By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

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

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

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

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

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

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

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

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

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

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

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

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

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

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

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

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

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

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

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

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

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

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

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

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

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

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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Memory, Martyrdom and the Mirage of the New Dubai

By Endex Ethiopian Tribune Chief Editor

A Date That Refuses to Fade and a City That Cannot Recognise Itself

Fly into Bole International Airport on any given morning and the new visitor to Addis Ababa will likely be struck by something unexpected. Glass towers catch the equatorial light. Half-finished luxury condominium blocks crowd the skyline. Billboards in Arabic and English advertise residential developments with names that evoke the Gulf. A certain class of returning diaspora, a certain strain of breathless travel writing, and a particular kind of investor prospectus have begun circulating a phrase that would have bewildered the city’s founders: Addis Ababa is the new Dubai.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

To ask that question in February 2026 as the Ethiopian calendar turns again toward Yekatit 12, the date on which 19 February 1937 falls,  is to ask something more urgent than whether visitors to Addis Ababa are aware of a historical tragedy. It is to ask whether the city’s newest patrons, its most vocal claimants, and its most ambitious planners have absorbed the ethical inheritance of that day: that Addis Ababa has already been declared, once before, the exclusive property of a foreign power and a particular vision of luxury. That it was reordered by force. That people died approximately 19,200 of them in seventy-two hours alone, by Ian Campbell’s careful estimate (Campbell, 2017), so that it might become someone else’s imperial capital.

The Dubai comparison is not merely aesthetic vanity. It is a political symptom. And Yekatit 12 is the historical lens through which its contradictions become visible.

I. The New Dubai Narrative: What It Means and Who It Serves

The comparison to Dubai carries different meanings depending on who is speaking. For some international observers and diplomats, it gestures toward Addis Ababa’s undeniable growth, its expanded road networks, its Chinese-built light railway, its emergence as the diplomatic capital of the African continent, home to the African Union and a proliferating constellation of UN agencies. The city accounts for more than thirty per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP while housing less than five per cent of its population (CSA, 2008). By certain measures, the analogy is not absurd.

But the Dubai comparison being circulated in a more specific, and more troubling, register is not primarily about economic dynamism. It is about a particular aesthetic and a particular clientele. It refers to UAE investors who have secured controlling stakes in high-end residential developments in the city’s expanding districts. It refers to the direct financial relationships cultivated between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Gulf capital relationships that have channelled foreign direct investment into visible, photogenic infrastructure while the social fabric beneath it strains under contradictions the glass facades do not reflect.

When visitors from abroad describe Addis Ababa as the new Dubai, they are often, whether they know it or not, describing a city being remade for a particular class of people. The Emirati investor. The returning high-net-worth diaspora. The international NGO professional who wants a rooftop pool and a concierge. What they are less likely to be describing — because these people are no longer visible in the neighbourhoods being redeveloped are the approximately 100,000 residents displaced from the city’s central and peri-urban areas to make room for this transformation. Communities removed from Kolfe, Gulele, Kirkos and the expanding metropolitan fringe, relocated to peripheral blocks far from their livelihoods, their schools, their social networks.

One hundred thousand people cleared. A skyline polished for the richest Gulf citizens.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

Historian Ian Campbell has documented how Italian fascist urban planners in the late 1930s envisioned reordering Addis Ababa along precisely these lines: European quarters to enjoy paved roads, sanitation and modernist boulevards; indigenous districts relegated to peripheral zones with minimal services (Campbell, 2017). Anti-miscegenation laws enforced social separation. By 1939, approximately 50,000 Italians resided in Ethiopia, concentrated in the capital. The colonial premise was explicit: Addis Ababa was to become a European imperial city, with Africans in subordinate spaces.

The mechanisms today are different. There are no Blackshirts. The legal instruments are municipal development orders, master plans and market forces rather than racial laws. Yet the spatial logic, the clearing of the poor and the indigenous to make room for an aspirationally cosmopolitan elite, carries an uncomfortable historical resonance that the Dubai enthusiasts have not paused to examine.

II. The Conservative Ethiopian Nationalist Argument: Menelik’s City Belongs to All Ethiopians

Before examining the Oromo elite claim on Addis Ababa, it is necessary to give serious attention to a counter-argument that Ethiopian nationalist conservatives have long advanced one that is historically substantive, frequently overlooked in international commentary, and which contains within it a profound and under-appreciated irony.

Conservative Ethiopian nationalists argue, with considerable historical justification, that Addis Ababa was founded as a city for all Ethiopians. Emperor Menelik II established the capital formally in 1886, choosing the site, known to surrounding Oromo communities as Finfinne , for its elevation, its climate and its hot springs. His empress, Taytu Betul, is credited with naming it Addis Ababa: New Flower. From its founding, it was conceived not as a tribal or ethnic capital but as the seat of a multi-ethnic empire that Menelik was in the process of consolidating.

Here the nationalist argument introduces its most pointed historical observation, and it deserves to be stated clearly and without embarrassment: Menelik II himself, by bloodline and ancestry, was of mixed heritage that included Oromo lineage. This is not a fringe claim. It is documented in Ethiopian dynastic history. The same applies, with varying degrees of genealogical complexity, to Emperor Haile Selassie I, whose family connections crossed the ethnic boundaries that contemporary political discourse treats as ancient and impermeable. And it applies, most strikingly of all, to President Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg strongman whose brutal seventeen-year rule is among the darkest chapters in Ethiopian history and who was himself of partial Oromo descent.

The conservative nationalist argument draws from this a pointed observation: none of these leaders not Menelik, not Haile Selassie, not even Mengistu ever claimed Addis Ababa as an exclusively Oromo city. None of them framed the capital as the sovereign possession of a single ethnicity. Whatever their failures, and those failures were considerable and in Mengistu’s case catastrophic, each of them conceptualised Addis Ababa as a city in which all Ethiopians, Amhara, Oromo, Gurage, Tigrean, Somali, Sidama and all others, had the right to dwell, to trade, to worship and to call home.

This is not a trivial point. It means that the framing of Addis Ababa as exclusively Oromo space,  Finfinne for the Oromo and by implication not equally for other Ethiopians, represents not the recovery of an ancient tradition but the invention of a new and exclusionary politics. Even the emperors and dictators of Oromo blood who preceded the current era did not make this claim. They governed, badly or well, as Ethiopians over Ethiopians.

The conservative nationalist position has its own blind spots and its own uses as political instrument. Ethiopian nationalism has historically suppressed minority identities, denied linguistic rights and used the rhetoric of unity to justify assimilationist policies that caused genuine harm to Oromo, Somali and other communities. The 2014-2016 protests that mobilised hundreds of thousands of Oromo demonstrators, and that cost hundreds of lives at the hands of federal security forces, were not manufactured grievances. They arose from real injustice.

But the nationalist argument about Addis Ababa’s civic universalism contains a democratic insight that transcends its ideological packaging: a city founded by a man of partial Oromo ancestry, built by labour from every corner of the empire, grown through the settlement of dozens of communities across more than a century, cannot be retrospectively converted into the exclusive patrimony of one ethnic group — even the ethnic group from whose land it grew.

If Menelik , Oromo by blood among other things, built a city for all Ethiopians, then the claim that his city belongs to Oromos alone is, at minimum, a selective reading of his own project. And if that claim is advanced by an elite class whose members have accumulated land, political appointments, business licenses and international celebrity under the banner of Oromo rights, while 100,000 poor residents, many of them Oromo themselves are cleared to make room for Gulf-financed towers, then the contradiction becomes not merely intellectual but moral.

III. The Oromo Elite Claim: Justice, Selectivity and the Dubai Exit

The claim of Oromo elites to Addis Ababa as fundamentally Oromo space is historically grounded in the displacement and dispossession that accompanied the city’s expansion across what had been Oromo farmland and grazing territory. The 1995 Constitution’s recognition of Oromia’s “special interest” in the capital under Article 49 reflects a constitutional acknowledgement of this history (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 1995). The protests of 2014-2016 demonstrated that these grievances commanded mass support across Oromia (Human Rights Watch, 2016).

Yet within elite Oromo political discourse, something else has also been operating alongside these legitimate arguments: a language of exclusive possession that sits uncomfortably beside the behaviour of those who advance it most loudly.

No figure encapsulates these contradictions more sharply than Feyisa Lilesa. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Lilesa crossed the marathon finishing line with his arms raised in an X — the gesture of Oromo protest performed before a global audience while his fellow protesters were being shot in the streets of Oromia. It was an act of extraordinary symbolic courage that forced the world to look at Ethiopia when it preferred to look away.

Yet the story does not end at the finishing line. Reports emerged that Lilesa was subsequently involved in a road incident in Addis Ababa in which children were struck by his four-wheel drive vehicle. Rather than face accountability within the country whose cause he had embodied, he departed. To Dubai.

The irony is almost architectural in its precision. The man who became the international face of Oromo resistance against a government he accused of dispossessing and killing his people who converted that resistance into celebrity, political protection and material wealth,  chose, when accountability arrived at his own door, to flee to the very city whose model of glittering exclusivity is now being applied to Addis Ababa to dispossess the very communities he claimed to represent.

Dubai does not do accountability. It does luxury and impunity and the purchased anonymity of the very wealthy. That an Oromo elite should flee there and that this should be treated as a private matter of no political relevance  is not a footnote. It is a window into the class character of an elite that speaks the language of historical justice while living the life of Gulf-adjacent privilege.

IV. The Shared Bloodline the Politicians Prefer to Forget

The conservative nationalist observation about Menelik’s Oromo ancestry opens a deeper question that contemporary Ethiopian identity politics systematically suppresses: after more than a century of intermarriage, shared urban life, military service, commercial partnership and cultural exchange in Addis Ababa, the ethnic categories being deployed to divide the city’s past and future are far less stable than any of their champions acknowledge.

Haile Selassie presided over a modernising empire with genuine Oromo lineage in his family tree and chose to govern as an Ethiopian emperor rather than an Oromo king. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a man of Oromo and Konso descent who instituted one of the most brutal dictatorships in African history, never once claimed to be governing in the name of Oromo sovereignty. Whatever the crimes of these regimes, and they were grave, their ethnic self-positioning was consistently toward an Ethiopian identity that encompassed rather than excluded.

The irony that contemporary Oromo elite nationalism, which presents itself as liberation from Amhara imperial domination,  finds its most direct historical refutation not in Amhara voices but in the choices of leaders who shared Oromo blood and chose Ethiopia anyway, is one that the current political discourse is structurally unable to process.

This does not mean that Oromo historical grievances are invalid. It means that the ethnic framework being used to prosecute those grievances is considerably more constructed, more recent and more politically motivated than its proponents acknowledge. As the 2007 census indicates, Addis Ababa is approximately 47 per cent Amharic-speaking, 19 per cent Oromo-speaking, 16 per cent Gurage-speaking, with significant further diversity in the remainder. These communities did not arrive as colonial settlers. They arrived, over generations, as Ethiopians, many of them poor Ethiopians seeking livelihoods in the capital that Menelik built and that every subsequent government maintained as a shared national space.

V. Displacement as Continuity: From Fascist Segregation to Market Erasure

Italian occupation of Addis Ababa from 1936 to 1941 was spatial as well as military. Urban planning documents from the period proposed redesigning the city along racial lines, displacing Ethiopians to peripheral zones while European quarters received paved roads, sanitation and modernist architecture (Campbell, 2017; Labanca, 2002). The demographic shock of Yekatit 12, approximately 20 per cent of the city’s population killed in seventy-two hours, emptied neighbourhoods that Italian settlers then filled.

