Editorial Foreword

on Professor Girma Berhanu’s

The Theatre of Power

Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation

Professor Girma Berhanu returns to our pages with an essay that begins, disarmingly, in insomnia — a documentary on Caligula watched to three in the morning, and the recognition, unbidden and by his own account unsettling, of a pattern he has spent the better part of a decade trying to name. Readers who have followed his contributions will know the shape of that preoccupation. In The Many Faces of Abiy Ahmed, written when much of the world was still applauding a freshly minted Nobel laureate, he recorded an early and rather lonely disquiet. What follows here is not a departure from that argument so much as its deepening through an older mirror.

The device is the historical analogy, and the Professor is scrupulous about its limits. He does not claim that a modern prime minister governing under a constitution, however contested, is a Roman autocrat reborn; he insists, in as many words, that the comparison is “an analytical analogy rather than an assertion of historical equivalence.” He is equally careful with the sources on which the Caligula portrait rests — Suetonius and Cassius Dio filtered through Winterling and through Barrett and Yardley — noting that the ancient record is itself a construction shaped by bias and literary convention. This is the intellectual honesty that distinguishes the piece from the cruder equivalences — Hitler, Nero, Idi Amin — that circulate freely on social media and explain very little. Berhanu has reached for those figures before and found them wanting; here he explains why Caligula, of all the tyrants on offer, fits the contour he is tracing: the personalisation of power, the leader as performance, the state remade in the image of a single man’s sense of destiny.

The argument’s spine is well sourced. Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project supplies the figures on the corridor developments; Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics furnishes the interpretive lens for a polity in which large populations are left exposed to violence and deprivation. Where the essay ventures onto contested ground it says so plainly. It treats the death of Simegnew Bekele — found shot in his car in July 2018 — as the established and still-unexplained fact it is, while flagging the persistent rumours about the Prime Minister’s family and his father’s death as speculation unsupported by credible evidence. We reproduce the piece in exactly that spirit: the distinction between the documented and the merely alleged is the Professor’s, and it is one this publication holds to.

The essay arrives at a pointed moment. Fighting has again broken out in the north, in fresh breach of arrangements meant to have ended it, and Berhanu writes with reports of a strike on a monastery still fresh — the human and cultural costs he catalogues are not historical but current. Yet his closing move is the one worth dwelling on. The real danger, he argues, is not the temperament of any single ruler but the system that permits personal rule to proceed unchecked: Caligula matters less as a “mad emperor” than as a case study in what follows when power is concentrated and accountability disappears. That is the durable thesis beneath the provocation, and it is why the analogy, for all its deliberate imperfection, earns its place.

Synopsis

In The Theatre of Power: Caligula, Abiy Ahmed, and the Politics of Personalisation, Professor Girma Berhanu uses the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula as an analytical lens through which to examine the premiership of Abiy Ahmed. Prompted by a late-night documentary, and drawing on the assessment of a senior former Ethiopian minister who independently arrives at the same comparison, Berhanu argues that the most revealing parallel between the two is neither cruelty nor extravagance in isolation but the personalisation of power — the substitution of a leader’s vision, image and sense of destiny for durable institutions.

He develops the case across several movements. The first traces the rise of personal rule, reading Medemer less as a governing programme than as an exercise in political branding, and identifying three competing personas — Abiy the Preacher, Abiy the Actor, and Abiy the Prince — whose contradictions expose the tension between democratic rhetoric and highly personalised authority. The second examines the marginalisation of rivals and the machinery of fear, pairing Caligula’s public spectacles of suffering with the quieter, institutionalised violence of the Ethiopian state, and treating the unexplained death of GERD engineer Simegnew Bekele as emblematic of a broader disappearance of independent figures from public life. The third turns to financial extravagance and symbolism, setting Caligula’s monumentalism beside the corridor projects, parks and urban demolitions catalogued in Tom Gardner’s The Abiy Project, and reading both as spectacle pursued while populations endure hardship.

Throughout, Berhanu is careful to bound his own argument: the comparison is an analogy, not an equivalence; the ancient sources are contested; and destructive leadership should not be reduced to armchair psychiatric diagnosis. Invoking Mbembe’s necropolitics, he closes on the essay’s central and most portable claim — that the lesson of Caligula is systemic rather than personal. The gravest risk lies not in any individual ruler’s temperament but in political orders that leave concentrated power without effective checks, a warning he reads as acutely relevant to Ethiopia’s present instability.

The views expressed are the author’s own. The Ethiopian Tribune publishes the essay as analysis and welcomes reasoned dissent.

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Perishing of Ethiopian Medical Doctors

Through the Lens of Achille Mbembe’s Theory of Necropolitics

by Professor Girma Berhanu · University of Gothenburg

Editor’s Foreword

Some essays are written to settle a question. This one is written to insist that a question be asked at all. Over the past three years, a quiet and terrible arithmetic has accumulated in the public domain: Ethiopian medical doctors disproportionately of Amhara origin dying in numbers their colleagues can no longer treat as coincidence. Some were shot by unidentified gunmen. Others died suddenly, of illnesses never publicly explained. In case after case, no independent investigation followed, and the families were left to bury both their dead and their questions.

Professor Girma Berhanu approaches this subject with the discipline it demands and the restraint it deserves. A scholar at the University of Gothenburg and a longstanding contributor to these pages, he refuses the easy consolations of certainty. Where others have speculated about vaccines, about coordinated campaigns, he draws a firm line between what is documented, what is alleged, and what remains unknown. He treats rumour as rumour and evidence as evidence, and asks the reader to do the same.

Yet this is not a detached study. Two years ago the author’s own cousin, an accomplished surgeon who had practised in Ethiopia, Greece, and Bulgaria was murdered while jogging near his home in Addis Ababa. His killers were never found. That loss sits beneath every measured sentence of this essay, and it is precisely the author’s refusal to let private grief overwhelm public reasoning that gives the piece its force.

To make sense of what he and his interviewees describe, Professor Berhanu reaches for Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics the theory that political power decides not only how populations are governed, but who is protected and who is left exposed to death. Read alongside Lauren Berlant’s notion of slow death, the framework lets him name something his informants feel but struggle to prove: the condition of healing others while living, in one physician’s chilling phrase, as a “dead man walking.”

The Tribune has followed the violence in the Amhara Region, the shrinking space for the country’s intellectuals, and the erosion of civilian protection across many issues. This essay belongs to that record. It does not deliver a verdict. It delivers something harder and more necessary a demand for the transparent, independent investigation that Ethiopia’s dead have so far been denied.

Synopsis

Drawing on interviews with five Ethiopian medical professionals at home and abroad, alongside public reporting and years of close observation, Professor Girma Berhanu examines a disturbing pattern: the deaths of Ethiopian doctors of Amhara origin killed in the region’s ongoing conflict, or dying in circumstances that were never explained.

The essay is careful about what it claims. It confirms that healthcare workers have been among the victims of violence: the World Health Organization condemned the fatal shooting of three health workers in North Mecha in April 2026; the outlet Ethio Focus has documented at least twenty-one health professionals killed or seriously injured in the Amhara Region; and Human Rights Watch has warned that such attacks may amount to war crimes. Individual cases anchor the abstraction — Getnet Misganaw, a health-centre head shot on official duty near “Sebat Minch”; Dr Tsegahun Sime, detained in Bahir Dar and reported dead hours later. But it stops short of asserting that all Amhara doctors are being systematically targeted for their ethnicity, insisting instead that motive and pattern remain open empirical questions.

Its analytical spine is Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the exercise of power not only through killing, but through the production of conditions in which certain populations are left chronically exposed to death. Through this lens the author argues that many Amhara medical professionals now practise their vocation in a state of persistent insecurity: healing others while fearing for themselves.

Professor Girma Berhanu situates the present within a longer history of exclusion from the dismissal of forty-two Addis Ababa University professors in the early 1990s to the recurring vulnerability of the Amhara educated class and draws on comparative atrocity studies, which show that educated elites are often among the first to be targeted. He advances no single conspiracy. He argues, rather, that the convergence of history, testimony, and documented harm is grave enough to demand what has so far been withheld: transparent, independent investigation.

Professor Berhanu’s complete essay follows below.

why-are-ethiopian-medical-doctors-perishing-2.docx

የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን  ·  የአርታኢ ማስታወሻ

የደም ዋጋ የተከፈለበት የአማራ ሕዝብ የሕልውና ትግል እና «ጽምዶ»፦ ወጥመድ ወይስ ስትራቴጂያዊ አጋርነት?

