By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

Editorial Forward

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

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

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

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

Synopsis: Permissive Disorder & the Corridor War

I. The Geopolitical Architecture Shifts

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

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

II. Two Blocs & the Recognition Weapon

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

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

III. Sudan & Yemen as Transmission Belts

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

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

IV. Eritrea: The Launching-Pad Thesis

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

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

V. The Four Interests Under Pressure

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

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

VI. Fragmentation as Defeat

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

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

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

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

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By Professor Girma Berhanu

Editorial Foreword

On Dehumanisation, Imagery, and the Long Shadow of Scientific Racism

The Editors  •  Ethiopian Tribune  •  April 2026

There are moments when an act of casual cruelty illuminates, with terrible clarity, the architecture of a deeper malice. When the sitting president of the United States shares an image depicting a Black former president and his wife as primates, the instinct of many is to reach for the vocabulary of aberration: reckless, impulsive, beyond the pale. The Ethiopian Tribune does not share that comfort. What such an act reveals is not an anomaly but a continuity the latest expression of a visual and rhetorical tradition whose roots run through the slave ships, the colonial exhibitions, and the pseudoscientific lecture halls of the 19th century.

It is in that spirit that we publish this essay by Professor Girma Berhanu, a scholar whose career has been devoted to the intersection of education, identity, and political violence. Writing from Sweden, where a social services department recently deployed imagery of apes in hijabs as a pedagogical tool for marginalised youth, Professor Berhanu asks the question that polite discourse prefers to skirt: not merely that such representations are offensive, but why the ape, and why it retains its power to wound across centuries and continents.

The answer, as Professor Berhanu traces with care and rigour, lies in the particular violence done to Darwin’s theory of evolution by those who required a scientific patina for their politics of hierarchy. Evolution taught that humans and apes share common ancestry; Social Darwinism translated that into a ladder, with some peoples assigned rungs closer to the animal kingdom than others. The insult, in this reading, is not merely abusive, it is a claim about ontological status, about who belongs fully within the category of the human.

For readers of this publication, the stakes are not abstract. Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa have endured their own encounters with the racialising gaze of empire, their own experience of being rendered primitive and pre-modern in the visual and textual archives of colonialism. The dehumanising logic that Professor Berhanu analyses is the same logic that framed African sovereignty as inconceivable and African suffering as natural. To understand it is to understand something essential about how power legitimises itself.

Professor Berhanu closes with a challenge that is also an obligation: legal remedy is insufficient. What is required is a transformed pedagogy, one that equips young people, and particularly those most targeted by such imagery, to read the visual world critically. The Ethiopian Tribune endorses that challenge unreservedly. Journalism, at its most purposeful, is itself a form of that literacy: naming the structure behind the slur, refusing to let cruelty pass as comedy.

“The insult carries no scientific weight. Its power lies elsewhere: in centuries of conditioning, in the grammar of empire, in the persistent human will to construct a hierarchy of the human.”

— The Editors, Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

Synopsis

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

This essay examines the historical and cultural origins of the “ape” insult as applied to racialised groups, tracing a line from the misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory through 19th-century scientific racism to the visual propaganda of the present day. The author’s inquiry is prompted by three concurrent incidents: a social media post by the US president deploying primate imagery against a Black former head of state and his wife; a legal complaint in Sweden over educational material depicting marginalised youth as apes; and the persistent reality of monkey chants directed at Black footballers in European stadiums.

Berhanu situates these incidents within a broader argument about visual culture and power. Drawing on bell hooks, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, he argues that the biological falsity of the insult is precisely the point: its force derives not from science but from centuries of cultural conditioning that deliberately confused the shared common ancestry of humans and apes with a racial hierarchy in which some peoples were placed “closer to the animal.”

The essay addresses the Swedish school curriculum’s emphasis on visual literacy, argues that images are neither neutral nor trivial particularly when directed at already marginalised communities and calls for an educational and institutional response that goes beyond legal prohibition. Berhanu’s conclusion is that dismantling the cultural infrastructure of dehumanising representation requires historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deepened public commitment to human dignity.

Approx. 1,050 words  •  Academic essay / Op-ed  •  Author: Prof. Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg  •  Cleared for publication

Essay

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

A few weeks ago, two boys who are enthusiastic about football asked me a difficult question: why are Black footballers insulted in stadiums with monkey chants, images of apes, or even by fans throwing bananas? Why apes of all animals? At the time, I struggled to respond. I tried to explain, in my own way, the role of history, human hierarchies, the theory of evolution, and scientific racism. Yet I felt inarticulate, as if I had not fully captured the depth and cruelty of the issue.

Since then, I have reflected more deeply. One recent incident involved a social media post by the president of the United States, who shared an image depicting a former president and his wife as apes or monkeys. After pressure from members of his own party, the post was deleted. But what was the intended message? That they look like apes, think like apes, or are somehow less evolved?

Public reaction followed a familiar pattern: initial shock, followed by quick dismissal. Many people brushed it aside as a childish or impulsive act, ignoring the deeper structural, institutional, and historical precedents behind such imagery. Yet we know that presidential communication is rarely accidental; it is often carefully crafted within inner political circles.

Around the same time, I revisited How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which examines how authoritarian politics divide societies into “us” and “them.” While I cannot explore his full argument here, his framework helps us understand how dehumanising language and imagery function politically.

A third incident occurred closer to home, Sweden. The newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reported that Lars Arrhenius was pursuing a legal case concerning educational material used by a social services department in north-east Gothenburg. The material, titled Angry Apes, was intended as a pedagogical tool for young people facing social challenges. It included images such as an ape wearing a hijab and other apes in a sweater labelled “Orten” (the neighbourhood).

The material was widely criticised and later withdrawn. A complainant argued that it “clearly contains racist and discriminatory images” and risks creating an exclusionary environment for children and youth. It is difficult to understand how associating already marginalised young people with apes could be considered educational. My purpose here is not to enter the legal debate, but to examine the cultural message embedded in such representations. Where does this deeply pejorative association between certain groups and apes originate?

We live in a visual culture. Images shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Yet many people lack the tools to critically interpret visual representations. As bell hooks observed, it is troubling that mass media increasingly uses powerful imagery for specific effects, whilst simultaneously encouraging us to believe that these images are insignificant.

Even the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 2011) emphasises that images play a crucial role in how people think, learn, and understand the world. Visual literacy is essential for democratic participation. Whilst powerful images can serve as effective pedagogical tools, degrading representations — particularly those targeting marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities — can reinforce harmful stereotypes and produce lasting damage.

To understand the enduring power of the “ape” insult, we must turn to history. Many of us learned about racism and colonialism in school, often alongside the ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin’s work in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man revolutionised biology, his ideas were widely misunderstood and misused.

Evolution does not claim that humans descended from modern apes. Rather, it posits that humans and apes share a common ancestor. However, this nuance was lost in public discourse. The simplified claim that “humans came from apes” made it easier to weaponise the comparison. Calling someone an “ape” came to imply that they are primitive, less intelligent, or less civilised.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these distortions merged with scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Thinkers misused evolutionary ideas to construct racial hierarchies, falsely claiming that some groups were “closer to apes” than others. As The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates, such pseudoscientific claims were used to justify colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the dehumanisation of non-European peoples.

This history helps explain why the “ape” insult persists today. Biologically, humans are primates; the insult has no scientific basis. Its power lies instead in centuries of cultural conditioning, visual propaganda, and racial hierarchy. The question, then, is not only why the insult exists, but how we confront it. How can we protect new generations — especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialised communities — from such deeply dehumanising representations? What role should schools play? What responsibilities do media and political institutions carry?

Legal measures alone are not enough. What is required is a broader transformative agenda: one that promotes historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deeper understanding of human dignity. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cultural foundations that allow such insults to persist.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

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By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

A Warning Ethiopia Cannot Afford to Ignore

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

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

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

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

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

The Editors

The Ethiopian Tribune Editorial Board

SYNOPSIS

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

By Professor Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Overview

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

Key Arguments

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

The Finfinnee Reclamation Framework

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

Oromummaa, Ethnic Federalism, and Comparative Politics

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

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

The Amhara Crisis and Three Tiers of Victimhood

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

Significance and Urgency

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

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

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

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

By Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD)

March 23, 2026

EDITOR’S FORWARD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune

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

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By Yonas Biru, PhD

Editor’s Forward

Ethiopia on the Brink: The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity

(A Summary of the full 30‑page article by Yonas Biru, PhD)

Ethiopia today stands at a crossroads where political ambition collides with economic reality. In this sweeping and meticulously argued essay, Dr. Yonas Biru dissects the country’s current trajectory with a clarity and urgency rarely found in contemporary analyses of Ethiopia’s political economy. His central thesis is stark: Ethiopia is governed by a philosophy of abundance a belief that vision, ambition, and positive thinking can override the hard constraints of economics while the nation itself is trapped in an economy of scarcity.

The result, he argues, is a widening gap between rhetoric and reality, between the spectacle of megaprojects and the erosion of the productive foundations that sustain real development. This forward distills the core arguments of the full article, which readers can access in full via the provided PDF link.

A Nation of Contradictions

Dr. Biru opens with a parable: Ethiopia’s economy resembles the elephant touched by blind men each observer perceives a different truth. The glittering skyline of Addis Ababa suggests progress to some, while for others it is a monument to property confiscation and displacement. Government speeches promise a “Digital Ethiopia 2030,” yet 92% of high school students fail the national university entrance exam. The data tell a sobering story: manufacturing has declined, education spending has collapsed, poverty has risen, and foreign direct investment has dried up.

The author’s diagnosis is not merely that Ethiopia is struggling, but that its struggles are structural, self‑inflicted, and accelerating.

The Philosophy of Abundance vs. the Economics of Scarcity

At the heart of the critique is the Prime Minister’s governing philosophy one that treats scarcity as a psychological barrier rather than a structural constraint. Dr. Biru contrasts this with the development paths of China, Vietnam, South Korea, and India, all of which embraced disciplined sequencing, prioritization, and institutional strengthening.