The occupation ended. The Yekatit 12 Monument at Sidist Kilo stands today as architectural testimony. Its bas-reliefs depict bound prisoners, grieving mothers and burning homes. The victims commemorated there are remembered as Ethiopians, not as members of discrete ethnic communities. The fascist bullets, as the historical record makes clear, did not distinguish between Amhara, Oromo, Gurage or Tigrean.

The spatial logic the massacre enabled clearing people from land to create a city for a different and more powerful class of inhabitants, has found new expression in the development model the Dubai analogy celebrates. The 100,000 displaced residents of contemporary Addis Ababa were not killed. They were relocated. But relocation at distance from livelihood is its own form of civic death. Markets disappear. Children travel hours to schools they used to walk to. Social networks built across generations dissolve. The language of development and master planning, deployed today as it was deployed in Italian urban policy documents of the 1930s, does not announce itself as violence. It announces itself as progress.

When Gulf investors purchase luxury residential blocks on the cleared land, and when Oromo political elites celebrate the assertion of Oromo sovereignty over the same city whose poor Oromo residents are among those being cleared, the question of who the Dubai transformation actually serves becomes impossible to avoid.

• VI. What the Three Claims Have in Common

Three distinct claims on Addis Ababa are currently in circulation. Gulf-inflected international capital claims it through investment and the transformation of its skyline into a mirror of Gulf urbanism. Oromo nationalist elites claim it through ethnic sovereignty and historical dispossession. Conservative Ethiopian nationalists claim it through the civic universalism of Menelik’s founding and the multi-ethnic imperial tradition.

Each of these claims, when pushed to its absolute, requires the exclusion of someone else. Gulf capital excludes the poor regardless of ethnicity. Oromo ethnic sovereignty excludes the Amhara grandmother who has lived in Merkato for fifty years, the Gurage trader whose family has been in Kolfe for three generations, the Tigrean civil servant whose children were born in the city. Conservative Ethiopian nationalism, in its less reflective iterations, has historically excluded Oromo cultural identity from legitimate expression in the public sphere.

The lesson of Yekatit 12,  as articulated in both historical scholarship and the ethical reflection that the date demands — is precisely that absolutism in civic ownership destroys cities. The victims of 19 February 1937 were drawn from every community that Addis Ababa contained. The shared trauma of that massacre produced the shared memorial at Sidist Kilo. The date did not belong to one ethnic group. The grief did not sort itself by tribe.

If there is an argument that transcends the current political fragmentation, it is the one contained in the historical behaviour of Menelik himself a man of mixed blood including Oromo ancestry who founded a city and named it New Flower and appeared, whatever his other failings, to intend it as a place where Ethiopians of all origins might dwell. Not perfectly. Not without violence and hierarchy and the injustices of empire. But as Ethiopians, together, rather than as ethnic populations sorted into zones of belonging and exclusion.

Knowing the Date, Reading the City

Each year the Ethiopian calendar turns to Yekatit 12. The date does not demand resentment. It demands remembrance and, more than remembrance, the kind of recognition that sees patterns,  the recurring logic of declaring a plural city the exclusive possession of a single power, whether that power is Italian fascism, Gulf capital, ethnic nationalism or imperial nostalgia.

Addis Ababa is both Finfinne and Addis Ababa. It is Oromo geography and Ethiopian capital. It is local homeland and African diplomatic centre. It was founded by a man of Oromo blood who called it New Flower for all his subjects. It was massacred by fascists who wanted it for Europeans alone. It was rebuilt by Ethiopians of every origin. It is currently being partially remade for Gulf investors and a thin wealthy stratum, at the cost of 100,000 of its poorest residents.

The conservative nationalist who invokes Menelik’s civic universalism is right that the city was never meant to belong to one ethnic group alone and should acknowledge that this universalism came with imperial violence that demands recognition. The Oromo nationalist who invokes historical dispossession at Finfinne is right that land loss is a genuine grievance, and should acknowledge that the man who built the city on that land shared their blood and did not build it for Oromos alone. The Gulf investor who sees the next Dubai should be asked, plainly and on the record: do you know what was cleared to build this? Do you know it is Yekatit 12?

If they all know, if the date is genuinely understood rather than merely observed, then they know that memory is not about the past alone. It is a compass for the future.

That compass, at the moment, is pointing somewhere that the martyrs of Yekatit 12, of every ethnicity who fell together on those three days in February 1937, would not have recognised as the city for which they died.

References

Campbell, I. (2014) The Plot to Kill Graziani. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.

Campbell, I. (2017) The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame. London: Hurst.

Central Statistical Agency (CSA) (2008) 2007 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: CSA.

Del Boca, A. (1969) Italiani in Africa Orientale. Rome: Laterza.

Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995) Constitution of the FDRE. Addis Ababa.

Human Rights Watch (2016) Such a Brutal Crackdown. New York: HRW.

Labanca, N. (2002) Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Marcus, H. (1994) A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley: University of California Press.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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By E. Frashie | Ethiopian Tribune columnist

Ethiopia’s political theatre, under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has become a masterclass in the management of appearances, whispers, and global expectations. The recent succession of high-profile international visits  the conspicuously warm hand-holding with India’s Prime Minister and the measured, almost surgical formality of Türkiye’s President Erdoğan revealed far more than diplomatic protocol. They exposed the entangled web of elite culture, public rumour, and the ordinary citizen’s bewildered gaze upon a country balancing precariously between internal fractures and external pressures.

Hovering above all of this is the rumour of the UAE president’s death  a story so vivid and so swiftly circulated across Turkish media, pan-Islamic channels, and social networks that it painted, for many, a portrait of secretive foreign influence, invisible hands, and the tantalising notion that Ethiopia’s leader might be quietly managing external chaos whilst projecting an image of unshakeable calm at home.

The contrast between India’s and Türkiye’s visits is, at its core, a study in how symbolism and substance collide. When India’s Prime Minister arrived, Abiy Ahmed received him with ceremonial grandeur  the public drive, the embraces, the hand-holding that delights both domestic media and diaspora audiences alike. Military bands performed. State dinners gleamed. The optics were unambiguous: India and Ethiopia, friends in both trade and spirit, bound by something warmer than treaty language. It was, in the most generous reading, diplomacy rendered as soft-focus emotional theatre  reassuring, photogenic, and carefully curated for international consumption.

Erdoğan’s February 2026 visit was an altogether different affair. There were no embraces, no personal driving tours, no gestures of playful camaraderie. Instead, the Turkish President delivered firm, layered statements about the Horn of Africa warning that the region must not become a battleground for foreign powers, rejecting Israeli recognition of Somaliland, and invoking shared historical and cultural ties through gestures such as the restoration of the Al-Nejashi mosque. The messaging operated on multiple frequencies simultaneously: cultural diplomacy through Islamic heritage, strategic caution against external interference, and economic signalling through Turkey’s legacy of railway investment and infrastructure ambition in the region. Abiy, for his part, navigated Erdoğan’s visit with chess-like restraint measured nods, careful phrasing, and the composure of a leader acutely aware that every gesture is being read by multiple audiences at once.

Perhaps nowhere was Ethiopia’s diplomatic complexity more visibly compressed than in the pageantry of state ceremony itself. Female Muslim ministers appeared in modest, conservative attire a calculated gesture of cultural respect towards Erdoğan’s perceived Islamic sensibility. Simultaneously, Ethiopia’s military band performed with unapologetic professionalism in ceremonial dress that bore no such concession to conservative norms. To the casual observer, it appeared a contradiction: secular and Islamic, deferential and assertive, all within the same state theatre and the same afternoon. To those inside the inner circle, it was a deliberate and nuanced display Ethiopia asserting its inclusivity, its sovereign authority, and its capacity to speak to multiple audiences without committing entirely to any one of them.

Yet even as these carefully managed ceremonies unfolded, a parallel and far more troubling drama was playing out just beyond the edges of the official frame  one that seasoned security professionals have begun to regard not merely as an embarrassment, but as a genuine and escalating threat. Wander through the corridors of any recent state function, stroll the perimeters of a parliamentary session, or position yourself anywhere near a visiting dignitary in Addis Ababa today, and you will encounter them: a new and rapidly proliferating breed of young Ethiopian digital content creators, gimbal-stabilised cameras strapped to their bodies, backpacks laden with equipment, telephoto lenses the length of a man’s forearm trained with startling intimacy upon the faces, movements, and immediate personal spaces of heads of state, senior ministers, and foreign dignitaries. They move through these environments with the breezy, unearned confidence of those who have confused a press badge  or sometimes the mere appearance of one,  with a security clearance. They possess, by all observable evidence, no formal training in the protocols, boundaries, or responsibilities that govern proximity to protected individuals. And they appear entirely unbothered by this fact.

The entitlement on display is, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with close-protection doctrine, quite breathtaking. These are not seasoned photojournalists who have spent years learning where the line is, why it exists, and what it costs when it is crossed. These are, in the main, young men intoxicated by the social currency of expensive equipment and the follower counts that footage of powerful people can generate. They materialise at parliament. They appear at state receptions. They insert themselves into the working perimeters of visiting foreign leaders with a casualness that would trigger immediate and forceful responses in virtually any other capital city in the world. In London, Washington, Ankara, or New Delhi, a man walking within arm’s reach of a head of state with a backpack, a gimbal, and a telephoto lens  without verified, screened, and closely supervised accreditation would find himself face-down on the floor within seconds, surrounded by individuals whose professional instincts had already calculated every possible implication of his presence. In Addis Ababa, he gets the shot, posts it to his channel, and collects the views.

Security analysts who have observed this phenomenon with growing alarm are not mincing their words. The convergence of several factors  the accessibility of high-resolution imaging equipment, the hunger for digital content, the culture of entitlement that pervades certain social circles in the capital, and the conspicuous gaps in how access to sensitive environments is controlled and enforced creates what one expert described, in terms that should give every responsible official pause, as a gathering storm. These young operators, operating today with apparent innocence and tomorrow with unknown motivations or under unknown influences, represent a vector of potential harm that Ethiopian security architecture has not yet adequately reckoned with. A telephoto lens that can capture the iris of a dignitary from forty metres can equally be used to gather intelligence on movement patterns, security formations, and personal vulnerabilities. A gimbal operator who has learnt, through repeated unchallenged access, exactly how close he can get before anyone reacts, has also learnt something that no hostile actor should ever be permitted to know. The question is not whether these individuals intend harm today. The question is what happens when someone who does intend harm observes that the door is open, the access is easy, and the consequences are nonexistent.

The scene at parliament is particularly instructive, and particularly galling to those who understand what they are looking at. Session after session, these self-appointed videographers wander into the sight lines of accredited international media, their enormous lenses jutting into carefully composed shots, their gimbal rigs swinging with cheerful obliviousness through spaces that ought to be controlled, their physical presence a constant, low-grade disruption to the professionals around them. To the accredited journalist trying to capture a considered, properly framed image from a respectful distance, they are an irritant the photographic equivalent of someone talking loudly on their telephone in a library. But to the security professional tasked with maintaining a protective envelope around the individuals in that room, they are something considerably more serious. They are unknowns. They are unvetted. They are close. And in the calculus of close-protection work, an unvetted unknown in close proximity to a principal is not an inconvenience it is a contingency that must be planned for, every single time, because the one time it is not will be the time it matters.