የአብይ አህመድ የብልፅግና አገዛዝ አስከፊነት ለሕወሓት የጥፋት ወጥመድ እጅ የመስጫ ምክንያት ይሆናልን?

የፖለቲካና ስትራቴጂያዊ ጥናት  ·  በዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ

የአርታኢ መቅድም

ባለፉት ወራት «ጽምዶ» የሚለው ስያሜ በኢትዮጵያ የፖለቲካ መድረክ ውስጥ ከተራ ቃል አልፎ የከረረ የስትራቴጂ ክርክር ማዕከል ሆኗል። የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን የአፍሪካ ቀንድን የኃይል አሰላለፍ — የተፋላሚ ኃይሎችን ጥምረት፣ የውጭ ተዋንያንን ሚና፣ እንዲሁም ይህ አሰላለፍ በአማራ ፖለቲካ ውስጥ የፈጠረውን ውዝግብና መከፋፈል — በተከታታይ ሲዘግብ ቆይቷል። በዚህ ዕትም የምናቀርበው የዶ/ር ሶስና ታደሰ ጥናታዊ ጽሑፍ ያንን ውይይት ወደ ማዕከሉ ወስዶ፣ በፋኖ፣ በሕወሓት (TDF) እና በኦነግ ሸኔ (OLA) መካከል ሊመሠረት ይችላል ተብሎ የሚነገርለትን ጥምረት ከአማራ ሕዝብ የሕልውና ጥቅም አንጻር በጥልቀት ይመረምራል።

ጸሐፊዋ ጥያቄውን በስሜት ሳይሆን በመዋቅራዊና በሞራላዊ ትንተና ለመመለስ ይሞክራሉ፦ ይህ የቀረበው ጥምረት «ስትራቴጂያዊ አጋርነት» ነው ወይስ በታሪክ ቁስል፣ በርስትና በማንነት ጥያቄ፣ እንዲሁም በተጣረሱ የፖለቲካ ራእዮች ላይ የቆመ «ወጥመድ»? በ«እባብና ጅብ» ምሳሌ የተቀነባበረው የሐሰት አማራጭ (False Dichotomy) ፍተሻ እና በጽሑፉ ውስጥ የተሰነጠሩት አምስቱ «ሞጋች ጥያቄዎች» የክርክሩን ጫፎች ወደ አንባቢው በቀጥታ ያቀርባሉ።

አንድ ሰው ከጀርባህ ስላለው ተናዳፊ እባብ ቢያስጠነቅቅህ፣ ከፊትህ ወዳለው ጅብ እየሳበህ ነው ማለት ነው?
— ከጥናቱ

የ ኢትዮዽያን ትሪቢዩን ይህን ጽሑፍ ለሕያውና ለተከራካሪ ውይይት እንደ አንድ ጠንካራ አስተዋጽኦ አድርጎ ያቀርበዋል። በጽሑፉ ውስጥ የተንጸባረቁት አቋሞችና ድምዳሜዎች የጸሐፊዋ እንጂ የዝግጅት ክፍሉ የተቋም አቋም አይደሉም፤ ርዕሰ ጉዳዩ ስሱና አከራካሪ እንደመሆኑ፣ ከዚህ የተለየ ሐሳብ ያላቸው ወገኖችም ምላሽ እንዲያቀርቡ በሩ ክፍት ነው።

አኅጽሮተ-ጽሑፍ

ጽሑፉ የሚነሳበት ማዕከላዊ ሙግት ግልጽ ነው፦ ከአማራ ሕዝብ ጥቅምና ሕልውና አኳያ በፋኖ፣ በሕወሓት እና በኦነግ ሸኔ መካከል የሚታሰበው ጥምረት መዋቅራዊና ሞራላዊ «የሕልውና ቅራኔ» ነው። ጸሐፊዋ ለዚህ ድምዳሜ አምስት መሠረታዊ ምክንያቶችን ያስቀምጣሉ፦ በአማራ ንጹሐን ላይ የተፈጸሙ ጭፍጨፋዎችን ያለ ፍትሕ የሚያልፍ የሰማዕታት ደም ክህደት፣ የወልቃይትና የራያ የርስትና የማንነት ጥያቄ፣ በ«ኦሮሚያ ሪፐብሊክ» እና በ«ታላቋ ትግራይ» ራእዮች ላይ የቆመ የተጣረሰ የፖለቲካ ግብ፣ የሕዝባዊ ቅቡልነት መጥፋት፣ እንዲሁም ፋኖ እንደ መሣሪያ ተጠቅሞ የመጣል አደጋ።

በክፍል አንድ ጸሐፊዋ የቀውሱን ሥርወ-መንስኤ ወደ ኋላ ይመልሱታል፤ ዛሬ በአማራ ሕዝብና በኦርቶዶክስ ተዋሕዶ ላይ የተከፈተውን ጦርነት የደደቢት ማንፌስቶ ቀጥተኛ ፍሬና የብልፅግና አገዛዝ «የዘር ውላጅ» አድርገው ይተነትናሉ። በዚሁ ክፍል «ጽምዶ»ን የሕወሓት፣ የኤርትራና የሱዳን ኃይሎች ጥምረት እንደሆነ በማስቀመጥ የእያንዳንዱን ተዋናይ ድብቅ ስትራቴጂያዊ ፍላጎት — የኤርትራን የጦር ሜዳ ወደ ኢትዮጵያ የመግፋት ስሌት፣ የሱዳንን የአልፋሽጋ ጥያቄ፣ የሕወሓትን የሁመራ ኮሪደርና «ታላቋ ትግራይ» ዕቅድ — ይዘረዝራሉ፤ ፋኖ በ«አርሚ 70» ልክ በቅጥረኝነት ሊሰለፍ ይችላል የሚል ስጋትም ያነሳሉ።

ክፍል ሁለት ጥምረቱን ለፋኖ የተዘጋጀ «የባርነት ካምፕ» በማለት ይሞግታል፤ የሕወሓት ያልተለወጠ የበላይነት አቋም በቃል አቀባዩና በአመራሯ ፈትለወርቅ (ሞንጆሪኖ) ንግግሮች ተጠቅሶ፣ ፋኖ የጥቂት አመራሮች የግል ንብረት ሳይሆን ሕዝባዊ መሠረት ያለው የነፃነት ታጋይ መሆኑ ይሰመርበታል። ክፍል ሦስት ደግሞ አራት የመፍትሔ አቅጣጫዎችን ያቀርባል፦ ሁለቱን ጠላቶች እኩል የመመከት «የድርብ መከላከል» (Double Defense) ስትራቴጂ፣ የፖለቲካና የወታደራዊ ነፃነትን በራስ አቅም ማረጋገጥ፣ የጎንደር ፋኖን የአቋም መግለጫ በአርአያነት በመጥቀስ መርህ-ተኮር የመሬት ላይ አንድነትን መፍጠር፣ እንዲሁም የሕዝቡ የሕልውና፣ የርስትና የፍትሕ ጥያቄዎች ሙሉ በሙሉ ሲቀበሉ ብቻ የሚደረግ የማይደራደር ዲፕሎማሲ።

በማጠቃለያው ጸሐፊዋ የብልፅግና አገዛዝ አስከፊነት ለሕወሓት ወጥመድ እጅ የመስጫ ምክንያት ሊሆን አይችልም ይላሉ፤ «ብቻችንን ከቆምን እንሰጥማለን» የሚለውን ትረካ የፍርሃት ፕሮፖጋንዳ አድርገው ውድቅ በማድረግ፣ የአማራ ሕዝብ አሸናፊ የሚሆነው አንዱን በዳይ በሌላው ለመተካት ሲሮጥ ሳይሆን በራሱ የእውነትና የፍትሕ ጥያቄ፣ በራሱ መርህና ድርጅታዊ ጥንካሬ ላይ ጸንቶ ሲቆም ብቻ ነው ሲሉ ይደመድማሉ።

የኢትዮጵያ ትሪቢዩን  ·  ነጻ የፖለቲካ፣ የጂኦ-ፖለቲካና የተጠያቂነት ጋዜጠኝነት  ·  ከ2012 ጀምሮ

The Alms and the Algorithm

Eshetu Melesse’s Donkey Tube promises cultural preservation and charity, but its selective solidarity, child-centric content, and emotive fundraising expose the fault lines of influencer philanthropy in the Horn of Africa.

