economist and Horn Review Against the Four Singular Interests

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)*

Editorial Foreword

Ten days after Ethiopians went to the polls in an election whose conduct this publication has already documented in unsparing detail, from the 143 polling stations that never opened to the telecommunications blackouts that left whole zones uncounted the temptation, in Addis Ababa and the diaspora alike, is to settle on a verdict about the man who presided over it. Was the vote the death rattle of competitive politics, as The Economist concluded in its election-eve assessment of an “imperial vision”? Or was it, as Horn Review argued in the same week, the legitimate capstone of a state being patiently and irreversibly reconstituted? Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s essay, the latest in a series that has run in these pages since his analysis of Adwa, GERD and the Red Sea, refuses both verdicts and in refusing them, makes an argument this newspaper considers worth taking seriously, even where it does not take it whole.

His method is to insist that both readings, for all their sophistication, make the same mistake from opposite directions: each makes Abiy Ahmed the subject, when the architecture of the state is what actually determines what any leader can or cannot do. Readers of this series will recognise the scaffolding the four singular interests of unity, Red Sea sovereignty, broad-based development and GERD and what is new here is the discipline with which it is turned, in a single essay, against a Western newsmagazine and against a publication closely identified with the governing party itself. The section on the constitution’s vesting of sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” rather than in the citizen is, whatever else readers make of the piece, among the clearest statements of that argument we have published.

It is also, in places, an argument with this newspaper. Dr Hailu engages directly with our 29 May piece on The Economist‘s leader, “The Geography of Delusion,” and while his scepticism of the “imperial vision” framing runs in a similar direction to ours, his route there differs in ways readers should weigh rather than wave through not least his treatment of Article 51 and the Doumeira–Beilul claim, where the line between “peaceful priority” and a reserved right of last resort is doing a great deal of work, and where this newspaper’s own coverage of Eritrean and regional perspectives has been less sanguine about how that distinction is heard in Asmara and beyond. Similarly, his “ledger” of the second mandate crediting the float, the wheat programme and the corridor projects as deposits against a development account that this paper’s reporting has more often shown in deficit will strike some readers as generous in ways the polling-day record of 1 June, recounted in his own footnotes, does not obviously support.

We publish the essay not because it resolves these tensions but because it sharpens them, and because the question it poses is it the constitution, stupid? is one this publication has circled for months without naming so directly. Readers will form their own view of how far structural diagnosis should extend absolution to the men who govern within, and profit from, the structure. That argument is the one worth having, and Dr Hailu has, characteristically, made it harder to avoid.

The full essay, with its complete argument, references and accompanying tables, can be read at the following link :-

sovereign_united_ethiopia.pdf Download

∗The author, aka MGH, is a global technical expert trained at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The views expressed are his own and do not represent any institutional position. MGH can be reached via mefkereseb.hailu1990@gmail.com.

Endex, Editorial Chief

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“A Professor Without Friends”: Scholarship, Activism, and the Cost of Speaking Out

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:22:52 +0000

Read Time:5 Minute, 39 Second

This article was inspired by a question posed by two young students during my läxhjälp (homework support) activities. They asked me a simple but profound question about friendship and whether I had many friends. In response, I spoke at length about friendship, family, and community. I also reflected on my own situation regarding friendships within the Ethiopian diaspora. This essay therefore focuses primarily on my relationships with fellow Ethiopians rather than on my social networks among Swedes or other communities in Sweden.

Over the course of my academic work and public engagement with Ethiopian affairs, I have learned that speaking openly about injustice often carries significant personal costs. One of those costs has been the gradual loss of friendships, professional relationships, and social networks.

My involvement in public debate began with a series of articles examining structural inequalities under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). In particular, I analysed what I regarded as the disproportionate political influence exercised by members of the Tigrayan ruling elite and the preferential access to opportunities enjoyed by individuals connected to the governing establishment. Among the issues I raised was the allocation of international scholarships, which, in my assessment, reflected broader patterns of political patronage and ethnic favouritism.