What makes this situation particularly pointed in the Ethiopian context is the class and entitlement dimension that runs through it like a fault line. These are not individuals who have fought their way into these spaces through years of professional credibility. Many have arrived there through social connections, through the reflected glamour of association with powerful figures, through the simple fact that nobody with the authority to stop them has yet chosen to do so consistently. They carry their equipment like a credential and their confidence like a clearance. They have absorbed, somewhere along the way, the lesson that in Ethiopia, if you look the part and move with sufficient assurance, the doors tend to open. It is the same lesson, expressed through a very different medium, that underlies the Feyisa Lilesa scandal the conviction, whether held consciously or simply lived unconsciously, that certain people in this country are simply not subject to the same rules as everyone else.

This same duality, so carefully choreographed on the ceremonial stage, finds a far less flattering mirror in the domain of elite accountability at home  and no case has crystallised public fury quite like that of Feyisa Lilesa. The celebrated Oromo long-distance runner, who once captured the world’s imagination and the conscience of a people with a single crossed-arm gesture on the Olympic podium in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, now finds himself at the centre of a scandal that has ignited a firestorm of outrage across Ethiopian society. According to reports circulating widely and discussed at length by Addis Mereja, Lilesa was involved in a serious road traffic collision in the Jemo Michael area of Addis Ababa  an incident that has since escalated from a tragic accident into a deeply charged political and moral reckoning.

The human cost of that collision is not abstract. A sixteen-year-old child is dead. Another individual sustained a broken bone and remains under medical treatment. These are not statistics  they are lives, and families, torn apart on an ordinary Addis Ababa street. Yet what has incensed the Ethiopian public beyond even the tragedy of the accident itself are the alleged circumstances that followed it. Reports claim that rather than submitting to police authority at the scene, Lilesa brandished a firearm and used it to intimidate officers, effectively preventing his own arrest. If accurate, this is not merely a legal violation  it is a declaration, however implicit, that certain individuals in Ethiopia exist beyond the ordinary reach of the law.

And then came the Facebook post. In the immediate aftermath of an accident that had killed a child and injured another person, Lilesa reportedly took to social media to describe the incident as a common accident, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone. The public reaction was swift and visceral. To many Ethiopians who had watched this unfold, the post read not as an expression of remorse but as a performance of nonchalance the casual deflection of a man confident that consequence would not find him. It was, to borrow the language of the streets, the message of someone who does not believe he will ever truly be held to account.

The rumours that followed were, in some ways, the most damning development of all. Widespread reports began to circulate — unconfirmed as yet by any official authority — that Lilesa had fled Ethiopia entirely, with Dubai emerging as the most frequently named destination. The Ethiopian police have not, at the time of writing, issued any official confirmation or denial of these reports. That silence, in itself, speaks volumes to a public that has grown finely attuned to the language of institutional evasion. When the state says nothing, Ethiopians have long since learnt to interpret that nothing with considerable sophistication.

This is not the first time Lilesa’s conduct has drawn public censure, and the pattern is instructive. When previously accused of public intoxication and disputes with neighbours, his reported response was characteristically defiant: “If I drink, I drink with my own money.” It was the retort of a man who had confused personal achievement with personal impunity — who had, somewhere along the road from Rio to Addis Ababa, begun to believe that fame was a form of sovereignty. His dismissive remarks about Ethiopia’s rising fuel prices — a crisis felt acutely by millions of ordinary citizens — further alienated those who might otherwise have retained residual goodwill towards him. And his controversial comments regarding the use of the Amharic language in traditional Oromo Aba Gada justice proceedings struck many as wilfully divisive, a provocation dressed in the language of cultural assertion.

The political dimension of Lilesa’s trajectory adds yet another layer of complexity to an already tangled story. When he returned to Ethiopia in 2018 following his self-imposed exile after Rio, he did so as a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of the Abiy Ahmed government — a transformation that struck many of his former admirers as jarring, even bewildering. The man who had crossed his arms above his head on the world’s most watched sporting stage, in solidarity with an Oromo people then facing brutal state repression, had become, in the eyes of some, a symbol of the very political accommodation he once appeared to resist. Whether that shift reflected genuine conviction, pragmatic calculation, or something more complicated entirely is a question that only Lilesa can answer. What is beyond dispute is that it reconfigured his public identity in ways that continue to reverberate.

For ordinary Ethiopians watching all of this unfold, the Lilesa affair is not simply about one man. It is a referendum on the question that sits at the heart of every functioning society: does the law apply equally, or does it bend for those with fame, political proximity, and the means to board a flight before the consequences arrive? Citizens observe the contrast with bitter clarity — ministers in modest attire performing deference to foreign dignitaries, military women dancing in ceremonial dress for the cameras, and a celebrated athlete who allegedly pointed a firearm at police officers and may now be sipping coffee in Dubai whilst a sixteen-year-old lies in a grave in Addis Ababa. The cognitive dissonance is not lost on anyone. It feeds rumour. It deepens mistrust. And it makes even the most outlandish whispers about foreign power brokers and shadowy elite networks feel, to many, entirely plausible — because the architecture of privilege that surrounds them is demonstrably, visibly real.

It is worth pausing here to observe that the gimbal-toting content creator shouldering his way past protocol officers at a state function and the celebrated athlete allegedly brandishing a firearm at police officers in Jemo Michael are, at some fundamental level, expressions of the same cultural pathology. Both represent individuals who have concluded, through experience, through impunity, through the repeated failure of institutions to assert boundaries,  that the rules governing ordinary Ethiopians simply do not apply to them. The content creator has learnt that nobody will stop him from walking into sensitive spaces with a backpack full of equipment and a telephoto lens trained on a foreign head of state. Lilesa apparently learnt that a firearm and a certain quality of confidence could send police officers stepping backwards. The specific expressions differ enormously. The underlying logic is identical. And it is a logic that, left unaddressed, corrodes everything it touches,  from the credibility of state institutions to the physical safety of the nation’s most protected individuals.

Addis Mereja’s coverage of the Lilesa incident concludes with a call that is as simple as it is urgent: the police must provide a transparent and timely update to the Ethiopian public. It is a demand that ought not to require stating. That it does,  that citizens must actively petition their institutions for basic accountability in a case involving a dead child and a nationally known figure,  is itself a measure of how far public trust in those institutions has eroded. Justice, in this instance, is not a complicated philosophical concept. It is a sixteen-year-old who deserved to grow up, and a family that deserves to know that their loss was not simply absorbed into the great Ethiopian silence that tends to swallow inconvenient truths.

Ethiopia’s leadership is simultaneously juggling several weighty portfolios that seldom receive the coherent public narrative they demand. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones signal military cooperation and procurement ambition. Railway investments, stalled by conflict and entangled in international arbitration, symbolise both the country’s grand infrastructure vision and its fragility in executing it. Mosque restorations gesture towards humanitarian and religious legitimacy on the international stage. Each element is deployed strategically,  showing just enough to reassure partners whilst carefully concealing vulnerabilities that a more transparent posture might expose. Yet it is arguably the vulnerabilities closest to home,  the entitled photographer at the palace gate, the athlete on a flight to Dubai,  that pose the most immediate and corrosive risk to the project of building a credible, governed state.

The rumour mill, meanwhile, does not pause for diplomatic niceties. The widely circulated story of the UAE president’s death  amplified by Turkish media and pan-Arab channels became a proxy for a broader public anxiety about foreign influence in Ethiopian affairs. For elites, it was a whispered talking point, a potential leverage in shadow conversations. For the layperson, it was fuel for outrage, suspicion, and political imagination. For the Prime Minister, it represented an opportunity: demonstrate control through public calm, measured diplomacy, and the quiet redirection of attention. In Ethiopia, as in many states where official communication is limited and political opacity is the norm, rumour does not merely fill the gaps in understanding, it becomes the primary currency of political discourse.

The satirical image almost writes itself. The Ethiopian Prime Minister, immaculately composed, nods attentively as Erdoğan’s eyes sweep the room with the cool deliberation of a general reviewing a chessboard. Behind them, a military band plays with disciplined flair whilst ministers in conservative Islamic dress murmur protocol reminders to one another. And somewhere just off to the side, perhaps three steps closer than any security doctrine would permit, a young man in a branded hoodie swings a gimbal-mounted camera towards the Turkish President’s face, his enormous telephoto lens catching the light, his backpack brushing the elbow of a close-protection officer who glances sideways with visible unease but says nothing, because nobody has yet told him definitively what to do about this. Cameras flash. Social media erupts with speculation about Arab power brokers, athletes allegedly fled to Dubai, and railway arbiters counting their fees in distant capitals. The content creator posts his footage. The views pour in. And the Prime Minister smiles, pours the tea, and holds the room, master of ceremonies, tactician, and juggler of perceptions across a stage that is, in more ways than one, alarmingly unsecured.

What this theatre ultimately reveals is the extraordinary complexity of Ethiopia’s balancing act,  both internally and externally. Domestically, the government must speak to Christians and Muslims, to Oromo and non-Oromo communities, to elites and ordinary citizens whose lived realities could not be more divergent. Externally, it must manage relationships with the UAE, Türkiye, India, Israel, China, and Western donors, each with their own expectations, their own leverage, and their own interpretation of every gesture Ethiopia makes. Every decision, from a minister’s choice of attire to the selection of ceremonial music, from a drone procurement deal to a mosque restoration, carries multiple and often contradictory signals. The art lies not in eliminating that contradiction but in holding it together long enough to keep every audience sufficiently satisfied. What cannot be held together indefinitely, however, is a security culture in which entitlement substitutes for vetting, and a social culture in which impunity substitutes for accountability.

The lessons embedded in this complex choreography are not trivial ones. Opacity, wherever it persists, breeds narrative creation,  and not always the narratives that governments would choose. Perception, verified or otherwise, shapes legitimacy in ways that policy alone cannot correct. Optics matter as profoundly as action, because the theatre of governance is watched not only by foreign partners but by citizens who are drawing their own quiet conclusions about fairness, competence, and sovereignty. And satire, in such an environment, is sometimes the only honest lens available, the only tool capable of holding the absurdity and the seriousness of it all in the same frame without flinching. But satire has its limits. A security breach does not.

Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia is, in the final accounting, many things at once,  a secular state with a deeply religious population, a military state with a taste for flamboyant ceremony, a country navigating elite favouritism and foreign influence whilst performing confidence on a world stage. The Prime Minister’s particular genius lies not in controlling every rumour, some, like the story drifting in from the Arab world, are simply beyond any government’s reach, but in managing appearances with sufficient skill that the performance itself becomes a form of power. India’s warmth, Erdoğan’s formality, the whispers from the Gulf, the contradictions of the ceremony hall, the sight of a celebrated Olympian allegedly fleeing accountability on a flight to Dubai whilst a teenager’s family mourns in Addis Ababa, and the gimbal operator who has just walked, unchallenged, to within two metres of a visiting head of state all of it intersects within a single, breathtakingly intricate and increasingly fragile theatre of governance.

For the casual observer, it may read as chaos, even farce. For the political analyst, it is a study in survival, strategy, and the calculated management of perception. For the security professional, it is something closer to a slow-motion crisis waiting for its moment. And for Ethiopia itself, the lesson endures: in a world governed as much by optics as by facts, appearances, carefully choreographed, can be every bit as powerful as the truth. But a sixteen-year-old child is dead. A foreign dignitary’s movements are being filmed from arm’s reach by someone nobody has screened. And no amount of choreography, however immaculate, can indefinitely paper over the cracks in a state that has not yet decided, with full seriousness, that its rules apply to everyone equally including those holding the most expensive cameras in the room.

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The death rumour of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed has placed the survival of Abiy Ahmed’s government under uncomfortable scrutiny. For eight years, Abu Dhabi’s billions have underwritten Ethiopian stability. The question now is whether a new ruler in the Gulf will honour the debts of a very personal friendship.