Ethiopia, by contrast, pursues simultaneous megaprojects, prioritizes showpiece construction over productive investment, and attempts to leapfrog into a digital economy without the educational or industrial foundations required to sustain it.

The result is a eucalyptus‑style growth pattern: fast‑growing, shallow‑rooted, and dangerously fragile.

The Shrinking Middle Class: A Nation Consuming Its Future

One of the most compelling sections of the article examines the erosion of Ethiopia’s middle class. In every successful late‑industrializing economy, the middle class expands before construction booms and technological leaps. In Ethiopia, the opposite is happening.

Doctors earn $70–$100 per month. Professors and teachers struggle to afford food and rent. Inflation erodes wages faster than they can be adjusted. Meanwhile, billions are poured into palaces, corridors, and vanity projects.

Dr. Biru’s conclusion is blunt:
No country has ever developed while shrinking its middle class. Ethiopia will not be the first.

Diaspora Investment: From Catalyst to Casualty

Where China and India mobilized their diasporas to build factories, technology hubs, and export industries, Ethiopia has channeled diaspora capital into speculative real estate. Currency devaluation, punitive taxes, and arbitrary property seizures have turned diaspora investment into a trap rather than a catalyst.

The article provides a striking example: a diaspora investor who bought a condominium for 2 million birr in 2019 would lose nearly 40% of their dollar investment if they sold today. The nominal birr gains are illusions; the real returns are negative.

This is not misfortune, the author argues, it is policy failure.

Institutional Decay: Property Rights, Corruption, and the Rise of Political Entrepreneurship

The essay devotes significant attention to the erosion of property rights and the rise of political entrepreneurship. Land is leased to multiple parties. Legally binding contracts are unilaterally rewritten. Properties are seized for corridor projects without compensation. Corruption investigations are launched with fanfare, only to be quietly buried when they implicate senior officials.

In such an environment, productive entrepreneurs are crowded out by politically connected actors. Investment flows not to the most efficient, but to the most favored.

This is not merely an economic problem it is a political one. Weak property rights fuel rent‑seeking, which fuels competition for state power, which fuels instability. Conflict becomes endogenous to the system.

Macroeconomic Fragility: Debt, Foreign Exchange, and the Illusion of Growth

Dr. Biru dismantles the government’s narrative of self‑reliance and rapid growth. Ethiopia is not borrowing less because it needs less; it is borrowing less because no one will lend. All three major rating agencies have downgraded Ethiopia to junk or default territory. The IMF and World Bank classify the country as being in debt distress.

Meanwhile, the government projects 10.2% GDP growth far above the estimates of the World Bank (7.2%) and the UN (5.8%). The author asks a simple question: Where is this growth coming from?

Not tourism, which remains constrained by security and infrastructure.
Not agriculture, which still imports wheat and leaves millions food‑insecure.
Not manufacturing, which has declined to 4.4% of GDP.
Not exports, which remain stagnant.

The only sector expanding is construction an import‑dependent, debt‑driven, speculative bubble.

The Counterfactual: What Ethiopia Should Have Built

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of the article is its counterfactual analysis. What if Ethiopia had invested in:

• electric transmission lines
• large‑scale irrigation
• electrified pumping systems
• agricultural modernization

instead of urban corridors and palatial complexes?

The data are unequivocal:

• Electrified irrigation increases farm profitability by 58–98%.
• Ethiopia spends $4–5 billion annually on fuel imports—three to four times its coffee export earnings.
• Irrigation could raise national agricultural output by 15–30%.
• Ethiopia has over 1 million hectares of viable irrigation potential.

These investments would have strengthened agriculture, boosted exports, reduced fuel imports, and provided raw materials for manufacturing.

Instead, Ethiopia built corridors.

The Coming Crisis: How Structural Fault Lines Interact

The author warns that Ethiopia’s vulnerabilities are not isolated they are interconnected. A foreign‑exchange shock can stall construction, which can trigger a real‑estate crash, which can destabilize banks, which can collapse tax revenues, which can force inflationary financing, which can erode confidence, which can accelerate capital flight.

This is how systemic crises begin.

A Path Forward: Institutional, Fiscal, and Structural Reform

The article concludes with a sequenced set of recommendations:

• Restore constitutional governance and legislative oversight.
• Rebuild credible property rights and rule‑based administration.
• Replace cadre‑driven policymaking with expert‑led institutions.
• Confront systemic corruption with independent enforcement.
• Rebuild trust with the diaspora through a joint commission.
• Rebalance public spending toward productive sectors.
• Address the foreign‑exchange constraint by expanding exports.
• Reinstate fiscal discipline and transparency.
• Reinvest in human capital especially education.
• Institutionalize technocratic policymaking beyond any single leader.

These are not incremental adjustments they are foundational reforms.

A Final Word

Dr. Biru’s essay is not a lament. It is a warning and a roadmap. It argues that Ethiopia’s crisis is not inevitable; it is the result of choices. And because it is the result of choices, it can be reversed by different choices.

But the window is narrowing.

This forward captures the essence of the full 30‑page analysis. For readers who wish to explore the complete argument, data, and case studies, the full PDF is available here.

[Download the full article: Ethiopia on the Brink – The Politics of Abundance in an Economy of Scarcity]

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By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————//——————

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

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By Professor Girma Berhanu

Introduction

The ongoing violence directed against Christian Amhara communities in the Arsi Zone raises serious concerns regarding the protection of vulnerable populations in Ethiopia. Recent reports indicate an intensification of targeted attacks, including killings, abductions, and the destruction of civilian property, particularly in districts such as Shirka, Guna, and Aseko. Investigations by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission have documented incidents since late 2025 in which armed groups carried out attacks that resulted in deaths, injuries, and displacement of local residents, severely undermining the security and basic rights of affected communities.

These developments must be understood within the broader context of Ethiopia’s complex and evolving conflict dynamics. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented widespread human rights violations in multiple regions of the country, including Oromia and Amhara. In 2023 alone, thousands of civilians were killed in violent incidents across these regions, while thousands were subjected to abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, and forced displacement. Such patterns indicate that the current violence is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader cycle of armed conflict and intercommunal tensions orchestrated by the system.

Historically, Amhara communities living in parts of Oromia have periodically faced episodes of mass violence and forced displacement. Several documented incidents—including massacres targeting civilians identified as ethnically Amhara—illustrate the recurring nature of such attacks. One example occurred in 2020 in western Oromia, where hundreds of Amhara civilians were killed in an attack widely reported by international media and human rights observers. These events underscore the vulnerability of minority communities residing outside their region of ethnic majority.

In recent months, observers and human-rights organizations have expressed concern over what appears to be a renewed escalation in violence. Reports describe killings, kidnappings, and large-scale displacement in parts of Oromia, with civilians caught between insurgent groups, local militias, and government forces. The insurgency involving the Oromo Liberation Army has contributed to a deteriorating security environment in which civilians are frequently exposed to abuses by multiple actors. However, the group claimed the violence aimed to fracture collective opposition by pitting communities against one another, including along Oromo–Amhara and Christian–Muslim lines. The OLA further stated that “whether in uniform or without, whether carrying a gun or a pen,” any actor who “weaponizes innocent civilians for political ends” would be considered its enemy, adding that it would confront such forces decisively.

Despite the gravity of these developments, the international response has often been perceived as limited compared with the scale of the humanitarian and human rights concerns involved. Scholars and policy analysts have noted that Ethiopia’s overlapping conflicts—spanning regions such as Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia—have complicated international engagement and reduced sustained attention to localized patterns of violence against minority communities.

Given these conditions, the situation warrants sustained monitoring, systematic documentation, and deeper international engagement. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, accountability, and civilian protection remains essential for mitigating further violence and ensuring that vulnerable communities are afforded the protections guaranteed under international human rights and humanitarian law.

Atrocities in Arsi: A Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia’s Oromia Region

The country of Ethiopia has been engulfed in war, massacres, and displacement at an alarming rate since Prime Minister Abiy came to power. The victims are mostly Amharas, particularly those who belong to the Orthodox Church. Such incidents have become increasingly common in the Oromia region. The perpetrators are often described as state-sponsored paramilitary groups and the so-called OLF, with each side blaming the other. This situation has continued for approximately eight years. Millions of people have lost their lives, properties have been destroyed, and displacement has become a defining feature of the new Ethiopia. The crimes being committed against Ethiopia and the defenseless Amharas are unbelievably horrifying and multifaceted. Yet both national actors and the international community remain largely silent.

The current spree of massacres in Arsi is telling. It took now over 6 months unabated. Many known media and newspapers have reported the atrocities. A good gesture is that three major Ethiopian religious bodies condemned the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi, urging swift investigations, accountability and stronger protection to prevent further inter-religious tensions. The Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council have each issued statements condemning the killing of 21 civilians in Shirka Woreda, East Arsi Zone of Oromia Region. They urged authorities to take immediate action to bring the perpetrators to justice and strengthen protection for residents. In their statements, the religious institutions denounced the attack and called for swift, transparent investigations, warning against attempts to exploit the incident to incite further violence. The known Borkena news outlet has reported the massacres continuously.

Violence in Arsi Zone and Competing Narratives

The Oromo Liberation Army has accused what it described as “mercenaries” of moving through the Arsi Zone and deliberately targeting Orthodox Christian civilians in order to inflame inter-religious and inter-ethnic tensions. The group has denied responsibility for attacks against civilians and instead alleged that unidentified armed actors are attempting to provoke conflict between communities.

In a statement dated 1 March 2026, the Permanent Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church reported that it had received information from its dioceses indicating that at least 21 civilians were killed in an attack in East Arsi. According to the statement, several survivors were abducted and their whereabouts remain unknown, while homes and property belonging to more than ten households were burned. The Synod emphasized that the victims were Orthodox Christians with no involvement in any armed conflict and stated that perpetrators who invoke religion to justify violence do not represent the teachings of any faith tradition. It further warned that such attacks risk creating divisions among religious communities that have historically coexisted in relative harmony and called upon Muslim and Christian leaders to jointly condemn the violence.

The Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council similarly expressed deep sorrow over the killings of what it described as innocent Orthodox Christian civilians in Shirka Woreda. In its statement, the council stressed that the attack does not represent any religious teaching and warned that such incidents threaten long-standing traditions of inter-religious coexistence and mutual respect. Independent reporting and advocacy sources have also highlighted the severity of the violence in the region. According to reports cited by the media outlet Borkena, districts including Shirka, Merti, Guna, and Holonto have experienced repeated attacks in which civilians were killed or injured, property was destroyed, and communities were displaced. These reports characterize the situation as a significant escalation of violence in the Arsi Zone.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has documented a pattern of attacks affecting civilians in the area in its March 2026 reporting. According to the commission, recent incidents resulted in dozens of deaths, including multiple killings in Shirka and Merti districts, alongside cases of injury, abduction, and missing persons. The EHRC also noted broader patterns of insecurity in parts of Oromia since 2025, where recurring attacks on civilians have contributed to a wider humanitarian and human rights crisis. Eyewitness accounts collected by investigators and journalists describe highly coordinated attacks in which armed assailants targeted households and villages, leading to civilian deaths and widespread displacement. These testimonies indicate that communities have been subjected to intimidation, destruction of homes, and forced migration, contributing to a deteriorating humanitarian situation in the region.

At the same time, responsibility for the violence remains contested. Federal and regional authorities have repeatedly attributed many attacks to the Oromo Liberation Army, while the OLA has denied involvement and accused government forces or affiliated militias of staging or exploiting violence in order to justify security operations. This cycle of mutual accusations has complicated efforts to establish accountability and has hindered independent verification of events on the ground. The resulting climate of uncertainty underscores the need for impartial investigation. Without credible and transparent inquiries into the perpetrators of these attacks, the persistence of violence risks normalizing impunity and further undermining social cohesion in Ethiopia’s ethnically and religiously diverse society. Strengthening mechanisms for independent investigation, civilian protection, and accountability therefore remains critical to preventing further atrocities and restoring trust between communities.

Borkena. (2022, September 27). Ethiopia: Attack in Horo Guduru Wollega, Oromia region. https://borkena.com/2022/09/27/ethiopia-horo-guduru-wollega-oromo-region/

The ‘New Auschwitz’? Mass Violence and the Targeting of Civilians in Arsi Zone

Many years ago, I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, located on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp during World War II. Several years later, I also visited a Jewish cultural center and museum in Riga, Latvia, which similarly commemorates the persecution and destruction of Jewish communities during the Holocaust. Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Holocaust memorial institutions serve as powerful sites of remembrance, preserving the memory of immense human suffering and reminding visitors of the catastrophic consequences of hatred, discrimination, and systematic dehumanization.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum provides a detailed historical account of the camp complex and the atrocities committed there. It stands as a solemn warning about what can occur when prejudice, exclusion, and ideological extremism are allowed to escalate unchecked. The enduring message of such memorials was eloquently articulated by Ellen Germain during the 75th anniversary of the museum on 13 July 2022. She emphasized the responsibility of future generations to safeguard historical truth:

“We must safeguard your testimony, their testimony, so that truth will never die. The world must never forget. The world must never deny. The world must never downplay the Holocaust. We must remain ever on guard, and we must do far more to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and apply them in our own time. We must counter hate and lies with tolerance and truth. And we must stand up for human dignity and freedom wherever they are imperiled.”

These reflections underline a critical principle: remembrance is not solely about honoring the victims of the past, but also about recognizing warning signs in the present. The lessons of the Holocaust compel societies to remain vigilant when patterns of discrimination, dehumanization, and targeted violence begin to emerge. When communities are singled out because of their identity—whether ethnic, religious, or cultural—the risk of escalating persecution becomes real.

It is within this broader moral and historical framework that contemporary reports of violence against civilians in the Arsi Zone must be considered. While historical contexts differ, the persistence of attacks against vulnerable populations raises urgent questions about protection, accountability, and the international community’s responsibility to respond when civilians become targets of systematic violence.

More than seventy-five years after the crematoria ceased their inhuman work, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum continues to preserve the former camp complex as a permanent site of memory. The preservation of this Holocaust memorial serves an essential purpose: to help future generations understand the consequences of hatred, racism, and systematic violence, and to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. The site also stands as enduring evidence against those who attempt to deny or distort the historical reality of the Holocaust.

Yet the lessons of these memorials are not confined to the past. The warning they convey—that societies must remain vigilant against hatred, persecution, and mass violence—remains deeply relevant today. Reports from several contemporary conflicts suggest that civilians continue to face grave abuses, including in the ongoing war in Ukraine and in parts of Ethiopia.

Particularly troubling are reports of attacks against civilians in the Arsi Zone of the Oromia Region. Accounts from religious institutions, local sources, and human-rights observers describe killings, abductions, and the destruction of homes affecting vulnerable communities. These reports raise serious concerns about the protection of civilians and the ability of affected populations to seek safety during episodes of violence. While historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Holocaust, the recurrence of violence against civilians underscores the enduring importance of remembering past atrocities and applying their lessons to contemporary crises. Memorials such as Auschwitz remind the world that indifference to suffering, denial of abuses, and failure to protect vulnerable populations can have devastating consequences. Ensuring accountability and safeguarding human dignity therefore remain essential responsibilities for governments, civil society, and the international community alike.

Violence, Silence, and Moral Responsibility

Reports emerging from parts of Oromia Region, particularly in areas such as Arsi Zone and Wollega, describe widespread violence against civilians, including killings, displacement, and the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Observers and advocacy groups have raised concerns that armed actors operating in the region have targeted vulnerable communities and that humanitarian access has at times been restricted, making independent verification and relief efforts extremely difficult. Allegations have also surfaced that bodies of victims have been burned and that attacks on civilians have been carried out with extreme brutality—imagery that evokes memories of some of the darkest chapters of twentieth-century violence.

This paper seeks to draw attention to what many observers describe as a deeply underreported humanitarian tragedy unfolding in these regions. While the historical contexts differ greatly from those of the Nazi concentration camps, the scale of civilian suffering and the persistence of violence raise urgent moral and political questions. Reports indicate that armed groups operating in the region, sometimes in environments where security institutions have failed to provide adequate protection, have created conditions in which communities live under constant fear of attack. As a result, thousands of civilians have reportedly been displaced and forced to flee their homes, creating a growing humanitarian crisis.

The failure of state institutions to adequately protect citizens exacerbates this tragedy. When attacks occur repeatedly without credible investigation or accountability, communities lose confidence in the ability of authorities to safeguard their security and basic rights. Observers have therefore called for independent investigations into allegations of mass killings, human rights abuses, and other violations in order to establish the facts and ensure that perpetrators are held accountable under the rule of law.

Ethiopia today faces immense human suffering and a profound national crisis. Many citizens feel that the country’s political future is increasingly shaped by competing ethno-nationalist movements and armed actors. In such an environment, atrocities—including killings, arrests, and the mistreatment of civilians—risk becoming normalized. The silence of political leaders, humanitarian actors, and international institutions in the face of such reports has raised troubling questions among many Ethiopians about whether the suffering of their communities is receiving adequate attention.

Religious and moral leaders may have an especially important role to play in such circumstances. Ethiopia is a deeply religious society in which spiritual institutions often serve as sources of moral guidance and social cohesion. Leaders from all faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, and indigenous spiritual traditions—can help promote reconciliation and emphasize the shared humanity of all Ethiopians. Their voices are particularly important in reminding communities that violence committed in the name of religion or ethnicity contradicts the ethical principles that faith traditions claim to uphold.

Periods of national crisis also highlight the importance of collective moral responsibility. Philosophical discussions of responsibility emphasize that institutions and leaders bear a duty to prevent harm when they possess the power to do so (Risser, 1996). Silence in the face of injustice can enable further abuses, while moral leadership can help mobilize societies toward peace and accountability. As the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned in The Gulag Archipelago, ignoring evil allows it to grow and ultimately undermines the foundations of justice.

Understanding why societies sometimes fail to respond to mass atrocities has also been explored by scholars. Psychologist Paul Slovic describes the phenomenon of “psychic numbing,” in which large-scale human suffering paradoxically leads to reduced emotional engagement and weaker public action (Slovic, 2007). People often respond strongly to the suffering of a single identifiable victim, yet become increasingly indifferent when confronted with statistics describing thousands of victims. This dynamic may help explain why some humanitarian crises fail to receive sustained international attention.

Political scientists have also highlighted how ethnic identity can be mobilized by political elites in ways that intensify violence. According to James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ethnic violence is frequently linked to strategic political mobilization in which elites frame conflicts in ethnic terms in order to consolidate power or mobilize supporters (Fearon & Laitin, 2000). Such narratives can generate fear, deepen divisions, and ultimately legitimize violence against perceived out-groups.

These dynamics underscore the importance of resisting propaganda, rejecting narratives that dehumanize other communities, and reaffirming the shared dignity of all citizens. Throughout history, attempts to manipulate ethnic identity for political purposes have produced devastating consequences. Divide-and-rule strategies and discourses of ethnic superiority can create cycles of resentment and retaliation that undermine national cohesion and long-term stability.

Ethiopia’s future therefore depends on a renewed commitment to accountability, justice, and reconciliation. Independent investigations, protection of civilians, and responsible leadership are essential steps toward breaking cycles of violence. Equally important is the willingness of citizens, community leaders, and institutions to confront injustice openly and to reject the normalization of cruelty and hatred.

As writer E. A. Bucchianeri observed, “It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf; perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.” Speaking out against violence and defending the dignity of all human beings is not an act of division—it is a necessary foundation for a just and peaceful society.

In conclusion, I argue that the Abiy regime’s leadership incompetence, systemic cruelty, and moral vacuum have directly fueled Ethiopia’s current crises—the result of a leadership class lacking fundamental moral intelligence. Beheshtifar, Esmaeli, and Moghadam (2011) define moral intelligence as the “central intelligence for all humans,” distinct from both cognitive and emotional intelligence. Lennick and Kiel, the architects of this concept, identify its four pillars as integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. Ethiopian ethnonationalists, particularly Oromo extremists, exhibit a profound deficit in these competencies—a legacy of moral decay inherited from their TPLF predecessors. For those lacking this essential intelligence, deception and malice become the standard, creating a pervasive political pathology that defines the current era.