By Leeshan Kuratey

The digital age has fundamentally redrawn the boundaries of cultural production, public philanthropy, and ethno-religious politics in the Horn of Africa, transforming independent media channels into high-stakes ideological battlegrounds. Among the most prominent and fiercely contested phenomena in this space is Donkey Tube, a digital enterprise spearheaded by the Ethiopian comedian, media entrepreneur, and public personality Eshetu Melesse. Commanding an audience of millions across both domestic and diaspora populations, Donkey Tube has branded itself as a sanctuary of positive social impact, cultural preservation, and philanthropic outreach. Yet beneath its polished veneer of communal solidarity and charitable restoration lies a complex, polarising enterprise. For journalists, academics, and regional observers alike, it offers a vital case study of the modern creator economy, illuminating how charismatic digital populism intersects with volatile ethnic politics, opaque financial mechanics, and the fraught ethics of influencer-driven philanthropy.

To grasp the polarising nature of Donkey Tube, one must first examine its foundational narrative, which artfully blends religious traditionalism with the emotive mechanics of parasocial leadership.

Throughout its years of operation, the channel has carved out a distinct niche by positioning itself in deliberate contrast to the sensationalised, scandal-driven digital media landscape. While many contemporary platforms thrive on rapid-fire gossip, ethnic vitriol, and domestic disputes to capture algorithmic traction, Donkey Tube has historically projected an image of careful curation. Its programming frequently spotlights traditional values, heritage sites, the ancient monasteries of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC), and uplifting human-interest profiles. By framing its output around cultural preservation and moral edification, the channel has cultivated profound trust particularly among the Ethiopian diaspora in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, who regard the platform as a rare cultural bridge to their homeland.

This carefully curated benevolence has, however, increasingly invited rigorous scrutiny, particularly over its selective engagement with religious and ethnic politics. Critics among them community intellectuals, regional analysts, and independent commentators, argue that Donkey Tube’s championing of the EOTC is neither politically neutral nor representative of Ethiopia’s broader religious landscape. The core charge is one of selective solidarity: detractors assert that the platform predominantly presents EOTC institutions and communities as the passive beneficiaries of its philanthropic drives, while remaining conspicuously silent on or actively downplaying the severe security crises, mass violence, and systematic church destructions reported in regions such as Oromia.

The core charge is one of selective solidarity.

This selective framing has led the channel’s harshest critics to charge that its editorial stance aligns, however inadvertently, with the prevailing narratives of the ruling administration functioning as a cultural conduit that softens the edges of deep-seated ethnic tension.

In a political climate where the state and rival ethno-nationalist factions are locked in fierce struggles over cultural dominance and institutional control, media figures who maintain cosy relationships with power invariably attract suspicion. Sceptics argue that, by declining to confront the political establishment over the targeted persecution of religious communities, Donkey Tube projects an illusion of peace and institutional harmony that contradicts the grim realities on the ground. Its frequent showcases of large-scale church restorations and material aid distributions are thus viewed by detractors not as acts of pure charity, but as carefully managed public-relations exercises designed to project state-sanctioned stability while bypassing systemic political grievance.

The ethical complexities of the channel’s content strategy are further intensified by its heavy reliance on child-centric programming most notably through high-profile segments such as “Dink Ljoch” which has provoked intense debate over child exploitation and selective protectionism.

Media watchdogs have repeatedly accused the platform of leveraging children to secure rapid fame, emotional engagement, and considerable financial gain through ethically ambiguous means. The criticism sharpens when set against the creator’s own public assertions: Melesse has frequently stated that he strictly shields his immediate family, forbidding his own children from watching social media or state broadcasts in order to protect them from digital exposure and psychological harm. Observers detect a profound double standard in a public figure who insulates his biological offspring from the digital sphere while featuring other, often less fortunate children on camera for sensational content, algorithmic reach, and monetisation. The dynamic raises uncomfortable questions about whether children from marginalised backgrounds are being used as emotional currency to drive views, donations, and brand equity under the guise of wholesome entertainment.

This ideological tension is compounded by the intricate financial ecosystem that sustains large-scale digital operations in a developing economy under acute macroeconomic strain. Running an enterprise like Donkey Tube extends far beyond the romanticised image of a lone creator filming in a studio; it functions as a corporate media entity with substantial physical infrastructure, production overheads, and a sizeable workforce. When Melesse recently took to his channel to deliver an emotionally charged broadcast warning of an impending financial crisis claiming that mounting economic pressures could force the abrupt dismissal of dozens of staff he laid bare the precarious fragility of the digital creator model in East Africa.

The public framing of this financial pinch as a near-bankruptcy crisis illustrates the psychological tactics often deployed in digital fundraising, where creators marshal high-stakes emotional appeals to mobilise community support.

From a strict legal and corporate standpoint, announcements of this kind do not equate to formal, court-ordered insolvency in the Western regulatory sense. Rather, they reflect acute cash-flow volatility driven by hyperinflation, severe currency devaluation, and shifting digital distribution platforms. As Melesse explained, while Donkey Tube produces elaborate, multi-day documentary projects demanding weeks of logistical planning, travel, and editorial oversight, the return from conventional monetisation avenues remains deeply uneven. The dominance of rival platforms such as TikTok, where third-party users routinely re-upload Donkey Tube’s high-performing content without authorisation diverts millions of views from the official channel, depriving the enterprise of vital advertising revenue while inflating its digital footprint elsewhere. And because standard YouTube Partner Programme payouts face regional complications and low domestic advertiser demand within Ethiopia, the channel’s primary financial engine relies heavily on international diaspora viewers and external funding.

To bridge this widening revenue gap, Donkey Tube has leaned aggressively into modern crowdfunding, urging its loyal diaspora base to take up YouTube Channel Memberships and direct micro-contributions. Crowdfunding is an established and legitimate practice within the global creator economy, but its implementation within highly polarised diasporic communities carries profound ethical dimensions. When financial appeals are inextricably bound to religious devotion, historical preservation, and emotional guilt such as urging viewers to subscribe lest vulnerable church mothers and ancient monasteries be abandoned the boundary between transparent, community-backed patronage and manipulative emotional leverage begins to blur. Donors are frequently left wondering whether their hard-earned money genuinely sustains independent cultural preservation, or underwrites an over-extended media empire with opaque internal accounting.

The controversy also extends into the murkier territory of commercial sponsorship, brand partnership, and the blurred line between editorial independence and covert promotional influence.

Critics have repeatedly questioned the vetting behind the commercial campaigns hosted or endorsed by high-profile influencers. In an environment where digital creators wield immense persuasive power over impressionable youth, the uncritical promotion of commercial entities, lifestyle products, or financial services can expose followers to consumer exploitation. Although Donkey Tube has publicly stressed its caution over alcohol advertising and inappropriate apparel, the wider influencer ecosystem in the region often operates without robust consumer-protection safeguards or transparent disclosure guidelines. When commercial transactions are cloaked in an aura of spiritual authority and philanthropic virtue, audiences are ill-equipped to discern where genuine civic duty ends and profit-driven promotion begins.

Where genuine civic duty ends and profit-driven promotion begins.

This raises broader questions about the societal implications of unchecked digital influence, particularly when popular media figures stray into dispensing casual advice, health narratives, or unverified educational initiatives. In recent discourse, the intersection of digital personalities and emerging technologies localised artificial-intelligence tutorials or dramatised software interactions among them has exposed a troubling drift toward sensationalism. When influencers take standard, automated safety prompts from AI chatbots and recast them as dramatic, life-or-death health scares to drive engagement, or inadvertently steer panicked followers toward expensive private clinics under the guise of digital authority, they risk inflicting tangible psychological and financial harm on vulnerable households. The ethical breach is considerable: whereas software applications operate on neutral algorithmic parameters designed to err on the side of caution, human creators with vast parasocial followings possess the agency and bear the responsibility to contextualise information accurately rather than exploit fear for clickbait metrics.

Ultimately, Donkey Tube and its creator defy simple categorisation, existing as a multi-layered paradox within the contemporary digital landscape. On one hand, the channel represents a remarkable indigenous media success story, harnessing modern technology to celebrate cultural heritage, document ancient religious history, and channel vital material aid to neglected rural communities. On the other, it exemplifies the inherent dangers of digital populism, in which immense soft power concentrated in a single charismatic personality operates largely beyond the reach of journalistic accountability, regulatory oversight, or transparent financial governance. As media scholars and regional journalists continue to trace the shifting paradigms of digital influence in the Horn of Africa, Donkey Tube endures as a monument to the complexities of the information age a space where genuine humanitarian impulse, commercial ambition, and ethno-religious polarisation are inextricably, and precariously, intertwined.

Forty-Three Kilometres

On the birthday of the Emperor, the journey worth remembering is not one of his own. It is his mother’s — made before sunrise, on muleback, through the forest between Harar and Ejersa Goro.