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

THERE IS A THEORY in Ethiopian political circles, unspoken at cabinet level but widely understood by the civil servants who carry the trays in and out: that the government’s stability does not rest chiefly upon its democratic mandate, its macroeconomic competence, or even the loyalty of the federal army. It rests, with the elegant fragility of a line of dominoes, upon a single telephone number in Abu Dhabi.

The death of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known universally as MBZ has, in the days since his unconfirmed passing, given that unspoken theory a rather urgent public airing. In financial ministries and foreign embassies across Addis Ababa, officials are engaged in conversations they are characterising, carefully, as expressions of condolence. Those outside the ministries are characterising them, with rather less diplomatic restraint, as emergency planning.

The stakes are not trivial. Since 2018, the bilateral relationship between Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia and the UAE has constituted one of the most consequential and least institutionally robust financial and security arrangements in the Horn of Africa. Understanding why MBZ’s death matters so profoundly in Addis Ababa requires understanding precisely what was built, how it was built, and upon whose personal authority it depended.

A state whose foundation rests upon another leader’s personal cheque-book is not a state at all. It is a house of cards, waiting for a change in the wind.

A THREE-BILLION-DOLLAR WAGER ON ONE MAN

In June 2018, weeks after Abiy Ahmed’s improbable ascent to the premiership of Africa’s second most populous nation, the UAE pledged a $3 billion (approximately £2.4 billion) aid package to Ethiopia. A substantial portion took the form of a direct central bank deposit a sovereign intervention in Ethiopia’s foreign exchange reserves at a moment of acute liquidity crisis (Reuters, 2018).

The effect was threefold. The deposit stabilised the country’s foreign currency reserves, signalled Gulf confidence in the new premier’s reform programme, and critically furnished Abiy with the domestic political capital to present himself as a leader who could attract serious international investment. The economy did not collapse. The birr did not become, in 2018, a collector’s curiosity. The new Prime Minister stood before his countrymen as a man capable of conjuring order from chaos. He could, admittedly, do so in part because a prince in the Gulf had decided he was worth the gamble.

This was not philanthropy in the conventional sense. The UAE’s Horn of Africa strategy is a coherent piece of middle-power geopolitics, positioning Ethiopia with its 130 million citizens and considerable agricultural and logistical assets as a demographic and commercial anchor for Gulf ambitions. Emirati sovereign wealth funds and private investors expressed interest in logistics, port access, agriculture and renewable energy. The arrangement delivered concrete returns for both parties.

What it did not deliver and this is the crux of the present difficulty was institutional durability. ‘Institutionalised alliances tend to survive leadership change more easily than relationships centred on interpersonal trust,’ notes one analysis of the bilateral relationship. The Abiy-MBZ partnership was, by diplomatic accounts, unusually personal: high-frequency direct communication, strategic backchannel discussions, and mediation roles including in the normalisation of Ethiopia-Eritrea relations that bypassed conventional diplomatic machinery entirely.

Personal diplomacy of this kind is efficient. It is fast. It gets things done. The cost — that everything constructed through a personal channel is only as durable as the relationship itself was a cost that neither party had strong incentives to acknowledge whilst the arrangement was working.

DRONES, TIGRAY, AND THE UNACKNOWLEDGED PILLAR

The financial dimension of the relationship is the one most readily discussed. The security dimension is, by contrast, the subject of sustained official silence on both sides.

During the Tigray conflict the war that consumed the northern highlands between November 2020 and November 2022, and which claimed, by various credible estimates, between 162,000 and 378,000 lives multiple international reporting organisations documented the presence of armed unmanned aerial vehicles in Ethiopian military operations, some reportedly linked to Emirati supply chains (International Crisis Group, 2021). Neither government has confirmed this. The drones, in the official record, have therefore never existed.

The strategic implication was, however, sufficiently clear. The Ethiopian National Defence Force entered the Tigray conflict and, within eighteen months, had experienced a near-catastrophic reversal before reclaiming Mekelle in late 2022. Aerial surveillance and strike capability represented, by most informed assessments, a decisive technological advantage for a force stretched across multiple theatres simultaneously. A government that might otherwise have fallen did not fall. The connection to Emirati materiel support — however formally unconfirmed — is one that analysts in Nairobi, Washington and London have drawn with some consistency.

This forms the third pillar of the Ethiopia-UAE axis, and its vulnerability to a change in Abu Dhabi’s leadership posture is as significant as the financial dimension perhaps more so, given the current security environment.

THE DOMINO SEQUENCE: FROM RIYADH ROAD TO ARAT KILO

Geopolitical analysis of the potential consequences of MBZ’s death has converged, with some unanimity, upon a domino-effect model: the sequential collapse of interdependent structural supports, each toppled by the failure of the one before it.

The sequence begins with personal trust. A successor in Abu Dhabi, even one from the same ruling family, does not inherit personal relationships. He inherits a strategic calculus. In that unsentimental light, the risks associated with Ethiopia a nation managing multiple simultaneous armed conflicts, persistent macroeconomic fragility, and a deteriorating human rights record may rapidly appear to outweigh the perceived returns. The first domino falls.

The loss of personal trust triggers the financial domino. Without Emirati backing, Ethiopia’s underlying economic vulnerabilities are exposed with some brutality. The birr has already shed approximately 57 per cent of its value against the dollar since 2022. The foreign exchange reserves that the 2018 deposit helped to stabilise have no equivalent replacement in prospect. A liquidity shock of any severity would extinguish the political capital with which Abiy Ahmed has managed elite networks and contained centrifugal pressures within his ruling coalition.

The financial domino topples the security domino. A government running on depleted reserves cannot sustain the Ethiopian National Defence Force’s operational tempo across Amhara, Oromia and the western lowlands simultaneously. The Fano militia has been conducting operations in Amhara since 2023; the Oromo Liberation Army remains undefeated in the field. Each of these conflicts has been containable partly because the government has retained the resources to fund counter-operations. A government under acute financial strain cannot offer that guarantee.

A new leader in Abu Dhabi does not inherit personal relationships. He inherits a strategic calculus. In that unsentimental light, Ethiopia’s risks may rapidly appear to outweigh its returns.

The collapse of the security pillar produces what analysts term the market signalling shock, the final and, in some respects, most damaging stage of the cascade. When a substantial backer is seen to disengage from a developing-nation government, the message transmitted to every other participant in the system is unambiguous: the risk profile has changed. Domestic investors redirect their capital. China, Turkey and the multilateral lenders begin quietly reassessing their exposure. Political factions within and without the ruling Prosperity Party sense the vulnerability and mobilise accordingly.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS SAYING AND WHAT IT MEANS

The Ethiopian government has, since MBZ’s passing, issued statements describing the late President as a visionary leader and a close friend of the Ethiopian people. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attended the funeral in Abu Dhabi, where he was photographed alongside Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the new UAE President.

Officials at the Ministry of Finance speaking to this correspondent on terms that precluded direct attribution reported that urgent conversations have been initiated at both technical and political levels to ensure the continuity of existing financial arrangements. One official used the word continuity seven times during a ten-minute exchange. The statistical frequency was noted.

The official position is that the Ethiopia-UAE relationship is, in the preferred formulation, institutionally embedded, and therefore durable beyond any individual leadership. There is a degree of truth in this. The bilateral relationship does encompass investment frameworks, development agreements and humanitarian partnerships with formal standing. What it conspicuously lacks, after eight years of deepening engagement between two governments that were always better at closing deals than building architecture is the kind of treaty-grade institutional infrastructure that would render the relationship genuinely indifferent to the question of who sits on the Abu Dhabi throne.

THE REPUTATIONAL FACTOR

There is one further element in this analysis, and it is perhaps the most uncomfortable to discuss in a family newspaper. The global reckoning with elite financial networks intensified, in the assessment of economic historian Adam Tooze, by revelations including those arising from the Epstein investigations has materially altered the reputational arithmetic for Gulf states that serve as financial hubs (Tooze, 2020).

This newspaper is clear: no verified evidence links Ethiopian or Emirati leadership to any such network. The structural effect is, however, real regardless of individual culpability: philanthropic channels now attract investigative scrutiny; sovereign financial flows face enhanced anti-money laundering compliance demands; and reputational risk has become, for Gulf states seeking to maintain their standing as well-governed jurisdictions, a factor of genuine strategic weight.

A new Emirati leadership, establishing itself in its first months, would be acutely sensitive to the optics of sustaining a highly personalised, backchannel-intensive financial relationship with a government managing active conflicts and a contested human rights record. The institutional incentives to proceed with greater caution, to formalise, slow, or simply allow the relationship to cool, are likely to be considerable.

THE PARABLE OF THE BORROWED FOUNDATION

Since 2018, Ethiopia’s macroeconomic floor its foreign exchange stability, its capacity to service external debts, its ability to project state authority across a large and fractious federation has rested in substantial part upon a foundation borrowed from Abu Dhabi. This was not a secret arrangement; it was a deliberate strategy, and for several years it worked. The floor held. The country, despite everything, did not collapse. The Prime Minister received a Nobel Peace Prize, which in retrospect may mark the precise moment at which the arrangement began to look, to the sharper-eyed observers, somewhat precarious.

The challenge confronting the Ethiopian government is not simply one of mourning an ally, though by informed accounts the grief in certain quarters of the palace compound in Addis Ababa is sincere. It is the rather more pressing task of identifying, at some speed, an alternative foundation or, better still, beginning the uncomfortable work of building one.

China stands ready with its customary combination of generous credit lines and demanding conditionality. Turkey has been making encouraging noises. The International Monetary Fund remains perennially available, provided the recipient government is prepared to accept the attendant structural adjustment conditions, which have historically enjoyed approximately the same popularity in Ethiopian coalition politics as a proposal to relocate the capital.

None of these alternatives carries the particular warmth, the operational speed, or the uncomplicated financial generosity of a direct line to Abu Dhabi. They are, however, foundations. And a foundation of one’s own, however demanding of maintenance, is considerably more durable than borrowed architecture particularly when the person who lent it has, without much warning, departed the building.

SOURCES

Hall, T. and Yarhi-Milo, K. (2012) ‘The personal touch: leaders’ impressions, costly signalling, and assessments of sincerity in international affairs’, International Studies Quarterly, 56(3), pp. 560-573.

International Crisis Group (2021) Ethiopia’s Tigray War: A Deadly, Dangerous Stalemate. Brussels: ICG.

Koch, N. (2019) The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia. Cornell University Press.

Lancet (2023) ‘Estimating conflict-related mortality in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.’ The Lancet, March 2023.

Reuters (2018) ‘UAE pledges $3 billion aid package to Ethiopia’, 16 June.

Tooze, A. (2020) Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. London: Allen Lane.

This article contains satirical commentary alongside factual reportage. All sourced claims are attributed. The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. Reproduced under editorial agreement.

© 2026 Ethiopian Tribune. All rights reserved.

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FORWARDING: Yekatit 12 – From Oblivion to Memory (Inaugural Newsletter)
This groundbreaking newsletter, created by descendants of Ethiopians imprisoned during the Italian Fascist occupation (1935-1941), chronicles the Yekatit 12 massacre of February 1937 and its aftermath. The publication represents a collective refusal to forget honouring those who suffered imprisonment, exile, and death while resisting colonial violence.

Future quarterly editions will feature prisoners stories, scholarly reflections, and testimonies that illuminate this suppressed history with honesty and depth.

Essential reading for anyone committed to historical truth and remembrance. We encourage you to read, reflect, and share this critical work of remembrance.