References

Beheshtifar, M., Esmaeli, Z., & Moghadam, M. N. (2011). Effect of moral intelligence on leadership. European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 43, 6–11.

Cohen, S. (2013). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Polity Press.

Eurasia Review. (2021, May 16). The logic behind events in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/16052021-the-logic-behind-events-in-ethiopia-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, April 13). Victims and victimization in Ethiopian politics: Targeting the Amhara on three fronts (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/13042022-victims-and-victimization-in-ethiopian-politics-targeting-the-amhara-on-three-fronts-oped/

Eurasia Review. (2022, July 26). Oromummaa unchained: Ethnic apartheid and territorial expansion in Ethiopia (Op-ed). https://www.eurasiareview.com/26072022-oromummaa-unchained-ethnic-apartheid-and-territorial-expansion-in-ethiopia-oped/

Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2000). Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity. International Organization, 54(4), 845–877.

Lind, G. (2008). The meaning and measurement of moral judgment competence: A dual-aspect model. In D. Fasko Jr. & W. Willis (Eds.), Contemporary philosophical and psychological perspectives on moral development and education (pp. 185–220). Hampton Press.

Risser, D. T. (1978). Power and collective responsibility. Kinesis, 9(1), 23–33.

Risser, D. T. (1996). The social dimension of moral responsibility: Taking organizations seriously. Journal of Social Philosophy, 27(1), 189–207.

Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Collective moral responsibility. http://www.iep.utm.edu/collecti/

The New Yorker. (2022, October 3). Did a Nobel Peace Laureate stoke a civil war? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/did-a-nobel-peace-laureate-stoke-a-civil-war

The Washington Post. (2022, July 18). Ethiopian genocide commands attention. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/ethiopian-genocide-commands-attention/

White, J. R. (2005). Auschwitz: A new history. History: Reviews of New Books, 34(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2005.10526737

The views, arguments, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Professor Girma Berhanu, and do not represent the editorial position of the Ethiopian Tribune. Readers are encouraged to consult multiple sources when forming their own judgments on the complex and evolving situation described.

Contact information:

Girma Berhanu

Department of Education and Special Education (Professor) University of Gothenburg

Box 300, SE 405 30

Göteborg, Sweden

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By Endex The Ethiopian Tribune editor in chief

Opinion & Analysis

There is a particular kind of arrogance embedded in the way certain international media institutions cover Africa. It is not always the arrogance of open hostility that would at least be straightforward to contest. It is, rather, the arrogance of the editorial template: the quiet, institutional assumption that a continent of fifty-four nations and a billion-plus souls can be adequately explained through a rotating cast of familiar imagery famine, fragmentation, and failure. Ethiopia has endured this treatment for decades. What demands urgent examination today is not merely that it persists, but who is perpetuating it, why, and what Ethiopia ought to do in response.
Al Jazeera, the Doha-based broadcaster funded by the Qatari state, has positioned itself globally as the voice of the underdog, the challenger of Western media hegemony, the outlet that speaks truth to power. It is a seductive proposition, and in certain contexts, notably its early coverage of the Arab Spring, it was not without merit. Yet when the camera turns toward Ethiopia, something rather revealing happens to that self-proclaimed editorial conscience. The underdog disappears. The complexity vanishes. What remains is a country rendered perpetually crisis-ridden, politically naïve, and diplomatically inconsequential.
This is not an accident. It is a pattern, and patterns in journalism are never merely stylistic.

The Architecture of a Double Standard
Academic scrutiny of Al Jazeera’s reporting on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has produced findings that should embarrass any institution claiming journalistic neutrality. Research by Aqalh and Abdul-Nabi (2026) demonstrates that the network’s coverage systematically “privileges Egyptian existential narratives whilst minimising Ethiopian developmental claims.” Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024) reach a complementary conclusion, finding that Al Jazeera “foregrounds conflict frames at the expense of cooperative or technical frames” when reporting the Ethio-Egyptian dispute. Nigatu and Lidetie (2025) are yet more direct, arguing that “the discursive privileging of Egyptian claims reflects broader regional power dynamics rather than journalistic neutrality.”
Let us be plain about what this means. When Ethiopia constructs a dam on the Blue Nile, a sovereign infrastructure project on its own territory, financed by its own citizens through bond purchases, designed to lift tens of millions out of energy poverty, Al Jazeera frames this as aggression. When Egypt invokes the language of existential threat to describe a dam it has no legal authority to veto, Al Jazeera amplifies that framing with minimal interrogation. The asymmetry is not subtle, and it is not neutral. It is, to borrow a phrase the network itself would deploy without hesitation in other contexts, state-serving propaganda dressed in the clothing of public interest journalism.
This double standard becomes yet more conspicuous when Al Jazeera trains its editorial eye upon Ethiopian journalists and social media influencers allegedly paid to promote Israeli narratives without disclosure. The ethical failures in question are genuine. Undisclosed sponsored travel is a serious breach of journalistic integrity, and it warrants honest, vigorous accountability. But Al Jazeera’s framing of these individual cases does not stop at ethical critique. It extrapolates, implying a broader Ethiopian susceptibility to manipulation, a national gullibility, as though the misconduct of a handful of individuals reveals something essentially true and damning about Ethiopia as a political society. One struggles to recall Al Jazeera applying the same extrapolative logic to, say, British journalists compromised by government access, or American commentators embedded with Gulf state public relations operations. The standard, it seems, applies selectively, and the selection tells us a great deal.

The Geopolitics Beneath the Editorial Line
Al Jazeera’s coverage of Ethiopia cannot be understood without understanding Qatar. The network is not an independent editorial enterprise in the manner it presents itself; it is a state-funded broadcaster whose editorial orientations are inevitably shaped by Qatari foreign policy priorities. Qatar has significant strategic interests in the Horn of Africa. It has mediated, with mixed results and considerable self-interest, in various regional disputes. Its relationships with Egypt, with various Islamist political movements, and with competing Gulf powers all create a web of geopolitical incentives that bear directly upon how its flagship broadcaster chooses to cover a country like Ethiopia.
When Al Jazeera foregrounds Ethiopian instability, it is not simply making an editorial judgement about newsworthiness. It is whether consciously or through the more insidious mechanism of institutionalised editorial culture, producing a representation of Ethiopia that serves certain regional actors and their preferred narratives. A fractious, fragile, easily-manipulated Ethiopia is convenient for those who wish to portray the GERD as reckless rather than visionary, who wish to frame Ethiopian foreign policy as reactive rather than strategic, who wish, in short, to diminish Ethiopia’s standing in a region where it remains, despite everything, the most populous nation and the diplomatic anchor of the African Union.
This is media as geopolitical instrument. It deserves to be named as such.

The History That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations — not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.
More glaring still is the erasure of Ethiopia’s history with Palestine. Ethiopia was among the earliest African nations to extend formal support to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Yasir Arafat addressed African leaders at the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; Ethiopia voted consistently in multilateral forums for Palestinian self-determination; Ethiopian diplomacy maintained active solidarity with Palestinian representatives at a time when such solidarity carried genuine political cost. This is not contested history. It is documented, verifiable, and, one might think, precisely the kind of historical context that a broadcaster claiming to champion the Palestinian cause would consider relevant when reporting on Ethiopian figures accused of normalisation.
The omission is not an oversight. Omissions of this magnitude are editorial choices, and editorial choices have politics. By stripping this history from its coverage, Al Jazeera constructs an Ethiopia that appears opportunistic, indifferent, or simply ignorant, when the historical record suggests something rather different. It is a fabrication by deletion, and it is no less dishonest for being achieved through silence rather than falsehood.

The Weaponisation of Ethical Critique
It would be foolish to dismiss the ethical questions surrounding undisclosed sponsored content. Ethiopian journalists, influencers, and public figures who accepted Israeli government-linked hospitality without transparency owe their audiences an explanation, and the institutions responsible for upholding professional standards in Ethiopian media must take this seriously. There is real work to be done here, and it must be done by Ethiopians critically, rigorously, and without defensiveness.
But Al Jazeera’s intervention in this conversation is not a contribution to that work. It is an exploitation of it. By transforming individual ethical failures into evidence of systemic national vulnerability, the network performs a rhetorical manoeuvre with which African countries are depressingly familiar: the individualisation of misconduct when the individual is sympathetic, and the nationalisation of misconduct when the nation is a useful target. The miscreant becomes the country; the country becomes the cautionary tale; and Al Jazeera, whose own editorial record includes systematic bias in its coverage of Qatar’s regional rivals, Egypt’s political upheavals, and the Syrian catastrophe, positions itself as moral arbiter.
This is audacity of a remarkable order. It ought to be said so, plainly and in public.

Reclaiming the Story
None of this analysis should be mistaken for an argument that Ethiopia’s image problems are entirely externally manufactured. There are genuine governance challenges, genuine humanitarian crises, genuine failures of accountability that Ethiopian citizens, including this columnist, have every right and obligation to scrutinise honestly. The integrity of Ethiopian public discourse depends upon exactly that kind of internal accountability. Narrative sovereignty is not a licence for self-flattery.
But there is a meaningful difference between honest internal critique and the systematic, geopolitically-motivated distortion of a country’s image by a foreign state broadcaster with its own interests to protect. Ethiopia is entitled to contest the latter even whilst engaging in the former. Indeed, the two are inseparable: a society confident enough in its own critical institutions is far better equipped to push back against external misrepresentation precisely because it has already done the harder work of honest self-examination.
What is required, practically, is investment in Ethiopian media institutions of genuine independence, in scholarly work that produces the kind of evidence-based counter-analysis demonstrated by researchers at Addis Ababa University and Jimma University, in diplomatic and cultural channels that carry Ethiopian perspectives into international conversations without waiting for the permission of hostile intermediaries. The work of Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024), of Nigatu and Lidetie (2025), of Ayalew (2021) — this is exactly the kind of intellectual infrastructure upon which narrative sovereignty is built. It needs to be resourced, disseminated, and taken seriously by Ethiopian institutions at every level.