The road from Harar to Ejersa Goro is forty-three kilometres. Today it is nothing. In the summer of 1892 it was a night’s hard travelling through dense forest, and a heavily pregnant woman made it on the back of a mule, surrounded by an entourage that had assembled for her from as far away as Wollo.

Everything that followed — Geneva, Kingston, Washington, Madrid, Persepolis; the aircraft and the collars and the golden keys of foreign cities — begins on that road. It is worth starting there, because the world remembers the son’s arrivals in other people’s countries and has largely forgotten the one journey that made them possible.

The counting of the losses

Woizero Yeshimebet Ali Abba Jifar was the daughter of Dejazmach Ali Abba Jifar of Wollo. She had married Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, governor of Harar, cousin to Emperor Menelik II and a man who would within four years be among the architects of the victory at Adwa. She had also, by the record that survives, endured eight pregnancies that did not give her a living child.

That number is not a footnote. It is the whole meaning of the song the women griots sang when at last a healthy boy was born:

Read against the eight losses, the couplet stops being flattery and becomes arithmetic. The griots were not saying that one child of this woman outweighed fifty children of another. They were saying that this woman had counted to eight in grief, and that the ninth had answered all of it. It is one of the most economical things ever said about her, and it was said by women, in public, on the day.

Why Ejersa Goro at all? Because Harar — garrison town, seat of government, thick with the business of a province — was no place to bring a ninth pregnancy after eight sorrows. The choice was for air and quiet and a change of mood. Waiting there was the wife of Fitawrari Nadawe, commander-in-chief of Ras Makonnen’s army, who had offered her compound as a lying-in house and had assembled midwives of her own.

And the travelling party was itself an argument. Yeshimebet’s sisters and their friends had come down in numbers from Wollo to attend her. Wise women were selected for the journey, among them, by the memory held in the family, Woizero Desta — mother of Dr Malaku Bayen, who would grow up to become the Emperor’s physician and his envoy to Black America, the man who carried Ethiopia’s cause to Harlem when Italy invaded. The best-known midwives available were brought. At five in the morning, before light, Ras Makonnen’s soldiers went ahead to open the road — men who within four years would be counted heroes of Adwa, Amba Alagi and Mekele, and who on this night were escorting a woman to her confinement.

She rode in the middle of all of it. They went left of her, right of her, and behind her, through the trees, in the dark.

Kidane Mehret

The child was born on Hamle 16, 1884 in the Ethiopian calendar — Saturday, 23 July 1892. It was the day of Kidane Mehret, the Covenant of Mercy, and the coincidence was not treated as one. As emperors and empresses took patron saints, so this boy took Our Lady of the Covenant of Mercy, and kept her: the church he would later raise inside his own palace in Addis Ababa carried her name.

They buried the umbilical cord, as is done, and over the place where it was buried they built a church, and the church is St Kidane Mehret at Ejersa Goro. There is something exact in that. The cord is the first thing severed and the first thing returned to the ground; to build over it is to say that a person begins at a particular point on the earth and that the point can be marked. Whatever else the man became — Ras Tafari, Regent, Negusä Nägäst, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and to millions across the Atlantic something more than any of those — he began in a compound at Ejersa Goro, on a Saturday, at a place now under a church floor.

Two years later, or thereabouts, Yeshimebet was dead. She had made her journey, borne her ninth child, and did not live to watch him grow. Her mother and her sister Woizero Mammit raised him. The Wollo women who had come down the forest road to help her deliver stayed to bring up her son.

The arrivals

What that boy then did with the world was, in the most literal sense, to travel it.

In June 1936 he arrived in Geneva, at the League of Nations, a sovereign whose country had been overrun with aircraft and mustard gas, and told an assembly that would not lift a finger that the fate of a small nation that day would be the fate of the great nations tomorrow. He was correct within three years. The speech did not save Ethiopia. It made him, for a generation of anti-fascists on every continent, something close to a living conscience — and it put the phrase collective security into the mouth of a man whom Europe had assumed would be its object rather than its author.

From Geneva he went into exile, and the country that took him in was the one that had failed him. He reached London in June 1936, and the British government found his presence in the capital politically embarrassing — appeasement was in the air, and a dispossessed African emperor in Knightsbridge was an inconvenient reminder of what the democracies had declined to do. So he went west, to Bath, drawn there for rest and, it has been suggested, for treatment of the mustard gas burns on his hands. Consider that. The sovereign who had stood at Geneva and told Europe what chemical weapons do to a people was carrying the evidence on his own skin.

In September 1936 he bought Fairfield House, an Italianate villa on Kelston Road, for three and a half thousand pounds, and moved his family in that October — an Ethiopian court in exile in a Roman city, keeping the fight for Ethiopian independence alive from a suburb of Somerset, with Sylvia Pankhurst among his allies and a grey horse called Poppy in the grounds. He lived there until Ethiopia was liberated and he went home in 1941.

In May 1954 he arrived in Washington and addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, then crossed the country — Princeton, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans — in a progress no African head of state had made before. He returned in 1963, and again in 1967, and again in 1969, and to the United Nations at twenty-five in 1970, and a last time in 1973.

On 21 April 1966 he arrived in Kingston, and something occurred for which protocol had no provision. The crowd that met the aircraft was not a crowd of officials. He gave the movement’s elders gold medallions bearing the Ethiopian seal, the only such gift of the visit; Rita Marley saw him pass in the motorcade and her life changed course. Ethiopians may make of Rastafari what they will — the Emperor himself was an Orthodox Christian to the end and never claimed what was claimed of him — but the fact stands that a man born at Ejersa Goro became, in the Caribbean, the visible sign that Africa had never been conquered. Jamaica keeps the day. They call it Grounation.

And in 1971, at seventy-nine, he made two journeys that between them say everything about what the throne had become. In May he arrived in Madrid, where General Franco met him at Barajas with full military honours, the mayor gave him the golden keys of the city, and the two of them exchanged their countries’ highest collars — the anti-fascist icon of 1936 decorated by the last surviving victor of Europe’s fascist wars, a thing neither man mentioned. In October he arrived at Persepolis for the Shah’s celebration of twenty-five centuries of Persian monarchy, and there, by protocol, he was the guest of honour: the senior sovereign in a tent city full of kings. Two of the oldest continuous monarchies on earth stood together in the desert. Neither survived the decade.

The Garter

But there is one more journey, and it is the one that closes the circle with Britain.

In October 1954 he came back — not as a refugee this time but as a head of state, the second guest of Elizabeth II’s new reign. He sailed from Malta to Portsmouth aboard HMS Gambia with his son the Duke of Harar, was received at Victoria Station by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and was carried by carriage procession to Buckingham Palace, where he stayed. And there the Queen conferred on him the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

It is worth being exact about what that is, because it is easily said and rarely understood. The Garter is the senior order of chivalry in the British system, founded in the fourteenth century, in the personal gift of the sovereign alone, its foreign members admitted under the statutes’ quaint title of Stranger Knights. There is nothing higher for Britain to give. He was later installed at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He gave in return the chain of the Order of the Seal of Solomon to the Queen and the Order of the Queen of Sheba to the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Duke of Harar was made a knight grand cross of the Royal Victorian Order.

Then, on 18 October, he went back to Bath. The city gave him the Freedom — the highest honour in its power — and paraded him through streets where people had known him as a neighbour; and he slept again at Fairfield House, refurbished for the occasion, with local people gathered at the gates to cheer a man they had last seen as an exile. Four years later, in 1958, he gave the house away. He handed the freehold to the Corporation of Bath in gratitude for the welcome the city had shown him, on condition that it serve as a home for old people. It did precisely that for thirty-five years, and the house stands today as a museum to him and a gathering place for Bath’s elderly African-Caribbean community. Of all the monuments raised to Haile Selassie anywhere in the world, that one — a shelter for the aged, given in thanks — may be the one that would have pleased Ejersa Goro most.

He returned to Britain for the last time in 1972, and he went to Windsor, to St George’s Chapel, for a ceremony of the Order of the Garter. He had been a refugee in that country and a knight of its highest order, and at the end he went back to the chapel where they had installed him. It was among the last foreign journeys of his reign.

Two years later the throne was gone. He was deposed in 1974 amid revolution and the exposure of famine, held in his own palace, and died there in August 1975. The Tribune does not print hagiography, and the argument over what the last years of that reign cost Ethiopians is a real argument that Ethiopians are still having. But the argument belongs to other days. This one belongs to the birth.

The return

Fifteen years ago a company gathered at Ejersa Goro, at the church of St Kidane Mehret built over the buried cord, to keep the birthday where it happened: Crown Prince Zera Yacob; Abuna Yared; the late Ato Abera Moltot of the Emperor Haile Selassie Memorial Foundation; Leke Khant Abate of the Ethiopian Patriots’ Association; and Rastafarians who had come, as Rastafarians do, a very long way.