I subsequently wrote about human rights abuses within Ethiopian prisons, including allegations of sexual violence, sodomy, and the mistreatment of political prisoners and activists. These interventions attracted criticism and hostility from individuals who preferred silence or denial. It became increasingly clear that my work had rendered me unwelcome in certain political and intellectual circles. At times, even some of those closest to me appeared uncomfortable with my public positions.

The political transition that followed did not alter my commitment to critical inquiry. On the contrary, I found myself equally compelled to scrutinise the policies and conduct of the new administration. While many observers initially celebrated the promise of political reform, I became increasingly concerned about the persistence of ethnic polarisation, large-scale displacement, atrocities against civilians, and the erosion of democratic norms. My criticism of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was based not on allegiance to any political faction but on a commitment to evidence, accountability, and universal principles of justice.

The reaction was often revealing. Some supporters of the government, including individuals within certain religious communities associated with Pentecostal and prosperity-gospel movements, appeared to regard criticism of political leadership as illegitimate or even sacrilegious. In such environments, rational debate became difficult, and personal loyalty frequently replaced critical analysis. As a consequence, some acquaintances and friends distanced themselves from me. Over time, I also withdrew from certain community gatherings and church activities because I perceived a troubling degree of opportunism, conformity, and hypocrisy.

One of my most widely discussed essays, The Many Faces of Abiy Ahmed, generated particularly strong reactions. Yet over time, some of its most vocal critics acknowledged that several of the concerns raised in the article had proven justified. A number of Ethiopian intellectuals who initially dismissed my arguments later expressed agreement with aspects of my analysis as the country’s political trajectory became clearer.

Over the past seven years, I have written approximately eighty articles addressing issues of governance, human rights, conflict, displacement, and ethnic politics in Ethiopia. Much of this work has sought to amplify the voices of communities affected by violence and marginalisation, particularly among the Amhara population, while maintaining a broader concern for the suffering of all Ethiopians regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation.

At the time of writing, reports continue to emerge of severe violence against Orthodox Christian communities in parts of Oromia, including the Arsi Zone. According to local accounts, civilians have been killed, displaced, and deprived of their homes and livelihoods. What I find particularly troubling is the limited international attention devoted to these events. The relative absence of sustained media coverage raises important questions about whose suffering receives global visibility and whose does not. These concerns motivated my recent article, The “New Auschwitz”? Targeted Atrocities against Orthodox Amharas in Arsi, Oromia, Ethiopia.

The cumulative effect of this engagement has been a growing distance between myself and many members of the Ethiopian diaspora. While some relationships were lost because of political disagreements, others dissolved because they were rooted more in convenience, conformity, or shared ethnic loyalties than in genuine intellectual exchange. I have increasingly concluded that meaningful scholarship and principled activism often require a willingness to stand apart from prevailing social pressures.

Rather than viewing solitude as a burden, I have come to regard it as a condition of intellectual independence. It provides the space necessary for reading, reflection, research, and writing. Equally important, it has allowed me to invest my energy in relationships and projects that I find genuinely meaningful, including my engagement with young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. These interactions have been among the most rewarding aspects of my professional and personal life.

The experience has reinforced a simple lesson: public intellectual engagement is rarely without cost. Those who challenge entrenched interests, dominant narratives, or collective myths should not expect universal approval. Friendship, professional advancement, and social acceptance may all be sacrificed in the pursuit of truth as one understands it. Whether this should be described as the cost of activism, the burden of intellectual honesty, or the price of dissent is ultimately a matter of interpretation. What remains beyond dispute is that openness carries consequences, and those consequences must be accepted by anyone committed to speaking freely.