Download the PDF

Source: https://www.fromobliviontomemory.org/asinara/

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On the curious disjunction between a capital that hosts the continent and a nation that cannot quite hold itself together

There is something peculiarly Ethiopian about the scene unfolding in Addis Ababa this February. The city presents itself with all the trappings of continental leadership summit halls filled with dignitaries, the hum of diplomatic motorcades, the unveiling of Africa’s first unmanned police station complete with biometric verification and artificial intelligence. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed tweets invitations to experience “a new era of African-led tourism development,” whilst the International Monetary Fund nods approvingly at Ethiopia’s fiscal discipline and structural reforms. On paper, at least, this is a nation ascending.

Yet step outside the carefully choreographed radius of official optimism and a rather different Ethiopia emerges, one that sits uneasily with the grand pronouncements. This is a country where peace agreements seem to function more as intervals between violence than as genuine settlements, where millions drift through displacement camps whilst their government courts foreign investors, where the language of modernisation coexists with the brutal arithmetic of malnutrition statistics. The dissonance is not merely awkward; it is fundamental, speaking to contradictions that run through the very sinews of the Ethiopian state.

Consider the timing. Whilst Addis hosts the thirty-ninth African Union Summit and welcomes Italian delegates for the Second Italy-Africa Summit, fresh clashes erupt between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front the same TPLF that signed a peace deal in Pretoria scarcely three years ago, ending a war that killed hundreds of thousands. In Amhara, irregular Fano militias who once fought alongside federal forces now turn their guns against them, engaging in nearly a hundred battles within seven weeks. The government speaks darkly of Eritrean meddling and TPLF conspiracies; Eritrea dismisses the accusations as fabrications. Meanwhile, satellite imagery suggests Ethiopia has been training thousands of fighters for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces in a secret camp in Benishangul-Gumuz, drawing the country deeper into regional conflagrations it can ill afford.

This is the Ethiopia that doesn’t make it into the summit brochures—fractious, militarised, its peace provisional at best. The Pretoria agreement was meant to close a chapter; instead, it seems merely to have turned a page. Violence mutates rather than dissipates, shifting fronts and allegiances with a fluidity that defies easy resolution. What was once a war between federal forces and Tigrayan rebels now fragments into multiple insurgencies, ethnic mobilisations, and cross-border entanglements, each with its own logic and grievances.

The humanitarian toll of this unravelling is measured in the usual grim metrics. Displacement runs into the millions. In Afar, severe acute malnutrition cases rise year on year, exacerbated by drought and conflict. Children bear the heaviest burden—interrupted schooling, psychological trauma, the gnawing hunger that doesn’t respect political cycles or diplomatic calendars. For these Ethiopians, the smart police station in Addis, with its promise of reduced response times and automated reporting, exists in a different universe entirely. One suspects they would trade all the biometric verification in the world for a meal, a school, a home that hasn’t been burned.

What makes Ethiopia’s predicament particularly fascinating and tragic, is how it manifests in the competing narratives of the country’s intellectual class. Two retired scholars, one Oromo and a pairing of Amhara and Tigrayan observers, offer interpretations so divergent they might as well be describing different countries altogether.

The Oromo intellectual sees vindication, a long-deferred reckoning in which Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group finally claims its rightful place at the helm of national affairs. For him, the summits and economic reforms represent not vanity but strategic reassertion proof that Ethiopia is becoming, at last, a nation that belongs to all its peoples rather than a narrow elite. The friction and realignment are the inevitable costs of any genuine transition. When he speaks of Oromos “leading the country and changing it as they always dreamed,” there is both pride and warning in his voice, a suggestion that this shift is non-negotiable, that history is finally being corrected.

His Amhara and Tigrayan counterparts see something rather different: fragmentation masquerading as reform, ethnic mobilisation threatening to tear apart whatever tenuous cohesion remains. To them, the persistence of armed conflict across multiple fronts reveals the hollowness of official stability claims. Identity politics, when weaponised, doesn’t build nations; it dismantles them. The Tigrayan scholar, shaped by the trauma of recent war, argues that reconciliation remains unfinished, that peace agreements signed under international pressure cannot paper over wounds still fresh and grievances still festering. The renewed clashes in Tigray are not aberrations but symptoms of structural failures that no summit can address.

Both narratives contain truth; both are incomplete. This is the bind of contemporary Ethiopia a country where every political advance for one group registers as a setback for another, where federal restructuring amplifies centrifugal forces, where the very diversity that might be a source of strength becomes instead a fault line. The competing visions of these retired intellectuals matter because they shape policy and public discourse, but they also matter because they reveal how profoundly Ethiopians disagree about what their country is and what it ought to become.

And so we return to Addis Ababa, that curious capital where diplomacy and displacement coexist, where economic reform proceeds alongside humanitarian crisis, where smart police stations rise whilst millions go hungry. The government’s wager seems to be that international summits and IMF approvals will gradually translate into domestic stability, that economic growth will eventually trickle down, that the performance of statehood will somehow conjure its substance. It is not an unreasonable bet, nations have bluffed their way to legitimacy before, but it is a precarious one.

The risk is that the spectacle becomes an end in itself, that branding exercises mask rather than address the deeper fractures. When citizens encounter militarised checkpoints in ordinary neighbourhoods, when secret training camps for foreign fighters dot the countryside, when food insecurity spreads whilst officials tweet about tourism development, the gap between official narrative and lived experience becomes unbridgeable. Credibility, once lost, is devilishly hard to recover.

Ethiopia has always been a country of contradictions; ancient yet modern, unified yet fractured, proud yet vulnerable. What distinguishes the present moment is how these contradictions have sharpened, how the space for ambiguity has narrowed. The nation stands at an inflection point, though whether it tilts towards consolidation or fragmentation remains genuinely uncertain.

For all the summit diplomacy and economic indicators, Ethiopia’s true test lies not in Addis but in its peripheries in Tigray and Amhara and Afar, in displacement camps and drought-stricken villages, in the daily struggles of citizens for whom stability is not a diplomatic talking point but a matter of survival. Can a government project continental leadership whilst struggling to govern its own territory? Can economic reform proceed whilst conflict simmers and millions go hungry? Can diplomatic capital substitute for domestic legitimacy?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that will determine whether Ethiopia emerges from this crucible intact or whether the contradictions finally prove insurmountable. The smart police station gleams in Addis, delegates fill the summit halls, the IMF reviews proceed apace. But beyond the carefully managed spectacle, Ethiopia remains a country at war with itself, its future hanging in a balance that no amount of diplomatic theatre can resolve. Only genuine reconciliation, inclusive governance, and enduring peace can do that and those, alas, cannot be unveiled at press conferences or tweeted into existence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Ethiopia’s economic debate is increasingly shaped not by what appears in the national budget, but by what happens outside it. Across ministries, agencies and development bodies, a growing share of public revenue is now raised through so-called contributions, commissions and special charges that sit beyond the formal tax system. These collections are rarely debated in parliament, seldom time-limited and often weakly linked to measurable outcomes. What began as an emergency practice has, quietly, become a governing habit.

For ordinary Ethiopians, the effects are felt not in policy documents but in daily transactions. Traders speak of new charges appearing without warning. Salaried workers notice deductions they struggle to interpret. Small businesses recount inspections that end with payments rather than guidance. The frustration is not simply about money; it is about uncertainty. When obligations change frequently and explanations are thin, people stop planning for growth and start planning for survival.

Economists warn that uncertainty is among the most damaging forces in any economy. It discourages investment, compresses ambition and raises the cost of risk. In Ethiopia, where private enterprise is already navigating inflation, foreign exchange shortages and weak demand, unpredictable charges act as a further brake. The economy remains active, but its capacity to expand is steadily eroded.

Supporters of these off-budget collections usually advance a familiar defence. Ethiopia, they argue, is under exceptional strain. Debt servicing costs are high, security demands remain pressing and public expectations continue to rise. Formal tax reform is slow and politically sensitive. Contributions, commissions and special levies are therefore presented as pragmatic tools, necessary to keep institutions functioning in difficult times.

At first glance, this logic appears reasonable. Governments everywhere must balance ideals against constraints. Yet the defence begins to weaken when the practice becomes permanent rather than temporary. Emergency measures are meant to bridge gaps, not replace systems. When institutions rely on extraction instead of reform, necessity quietly turns into dependency.

The deeper problem is not revenue collection itself, but the absence of a clear link between payment and value. In public finance, legitimacy depends on reciprocity. Citizens accept taxation when they can see how it supports services, infrastructure and opportunity. When money is collected merely to sustain institutions, without visible improvement in performance, trust declines. Over time, compliance becomes grudging rather than voluntary.

This erosion of trust has tangible economic consequences. Businesses shorten their planning horizons. Entrepreneurs postpone expansion. Capital becomes cautious, then mobile. Skilled workers begin to consider exit options. None of this happens overnight. It unfolds gradually, often unnoticed by policymakers until the damage is well advanced.

Ethiopia is not the first country to face this dilemma. Around the world, states under fiscal pressure have experimented with parafiscal measures, especially during periods of crisis. The outcomes are remarkably consistent. Where extraction became routine, growth slowed, informality expanded and political resistance hardened. Where governments corrected course, recovery followed.

In parts of Latin America, repeated emergency levies introduced during debt crises fragmented tax systems and undermined compliance. Businesses faced overlapping obligations, many poorly defined and inconsistently enforced. Investment retreated, and capital flight accelerated. Fiscal stability returned only after governments simplified revenue systems, restored legislative oversight and rebuilt credibility.

Closer to home, several African economies have encountered similar tensions. Special charges introduced to shore up revenue initially generated income, but over time discouraged formalisation and weakened trust. Where reform-minded governments intervened, the solution was not harsher enforcement but rationalisation. Temporary measures were sunsetted, tax bases widened through growth, and administrative efficiency improved.

East Asia’s experience offers perhaps the clearest contrast. During their periods of rapid development, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan faced immense fiscal demands. Yet they resisted the temptation to extract indiscriminately. Instead, they prioritised productivity, industrial expansion and employment. Revenue followed growth, rather than preceding it. Taxes were transparent, predictable and legislated, even as the state played an active economic role.

The common thread across these cases is not ideology, but discipline. Successful governments maintained clear boundaries between taxation and fees. Anything compulsory passed through law. Institutions were required to justify their budgets through performance, not pressure. Citizens were treated as partners in development, not merely sources of revenue.

In Ethiopia, the expansion of off-budget contributions suggests those boundaries are weakening. Institutions increasingly ask where money can be collected, rather than how value can be created. This shift in mindset has long-term consequences. When survival depends on extraction, reform becomes optional. Inefficiency hardens. Accountability fades.

The human cost of this trajectory is often underestimated. Economic pressure does not need to be dramatic to be decisive. For skilled professionals and entrepreneurs, the calculation is incremental. Each additional charge, each new uncertainty, nudges the balance away from investment and towards exit. The result is a quiet but persistent loss of talent and capital.

None of this implies that Ethiopia lacks patriotism or resilience. On the contrary, citizens have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to endure hardship when it is clearly linked to collective progress. What undermines that willingness is not sacrifice itself, but the sense that sacrifice is being demanded without direction or return.

There is also a political dimension that cannot be ignored. When revenue collection escapes parliamentary scrutiny, democratic accountability weakens. Legislatures exist not merely to approve budgets, but to legitimise extraction by linking it to public purpose. Bypassing that process may seem efficient in the short term, but it carries long-term costs for governance.

Critics of reform often argue that Ethiopia cannot afford restraint. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Extraction without growth narrows the future tax base. Growth without extraction expands it. The choice is not between revenue and development, but between short-term relief and long-term viability.