They had all, in their fashion, travelled the forty-three kilometres.

Because that is the shape of it. The mother made one journey and it was short and it nearly killed her and she died soon after. The son made a hundred journeys and was received by presidents, emperors, dictators and congresses on four continents, was given the keys of foreign cities and the freedom of an English one, and was made a knight of the oldest order of chivalry in Europe by a queen whose government had once wished him quietly out of London — and every one of those receptions was in some sense a receipt issued against her forty-three kilometres. Modern Ethiopia, African unity, the idea that international morality might be something a small nation could demand rather than merely hope for, the craft of diplomacy as Africa’s instrument and not only Europe’s — all of it can be argued back, along the road, through the forest, to a woman on a mule who had already buried eight hopes and was riding through the dark with the ninth.

Happy birthday, Your Majesty. And may the memory of Woizero Yeshimebet Ali be a blessing.

Editorial Foreword

The Spear We Helped to Forge

A foreword to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay on South Africa’s anti-immigrant violence and the shared history that makes it unbearable to watch.

There are betrayals that wound precisely because of what came before them. When a stranger turns on you, the injury is simple. When someone you once armed and sheltered does, the injury carries the whole weight of the history you shared. It is this second, heavier grief that runs beneath Professor Girma Berhanu’s latest essay for this newspaper, and it is why we commend it to our readers with particular care.

The Professor of the University of Gothenburg, and a contributor whose scholarship has enriched these pages across many months, on subjects ranging from the Amhara question to the health of Ethiopian democracy turns here to the mob violence that has once more engulfed African migrants in South Africa. Ethiopians have been among the dead. He asks us to hold two facts in the same hand: that our compatriots are being burned, beaten and driven from their livelihoods; and that it was Ethiopia, six decades ago, that helped teach the men of Umkhonto we Sizwe how to fight.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a matter of record one this newspaper has itself reported at first hand, through the testimony of an Ethiopian officer who trained fighters of the Spear of the Nation for the armed struggle. When Professor Berhanu describes the young Nelson Mandela receiving military instruction on Ethiopian soil in 1962, he is naming a debt that South Africa’s own liberation history acknowledges. The essay’s force lies in the distance between that debt and the present cruelty.

Readers will know that the Tribune has devoted sustained coverage to this crisis from “Pass Freely and Without Hindrance” to “The Deadline and the Debt” and our analysis of the countermeasures now open to African states. Professor Berhanu widens the frame from policy to conscience. He is not content to catalogue the violence; he asks what African solidarity was ever for, if it dissolves the moment the shooting stops and the invoices arrive.

We are grateful, as ever, for his continued generosity to our readership, and proud to carry his voice. A synopsis follows; the essay may be read in full via the link below.

— The Editors, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Professor Berhanu builds his essay in three movements.

He opens on the violence itself: the recurring waves of mob attacks on foreign African nationals, justified in the language of stolen jobs and illegal residence, and the human wreckage they leave behind the dead, the looted shops, the displaced families. He notes that some governments, Nigeria among them, have moved to evacuate their citizens and even to document their losses for future compensation, while Ethiopia, he argues, has too often stood by. From this he draws the essay’s two organising questions: what concrete measures could end the violence, and how might African states and institutions be mobilised to hold South Africa to account?

The central section is a work of historical retrieval. Here he sets out Ethiopia’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle: the military training of the ANC’s armed wing, including Mandela’s own instruction in 1962; the diplomatic and political campaigning against the apartheid regime; the seat of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; the moral leadership of Emperor Haile Selassie; and the deeper symbolism of Adwa in 1896 and of an Ethiopia that never fell. Solidarity, he reminds us, was not a slogan but a policy paid for in scarce resources and, elsewhere on the continent, in lives.

He then turns to the anatomy of the violence in present-day South Africa: the structural drivers of unemployment, inequality and poverty; the scapegoating of migrants against the weight of the evidence; and government responses he judges long on condemnation and enforcement yet short on prevention. Most pointedly, he sets out the paradox that animates the piece that a wealthy minority, insulated by private security and now courted for expedited asylum abroad, escapes the street-level fury that instead falls upon the poorest and least protected. Civil society, he argues, must carry much of the work that policing alone cannot.

The essay closes where it began with Ethiopia, and with a charge against the Ethiopian state, whose apparent indifference to its citizens abroad Professor Berhanu names as a second tragedy laid atop the first. The victims, he insists, deserve justice; their families deserve compassion; and Africa deserves better than a future in which those who once stood together against oppression are divided by fear.

The Ethiopian Tribune

Comment · Comparative Analysis

The Language of the Palace

The Prime Minister has found his ideal witness — a traveller who films the wilderness and now sits in the palace. China’s Golden Week shows what the performance leaves out.

By Leeshan Kuratey

There is a moment, near the end of the Prime Minister’s tourism interview with NBC, when the performance briefly shows its wiring. He has spent the better part of an hour being expansive — five economic pillars, a global tourism market he sizes at $12.6 trillion, Bale and Jimma rendered as undiscovered Edens — and then, asked for a closing message, he arrives at the Ethiopian taxi driver. The driver, he complains, collects a passenger at Bole and at once begins reciting woes: there is no work, times are hard, we are suffering. He does this, the Prime Minister says, to manufacture sympathy and extract a small tip, and so effectively that by the time the visitor reaches the hotel he will not leave his room. Then comes the tell. In other countries, Abiy observes admiringly, the very route along which a tourist is driven is arranged so that he does not see anything ugly.

Hold that sentence. It is the most honest thing said in the interview, and its subject is not the taxi driver.

But before we weigh what the Prime Minister says, it is worth looking at whom he chose to say it to, because in a set piece the casting is part of the argument. The interviewer is not a diplomatic correspondent or an economist. He is a travel presenter named Henok, and his presence in that chair is the first performance in a programme made of them.

The Man in the Tent

Henok’s ascent is its own small parable. He built a public profile by appealing to strangers to fund his journeys into the remote countryside, pitching the wilderness as latent revenue — the next money-making destination, waiting to be filmed and sold. The pledges came, and with them a berth at a television channel whose independence is, to put it gently, contested, and which functions in practice as a promotional register for the mood the state wishes to project. The output is instantly recognisable: the drone sweeps, the tripod-steadied panoramas, the long hours of footage compressed into a single glossy episode, the presenter framed against the horizon, eating with his entourage, arriving by four-by-four.

There is nothing wrong with a keen traveller; the country could use a hundred honest ones. But let us be exact about the genre, because his admirers are not. This is not natural history in any Attenborough sense — there is no science under it, no institution behind the lens holding it to a standard, no argument being tested against the world. It is a man of large enthusiasm and visible self-regard performing the discovery of a country for an audience primed to applaud the discoverer. The wilderness, in this telling, is chiefly the backdrop against which the traveller gets to be seen being intrepid. It is self-portraiture with scenery.

And that is precisely the man the campaign required — which is why the striking fact about the interview is not that Henok is in it, but where he is sitting. He has been brought in from the tent to the courtyard, seated, as the Prime Minister points out, inside the Entoto Bete Giorgis museum, itself a showpiece of the Gebeta-Lesheger beautification programme. The wilderness auteur has been installed in the palace, and the palace has notes for him. We will come back to the notes.

A Holiday, Engineered

To judge whether any of this amounts to a tourism strategy or merely a tableau, you need a control case — somewhere that decided, deliberately, to build a domestic tourism economy and managed it. Golden Week is that case, and it was no accident. In September 1999, at a moment of stimulus urgency after the Asian financial crisis, China’s State Council stitched statutory holidays to adjacent weekends to manufacture week-long national breaks, expressly to prise open a domestic tourism market. The first National Day Golden Week, in October 1999, produced 28 million domestic trips and 14.1 billion yuan in tourism revenue. By this year’s “Super Golden Week” the eight-day total reached 888 million trips and 809 billion yuan — about $113.6 billion. The scale is almost not worth arguing with.

But — and here is the part the Ethiopian adaptation quietly skips — Golden Week was never merely a holiday and a photo opportunity. It was demand engineering laid over a mobility base the Chinese state was building in the same years: railway, motorway and aviation capacity all expanding together. The calendar told a billion people they were free to move; the infrastructure meant they actually could. Concentrated leisure time is the spark. The functioning road is the engine. Remove the engine and the spark merely illuminates a stationary car.