A Final Remark
Al Jazeera will, in all probability, continue to cover Ethiopia through the lens of crisis, conflict, and selective moral outrage. The incentives that produce such coverage have not changed. What can change is Ethiopia’s posture in relation to it , from passive subject to active interlocutor, from recipient of external narratives to producer of its own.
Ethiopia’s story, its complexity, its resilience, its genuinely extraordinary diplomatic and humanitarian record, is too important to be left to those with every reason to tell it badly.
It is time to tell it ourselves.

——————-//——————-

References
Abebe, T., Tilahun, M. & Belay, S. (2024) Media Framing of the Ethio-Egyptian Dispute over the First Round Water Filling of GERD: ETV and Al Jazeera in Focus. Addis Ababa University Press.

Aqalh, A. & Abdul-Nabi, M. (2026) Framing of Ethiopia–Egypt Dam Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Emerald Publishing. DOI: 10.1108/978-1-80592-949-920261005.

Ayalew, M. (2021) Framing of the Ethio-Egypt Conflict on GERD’s Water Filling: ETV and Al-Jazeera in Focus. MA Thesis, Jimma University.

Nigatu, M. & Lidetie, A. (2025) ‘Sovereignty vs Survival: A Critical Discourse Analysis of BBC and Al-Jazeera’s Reporting on GERD Negotiations’, Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2025.2451486.

Ojola, D. (2025) Framing Analysis of BBC and Al Jazeera Coverage of the Ethiopia–Somaliland MoU. University of Helsinki.

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How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

By Sewasew Teklemariam the Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than argument. It is the silence that descends upon a room when someone has said the unsayable with perfect precision, when an accusation is so well-documented, so calmly delivered, and so unanswerable that the only available response is the panicked shuffle of papers and the avoidance of eye contact. That silence fell upon the representatives of Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party during the country’s first major televised multi-party debate of the 2026 election cycle. The person who produced it was not a veteran statesman, not a celebrated economist, not a familiar face from the long and exhausted gallery of Ethiopian opposition politics. She was a former television journalist in her early thirties, representing a coalition whose symbol is a thumbs-up, whose name is Mistresilasie Tamerat, and who, in one broadcast hour, did more damage to the government’s democratic pretensions than two decades of politely worded opposition press releases ever managed.

Ethiopia is preparing to hold its seventh national election in June 2026, with 24 national and 45 regional political parties contesting for power in what many analysts describe as a critical test of the country’s democratic evolution, a description that grows more ironic the more closely one examines the conditions under which that evolution is supposedly occurring. The scale is impressive on paper: 1,300 candidates nationwide, 936 for regional councils, a National Electoral Board with a mandate and a calendar. The substance is considerably less so. Political prisoners remain detained. Conflicts rage in the Amhara region and beyond. The media landscape is captive. International observation is uncertain. In this context, Mistresilasie Tamerat stood before the cameras and said, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for precisely this moment: we do not believe that the electoral process can be described as fair, democratic, or independent. She did not flinch. Neither did the camera.

Her background is essential to understanding the force of the moment. She trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter and political affairs analyst at Asham TV, a career that gave her something most Ethiopian opposition politicians conspicuously lack: the ability to communicate complex arguments clearly, quickly, and under the pressure of broadcast conditions. When she transitioned from journalism into active politics, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party one of the country’s oldest opposition formations, founded in the radical crucible of the 1970s student movement received her and, unusually for a party in a political culture dominated by elderly men, entrusted her with its most senior administrative post: secretary-general. The party also made her coalition secretary for the “Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity,” the five-party alliance that now stands before the Ethiopian electorate with its thumbs raised.

She has said as much herself. The political space, in her own precise formulation, is dominated by long-established figures, and penetrating its leadership structures requires persistence and resilience. Being both young and female in that environment means perpetual proof-of-concept, an exhausting requirement applied to no comparable male colleague of similar ability. What the debate demonstrated is that she has cleared that bar so comprehensively that the requirement itself begins to look absurd. She did not participate in the debate. She commanded it.

“Being both young and female often means having to prove oneself repeatedly in environments where experience is measured narrowly and leadership is traditionally defined.”

The four arguments she deployed were not improvised. They were the product of a politician who understands that in a televised debate, the purpose is not to persuade the other side but to expose it. Her first line of attack concerned political prisoners, specifically, the more than 300 ordinary citizens reported detained in the Amhara region alone, some in connection with the Fano armed movement, others for no apparent reason beyond identity. This was not rhetoric. It was documentation. The Prosperity Party has invested considerable effort in framing the Amhara conflict as a security matter: a necessary state response to armed rebellion, regrettable but inevitable. Mistresilasie relocated that framing to the electoral arena, where it becomes something else entirely evidence that the conditions for a free election do not exist, that citizens are being detained for who they are rather than what they have done, and that any government which presides over this whilst simultaneously claiming democratic legitimacy is engaged in a contradiction it cannot resolve in front of a camera.

Her second argument, that one cannot speak credibly of democratic competition while war continues, was delivered with similar precision. She went further than most opposition politicians dare, calling not merely for ceasefire but for genuine, inclusive negotiations that encompass armed groups currently excluded from peace processes. This is the argument that sustainable peace cannot be achieved through exclusion, and it is one that speaks directly to the lived reality of millions of Ethiopians whose relationship with the state has been defined by violence rather than representation. The Prosperity Party’s representatives had nothing to offer in response that would not have required them to publicly justify policies they had spent considerable energy trying not to discuss.

The arguments on media independence and international observers were, in some ways, the most devastating precisely because they were the least dramatic. They required no statistics, no documentation of specific abuses, no emotional appeal. They required only the observation that these are the minimum conditions for any democratic process worthy of the name conditions so basic that their absence does not require lengthy argument, merely acknowledgement. The government’s representatives could not acknowledge them without conceding the point. They could not deny them without appearing to endorse a system of managed elections. They were, in the language of debate, trapped. The silence that followed was the sound of that trap closing.

The Prosperity Party excels at spectacle. What it struggles with is the rough-and-tumble of genuine democratic accountability and on that stage, there was nowhere left to hide.

It would be too simple to attribute this merely to the personal failings of the individuals who represented the ruling party on that stage. The deeper truth is structural. A party that has governed with the concentrated authority of the Prosperity Party, that has systematically dismantled independent judicial oversight, suppressed critical media, and treated dissent as a category of disloyalty , cannot easily produce, on short notice, the kind of confident, substantive defenders that open democratic debate requires. The machinery of authoritarian governance is not designed to generate intellectual accountability. It is designed to suppress the need for it. When that suppression fails — when someone stands before the cameras and refuses to be managed, the system has no response prepared, because it had convinced itself the moment would never come.

The Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice , EZEMA, occupies a different position in this story, and in some respects a more troubling one. EZEMA is, by most measures, the most institutionally coherent of the major opposition formations. It has a recognisable leadership, an urban electoral base, and a track record of participating in the formal processes of Ethiopian politics. It also has a track record, less frequently discussed, of accommodation. During the 2021 elections, EZEMA positioned itself against the formation of a transitional government at the precise moment when such a government represented the most credible alternative to the ruling party’s dominance. The practical effect of this position was to align EZEMA, at a critical juncture, with the preferences of the party it nominally opposed. In Addis Ababa in 2021, EZEMA and Balderas together received approximately 32 per cent of the capital’s vote and won zero seats in parliament a result that tells you everything you need to know about the electoral system, but also something important about the limits of a strategy built on institutional respectability rather than principled confrontation.

One of EZEMA’s own representatives captured this posture with an inadvertent candour before this year’s election. Despite the ongoing conditions the detentions, the lack of media freedom, the contested electoral environment the party acknowledged it had “no option but to participate in the election, if the government proceeds on its current track.” It is a sentence worth reading twice. It concedes the entire argument. It acknowledges that the conditions are inadequate. It then proceeds to participate anyway, not out of confidence but out of resignation. Compare this to Mistresilasie’s formulation: the process cannot be described as fair, democratic, or independent and here are the specific conditions that must change before it can be. One is a statement of principles with demands attached. The other is a statement of defeat dressed as pragmatism. The contrast, aired before a national television audience, was merciless.

The social media dimension of this story is not a footnote. Ethiopia is a country with a median age below 20. An overwhelming majority of its population has known no political dispensation other than the EPRP’s former enemies and, since 2018, the Prosperity Party. This is a generation whose relationship with politics has been defined by spectacle without accountability, by promises without delivery, and by the particular exhaustion that comes from watching one’s country torn apart by conflicts that feel simultaneously inevitable and entirely unnecessary. The appetite for a political figure who is young, female, articulate, and genuinely confrontational was not manufactured by social media. It was waiting. Mistresilasie gave it somewhere to go.

By contrast, the opening statements by ESDP and EZEMA, positioned at [00:04:53–00:08:15], produced what the analytics reveal as a characteristic “dip”: that moment, well known to anyone who has studied long-form political broadcast data, when casual viewers make their decision to stay or leave. ESDP’s pitch of gradual reform and EZEMA’s invocation of social justice are not unworthy positions. But they are positions that a viewer already fatigued by years of unfulfilled political promises will recognise and, the data suggests, will choose not to engage with further. The drop-off at this juncture is a verdict rendered not in ballot boxes but in closed browser tabs, and it is a verdict that the parties concerned would do well to examine. A political platform that cannot hold a free audience’s attention for eight minutes of prime-time debate is a platform with a communication problem that no amount of ideological refinement will resolve. The audience did not leave because the arguments were wrong. They left because the arguments felt familiar in the worst possible sense: competent, cautious, and utterly unexciting.

The TikTok virality, the comment threads declaring “she is who we wanted to become” these are not merely expressions of admiration for a single politician. They are an expression of political hunger: the demand of a generation for representation that actually looks like them, speaks like them, and is willing to say in public what they say to one another in private. That this hunger has found its focus in someone representing a coalition whose electoral history is modest and whose internal consolidation is incomplete is, simultaneously, the most interesting and the most precarious aspect of the current moment.