After reading an earlier draft of this essay, a friend residing in the United States—a neurologist by profession, whom I have never met in person—offered a thoughtful observation:

“This is not unique to Ethiopia. Even in the United States, whether one is Republican or Democrat, speaking uncomfortable truths can sometimes lead to criticism, isolation, or the loss of friendships. The challenge is universal. What should guide us is not political affiliation, ethnicity, or personal loyalty, but the truth as best as we can discern it. As a professor and public intellectual, the responsibility is not to please one side or another, but to follow the evidence wherever it leads and to remain consistent in applying the same standards to everyone.

In the end, reputations come and go, political winds change, and governments rise and fall. What endures is integrity. Let truth guide the analysis, and let intellectual honesty be the legacy.”

His remarks capture an important reality. The tension between truth and belonging is not confined to Ethiopia. It is a universal feature of public life. The question each of us must answer is whether we value comfort and acceptance more than honesty and intellectual integrity. For my part, I have chosen the latter, despite the costs.

GIRMA BERHANU
Professor

GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY

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Commission’s ‘Farce’ of a Report Claims Only Three Dead; Aseko Church Condemns Outrageous Erasure

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:00:39 +0000

Read Time:1 Minute, 57 Second

The Aseko District Church has utterly rejected the casualty figures released by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) regarding the brutal militant attacks in Arsi Zone, Oromia, on Ginbot 23 & 24, 2018 EC
While the Commission seems content to play down the bloodshed, His Grace Abune Elisa, Archbishop of the Arsi and Somali Region Jigjiga Dioceses of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, had already confirmed the grim reality at the time: 13 Orthodox Christians slaughtered, over 280 faithful displaced, and a century-old church reduced to ashes.
Local residents speaking to Borkena went further, placing the death toll at well over 50, with numerous others still missing.
Yet, in a staggering display of detached reporting last night, the EHRC claimed the fatalities amounted to a grand total of “three” conveniently categorised as two Christians and one Muslim. They also noted damage to the perimeter wall of Sheikh Mustafa Mosque, alongside the destruction of the Seleta St. Gabriel Church.

“We Were on the Ground!! They Wiped Out Scores”

Speaking on condition of anonymity following the EHRC’s whitewash, a senior official from the Aseko District Church Diocese didn’t mince words:

“We actually went to the massacre sites. The number of dead is massive.”

The official clarified that while one Muslim resident was tragically among the casualties, the total number of murdered victims exceeds 50.
“282 homes and a church were torched,” the official added, noting that recent assessments show the number of displaced people has now skyrocketed past 2,500. “As for the property destroyed? It is simply beyond measure.”

The Blatant Disconnect

When challenged on the glaring discrepancy between the Commission’s claim of “three” dead and the Church’s figure of “over 50,” the local church official shut down the EHRC’s narrative completely.
He confirmed that the diocese had explicitly provided the Commission with the exact figure of 52 dead and over 2,500 displaced.
“We didn’t rely on hearsay,” the official snapped. “We compiled hard data directly from the displaced survivors—we know exactly how many children they lost, and how many of their family members were butchered.”

The official completely dismissed the EHRC’s report as an offensive fabrication:
“It is completely detached from reality. It is erroneous, unconscionable, and flat-out wrong. Even government officials came to the site and saw the truth with their own eyes.”

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Why should innocent people perish? Why should the motherland die?

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:14:33 +0000

Read Time:3 Minute, 48 Second

Bekele Gesesse (PhD), June 2026

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest condolences regarding the utterly shameful and barbaric massacre recently committed against the church and the faithful in Arsi. May the Lord our God rest the souls of the deceased, and may He bring His judgement upon the murderers and the destroyers of the church.

1st/ Who is Ethiopia? What has she contributed?