Progressive democratic governments that have faced similar constraints have learned this lesson through experience. They have moved to simplify revenue systems, protect predictability and focus on enabling economic activity. They have accepted that sustainable finance depends on confidence as much as coercion.

For Ethiopia, the path forward does not require abandoning revenue mobilisation. It requires re-anchoring it. Contributions must be exceptional, clearly defined and time-limited. Institutions must be incentivised to improve performance rather than seek payments. Parliament must reclaim its role in legitimising compulsory collections.

Most importantly, economic policy must return to first principles. Wealth is created through productivity, innovation and work. Revenue is a by-product of that process. When the order is reversed, economies strain and societies lose faith.

The debate sparked by recent analysis is therefore not a technical quarrel about fees. It is a question about the kind of state Ethiopia wishes to be. A state that finances itself by expanding opportunity builds resilience. A state that finances itself by constant extraction exhausts it.

History offers ample warning, but also reassurance. Countries that recognise the limits of extraction early can correct course. Those that delay pay far more to recover. Ethiopia remains at a moment of choice.

Whether that choice is taken will shape not only fiscal outcomes, but the relationship between citizens and the state. In the end, no economy grows on pressure alone. Growth rests on trust, clarity and the shared belief that effort leads somewhere worth reaching.

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An investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached Ethiopia, and what it reveals about power, complicity, and the global reckoning with sexual predation

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

In the grand tradition of British scandals involving the powerful and the predatory, the Jeffrey Epstein affair has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving—or rather, taking. As the US Department of Justice released millions of documents related to the convicted sex trafficker and financier, Britons watched with grim familiarity as two of their own, Lord Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew, found themselves ensnared in the lengthening shadow of Epstein’s crimes. For Ethiopians and East Africans, however, the revelations have taken on a peculiar local dimension: their country appears in approximately 334 of the released documents, raising uncomfortable questions about who knew what, and when.

The British experience offers a cautionary tale. Lord Mandelson, the Labour grandee and former EU trade commissioner, has faced renewed scrutiny over his association with Epstein, leading to swift rejection of his potential appointment as US ambassador and intense public opprobrium. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has become a pariah within his own family, stripped of royal duties and forced to settle a civil sexual abuse case brought by Virginia Giuffre for a reported £12 million. Both men’s falls from grace illustrate a crucial shift in public tolerance: proximity to a convicted paedophile is no longer merely unfortunate it is damning.

For Ethiopia, a nation already grappling with internal conflicts, economic challenges, and questions of governance, the Epstein connection represents yet another unwelcome international embarrassment. But it also raises profound questions about how predators like Epstein exploited developing nations, and whether enough is being done to investigate his network in Africa.

Britain’s reckoning with the Epstein scandal has been particularly visceral, perhaps because it touches upon enduring anxieties about privilege, power, and paedophilia within the establishment. Lord Mandelson’s association with Epstein reportedly introduced through mutual connections in elite circles—has proven politically toxic. Despite his protestations that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their acquaintance, the court of public opinion has rendered its verdict. His nomination as ambassador to Washington was effectively dead on arrival, with both Conservative and Labour figures expressing alarm.

The Mandelson affair echoes the Prince Andrew debacle but with notable differences. Whilst Andrew’s relationship with Epstein was documented through photographs, flight logs, and eventually legal testimony, Mandelson’s connection appears more tangential, dinners, social gatherings, the sort of networking that defines elite circles. Yet in the post-Epstein era, such distinctions matter less than they once might have. The question is no longer “Did you know?” but “Should you have known?” and increasingly, “Why didn’t you ask?”

Prince Andrew’s trajectory from the Queen’s favourite son to virtual exile illustrates the mechanism of social rejection in real time. The now-infamous BBC Newsnight interview in November 2019, in which he claimed he couldn’t have been at a nightclub with Virginia Giuffre because he was at Pizza Express in Woking and suffered from a medical condition preventing him from sweating, became a masterclass in self-immolation. Public revulsion was swift and comprehensive. Corporate sponsors fled. Charities distanced themselves. The military stripped him of honorary titles.

What united both men’s downfalls was their association with a man whose crimes were, by 2008, a matter of public record. Epstein’s initial conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, a sweetheart plea deal that saw him serve just 13 months, should have ended his social acceptability. That it didn’t speaks to the power of wealth, influence, and the willingness of elites to overlook uncomfortable truths.

Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors and his subsequent death by apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell merely confirmed what investigators had long suspected: his earlier conviction represented only a fraction of his crimes. The subsequent releases of court documents, flight logs from his private jet (dubbed the “Lolita Express”), and now the DOJ files have painted a portrait of industrial-scale sexual exploitation involving girls as young as 14.

Yet the released documents reveal something far more disturbing than the already horrific sex trafficking operation. Buried within thousands of pages are references to Epstein’s fascination with eugenics, transhumanism, and what can only be described as a God complex that would make Lucifer himself envious. Witnesses and associates described Epstein’s interest in using his New Mexico ranch to seed the human race with his DNA, impregnating multiple women to create a “superior” bloodline a scheme that echoes the darkest chapters of 20th-century pseudoscience.

The files contain disturbing allegations that extend beyond sexual abuse into territory that seems almost mediaeval in its barbarity. Court testimonies reference Epstein’s circle discussing practices that blur the line between scientific experimentation and occult ritual. One particularly harrowing account describes conversations about cellular regeneration theories and the procurement of biological materials from young victims allegations that, whilst unproven in court, paint a portrait of a man whose depravity knew no bounds.

Whether these represent literal truths or the exaggerations of traumatised witnesses struggling to articulate unspeakable experiences, they underscore a crucial point: Jeffrey Epstein was not merely a sex offender but a man who believed himself above natural and moral law. His interest in cutting-edge science, from artificial intelligence to genetics, was inseparable from his conviction that wealth and intellect entitled him to treat human beings, particularly young girls, as experimental subjects. This, then, was the “Lucifer” that Professor Berhanu Nega might have unwittingly invoked.

The revelation that Berhanu Nega, now Ethiopia’s Minister of Education, received scholarship funding from Jeffrey Epstein takes on an almost prophetic irony given the professor’s own public statements. During his years in opposition to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government, Nega famously declared that he would “work with Lucifer himself” if it meant overthrowing the regime he despised.

It was not mere rhetoric. Nega’s political journey has been one of scorched-earth pragmatism. Having left the United States, where he held academic positions, he took the extraordinary step of accepting Eritrean citizenship to wage an armed insurgency against the Ethiopian government. His organisation, Ginbot 7, launched attacks from Eritrean territory, making common cause with one of Africa’s most repressive regimes a government that has held no elections since independence in 1993 and operates what human rights organisations have described as an open-air prison.

The insurgency failed militarily but succeeded in keeping Nega relevant. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Nega was among the formerly exiled opposition figures welcomed back to Addis Ababa. His transformation from armed rebel to Minister of Education was swift and, to many observers, bewildering. That he now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children whilst having received funding from a convicted paedophile strikes many Ethiopians as a cosmic joke in exceptionally poor taste.

Nega has maintained that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes when he received the scholarship funding in the early 2000s. This is plausible, Epstein’s 2008 conviction came later, and his ability to maintain a veneer of respectability amongst academics was well-documented. Yet the symbolic resonance remains inescapable: a man who vowed to work with Lucifer did, in fact, accept money from perhaps the closest thing to a living embodiment of evil that modern America has produced.

The question now confronting Nega and the Ethiopian government is whether historical ignorance absolves present responsibility. Should a Minister of Education, responsible for safeguarding children, remain in post whilst associated, however tangentially, with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker?

The Epstein connection to Ethiopia becomes more disturbing when examined alongside recent developments in the country’s digital infrastructure. According to documents circulating amongst civil liberties advocates and technology researchers, the Ethiopian government has harvested DNA and biometric data from approximately five million children as part of a digital identity programme. The initiative, ostensibly designed to improve access to education and health services, has raised alarm bells amongst data protection experts.

What transforms this from a concerning privacy issue into a potential Epstein connection is the funding architecture. Investigative journalists have identified links between the biometric programme and funding arrangements involving entities connected to Epstein’s network of technology investments. Moreover, contracts with United Arab Emirates-based businesses, some of which appear in the periphery of the Epstein files, suggest a complex web of financial relationships that demand scrutiny.

The UAE connection is particularly troubling. Epstein maintained extensive business relationships in the Gulf states, where privacy laws and less stringent regulatory oversight provided convenient cover for questionable transactions. That Ethiopian government contracts for biometric data collection involving children might flow through similar channels raises urgent questions.

To be clear: there is no evidence of direct Epstein involvement in Ethiopia’s digital ID programme, which postdates his death. But the pattern is familiar developing nations desperate for technological advancement and foreign investment, complex funding arrangements involving offshore entities, and programmes that collect sensitive biological data from vulnerable populations. These are precisely the conditions that predators like Epstein exploited.

The collection of children’s DNA in particular evokes Epstein’s documented fascination with genetics and eugenics. His stated desire to “seed the human race” with his genetic material, his funding of research into human longevity and enhancement, and his connections to the transhumanist movement all suggest a man obsessed with biological manipulation on a grand scale.

For five million Ethiopian children to have their genetic information collected and stored in databases accessible to foreign contractors recalls the darkest elements of the Epstein files. What safeguards exist to prevent this data being sold, shared, or exploited? Who has access? What purposes, beyond the stated administrative ones, might it serve?

These questions acquire particular urgency given Ethiopia’s political instability and history of surveillance. The EPRDF government, which Nega spent years fighting, was notorious for its extensive security apparatus. The current government under Abiy Ahmed has shown little inclination toward greater transparency or respect for privacy rights. The Tigray conflict demonstrated the willingness to use technology, including telecommunications shutdowns, as weapons of war.

The majority of Ethiopian references in the released documents relate to market intelligence reports that Epstein commissioned from consultants, suggesting he had, or was considering, investments in the country. One confirmed investment was iCog Labs, an artificial intelligence research laboratory co-founded by Ben Goertzel, a prominent AI researcher, and Getnet Aseffa. The emails reveal Goertzel’s energetic cultivation of Epstein as a funder, with repeated assurances that “the guys” in Ethiopia were doing “amazing things”, the sort of vague enthusiasm that signals either genuine excitement or, more cynically, the massaging of a wealthy patron’s ego.

The iCog Labs connection is particularly relevant because it illustrates Epstein’s modus operandi in respectable society. By positioning himself as a patron of cutting-edge scientific research, he also funded Harvard University’s Programme for Evolutionary Dynamics and MIT’s Media Lab, Epstein purchased legitimacy. Scientists and academics who accepted his funding found themselves in an impossible position after his crimes became undeniable: return the money and acknowledge poor judgment, or keep it and face accusations of complicity.

Given Epstein’s documented interest in artificial intelligence, genetics, and human enhancement, his funding of an AI laboratory in Ethiopia takes on sinister overtones. Was this genuine philanthropic interest in African technological development, or was Ethiopia, with its limited regulatory oversight and desperate need for investment, an attractive location for research that might face ethical objections elsewhere?

More colourful, if less consequential, are the emails from Shaher Abdulhak, a Yemeni billionaire who died in 2020 and who addressed Epstein as “cousin brother” a term of endearment that sounds rather less charming in English than presumably intended. Abdulhak’s pitches to Epstein included the gloriously ill-conceived idea of creating an energy drink from khat (a stimulant plant chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen) mixed with lemon juice to compete with Red Bull.