And even China’s version strains — a nitpicker is obliged to say so. Overcrowding set in by the mid-2000s; the May Day Golden Week was scrapped in 2008 and only restored in 2019; and this year, for all the record 888 million trips, average spending per trip ran about three per cent below pre-pandemic 2019. Commentators called it “Golden Weak.” I raise it because it bears on the argument: the most successful piece of domestic-tourism engineering in modern history is a story of relentless capacity-building and constant correction — the precise opposite of a performance.

The Case, Stated Fairly

Abiy is not wrong about everything, and a column that pretends otherwise is worth nothing. His core logic is sound: unlike an export, a tourist arrives and spends inside the country — no shipping, no letters of credit, the consumer coming to the shoe rather than the shoe being sent to the consumer. Private capital is genuinely following the state’s lead, and I will not pretend it isn’t: at Wenji, Gorgora and Arba Minch, private resorts are rising beside the government’s, and the Kuriftu project at Arba Minch — 53 villas on 52,000 square metres, more than 300 jobs promised — is, by the accounts, a real and better-built thing than its predecessors. The perception gap is real too: the diaspora arrival who braces for famine and finds Bahir Dar is a genuine phenomenon, and a country’s image can lag its reality by a decade.

His claimed results, if accurate, are considerable. He puts this year’s arrivals above four million, domestic trips at 50.16 million, tourism foreign exchange above $5.2 billion, international conferences at 204, and GDP growth at 10.2 per cent. I write “if accurate” deliberately — and not only because these are his figures, mangled here and there in the telling, none independently before me. It is also that where independent counts exist, they do not match: analyses of the 2025 rebound put arrivals nearer 1.5 million and revenue around $2 billion, less than half the numbers the Prime Minister recites. Treat his figures as claims entered into evidence, not findings.

The Ground the Claims Stand On

A tourism economy is only as strong as the road to the destination, and here the interview parts company with its own government. Only last year the Ministry of Tourism published a revised policy that quietly concedes almost everything the interview denies: that the sector has failed to deliver its expected economic contribution; that progress on new destinations has been minimal; that tourist sites remain inaccessible; that marketing has been ineffective; and that no conducive business environment yet exists. That is not an opposition pamphlet. It is the state auditing itself — and then, on NBC, performing the opposite.

Begin with the road. A study covering just 40 per cent of the country — the Trade Minister’s own figure — identified 290 illegal checkpoints: not service posts but extraction points, run by municipal officers, revenue officials and local militia to tax the movement of goods. Drivers hauling cement the 300 kilometres from the Lemi factory towards Dessie have reported being charged at a dozen of them. In a single fortnight last year, transporters’ associations counted dozens of truckers abducted on Amhara routes alone. Even the Addis–Djibouti corridor, which carries over 95 per cent of the country’s import–export trade, is not spared. The complaint the taxi driver makes to the tourist — that moving through this country is hard and dear — is not a sob story. It is a field report.

And here is a detail the Prime Minister might have checked before reaching for the driver as his villain: his own Ministry of Tourism has already put airport drivers through image-training, in partnership with a ride company, to school them in the first impressions they give visitors. The state trained the man. Then the head of state, on air, blamed him.

The collapse is most legible where the tourists used to be. At Yeha, site of a temple older than the Aksumite kingdom, the visitors who once came in numbers are simply gone, the hotels shuttered, the young leaving. In Aksum, a hotel that opened in 2020 with scores of rooms, a pool and a spa now sits mostly empty, bookings cancelled by guests frightened of the next round of fighting. And in Lalibela, roughly half of the 37 hotels in the local association have received foreclosure notices — thirty days to settle ballooning debts or forfeit to creditors, chief among them the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. Here is the detail I cannot get past: the same reporting that carries the foreclosure notices also carries the Tourism Ministry’s assurance that the country welcomed around a million tourists in nine months, up nine per cent. The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The recovery and the repossession, printed on the same page.

The security picture is why. Foreign offices in Washington and London still warn against travel to the very regions that hold the crown jewels; the wars in Tigray and Amhara devastated Lalibela and Gondar directly. Nor is the paralysis only rural. In the capital, the beautification that supplies the campaign’s most flattering footage has driven displacement and sent rents climbing in a city where most housing is already classed as slum — and the tourism bet is visibly misfiring even there, with hotels raised for a projected boom now standing empty, some repurposed into hospitals. As critics of the programme have put it, Ethiopia is becoming a country divided by mobility: the rulers travelling above, the ruled trapped below.

Beneath the resorts sits an architecture of failed lending. Late in 2024, Parliament approved 900 billion birr — about $7.4 billion — in bonds, of which 845.3 billion goes to settle the non-performing loans state enterprises owe the Commercial Bank; three of them — Electric Power, Railways and Sugar — had between them run up something on the order of $15 billion in bad loans. The country defaulted on its sovereign debt at the end of 2023. None of this was an accident. As the economist Eyob Tesfaye has argued, public infrastructure came to serve as the language of power — feasibility studies and financial prudence giving way to speed, symbolism and political command; the label of the developmental state borrowed without the institutions that once made it credible; the banking system bent to politics until deposits were funnelled into projects with little prospect of return. What the interview sells as a pillar, this reading takes for spectacle raised over eroding foundations.

For a parable of what this state builds, read the Federal Anti-Corruption Commission on irrigation. Arjo Didesa, in Oromia, was launched fifteen years ago at 755 million birr, to be finished in eighteen months; thirteen years on it has swallowed close to seven billion. Megech, in Amhara, began at 2.4 billion birr — and how much it has since consumed depends on which official body you believe, the Commission’s figure and the auditors’ differing by a margin that is itself a scandal (the Commission cites some 18 billion birr; other audits put the swollen cost nearer 6.4). Either way, the aggregate is the number that should have stopped the interview cold: thirteen large-scale schemes meant to irrigate more than 550,000 hectares have, after nearly 61 billion birr, managed under 44,000 — about eight per cent. The Prime Minister visited Megech and called the river diversion an “important stage.” He is fluent, we might say, in the language of the important stage.

These are not separate failures; they compose a single, self-reinforcing loop. Grand corruption inflates and diverts, loading the state with debt; the debt forces maintenance to be deferred; the neglected roads turn dangerous and are colonised by the roadblock tax; the transit fees feed inflation and erode trust; and the tourism now marketed as salvation withers precisely in the regions where the loop runs hottest. You cannot photograph your way out of a loop.

What “Performative” Actually Means

Now the notes. Near the end, the Prime Minister delivers his verdict on the genre in the chair opposite him: Ethiopia, he says, needs not one Henok but many, and the presenter’s labour must be recognised. Those who would criticise the tourism-influencers, he adds, are simply fools. Read the scene for what it is. A man who built a brand performing the discovery of the countryside has been seated in a restored palace and told, by the head of state, that the nation needs more of him — while the same head of state, minutes earlier, admired the foreign practice of routing visitors past anything unsightly. The personal performance and the party’s performance have fused. The traveller performs intrepid discovery; the state performs benevolent custody; and the two of them, in a museum built by the beautification programme, agree that the outstanding problem is the attitude of a man earning tips at the airport.

That is the precise sense in which the whole exercise is performative — not merely showy, but constitutively about the surface rather than the substrate. Critics have a name for it: performative nationalism, a choreographed display of unity and prosperity staged against the lived reality of millions who cannot cross their own country. Golden Week engineered the substrate and let the appearance follow. This programme inverts the order: build the resort, restore the palace, fly the drone, seat the wanderer in the museum — and then locate the remaining gap in the disposition of a taxi driver.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it.

You cannot lay a Golden Week over a road with 290 checkpoints on it. The calendar cannot summon the movement the militia is taxing — and no amount of footage, however lovingly edited, can shoot around a country the government’s own policy admits it has failed to make reachable.

The Question of Sequence

Let me be fair to the other side of my own argument. None of this makes the endowment fake — Ethiopia’s variety is real, and Abiy describes it well. None of it makes the private investment imaginary or the perception gap costless; it is entirely possible that arrivals really are climbing, that the conference trade really is growing, that some of these resorts will, in a calmer decade, look like foresight rather than vanity.

The question the interview cannot answer — the question it is arranged not to answer — is one of sequence. China did not ask its citizens to perform prosperity while it built the roads; it built the roads, then let them travel. Ethiopia is being asked to celebrate a tourism boom from inside a mobility collapse, to admire the palace while the corridor is taxed at gunpoint, and to accept a crowdfunded traveller in a courtyard as evidence of a country made whole. Tourism can be a pillar. But a pillar is a load-bearing thing, and you do not test one by photographing it. You test it by putting weight on it — and the weight, in this country, is still stuck at a checkpoint, being told by a frightened driver that yes, unfortunately, the road ahead is worse than it looks.