Ethiopia is a holy country that has existed for thousands of years, created by the Lord our God who endowed her with everything in abundance.
She is a unique country where Orthodox and Muslim followers have coexisted with mutual respect and love. It was a nation where various ethnic groups and tribes intermarried, cooperated, and lived together in peace. She is deeply hospitable.
When foreign invasions threatened her, she united through the power of God, repelled the forces, and preserved her independence. She is an honoured nation that contributed immensely to liberating Africa from slavery and colonialism. She was Africa’s sole member of the League of Nations and a founding member of the United Nations. She played a monumental role in the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity.
For these reasons, she became the seat of the African Union and various international branch organisations.

2nd/ Why have her enemies multiplied?

a) Historical foreign enemies harbour grudges against us.

Emperor Tewodros did not surrender to the British invading forces at Maqdala.
We made history by defeating Italy at Adwa.
During the second invasion at Maychew, we resisted poison gas and modern weaponry, safeguarding our independence after five years of bitter struggle.
As mentioned above, Ethiopia contributed immensely to the liberation of African countries from slavery and colonialism. Because the Amhara people and the Orthodox faith played a major role in this achievement, enemies wish to destroy them, dismantle Ethiopia, and return Africa to subjugation.
b) The role of internal slaughterers and secessionist forces
It was expected that the Italians would be completely cleared out after their defeat at Adwa. Instead, they retreated to the Bahre Negash (the maritime province) and occupied it, changing its name to Eritrea. Eventually, Eritrea reunited with its motherland through a federation. When that federation was dissolved, the ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front) rose up to reverse it. Subsequently, the EPLF was formed. Due to external backing and internal weaknesses, the question shifted from federation to secession.
The military Derg regime, after seventeen years of weakening the country by slaughtering numerous leaders, generals, and intellectuals, handed over power to the EPLF and TPLF forces and fled abroad. When the TPLF took power, they quickly facilitated Eritrea’s secession. They introduced an ethnically divisive constitution. Through fabricated narratives, they framed the Amhara people, in particular, as the public enemy.
After twenty-seven years of exploitation, a weakened TPLF handed power over to Oromo forces and retreated to Mekelle.

3rd/ The ongoing massacres and the campaign to destroy the country

The situation has rapidly deteriorated, particularly since the establishment of Abiy’s Oromuma administration.
The following explicit crimes are actively being perpetrated:

The massacre of the Amhara people,
The massacre of Orthodox Christians,
Attacks on churches,
The closure of schools,
The denial of medical treatment,
The displacement of people,
The destruction of heritage and looting of property,
The stripping away of stability,
The destruction of the economy,
Causing the nation to be despised in the eyes of Africa and the world,
Dismantling the country,
And so forth.
Why? Why? Why?

4th/ Conclusion

Do we all equally understand the catastrophic dangers mentioned above? If so, why have we failed to form a grand alliance to swiftly bring about a change that benefits everyone? What more are we waiting for???
The TPLF’s dream of annexing fertile Amhara land to establish a Tigray nation is sheer madness. Similarly, the dream of the Oromuma forces to build an Oromo nation by slaughtering the Amhara, Orthodox Christians, and others is equally mad. It would be far better, especially for the Tigray and Oromo public, to wake up quickly and stand with others for unity, peace, and sustainable development.
Others, realising that tomorrow it could be them, must stand shoulder to shoulder with the Fano, who are currently fighting for their very survival.
If foreign powers believe they will benefit from the dismantling of Ethiopia, they are mistaken. They would do well to learn from their past errors and refrain from their malicious actions.
May the Lord our God stand by our innocent, impoverished citizens, break the arm of the murderous and destructive forces, and send down His peace. Amen.

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ንፁህ ህዝብ ለምን ይለቅ? እናት አገር ለምን ትሙት?

Ethiopian Tribune editor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:12:13 +0000

Read Time:2 Minute, 20 Second

በቀለ ገሠሠ (ዶ/ር) June 2026

በመጀመሪያ በአርሲ ቤተክርስቲያንና ምእመናን ላይ ሰሞኑን ስለደረሰው እጅግ አሳፋሪ አረመኔያዊ ጭፍጨፋ የተሰማኝን ትልቅ አዘኔታ እገልፃለው፣ እግዚአብሔር አምላካችን የሞቱትን ነብስ ይማርልን፣ በነፍሰገዳዮቹና ቤተክርስቲያን አውዳሚዎች ላይ ፍርዱን ይስጥልን።

፩ኛ/ ኢትዮጵያ ማን ናት? ምንስ አበረከተች?