More seriously, Abdulhak sought a $20 million loan for National Tobacco Enterprise Ethiopia, claiming his Sheba Investment Company owned 60% of it. Whether Epstein provided the funds remains unclear, though the brazen nature of the request speaks to the casual corruption that characterised elite interactions with the financier.

Buried in the correspondence is one email that transforms the Ethiopian connection from merely embarrassing to potentially sinister. In a message apparently sent to Abdulhak, Epstein mentioned that a “good friend who runs a modelling agency” believed there were “interesting girls” in Ethiopia.

In isolation, this phrase might be innocuous. In context, an email from a convicted sex offender who trafficked underage girls internationally, it becomes chilling. The term “interesting girls” echoes the euphemistic language Epstein and his associates used to discuss recruitment of victims. Modelling agencies, legitimate and otherwise, have long been identified as potential vectors for exploitation, offering young women from impoverished backgrounds promises of international careers whilst potentially exposing them to abuse.

Court documents from Epstein’s trials reveal a recruitment pattern that was both systematic and global. Victims were often approached through seemingly legitimate channels, modelling scouts, educational programmes, employment opportunities, before being groomed and trafficked. The operation relied on local recruiters who understood cultural contexts and could identify vulnerable targets.

Ethiopia, with its poverty, limited opportunities for young women, and a culture where deference to wealthy foreigners remains common, would have been an ideal hunting ground. That Epstein’s private jet received permission to land in Ethiopia, and that he mentioned visiting the country in correspondence with Steve Bannon, confirms he had physical presence there.

There is no direct evidence in the released documents that Epstein trafficked Ethiopian girls or engaged in criminal conduct within Ethiopia. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when so much of Epstein’s operation was deliberately hidden. Victims have described being trafficked to numerous countries, being flown on his private jets to locations where their passports were confiscated and they were kept in conditions resembling sexual slavery.

For Ethiopian law enforcement and civil society, these revelations demand investigation. If Epstein visited Ethiopia, whom did he meet? Were any young Ethiopian women recruited through his network? Did any of his associates, the modelling agency friend, for instance, operate in the country?

The reaction amongst Ethiopians and East Africans to the Epstein revelations has been complex, reflecting broader ambivalences about corruption, foreign influence, and accountability. On social media and in diaspora communities, there is genuine anger, not merely at Epstein, but at the Ethiopian individuals and institutions that enabled his presence.

The revelation about Berhanu Nega has proven particularly divisive. His supporters argue that accepting scholarship funding from Epstein over two decades ago, before the full extent of his crimes was publicly known, represents an unfortunate association rather than complicity. His critics counter that a man who vowed to work with Lucifer cannot now claim shock at having done precisely that.

The controversy has reignited broader questions about Nega’s judgment and principles. His acceptance of Eritrean citizenship to fight Ethiopia, making common cause with a regime at least as repressive as the EPRDF he opposed, already raised eyebrows. His seamless transition from armed insurgent to government minister suggested a pragmatism that borders on opportunism. The Epstein connection adds another troubling layer.

Yet there is also a strain of fatalism in East African responses, a sense that corruption and exploitation by wealthy foreigners is simply business as usual. Ethiopia has long experience with foreign actors from colonial powers to modern corporations and NGOs extracting value whilst leaving minimal benefit. In this reading, Epstein is merely the latest in a long line of predators, and focusing on him distracts from structural problems.

This cynicism, whilst understandable, is dangerous. It normalises exploitation and discourages the accountability mechanisms necessary to prevent future abuses. The global reckoning with Epstein’s crimes has demonstrated that exposure and prosecution are possible, albeit belatedly.

The convergence of Epstein’s eugenic obsessions with Ethiopia’s biometric data collection programme represents a thoroughly modern nightmare. Epstein’s interest in “improving” the human race through selective breeding was, at least in his expressed ambitions, constrained by biology how many women could he impregnate? But contemporary genetic databases and artificial intelligence offer possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction even a decade ago.

The five million Ethiopian children whose DNA has been harvested now exist as data points in systems whose full capabilities and access protocols remain opaque. In the wrong hands, such databases could enable precisely the sort of genetic manipulation and selection that Epstein fantasised about. Even in benign hands, the data represents extraordinary value pharmaceutical companies pay enormous sums for genetic information from diverse populations.

That contracts related to this programme involve UAE-based entities with peripheral connections to Epstein’s network may be coincidental. But given the pattern of Epstein’s investments, artificial intelligence in Ethiopia, genetic research globally, transhumanist projects, the possibility of intentional targeting cannot be dismissed.

The Ethiopian government’s response to questions about data security has been, at best, inadequate. Officials tout the benefits of digital identity whilst providing few details about encryption, access controls, or international data-sharing agreements. For a government that has demonstrated willingness to use technology repressively, and which employs a Minister of Education who received funding from a paedophile eugenicist, assurances ring hollow.

What the Epstein files ultimately reveal, whether the references are to Britain, Ethiopia, or the dozens of other jurisdictions touched by his crimes, is the banality of elite evil. Epstein was not a Bond villain operating from a secret lair. He was a fixture of respectable society, funding university departments, advising the wealthy, socialising with princes and presidents.

His crimes were enabled not by exotic conspiracy but by the mundane mechanisms of wealth and power: the assumption that rich men deserve privacy, the reluctance to ask awkward questions of generous donors, the willingness to overlook earlier convictions in exchange for access and funding.

For Ethiopia, the lessons are particularly stark. When Professor Berhanu Nega vowed to work with Lucifer himself to achieve his political aims, he articulated a principle, that ends justify means, which is fundamentally corrupting. Whether he knowingly accepted money from a monster is less important than his demonstrated willingness to do so. That such a man now oversees the education of Ethiopia’s children, whilst his government harvests their genetic data through murky international contracts, should alarm anyone concerned with child welfare.

The parallels with Britain’s experience are instructive. Lord Mandelson and Prince Andrew discovered that wealth, title, and power provide no immunity from public judgment when the crimes are sufficiently heinous and the association sufficiently close. Both have been effectively exiled from polite society, their legacies permanently tarnished.

Ethiopian figures connected to Epstein deserve similar scrutiny. The fact that Ethiopia is poorer than Britain, that its media infrastructure is weaker, that competing crises demand attention none of these absolve the moral responsibility to investigate and, where appropriate, demand accountability.

As more files are released and investigations continue, the full extent of Epstein’s Ethiopian connections may become clearer. For now, Ethiopians are left with uncomfortable questions, partial answers, and the knowledge that their country appeared on the radar of one of history’s most prolific sexual predators a man whose interests in genetics, artificial intelligence, and young girls may have found fertile ground in a nation desperate for investment and incapable of effective oversight.

If Berhanu Nega truly made a Faustian bargain, working with his Lucifer to achieve power, the devil has certainly had his due. The question now is whether Ethiopia’s children will pay the price for their elders’ moral compromises. With five million of them reduced to data points in databases connected, however tenuously, to a dead paedophile’s trans humanist fantasies, the answer may already be written in code we’ve yet to fully decrypt.

The Ethiopian Tribune continues to investigate the Epstein files and welcomes information from readers regarding any connections between Epstein’s network and activities in the Horn of Africa. We particularly seek information about the biometric data collection programme, its funding sources, and its international partnerships.

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Our columnist Sewasew Teklemariam exposes systematic distortion of growth figures and cost-of-living data in parliamentary address

Addis Ababa — When Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stood before parliament on 3rd February to deliver his government’s mid-year performance report, he painted a picture of economic triumph. Ethiopia, he declared, was experiencing 9.3 per cent growth according to both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Utilities, he assured legislators, were cheaper than in neighbouring countries. It was a masterclass in political theatre and, according to our columnist Sewasew Teklemariam’s damning forensic analysis, a masterclass in statistical manipulation.

The reality, as Teklemariam meticulously documents, tells a starkly different story. Behind the veneer of technocratic credibility lies what he characterises as “selective endorsement,” “decontextualisation,” and the systematic omission of inconvenient truths, all designed to construct a narrative of progress whilst obscuring the grinding economic difficulties facing ordinary Ethiopians.

At the heart of the Prime Minister’s economic case lies a figure that sounds impressively precise: 9.3 per cent GDP growth. Mr Abiy attributed this projection to both the IMF and the World Bank, lending his government’s performance the imprimatur of international financial orthodoxy. The problem, as our columnist meticulously documents, is that it simply isn’t true.

The World Bank never projected 9.3 per cent growth for Ethiopia. Their January 2026 Global Economic Prospects report clearly states 7.2 per cent for calendar year 2026. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a 2.1 percentage point discrepancy that represents tens of billions of birr in economic activity. Development economists who have followed Ethiopia’s trajectory note that this difference is enormously significant in real-world terms.

The IMF did indeed project 9.3 per cent growth, but only after its fourth review under the Extended Credit Facility arrangement a programme through which the Fund provides financial support conditional on reform implementation. The IMF’s forecast is made within the context of a funded programme. It’s inherently more optimistic because it assumes the government will deliver on its commitments. The World Bank’s independent assessment, by contrast, incorporates risks like ongoing conflict, climate shocks, and elevated public debt precisely the factors that would temper any growth outlook.

The Ethiopian government’s own projection, quietly revealed by Mr Abiy during the session, goes even further: 10.2 per cent. What emerges, Teklemariam argues, is a hierarchy of optimism. The government produces the rosiest figure, then publicly anchors the debate to the IMF’s high but more credible projection, whilst conveniently erasing the World Bank’s more cautious view. It’s statistically sophisticated narrative construction, designed to manufacture consensus where significant disagreement actually exists.

Yet even if one accepts the highest growth projections at face value, economists warn that the figure obscures as much as it reveals. Ethiopia’s economic expansion has historically been driven by state-led infrastructure investment vast dam projects, railway construction, and industrial parks financed through debt. Whilst such capital expenditure shows up handsomely in GDP statistics, its impact on ordinary livelihoods is far less clear.

The crucial question isn’t whether Ethiopia is growing, but who benefits from that growth. If the expansion comes primarily from building Chinese-financed railways that employ relatively few people and don’t immediately generate income for smallholder farmers or urban informal workers who together represent the vast majority of Ethiopians then that 9 per cent growth figure becomes somewhat abstract for the average family struggling to afford teff and cooking oil.

The World Bank’s own report, cited in Teklemariam’s analysis, explicitly flags “elevated public debt, domestic conflicts, and climate shocks” as dampening factors. These are not minor footnotes but fundamental structural challenges that question the sustainability and inclusiveness of any headline growth figure. Mr Abiy’s parliamentary address, however, contained no such caveats. The narrative presented was one of unalloyed triumph, validated by international institutions speaking with one voice except they weren’t.

If the growth claim represents distortion through conflation, the Prime Minister’s assertion about utility prices demonstrates decontextualisation of an altogether more brazen variety. His claim that electricity, water, and fuel costs are “cheaper” in Ethiopia than in Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania appears designed to counter domestic frustration over cost-of-living pressures. Our columnist’s statistical analysis dismantles it entirely.

Teklemariam deploys Consumer Price Index data for housing, water, electricity, and fuel, the most reliable cross-country comparison available. Ethiopia’s CPI for this category stood at 300.7 in June 2023, using a 2015/16 base of 100. This means costs had tripled in roughly seven years. Tanzania’s equivalent index, by contrast, stood at 118.3, and Somalia’s at 149.5 increases of 18 per cent and 50 per cent respectively, albeit from different base years.