◆

A Note on Sources

Golden Week: China Daily and CNBC (1999 and 2025 official data). The revised tourism policy’s admission of “strategic failure” (sites inaccessible; marketing ineffective; no conducive business environment): Ministry of Tourism, via The Reporter. Ministry image-training for airport drivers: Ministry of Tourism newsletter. Checkpoints (290 across 40 per cent of the country; corridor >95 per cent; Lemi–Dessie; Amhara abductions): ICTD (citing the Minister of Trade), EHRC and The Reporter. Yeha and Aksum hotel collapse: The Reporter and Reuters reporting. Lalibela foreclosures beside the one-million-arrivals claim: Addis Fortune. Empty Addis hotels converted to hospitals, and the megaproject-as-spectacle reading: analyses of Ethiopia’s megaproject economy, including Eyob Tesfaye in Addis Fortune (argument paraphrased). State-enterprise debt (900bn-birr bond; 845.3bn in CBE NPLs; ~$15bn at EEP/Railways/Sugar; 2023 default): Bloomberg, The Reporter, Birr Metrics. Irrigation (Arjo Didesa; disputed Megech cost; 13 schemes at ~8 per cent of 550,000 hectares): Federal Anti-Corruption Commission and The Reporter. Independent 2025 arrivals estimate (~1.5m; ~$2bn): tourism-branding analysis, set against the Prime Minister’s NBC claims of 4m+ arrivals, 50.16m domestic trips, $5.2bn forex, 204 conferences and 10.2 per cent GDP growth, reproduced here as claims pending independent confirmation. “Performative nationalism” and “rulers above, ruled below” are critics’ framings.

Pass Freely and Without Hindrance

What a borrowed Ethiopian passport asked of the world in 1962 and what South Africa now refuses the continent that once sheltered its liberator.

In 1962 a wanted man with no country of his own boarded an aircraft in Addis Ababa carrying a passport that did not bear his name. The document was issued by the Empire of Ethiopia, stamped with the Lion of Judah, and made out to one David Motsamayi. The bearer was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, commander of a newly founded guerrilla army, fugitive from a state that called him a terrorist, and by the grace of an emperor he had never met a free traveller for the first time in his life.

The passport carried a request, set in the formal cadence of imperial English: that the civil and military authorities of all friendly countries allow the bearer to pass freely and without hindrance, and to afford him every assistance of which he stood in need. Sixty-four years later, those words read like an indictment. For the question that should trouble every South African political elite who has lodged a brief at The Hague while a mob gathers at home is brutally simple: what has become of that request?

The debt that built a nation

Mandela did not arrive in Ethiopia as a curiosity. He came as a delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa, the body that would become, the following year and on Ethiopian soil, the Organisation of African Unity. He addressed that conference directly after Emperor Haile Selassie, and he named Ethiopia for what it was a country that had paid the full price of its own freedom and now extended that freedom to others.

What followed was not symbolism. It was logistics, money and weapons training. At the Kolfe police camp outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopian officers drilled him seven days a week in tactics, sabotage, explosives and the discipline of guerrilla command. He left with five thousand pounds, granted by order of the Emperor, to arm Umkhonto we Sizwe. On the flight in, he had been startled to find a black man in the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft the first he had ever seen and understood, before he had even landed, what an Africa governed by Africans might look like.

Ethiopia was the keystone, but the arch was continental. Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika gave him passage and, later, sanctuary to thousands of exiles. Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia handed him another five thousand pounds for weaponry. Nasser’s Egypt received him; Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal opened their doors. Zambia would host the principal camps of the ANC’s army. And when the imperial era gave way to the Derg, the patronage did not stop: Mengistu Haile Mariam trained Zimbabwe’s ZANLA guerrillas and the fighters of half a dozen liberation movements a debt Robert Mugabe would repay, controversially, by sheltering Mengistu in Harare for the rest of his days.

This is the unglamorous machinery of African solidarity: passports issued, camps built, instructors seconded, money pressed into the hands of men the West had branded criminals. Much of it remains unwritten. The Ethiopian instructors who trained liberation cadres at camps across the region men such as Asnakew Sisay, whose account The Ethiopian Tribune has documented from his own testimony have largely vanished from the official record their students went on to govern. That forgetting is itself part of the story.

The brother at the border, turned away

Now hold that history against the present.

South Africa today presents the world two faces. Abroad, it wears the robes of moral conscience most visibly at the International Court of Justice, where Pretoria lodged a genocide case over Gaza and won the applause of the Global South. At home, in the same season, African nationals are hunted in the streets. Movements such as Operation Dudula have made a political programme of it: the harassment of asylum seekers, the blockading of clinics, the demand that the foreigner overwhelmingly the African foreigner be expelled. Vigilante ultimatums set deadlines. Authorities issue statements and look away.

The word for this is not xenophobia in the abstract. Its victims are specific: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Congolese the nationals of precisely those states that armed, hid, funded and trained the men who broke apartheid. The grandchildren of the liberation are raising the panga against the grandchildren of the liberators. There is no crueller inversion of Mandela’s passport than a South African mob demanding that an Ethiopian ‘go home’.

The failure is not of the young it is of those who failed to teach them

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of an under-educated, ethnocentric youth who never learned the principles the African Union and the United Nations were built to protect the dignity of the refugee, the rights of the migrant, the idea of an African citizenship larger than the tribe. The temptation should be resisted, because it lets the guilty off lightly.

A generation does not forget its own history by accident. It forgets because those entrusted with transmitting it the governing party that calls itself the heir of Mandela, the ministers, the curriculum-setters, the elders who sat in those exile camps found it expedient to let the memory lapse. It is easier to govern a frightened population that blames the foreigner for joblessness than to answer for three decades of unemployment, inequality and collapsed service delivery. The xenophobe is manufactured, and the factory is political. To call South Africa’s angry youth ignorant is true but insufficient; the deeper charge is against the elites who profited from keeping them so.

None of this is to flatten a difficult reality. South Africa’s pressures are real an economy that cannot absorb its own, a state that struggles to manage migration, communities competing over genuinely scarce resources. Those conditions explain the violence. They do not excuse it, and they certainly do not license a government to perform humanitarianism at The Hague while withholding it in Diepsloot. (A note of editorial honesty: the documented core of this crisis is afrophobia — violence against fellow Africans. Claims of a coordinated campaign against the white minority belong to a separate and contested debate, and the Tribune does not conflate the two.)

Coda

The passport that carried Mandela out of bondage asked a single thing of the world: that its bearer be allowed to pass freely and without hindrance, and be given the assistance of which he stood in need. Ethiopia granted it. Tanzania, Zambia, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and a dozen other African states granted it. They did so for a man their own governments could have handed back for a reward.

South Africa is free today because the continent refused to turn its liberator away at the border. The least it owes to Mandela, to the OAU founded in Addis, to the brothers who sheltered him is to extend that same grace to those who now stand, frightened and unwelcome, at its own gate.

Pass freely and without hindrance. It was never only a sentence on a forged passport. It was the founding promise of a free Africa. South Africa, of all nations, should be the last to break it.

The Ethiopian Tribune

The Ethiopian Tribune · Comment

The Deadline and the Debt

As a vigilante ultimatum falls on 30 June, the country whose liberation drew on Adwa turns on the Africans it shelters — while the world is told the wrong people are dying

By E. Frashie

Tomorrow a deadline expires that no law recognises. The movement that set it — March and March, a vigilante coalition that surfaced in 2025 — has spent months marching through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town demanding that every undocumented foreigner quit South Africa by the thirtieth of June. Pretoria has said plainly that the ultimatum carries no standing in law. Yet the standing it lacks in statute it has seized in the street: foreign-owned shops looted across several provinces, families driven from their homes, and a procession of African governments — Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique — mounting emergency airlifts of their own citizens. The Malawians repatriated on 18 June stepped off into a stadium pressed into service as a reception hall.

A date with no standing in law has acquired all the standing it needs in the street.

For Ethiopians the fear is already intimate, though honesty demands precision about its shape. In April, five Ethiopian men were shot dead in central Johannesburg — three of them inside a McDonald’s, four within forty-eight hours. The temptation is to fold those killings straight into the xenophobia ledger, and some have: the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself an Ethiopian, counted them in a public appeal on 14 June. But South Africa’s foreign ministry disputes the framing, attributing the deaths to organised crime — extortion and trafficking networks — and the Daily Maverick, on investigation, could find no credible thread tying those particular murders to the marches. The distinction is not pedantry. A movement that thrives on conflation cannot be answered with conflation; the Tribune will not avenge five men by misnaming how they died. What is beyond dispute is the climate around the living: in Gauteng, a run of attacks on Ethiopian-owned businesses; in Pretoria, Ethiopians describing days spent indoors, threatening messages, machetes carried in the open, and an embassy slow to answer.