ኢትዮጵያ እግዚአብሔር አምላካችን ሁሉን አሟልቶ ፈጥሮ ለብዙ ሺ ዓመታት የኖረች ቅድስት አገር ናት።

ኦርቶዶክስና ሙስሊም ተከታዮች ተከባብረው ተፋቅረው የኖሩባት ልዩ አገር ናት። የተለያዩ ጎሣና ነገዶች ተጋብተው ተባብረው በሰላም የኖሩባት አገር ነበረች።
እንግዳ ተቀባይ ናት።

የውጪ ወረራም ሲመጣባት በእግዚአብሔር ኃይል በጋራ መክታ ነፃነቷን አስከብራ የኖረች አገር ናት። አፍሪቃን ከባርነትና ከቅኝ አገዛዝ ለማውጣት ከፍተኛ አስተዋጽኦ ያደረገች የተከበረች አገር ናት። ከአፍሪቃ የሊግ ኦፍ ኔሽን ብቸኛ አባል ነበረች። የዓለም መንግሥታት መሥራች አባል ናት።
በአፍሪቃ አንድነት ምሥረታ ከፍተኛ አስተዋጽኦ አድርጋለች።
በነዚህም ምክንያቶች የአፍሪቃ ህብረትና የተለያዩ ዓለማቀፋዊ ቅርንጫፍ ድርጅቶች መቀመጫ ሆነች።

፪ኛ/ ጠላቶችዋ ለምን በዙ?

ሀ) የውጪ ታሪካዊ ጠላቶች ቂም ይዘውብናል።

ዐፄ ቴዎድሮስ በመቅደላ ላይ ለእንግሊዝ ወራሪ ኃይሎች እጅ አልሰጡም።
በአድዋ ላይ ጣሊያንን አቸንፈን ታሪክ ሠራን።
በማይጨው ዳግመኛ ወረራ ወቅት መርዝ ጪሶችንና ዘመናዊ የጦር መሣሪያዎችን ተቓቁመን ከአምስት ዓመት መራራ ትግል በኋላ ነፃነታችንን አስከበርን።

እላይ እንደተጠቀሰው የአፍሪቃ አገሮች ከባርነትና ከቅኝ አገዛዝ ነፃ እንዲወጡ ከፍተኛ አስተዋጽኦ አድርጋለች።
ለዚህ ደግሞ የአማራው ህዝብና ኦርቶዶክስ ሃይማኖት ከፍተኛ አስተዋጽኦ በማድረጋቸው ምክንያት እነርሱን አጥፍተው ኢትዮጵያን በትነው አፍሪቃን ወደባርነት ሊመልሱ ይፈልጋሉ።