Even accounting for methodological differences, the scale of the divergence is extraordinary. Ethiopian households have experienced vastly steeper historical increases in utility costs than their regional counterparts. To now claim that utilities are “cheaper” requires ignoring this inflationary history entirely. It’s rather like boasting that your house is affordable because you’ve forgotten to mention that the price has tripled since you bought it.

The inflation context compounds the problem. As of December 2025, Ethiopia’s general inflation rate stood at 9.7 per cent more than double Tanzania’s 3.6 per cent and Kenya’s 4.4 per cent. When inflation is running at nearly 10 per cent, even a nominally static price is effectively rising in real terms. Households must allocate an ever-larger share of stagnant or slowly growing incomes just to maintain the same consumption level. The purchasing power of ordinary Ethiopians is being steadily eroded, even if the nominal birr price on their electricity bill remains unchanged.

Yet the most glaring omission in Mr Abiy’s utility comparison, Teklemariam observes, is the one factor that determines whether a price is genuinely “affordable”: income. A kilowatt-hour of electricity might theoretically cost fewer birr in Addis Ababa than shillings in Nairobi, but if the average Ethiopian earns a fraction of what the average Kenyan does, the relative economic burden could be far heavier.

This is basic comparative economics. Price without reference to purchasing power is a meaningless datapoint. The Prime Minister presented a nominal price comparison as if it were a valid measure of living standards. It’s a category error, and one that appears entirely deliberate. Obtaining consistent, comparable income data across the region is notoriously difficult, given vast informal economies and differing statistical methodologies. The Ethiopian government provided no such data to contextualise its claim—a fact our columnist highlights as indicative of the assertion’s fundamental intellectual dishonesty.

It’s a classic populist move. You make a claim that sounds specific and factual—“our utilities are cheaper”—knowing that ordinary citizens can’t easily verify prices in Dar es Salaam or Mogadishu. It creates a perception of competent custodianship whilst diverting attention from domestic failures. The claim doesn’t need to withstand rigorous scrutiny; it merely needs to sound plausible enough to shape the immediate political narrative.

What makes the statistical engineering particularly striking is the contrast with other elements of Mr Abiy’s parliamentary performance. The same session that featured optimistic growth projections and utility comparisons also included an unprecedented admission: that Eritrean troops had committed massacres in the Tigrayan town of Axum during the devastating civil war. This was a significant, if belated, acknowledgement of atrocities that the government had long deflected or denied.

There is an extraordinary duality at work here, Teklemariam argues. On matters of geopolitical blame and historical violence, the Prime Minister can be remarkably candid—perhaps because it deflects responsibility onto an external actor. But on socioeconomic metrics where his government’s competence is directly being judged, the discourse shifts to obfuscation, conflation, and selective omission. One can admit to Eritrean massacres because the culpability lies elsewhere; one cannot admit to economic mismanagement because that responsibility is unavoidably internal.

Yet perhaps the most troubling moment in the parliamentary session came when Mr Abiy addressed the ongoing conflict in the Amhara region. When questioned about the government’s approach to the Fano militia—armed groups that emerged initially to defend Amhara communities but have since become a significant insurgent force the Prime Minister declared his willingness to engage in dialogue. “We are ready to discuss with anyone who wants peace,” he stated, adding that his government would consider talks with armed groups if they demonstrated genuine commitment to resolving the conflict peacefully.

On the surface, this sounds like statesmanship, a leader extending an olive branch to end bloodshed. But our columnist identifies a deeply cynical calculus at work. This is the same government that has repeatedly refused meaningful dialogue with Amhara political figures, that has imprisoned journalists and activists from the region, and that has conducted military operations resulting in civilian casualties. The offer of talks with “armed insurgents” comes only after conventional political channels have been systematically closed, after peaceful dissent has been criminalised, and after communities have been pushed into armed resistance as their only remaining avenue for political expression.

“The offer to negotiate with those who take up arms whilst simultaneously crushing those who seek peaceful political change sends a chilling message,” Teklemariam writes. “It tells Ethiopians that violence, not constitutional politics, is the pathway to being taken seriously by this government. It validates the gun over the ballot box.”

The timing is particularly revealing. The Amhara conflict has proven far more intractable than the government anticipated. Fano groups control significant rural territory, the regional economy is paralysed, and federal forces have struggled to reassert control despite months of military operations. The offer of dialogue comes not from strength or genuine reconciliation, but from military stalemate. It’s the same pattern observed in Tigray-talk peace only when you cannot impose military victory.

Moreover, the framing of potential interlocutors as “armed insurgents” rather than representatives of legitimate Amhara grievances is itself instructive. It strips the conflict of its political context the controversial dissolution of regional special forces, the perceived marginalisation of Amhara interests in federal politics, the unresolved questions of territorial administration. By reducing complex political disputes to a security problem requiring negotiation with “armed groups,” the government avoids accountability for the policies that created the crisis in the first place.

Our columnist notes the bitter irony: a government that came to power promising to open political space and embrace dialogue has instead created conditions where Ethiopians increasingly see armed resistance as more effective than peaceful opposition. The ruling Prosperity Party faces virtually no meaningful challenge in parliament, where it holds an overwhelming majority. Independent media has been shuttered or intimidated into self-censorship. Civil society operates under constant surveillance and threat. In this environment, Mr Abiy’s offer to talk with those who’ve taken up arms is less magnanimity than recognition that force has achieved what constitutional politics could not the government’s attention.

“This is how democracies die,” Teklemariam observes. “Not with a single coup, but with the gradual erosion of peaceful political competition until violence becomes the only language the state understands. The Prime Minister’s offer to negotiate with armed groups in Amhara would be laudable if it were accompanied by genuine opening of political space. Instead, it’s a tactical response to military pressure, one that will likely result in a temporary ceasefire that addresses none of the underlying political grievances.”

Opposition MP Dr Abebaw Desalegn’s pointed criticism during the session, highlighting the “pervasive lack of peace” and ongoing human rights violations underscores the broader context in which these economic claims and political manoeuvres are being made. Ethiopia remains a country navigating post-war trauma, regional instability in Amhara and Oromia, severe foreign exchange shortages, and diplomatic isolation following the deterioration of relations with Eritrea. In such an environment, projecting economic competence and conflict resolution becomes an existential political imperative. The government cannot afford to appear as though it is failing on all fronts simultaneously.

The sophistication of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical strategy should not be underestimated. By invoking the IMF and World Bank, institutions whose technical credibility exceeds that of any political actor, Mr Abiy wraps his narrative in what Teklemariam calls “a technocratic seal of approval.” The selective nature of that invocation is easy to miss in the moment but devastating upon scrutiny.

This is how modern governments with authoritarian tendencies operate in an age of information abundance. They don’t crudely fabricate numbers from whole cloth, that’s too easily disproven in the digital era. Instead, they cherry-pick from legitimate sources, conflate where convenient, and omit context. The result is a narrative that sounds data-driven and can survive a casual fact-check, but collapses under rigorous examination. It’s statistical sophistication in service of political survival.

The strategy reveals a broader pattern identified across developing economies attempting to balance reform commitments to international lenders with domestic political survival. The IMF programme requires Ethiopia to demonstrate progress. But delivering painful reforms, subsidy cuts, currency devaluation, liberalisation, creates immediate political backlash. The urban poor feel the pinch when fuel subsidies are withdrawn; businesses struggle when the currency weakens and imports become expensive. So the government amplifies the positive indicators the IMF generates whilst downplaying the conditionalities and risks the World Bank emphasises. It’s a delicate dance between satisfying international creditors and placating domestic constituencies.

For Ethiopian citizens, the implications extend beyond academic critique of governmental rhetoric. If parliament theoretically the premier forum for executive accountability, cannot effectively interrogate statistical claims, the democratic check on executive power is fundamentally weakened. What our columnist’s analysis demonstrates is the vital importance of independent verification. A functioning democracy requires a free press that can access and interpret World Bank reports, opposition MPs with research capacity, and academic economists who can unpick CPI data and identify discrepancies. Without these institutional counterweights, the government’s narrative simply becomes “the truth” by default.

International partners face a similar reckoning. Western donors and multilateral institutions that continue to support Ethiopia, despite its recent conflicts and democratic backsliding, rely heavily on economic metrics to justify continued engagement. If those metrics are being systematically spun, the basis for that support becomes questionable. The IMF and World Bank need to be far more explicit about the divergences in their assessments. When their figures are being weaponised in domestic political discourse, silence or diplomatic discretion isn’t neutral, it becomes complicity in misrepresentation.

At its core, Teklemariam identifies what he terms an “ontological tension” in Ethiopian governmental communication: the struggle between acknowledging profound challenges and maintaining an unwavering narrative of progress. This tension produces the paradoxes evident in Mr Abiy’s parliamentary performance bold admissions on Eritrean atrocities coexisting with rose-tinted economic claims and cynical offers of dialogue with armed groups whilst peaceful opposition is crushed. It’s a form of compartmentalisation, common in individuals and institutions under extreme stress. You can acknowledge failure in one domain because it’s externalised Eritrea’s fault, Fano militants’ fault, not ours whilst rigidly defending competence in another domain where responsibility is unavoidably internal.

The question facing Ethiopia is whether this compartmentalised discourse can be sustained indefinitely. Economic realities—inflation, unemployment, foreign exchange shortages, the simple difficulty of putting food on the table—are lived experiences that no amount of statistical reframing can fully obscure. Similarly, political realities—the growing armed resistance, the shuttered media, the imprisoned activists—cannot be wished away through selective offers of dialogue. When the gap between narrative and reality becomes too wide, political legitimacy erodes. Citizens may tolerate being told that growth is robust when their own experience suggests stagnation, but only for so long. Eventually, the cognitive dissonance becomes untenable.

Our columnist’s forensic deconstruction of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s parliamentary claims offers more than a fact-check. It provides a case study in how governments in fragile states use data not merely to inform but to construct reality itself a reality designed to legitimise, to reassure, and ultimately to survive. The conflation of IMF and World Bank growth projections, the decontextualised utility price comparisons, the systematic omission of contradictory evidence, the tactical offer to negotiate with armed insurgents whilst denying space to peaceful opposition, these are not mere rhetorical flourishes but calculated strategies of narrative control. They reveal a government acutely aware that in the modern information environment, statistical authority and strategic concessions can substitute for democratic accountability.

For Ethiopia, the stakes could not be higher. A nation emerging from civil war, grappling with regional instability, and facing profound economic challenges needs honest reckoning, not statistical theatre. The country’s ability to attract genuine investment, to rebuild trust with international partners, and to foster social cohesion amongst its deeply fractured population depends on credible governance, and credibility begins with truthfulness.

As Teklemariam concludes, the health of Ethiopian democracy depends on “rigorous, sceptical, and unwavering commitment to discursive accountability.” This means citizens who demand evidence, journalists who investigate claims, opposition politicians who challenge narratives, and international partners who refuse to accept convenient fictions. It means building and protecting the institutional capacity to say, loudly and clearly, when the emperor’s statistical clothes don’t quite fit, and when his offers of peace ring hollow against the backdrop of systematic political repression.

Whether that commitment can be sustained, in parliament, in the press, and amongst citizens, may well determine not just the accuracy of the government’s numbers, but the trajectory of the nation itself. Ethiopia stands at a crossroads. Down one path lies genuine reform, painful honesty about challenges, the opening of real political space, and the slow reconstruction of trust. Down the other lies increasingly sophisticated narrative management, tactical negotiations that preserve power whilst avoiding structural change, a widening gap between claim and reality, and the eventual collapse of credibility. The choice, ultimately, rests with those in power, and with those willing to hold them to account. Our columnist has done his part. The question is whether anyone with the power to act is listening.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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