Because this column owes its readers scepticism as well as appreciation, certain questions must be put. Mistresilasie Tamerat has demonstrated, with considerable flair, the capacity to articulate what is wrong with Ethiopian politics and the electoral environment in which it currently operates. She has been notably less specific about what her coalition’s governance would look like in practice. Social democratic ideology and a commitment to equitable development are principles. They are not, in themselves, a programme for managing a country with rampant inflation, a currency under significant pressure, endemic unemployment, and a security situation that cannot be wished away with negotiations, however inclusive. The debate stage rewards the sharp identification of failures. Governing requires the harder discipline of proposing credible remedies.

The coalition’s internal cohesion presents a further question. Of the five parties that formed the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity alliance, only three remain actively engaged in the electoral process. A coalition that cannot fully consolidate before the election begins is one whose ability to hold together under the pressures of governance or even the pressures of a contested result must be considered uncertain. And whilst the demand for minimum conditions before participation is principled, the coalition has not yet articulated the clear red line that would tell the public: if these conditions remain unmet, we will withdraw and say publicly why. Without that line, the demand for conditions risks becoming a rhetorical position rather than a constitutional one.

None of which should obscure the significance of what has already happened. In a debate that the ruling party entered expecting to perform its usual controlled dominance, a young woman representing a minority coalition with a thumbs-up symbol and a name that translates as the Secret of the Trinity walked onto the stage and turned the performance inside out. She exposed the Prosperity Party’s inability to defend its record under genuine scrutiny. She implicitly indicted EZEMA’s decades of dignified accommodation. She gave the youngest generation of Ethiopians a face to attach to the possibility of a different kind of politics. She did all of this calmly, precisely, and entirely on her own terms.

“In a political landscape where the bar for meaningful opposition is depressingly low, she cleared it with visible ease and the camera caught every moment.”

The numbers, as it happens, are not merely anecdotal. An analysis of the YouTube broadcast of the seventh general election’s first debate officially titled “የ7ኛው ጠቅላላ ምርጫ የመጀመሪያው የክርክር መድረክ” reveals a viewing pattern that tells its own story about where public attention truly resided during more than two hours of broadcast. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity, known by its Amharic designation TIBIBIR, did not merely win the argument in the room. It won the audience at home, repeatedly, and at the moments that mattered most.

The broadcast’s viewership data identifies four distinct peaks where audience engagement spiked, and the pattern is instructive. The first came at [00:02:18], barely two minutes into proceedings, when inter-party friction first surfaced during the direct questioning phase the segment in which each party had two minutes to put questions directly to its opponents. YouTube’s retention analytics consistently show that confrontational exchange drives re-engagement: viewers who have wandered lean back in; those who had the broadcast running in the background pick it up. The second, and arguably most consequential, peak arrived at [02:05:12] the precise moment at which the TIBIBIR representative delivered her direct assessment of the Prosperity government’s economic record. The single word “failed” is, in broadcast terms, what analysts call a high-engagement unit: a declaration short enough to clip, sharp enough to share, and specific enough to be held accountable. The critique of the cost of living, the inability to pay rent, to afford daily meals, moved the debate from the abstractly political to the viscerally personal, producing the kind of resonance that generates not just initial views but re-watches, the metric that most accurately measures genuine impact. Within one minute, at [02:06:13], a second peak followed, driven by the explanation of the coalition’s campaign symbol, the raised thumb, and the closing appeal to voters. Audiences who skip to the end of long political broadcasts are not disengaged; they are specifically seeking the summary, the verdict, the moment of meaning. The fact that TIBIBIR’s symbol and final statement produced a measurable viewership spike at exactly this point suggests that the coalition had successfully generated sufficient curiosity earlier in the broadcast that viewers returned to hear how it concluded.

The coalition did not merely win the debate. According to the broadcast’s own viewership curve, it owned the moments the audience came back to watch twice.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond the mechanics of YouTube analytics. Political communication in the digital age does not reward the measured and the moderate. It rewards the specific, the confrontational, and the emotionally resonant. Mistresilasie Tamerat did not go viral because she was young or because she was female, though both facts added to the novelty of the moment. She went viral because she said something true, in plain language, to a camera, without flinching. In a media environment flooded with managed statements and rehearsed equivocation, that quality, the quality of simply meaning what one says, is rarer and more powerful than any focus-grouped slogan. The viewership data confirms what the debate room already knew: when she spoke, people stopped scrolling.

The thumbs-up is, in the end, a simple gesture. It means: yes. Yes, there is something worth approving of here. Yes, this is possible. Yes, we see you. In the context of an Ethiopian election whose integrity remains in serious doubt, whose conditions remain deeply problematic, and whose outcome remains controlled by forces that have never willingly relinquished power, this small affirmative gesture is either a political act of considerable bravery or a symbol that will be crushed, like so many before it, beneath the weight of the system it challenges.

Which of these it turns out to be will be determined not in one debate, however memorable, but in the months that follow in whether the coalition holds, in whether the conditions are partially met or entirely ignored, in whether the international community chooses to observe or to avert its gaze, and in whether a generation of young Ethiopians can convert the emotional energy of a TikTok moment into the harder, slower, more dangerous work of political organisation. Mistresilasie Tamerat has earned the right to be taken seriously. Ethiopia has not yet earned the right to call what is happening a democracy. Between those two facts lies the entire story of this election.

The debate has begun. Whether it will be permitted to conclude on the people’s terms is the only question that matters.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. This column reflects political analysis and does not constitute endorsement of any party or candidate.

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By Professor Girma Berhanu

Editor’s Foreword

In this edition of Ethiopian Tribune, we are pleased to present a deeply researched and timely contribution from Professor Girma Berhanu of the University of Gothenburg, an essay that confronts one of the most sensitive and consequential questions in Ethiopia today: how language, names, and perceived ethnic affiliation have become informal instruments of power.

Drawing on years of observation and extensive personal accounts, the author argues that contemporary Ethiopia is witnessing the rise of what he terms ethnicized gatekeeping, a system in which the ability to speak Afaan Oromo or to bear an Oromo‑sounding name increasingly shapes access to public services, personal security, and institutional trust. As the essay notes, “just a few sentences in Oromogna can open doors to services and spare some individuals the unnecessary difficulties others face” a striking illustration of how linguistic markers now function as practical political capital.

Professor Berhanu situates these everyday encounters within a broader historical and structural analysis. He traces the shift from the TPLF/EPRDF era, when ethnic Tigrayan elites were widely perceived as dominant to the present, where Oromo political actors hold significant executive authority. Yet the central concern remains constant: the concentration of power within narrow elite networks, regardless of ethnicity, undermines the promise of equal citizenship.

The essay highlights several mechanisms through which these dynamics unfold:

• Instant assumptions of belonging, where language or names trigger trust or suspicion.
• Informal gatekeeping, where perceived identity influences bureaucratic treatment.
• Network effects, in which opportunities flow along ethnic or linguistic lines.
• Cumulative advantage, echoing the Matthew Effect, where early privileges compound over time.

These patterns, the author warns, risk entrenching a hierarchy of access that fragments national identity and corrodes institutional neutrality. As he writes, “the cumulative effect…is the perception, and in some cases the experience of differentiated citizenship.”

Importantly, the essay rejects any narrative of collective ethnic blame. It stresses that the issue is structural, not inherent to any group, noting that “Oromos as a whole should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of political elites who claim to act in their name.” Instead, the call is for accountability, institutional reform, and a renewed commitment to civic equality.

This is a sober, meticulously argued, and morally urgent piece one that challenges readers to confront uncomfortable realities while resisting the temptations of ethnic essentialism. It is, above all, a wake‑up call: a reminder that Ethiopia’s long‑term stability depends not on the dominance of any group, but on the creation of institutions that treat all citizens with fairness, dignity, and impartiality.

We invite our readers to engage with this essay in the spirit in which it is offered: critically, thoughtfully, and with an eye toward building a more just and inclusive Ethiopia.

_____________//____________

Ethnicity at the Gate: The Advantage of Sounding Oromo in Contemporary Ethiopia

[Ethnicized Gatekeeping: How Afaan Oromo and Oromo-Sounding Names structure Advantage]

By Professor Girma Berhanu  

Department of Education and Special Education (Professor) 

University of Gothenburg 

Box 300, SE 405 30 

Göteborg, Sweden 

Email: Girma.Berhanu@ped.gu.se 

Introduction

This essay argues that in contemporary Ethiopia, linguistic and onomastic markers—particularly the ability to speak Afaan Oromo or to bear an Oromo-sounding name—have been transformed into informal instruments of power. These markers increasingly structure access to public services, personal security, and institutional trust. In doing so, they institutionalize unequal forms of citizenship and erode the state’s claim to universal, neutral governance.

Over several decades, I have observed and documented personal accounts reflecting these dynamics. During the TPLF/EPRDF period, I published a number of articles examining ethnic stratification, internal colonialism, and systemic inequalities (see Berhanu, G. 2017. Ethiopia: Intellectual Genocide in the Making? The Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Ethnic Inequalities. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 4(13), 133–165). That body of work analyzed both macro-level structural domination and micro-level aggressions embedded in everyday interactions. At the time, I argued that Tigreans were disproportionately favored across political, economic, military, and cultural institutions, resulting in entrenched hierarchies of power and access.

My scholarly interest has consistently centered on how such hierarchies are reproduced in daily interactions—through language, naming practices, and informal gatekeeping mechanisms. By documenting and analyzing these patterns, I sought to contribute to a broader understanding of ethnicized governance and its consequences, with the aim of encouraging critical reflection, reform, and peaceful transformation

In this essay, structural racism—conceptualized here as ethnicized state hierarchy—is examined as a system through which historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal dynamics become normalized and legitimized. I argue that in contemporary Ethiopia, these dynamics increasingly advantage segments of the Oromo political elite while generating cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for other ethnic communities across the country. The result is a hierarchy of power and access in which preferential treatment, patronage networks, and informal gatekeeping practices shape citizenship in unequal ways.