ለ) የውስጥ ጨፍጫፊና ተገንጣይ ኃይሎች ሚና

ጣሊያኖች ከዐድዋ ሽንፈት በኋላ ተጠራርገው ይወጣሉ የሚል ግምት ነበረ።
እነርሱ ግን ወደባህረ ነጋሢ ሸሽተው ተቀመጡ። ስሟንም ወደኤርትራ ቀይረው ተቆጣጠሯት።
በመጨረሻም በፌደረሽን ከእናት አገሯ ጋር ተመልሳ ተቀላቀለች። ፌደረሽኑም ሲፈርስ ያንን ለማስመለስ ጀብኃ ተቋቁሞ ተነሣ። ቀጥሎም ሸዓቢያ ተፈጠረ። በውጪ ድጋፎችና በውስጥ ድክመቶች ምክንያት ጥያቄው ከፌደረሽን ወደግንጠላ ተሸጋገረ። ወታደራዊው ደርግም ለአስራ ሰባት ዓመታት ብዙ መሪዎችን፣ ጄነራሎችና ምሁራንን ጨፍጭፎ ሲዳከም ሥልጣኑን ለሸዓቢያና ወያኔ ኃይሎች አስረክቦ ወደውጪ ፈረጠጠ። ወያኔ ሥልጣን ስትረከብ የኤርትራን ግንጠላ ቶሎ አመቻቸች። ዘረኛ ህገመንግሥት አወጡ። በውሸት ትርክቶች በተለይ አማራውን የህዝብ ጠላት አስመሰሉ ።
ወያኔም ከሃያ ሰባት የብዝበዛ ዓመታት በኋላ ተዳክማ ሥልጣኑን ለኦሮሞ ኃይሎች አስረክባ ወደመቀሌ አፈገፈገች።

፫ኛ/ የሚካሄደው ጭፍጨፋና አገር የማፍረስ ዘመቻ፣

በተለይ የዐቢይ ኦሮሙማ አስተዳደር ከተመሰረተ ወዲሁ ሁኔታዎች በመባባስ ላይ ይገኛሉ።

የሚከተሉ ግልጽ ወንጀሎች በመካሄድ ላይ ይገኛሉ፣

የአማራ ህዝብ ጭፍጨፋ፣
የኦርቶዶክስ ተከታዮች ጭፍጨፋ፣
አብያተ ክርስቲያናት ጥቃት፣
ትምህርት ቤቶችን መዝጋት፣
የህክምና እድሎችን መንፈግ፣
ህዝብ ማፈናቀል፣
ቅርሶች ማውደምና ንብረቶች መዝረፍ፣
እርጋታ ማሳጣት፣
ኢኮኖሚ ማውደም፣
በአፍሪቃም ሆነ በዓለም ፊት እንድትናቅ ማድረግ፣
አገር መበተን፣
ወዘተ።

ለምን ለምን ለምን?

፬ኛ/ መደምደሚያ

እላይ የተጠቀሱትን እጅግ አስከፊ አደጋዎች እኩል እንረዳለን ወይ? ከሆነስ ለምን ታላቅ ህብረት ፈጥረን ለሁሉም የሚበጅ ለውጥ ቶሎ ማምጣት አቃተን? ከዚህ በላይ ምን እየተጠበቀ ይገኛል???

ወያኔ የአማራን ለም መሬት በመንጠቅ የትግሬ አገር የመመስረቱ ህልም እብደት ነው።
የኦሮሙማ ኃይሎች ደግሞ አማራን፣ ኦርቶዶክስንና ሌሎችንም በመጨፍጨፍ የኦሮሞ አገር የመገንባት ህልም እንደዚሁ እብደት ነው።
በተለይ የትግሬና ኦሮሞ ህዝብ ቶሎ ነቅቶ ለአንድነት፣ ለሰላምና ዘለቄታ ለሚኖረው እድገት ከሌሎች ጋር አብሮ ቢሰለፍ ይሻላል።

ሌሎችም ነግ በእኔ ብለው በመነሳት ለህልውናው በመዋደቅ ላይ ከሚገኘው ፋኖ ጎን መሰለፍ ይጠበቅባቸዋል።

የውጪ ኃይሎችም ኢትዮጵያን በመበተን ጥቅም እናገኛለን ብለው ከገመቱ ተሳስተዋልና ካለፉት ስህተቶቻቸው ተምረው ከሰይጣናዊ እርምጃዎቻቸው ቢቆጠቡ ይሻላቸዋል።

እግዚአብሔር አምላካችን በንፁሃን ምስኪን ዜጎቻችን ጎን በመሆን የጨፍጫፊና አውዳሚ ኃይሎችን ክንድ ይስበርልን
ሰላሙን ያውርድልን፣ አሜን።

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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