The urgency of this situation cannot be overstated. Patterns of perceived inequity—manifested in favoritism, nepotism, land appropriation, unequal access to state resources, and uneven protection under the law—have contributed to deep mistrust among communities. An adequate response to injustice of this magnitude requires structural reform: genuine democratization, strengthened rule of law, and the development of independent civil society institutions capable of holding power accountable. Without these, grievances accumulate and cycles of instability persist.

The gravity of the matter recalls the moral clarity expressed by Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10, 1986. He warned: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” His broader message—that indifference in the face of injustice enables oppression—resonates strongly in contexts where human dignity, political participation, and equal citizenship are perceived to be under threat. For Ethiopia, the concern is that political neutrality in the face of systemic discrimination risks eroding the nation’s intellectual, civic, and moral foundations.

My central thesis is that the current Ethiopian regime appears, in practice, to reproduce ethnicized governance patterns that many citizens experience as discriminatory. Reports of inequitable distribution of public goods, selective enforcement of laws, suppression of dissent, and violent crackdowns on protest contribute to a volatile political environment. Mass demonstrations demanding basic human rights—long suppressed during the EPRDF era and continuing under the current administration—have repeatedly been met with coercion, excessive force, and sweeping restrictions on dissent. Such responses have deepened perceptions of entrenched authoritarianism, systemic democratic deficit, and the deliberate exclusion of citizens from meaningful political participation.

The federal system—introduced with the stated aim of managing diversity and mitigating ethnic conflict—has struggled to fulfill its integrative promise. While designed to institutionalize self-governance, critics argue that political and economic power remains highly centralized at the federal level. At the same time, ethnic favoritism, state partiality, and the absence of a unifying national vision have weakened trust in the system. Secessionist pressures and interethnic tensions continue to threaten long-term stability.

Historically, political dominance in Ethiopia shifted from a period in which the ruling coalition was widely perceived as dominated by ethnic Tigrayan elites to the present era, in which Oromo political actors hold significant executive authority. Yet the broader structural concern remains constant: concentration of power within narrow elite networks—regardless of ethnic identity—undermines inclusive governance.

As a scholar of education, I have paid particular attention to how these hierarchies manifest in daily institutional life. Language proficiency, personal names, and perceived ethnic affiliation can influence interactions within public institutions. Informal gatekeeping practices—at airports, passport offices, tax bureaus, and other state services—are widely reported and observed by citizens as mechanisms through which inclusion or exclusion is enacted. Whether through overt discrimination or subtle micro-level interactions, such practices erode confidence in the neutrality of public administration.

Economically, there is a widespread perception that wealth distribution has shifted unevenly, with benefits accruing disproportionately to politically connected elites. Although some development gains have reached multiple regions, critics argue that disparities remain large and persistent. These inequalities, whether empirically measured or socially perceived, shape political mobilization and collective grievance.

The broader question, therefore, is not solely which ethnic group holds power at a given historical moment, but whether Ethiopia can build institutions that transcend ethnic patronage systems altogether. Sustainable peace and democratic consolidation require impartial state institutions, transparent governance, equitable development policies, and protection of civil liberties for all citizens—regardless of ethnic identity, language, or region.

Only through structural transformation grounded in democratic accountability and civic equality can the underlying causes of recurring injustice be addressed. Without such reform, the cycle of elite domination, public discontent, and instability is likely to continue.

Ethnicized Gatekeeping: How Afaan Oromo and Oromo-Sounding Names Structure Advantage

The overall aim of this analysis is to document and examine how Afaan Oromo and onomastic identity function in practice as informal instruments of power within contemporary Ethiopia. Drawing on long-term observation, personal accounts, and institutional case illustrations, the study explores how linguistic proficiency and name-based ethnic identification appear to influence everyday interactions with state authorities and public institutions. In multiple reported contexts—such as passport services, taxation offices, public administration, airport procedures, and educational institutions—language use and name recognition are described as shaping the quality, speed, and tone of service delivery.

In this sense, Afaan Oromo proficiency and Oromo-sounding names may operate as forms of practical political capital. These markers can affect perceived belonging, institutional trust, and informal access to decision-makers. While the politicization of language and naming is not unique to Ethiopia, the current context renders these identity markers particularly salient in bureaucratic encounters. Patterns described by respondents suggest that language and naming sometimes function as informal criteria through which inclusion, advantage, or exclusion are enacted.

Rather than treating these dynamics as isolated incidents, this analysis situates them within broader institutional structures, where informal gatekeeping practices intersect with formal state authority. The cumulative effect of such practices, as reported across sectors, is the perception—and in some cases the experience—of differentiated citizenship, in which institutional neutrality is unevenly applied.

The material I used for this synthesis is enormous, particularly covering the eight years since Abiy took power. It is based on observations accumulated over this period.

People have shared story after story with me. It is disturbing how just a few sentences in Oromogna can open doors to services and spare some individuals the unnecessary difficulties others face when trying to complete errands in town that require official approval. One friend, who has only a rudimentary knowledge of Oromogna, managed to clear his matters at the airport simply by saying in Oromogna, “Am I done now?” An officer—who had previously asked him a rather absurd question about whether he had drones or drone-operating software on his computer, seemingly because his name did not sound Oromo—was clearly taken aback. Once my friend spoke a few words in Oromogna, everything was facilitated.

Even last week, several acquaintances from the Middle East, with names such as Fatima Abamecha, Birkisa Aba Jebel, Chaltu Aba Geru, and Zebiba Aba Jifar—along with surnames like Aba Gero or Aba Gidi—described how their names effectively functioned as “green cards” at the airport and in many offices in the city and regional towns where official signatures are required. They told me themselves how their names suddenly and unfairly facilitated their cases. These are thoughtful and decent people, and they are fully aware of the long-term consequences that such practices may have.

A friend whose grandfather’s name is Wako encountered difficulties in Addis while trying to process a case. An officer or clerk asked him whether he could speak Oromogna. He replied, “Even my father cannot speak it, because his father died at a very young age during the war. My father grew up in Addis with relatives.” The officer responded by questioning how he could carry such a “great” name and yet not speak Oromogna. The exchange led nowhere. The clerk became unnecessarily upset over what seemed to be a trivial matter. Eventually, my friend grew tired and left the office without completing his power-of-attorney errand.

Another troubling development is that some members of the elite with mixed ethnic heritage have begun adjusting or changing their names to sound Oromo. This appears to be an opportunistic and materially driven response to current circumstances. In the past, many Oromos changed their names in an effort to adopt more modern, Amhara, or Christian-sounding names, often voluntarily, as a way of integrating more easily into Ethiopia’s multiethnic landscape. This was partly because Amharic has long functioned as a lingua franca in Ethiopia. At the same time, it is difficult to deny that there has often been subtle social pressure to adopt the national language and to speak it without an accent.

An empirical question concerns how these dynamics play out in practice. Several mechanisms can be identified.

First, instant assumptions and trust. Speaking Afaan Oromo or having an Oromo-sounding name can function as an immediate marker of belonging to those perceived to be in power or to dominant local networks. In practical terms, this may translate into less suspicion at checkpoints, smoother interactions with local officials, and faster access to services or informal cooperation. The mechanism is not necessarily explicit or consciously articulated as “I will help you because you are Oromo.” Rather, it often operates at a subconscious level: “You are one of us.”

Second, gatekeeping and risk management. In a tense political climate, identity markers can become proxies for risk assessment. Accents or names associated with non-Oromo backgrounds may trigger additional scrutiny, as illustrated in the examples above. In response, some individuals strategically switch languages or adjust their names to minimize friction. In such contexts, silence or code-switching becomes a survival strategy. When linguistic adaptation is driven primarily by fear or precaution rather than convenience, it signals deeper structural imbalances.

Third, network effects. Power rarely operates only through formal hierarchies; it circulates through personal and professional networks. A substantial body of comparative research shows that employment opportunities, contracts, permits, and informal protection often move along ethnic or linguistic lines, particularly in environments where institutions are weak. If Oromo elites dominate specific institutions, Oromo identity can become a form of social capital. The structural consequence is that others may perceive themselves as excluded, regardless of qualifications. Over time, such perceptions can generate cumulative resentment across groups.

Fourth, the shift from historical marginalization to perceived dominance. The emotional intensity of the current situation is rooted in competing historical narratives. Many Oromos argue that they experienced longstanding marginalization within the Ethiopian state. Political change therefore raised expectations of justice and structural correction. However, emerging evidence and personal testimonies suggest that significant segments of the population now interpret current developments not as national reconciliation but as ethnic reversal. Whether or not the original marginalization narrative is universally accepted, the perception of new inequities has become politically consequential.

The broader risks of such dynamics are well documented in international scholarship. When language or names begin to influence perceptions of safety and opportunity, meritocratic principles erode, national identity weakens, and interpersonal trust declines. Citizens increasingly interpret one another through ethnic categories rather than shared civic belonging. Historically, societies that institutionalize identity as the primary channel of access to resources often move from diversity toward fragmentation.

The core issue, therefore, is not about Oromo individuals as such. It concerns institutional arrangements that reward ethnic identification over citizenship. Systems structured in this way tend, over time, to undermine even those who appear to benefit from them in the short term. In my previous article, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Apartheid in Ethiopia: Internal Colonialism and Uneven Effects of Political, Social, and Economic Development on a Regional Basis, I elaborated extensively on the long-term consequences of this unsustainable trajectory.

Persistent and Pervasive Inequality and the Concept of “Oromo Privilege”

The current system may be analytically described, by some observers, as resembling a form of ethnic stratification that can be interpreted through the lens of internal colonialism. Internal colonialism is a theoretical framework used to explain how persistent and pervasive inequality can be reproduced within a sovereign state, even in the absence of foreign rule. In such cases, domination is exercised internally through political control, institutional arrangements, and asymmetrical access to resources and representation. The “internal colony,” in this formulation, consists of regions or populations that experience structural disadvantage relative to those aligned with the dominant political center.

Within this framework, the notion of “Oromo privilege” has emerged as a contested analytical term. By analogy to “white privilege”—often defined as the ability of dominant racial groups to maintain elevated social status in ways that obscure structural inequality—“Oromo privilege” may be tentatively defined as a perceived set of institutional advantages disproportionately benefiting members of a politically dominant ethnic group, particularly its elites (see Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Harris, 1995; Lund, 2010). The term does not refer to inherent characteristics of individuals, but to systemic patterns of access, presumed belonging, informal protection, and social credibility that may accompany alignment with centers of power.

Critics argue that when a ruling political formation—such as the Prosperity Party and networks associated with Oromuma—is widely perceived as closely linked to a specific ethnic constituency, structural inequalities may be interpreted as ethnically structured. In such contexts, disparities in power, resources, prestige, and perceived social worth can become mapped onto ethnic categories. These dynamics are often reinforced not only through formal institutions but also through narratives, symbolic politics, and everyday administrative practices.

The purpose of this analysis is therefore partly to interrogate and deconstruct claims of ethnic hierarchy and cultural superiority. Historical experience demonstrates the dangers of institutionalizing such narratives. In Rwanda, for example, colonial racial classifications and constructed historical myths hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi, contributing to long-term polarization and, ultimately, catastrophic violence. The broader lesson drawn in comparative scholarship is that politicized narratives of inherent group superiority can entrench divisions that later become extremely difficult to reverse.

It is essential to emphasize that contemporary scientific consensus rejects biological claims of ethnic or racial hierarchy. As Crane (1994) argued, there is no credible genetic evidence supporting differences in intelligence between races; race itself is fundamentally a socially and politically constructed category rather than a coherent biological one. Similarly, Gould (1996) stressed that human diversity cannot be meaningfully organized into hierarchical biological classifications.

Applied to the Ethiopian context, the central issue is not the intrinsic qualities of any ethnic group, but the structural risks posed by political systems perceived to privilege identity over equal citizenship. When institutions are widely viewed as rewarding ethnic alignment rather than merit or civic belonging, social trust declines and zero-sum competition intensifies. Over time, such perceptions—regardless of how they are interpreted by different groups—can contribute to fragmentation rather than integration.

A sustainable path forward therefore requires moving beyond ethnicized narratives of superiority or victimhood and toward institutional reforms grounded in equal citizenship, transparency, and merit-based governance.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the So-Called Matthew Effect

It is widely recognized that individuals and groups who begin with structural advantages are more likely to excel across multiple domains. The so-called Matthew Effect—the idea that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”—is relevant in this regard. In Outliers (2008), Gladwell argues that success is rarely accidental; it is shaped by cumulative advantages such as family background, cultural legacies, institutional support, and differentiated opportunities. Processes such as selection, streaming, and unequal exposure to resources amplify early advantages over time.

A well-known example is the selection of youth hockey players in Canada. Sociologist Robert Merton described such dynamics as a self-fulfilling prophecy: an initially arbitrary or even mistaken assumption produces behaviors that eventually make the assumption appear true. In the Canadian hockey case, older children within the same age cohort are more likely to be selected as “talented,” simply because they are more physically mature. Once selected, they receive better coaching, more practice, and greater encouragement—advantages that reinforce and validate the original, flawed assessment. As Merton observed, the apparent confirmation of the original judgment perpetuates the initial error.

These mechanisms also operate at the group level, including along ethnic, gender, or national lines. One related psychological concept is stereotype threat: members of stigmatized groups may underperform in academic or professional settings partly because they internalize negative stereotypes. Anticipating poor performance generates stress, which in turn interferes with cognition and achievement. Research has shown that such effects can influence not only racial minorities in Western contexts, but also girls, persons with disabilities, and older individuals.

When low expectations become institutionalized—whether explicitly or implicitly—they can produce long-term structural consequences. Individuals who repeatedly encounter limited expectations may gradually adjust their aspirations downward. Over time, this process generates what appears to be evidence of group-based inferiority, when in fact it reflects unequal treatment and opportunity. These are subtle but powerful mechanisms through which inequality reproduces itself.

Closely related is what educators call the Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthal effect), the phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to improved performance. Conversely, the Golem effect refers to the decline in performance that follows from low expectations. Both are forms of self-fulfilling prophecy. When individuals are labeled as capable and are treated accordingly, they tend to internalize those positive expectations and perform better. When they are labeled as inferior or less deserving, performance often declines in line with those diminished expectations. These dynamics have been widely documented in educational and organizational settings.

In the Ethiopian context, these concepts offer a framework for examining how differential expectations placed on ordinary citizens—or on those perceived to belong to “the wrong” ethnic group—may shape long-term outcomes. If political elites, administrators, or economic actors implicitly assign lower competence or legitimacy to certain groups, the resulting disparities in access, encouragement, and institutional trust can translate into measurable differences in achievement.

The broader concern is that material advantages accumulated by politically connected elites may be converted into durable group-based inequalities, particularly in education and economic opportunity. When resources are unevenly distributed along identity lines, cumulative advantage effects intensify over time.

Comparative historical experience suggests that systems rooted in chauvinism or exclusive privilege—whether ethnic, regional, or ideological—ultimately undermine national cohesion. Sustainable governance requires moving away from identity-based entitlement and toward equal citizenship, institutional accountability, and merit-based opportunity. The long-term stability of any political community depends not on the short-term consolidation of power by particular elites, but on the creation of inclusive systems that all citizens perceive as fair.

Ethnic Identity and Ethnic Manipulation: Collective Guilt Versus Individual Responsibility

As noted earlier, this analysis does not attempt to detail specific allegations concerning material resource misuse, corruption, military conduct, or institutional malfunction. Rather, it seeks to interpret broader structural patterns. One such pattern may be described as the politicization of ethnic identity—manifested, for example, in forms of ethnicized gatekeeping, where language, names, and perceived affiliation shape access to opportunity and protection.

When political authority becomes closely associated with a particular ethnic narrative, concerns often arise about long-term national cohesion. Speculation about state restructuring, symbolic territorial claims, or ethnically framed political projects reflects deeper anxieties about belonging and sovereignty. Whether or not such fears are empirically substantiated in every respect, their presence in public discourse signals declining trust across communities.

Comparative political research shows that divide-and-rule strategies and discourses of group superiority frequently produce destabilizing consequences. Informal interviews with Ethiopian scholars and observers suggest that political rhetoric—both in official settings and in affiliated social media spaces—sometimes includes derogatory language about other ethnic communities. Such narratives, when normalized, risk entrenching perceptions of hierarchy and humiliation. Historical experience demonstrates that sustained dehumanizing rhetoric can create permissive environments for discrimination and violence.

The warning often attributed to George Santayana—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—is frequently invoked in such contexts. While rhetorically powerful, the deeper lesson is empirical: political systems that institutionalize humiliation, confiscatory settlements, or unchecked concentration of power often generate cycles of instability. This pattern has appeared across diverse historical settings.

The manipulation of ethnic identity has been studied extensively in political science and sociology. In the case of Rwanda, colonial administrations institutionalized rigid ethnic categories, reinforcing distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi that had previously been more fluid. Subsequent political transformations deepened these divisions rather than dissolving them, contributing to catastrophic violence in 1994. Scholars such as Scott Straus and others have argued that large-scale ethnic violence is frequently elite-driven. Fearon and Laitin (2000), for example, emphasize the strategic construction and mobilization of ethnic identities by elites, often in pursuit of intra-elite competition or political consolidation. In such scenarios, ordinary citizens may follow leaders out of fear, coercion, or localized grievances rather than deep ideological commitment.

This raises the difficult question of responsibility. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on post-war Germany, warned against conflating collective guilt with individual responsibility. She described the tendency of entire populations to claim generalized guilt—while specific perpetrators evade accountability—as a form of moral confusion. From this perspective, guilt properly belongs to those who commit, authorize, or directly enable wrongdoing. Broadly assigning guilt to entire communities risks obscuring individual accountability and may itself perpetuate injustice.

In the Ethiopian context, debates about collective responsibility are highly contentious. It is analytically problematic to attribute the actions of political parties, armed movements, or state institutions to all members of an ethnic community. Individuals differ in their political views, levels of influence, and degrees of freedom. Many may themselves live under conditions of fear or constraint. Moral and legal responsibility, in its strict sense, attaches to agents who act, command, or knowingly collaborate—not to those who merely share an identity label.

At the same time, political philosophers have long debated whether communities bear forms of moral responsibility distinct from legal guilt. While collective guilt as a legal category is generally rejected, moral responsibility may encompass expectations of dissent, civic engagement, or refusal to endorse harmful policies carried out in one’s name. The question is not whether an entire group is culpable, but whether members of a political community have ethical obligations to oppose injustice when possible.

Ultimately, sustainable peace requires rejecting both ethnic chauvinism and blanket ethnic blame. Systems that reward identity over citizenship undermine social trust, but so too do narratives that ascribe inherent guilt to entire communities. The challenge is to hold specific actors accountable while preserving the principle of equal moral worth among citizens.

As David Risser and others have observed, some conception of moral responsibility is constitutive of social life. Societies cannot function without norms that distinguish right from wrong and assign accountability accordingly. Yet extending these norms from individuals to groups remains philosophically complex and politically sensitive. A careful balance is therefore required: accountability without collective stigmatization; critique of power without ethnic essentialization; and reform grounded in shared citizenship rather than inherited blame.

Finally, this should be understood as a wake-up call—these are matters of real and growing concern for people living in Ethiopia and in the diaspora. At the same time, it is essential to state clearly that Oromos as a whole should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of political elites who claim to act in their name. Collective blame obscures individual agency and undermines the very principles of justice being invoked.

That said, the question of moral responsibility cannot be dismissed. As David Risser notes, the core elements of moral responsibility are deeply embedded in the fabric of every society; they are constitutive of social life itself. Without some shared understanding that individuals and communities are accountable for actions carried out in their name, no society can sustain moral coherence.

While there is broad—often implicit—agreement about how moral responsibility applies to individuals, extending this concept to groups remains philosophically contested. The challenge is to distinguish clearly between legal guilt, which must remain individual, and broader civic or moral responsibility, which may involve speaking out, dissenting, or refusing to legitimize injustice. Navigating this distinction carefully is essential if accountability is to be pursued without reinforcing cycles of collective accusation and ethnic polarization.

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