Beneath the spectacle of the mob lies a quieter and more durable cruelty, and it is the one the diaspora’s advocates too rarely name. A child born in South Africa to undocumented parents frequently cannot obtain a birth certificate; without it, the country becomes a trap that springs shut at eighteen. The Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town sets out the mechanism with clinical calm: on reaching majority, such a young person cannot be lawfully employed, cannot open a bank account, cannot marry, cannot enrol at a university, and may be detained or deported to a country never seen. It is no predicament peculiar to Ethiopians — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans and the children of every neighbouring state are caught in the same vice — and it does not spare the long-settled: there are men and women who have lived in South Africa for twenty-five and thirty years, schooled and graduated there, and still cannot lawfully take a job for want of a page. There are, by credible estimate, more than a million undocumented children in the country. The Basic Education Laws Amendment Act of 2024 now forbids schools from turning a child away for want of papers — a genuine advance — but it mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood. The wall at adulthood still stands.

It mends the gate at the schoolhouse, not the wall at adulthood.

That the wall can be lowered is not a fantasy; South Africa has reached for the ladder before. The Zimbabwean Exemption Permit, born of a 2009 dispensation, has for over a decade let some 178,000 Zimbabweans live and work lawfully where they held no passports to show. But the permit’s present is a parable in itself. In 2021 the government moved to scrap it; the courts found the termination procedurally unlawful and ordered consultation; it survives now only on an extension to May 2027 — and Operation Dudula, one of the movements behind this week’s marches, is in court trying to end it. The precedent exists, and it is under siege from the very forces that have fixed tomorrow’s date. That is the true measure of the continent’s free-movement ambitions: a single African passport and a protocol on free movement sit grandly in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, ratified by almost none of the states that would have to honour them. Solidarity, it turns out, is easy to sign and hard to keep.

The reason the wall stands is not mysterious. South African unemployment sits above thirty per cent and youth unemployment beyond sixty, and a frightened polity has been encouraged to read those figures as a foreign theft rather than a domestic inheritance. There is a grievance with a grain in it — South Africa, unlike Ethiopia, reserves no tier of petty commerce for its own nationals, so the foreigner is visible behind every market stall — but that is a quarrel with the absence of a law, not a licence for the street to write one in blood. The landlessness, the joblessness, the equity gap are the unsettled accounts of apartheid, not the handiwork of a Somali shopkeeper or an Ethiopian trader selling breakfast in the central business district. To charge the structural to the stranger is the oldest sleight in politics, and it is being performed again, at scale, with a date attached.

There is a particular bitterness in the stage on which it plays. It was the victory at Adwa in 1896 — Ethiopian in fact, continental in meaning — that proved European arms could be broken on African ground, and it was the Ethiopianism kindled in its wake that fed the current which would produce South Africa’s own movements of liberation. Nor is the kinship only spiritual. The Ndebele who form a substantial nation within Zimbabwe descend from the Nguni who moved north under Mzilikazi two centuries ago; the Tsonga straddle the Mozambican border as though it were a garden fence; and when South Africa’s liberation fighters needed sanctuary, it was Zambia and Tanzania and Mozambique that housed them, and a continent that funded them. The nation now fixing a date for Africans to leave is a nation whose freedom was, in some measure, an African loan — and it is being asked to repay the loan with expulsion. Empress Taytu — whose severing of the enemy’s water supply at Mekele hastened the reckoning at Adwa — is poorly honoured by men demanding papers in Hillbrow. The solidarity ran one way once. Asked to run the other way now, it is found wanting.

That fracture is no longer a matter of theory. When Bafana Bafana lost their World Cup opener to Mexico this month, much of the continent declined to mourn a fellow African side and chose instead to celebrate, filling the networks with Mexican flags and sombreros and saying plainly that a country which treats African migrants as South Africa now does had spent its claim on African goodwill. The team recovered to reach the knockout rounds for the first time in its history before Canada put it out days ago; but the verdict of that opening night will outlast the scoreline. The debt of Adwa is being called in — and it is the very brothers the marchers would expel who are calling it.

There is a crueller asymmetry still, and this one is global. In the same season that Black Africans are hunted through South African townships, the loudest cry of persecution to reach Washington — and to preoccupy President Trump personally — concerns not them but the country’s white minority. The United States has bent its refugee programme, all but sealed against the world’s war-displaced, into a rescue channel for Afrikaners said to face a “genocide” that South Africa’s government, its own farm-killing statistics, and even its principal Afrikaner lobby groups insist is not occurring; some six thousand have been resettled. No such airlift reached the Malawian who, by a credible account, died after police beat him for failing to produce his papers. Washington files the safer white farmer as a refugee while South Africa files the murdered Black migrant as a statistic of organised crime.

The murdered Black migrant is ‘organised crime.’ The safer white farmer is a refugee. Suffering is legible to power only in certain colours.

The thirtieth of June will pass. The police have promised to meet any violence beyond it with force — itself an admission that they expect some. What will not pass with the date is the trap beneath it: the child turning eighteen into statelessness, the trader weighing whether to raise his shutters, the embassy that answers too late. Ethiopia gave this continent a precedent at Adwa — that the African is not to be presumed upon. It falls now to Ethiopia’s diaspora, and to those who report on it, to insist the precedent still holds, and to refuse, even in grief, the consolation of the easy and the untrue.

E. Frashie for The Ethiopian Tribune

Published 29 June 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune · Horn of Africa

The Strategy of Strangulation

An analyst in Oslo says Ethiopia’s war is not coming soon. The chorus of brink-watchers says the fuse is already lit. The unsettling possibility is that both are describing the same powder.

By E. Frashie · 29 June 2026

The question that hangs over Ethiopia this June — is war coming? — carries a hidden assumption: that war is a future event, an arrival, something that crosses a border or a date on the calendar. Muhammad Omar, a Horn of Africa analyst speaking to Firstpost Africa from Oslo, quietly declined the assumption. Asked directly whether the tension around Tigray would tip into conflict, he gave an answer that flatters no camp. War, he said, is not coming soon. And then, almost in the same breath, he closed the door he had just opened: it is not about will there be war, but a matter of when and how.

That is not a contradiction. It may be the most honest sentence spoken about Ethiopia in weeks — and it deserves to be taken apart slowly, against the record, rather than swallowed whole.

I. The View from Oslo

Omar’s argument rests on a reading of Abiy Ahmed’s method rather than his intentions. The Prime Minister, he contends, has no need of a Tigray offensive because he is already winning by other means. Tigray is strangulated — his word — without cash, without much medicine, without humanitarian aid, its civil servants unpaid, its regional budget withheld, the off-switches for electricity and the internet still resting in federal hands and not yet thrown. Why march on a region you can quietly throttle? Better, on this account, to let the regions wear themselves down: Amhara against Amhara, Oromo against Oromo, and now Tigrayan against Tigrayan, as the Front splinters between Getachew Reda’s ousted moderates and the Debretsion hardliners who seized the regional administration in May.

The conscription drive, in this reading, is not a war drum but a confession. A movement that still commanded genuine loyalty would not need to round up its young men. That the TPLF — which prosecuted a seventeen-year bush war without forced recruitment — now resorts to coercion is, Omar argues, the plainest measure of how far its popular support has fallen. People are leaving rather than enlisting. The mobilisation, he says, is desperation, not strength.

It is not about will there be war. It is just a matter of when and how.

II. The Evidence Beneath the Claim

Here the Tribune’s own standard requires that we test the analyst against the record, and the record is unkind to comfortable readings. Omar’s portrait of a desperate, coercive mobilisation is, if anything, understated. On 5 May the TPLF reasserted control over Tigray and removed the federally backed interim administration. In June it pushed through a mobilisation proclamation — forty-four pages, reaching back retroactively to the first day of the 2020 war — that makes military service a legal obligation and threatens evaders, and journalists who question the drive, with sentences of fifteen and twenty-five years, and in its gravest clauses with death. Human Rights Watch describes door-to-door round-ups that sweep up children and punish the parents of those who flee; the European Union, on 27 June, called the whole exercise a breach of the Pretoria agreement. Opposition figures inside Tigray have been blunter still, calling the law Eritrean in spirit and a device to salvage a legitimacy already in ruins.

So the strangulation thesis holds. But notice what it actually describes. A region without salaries, medicine or fuel; a leadership compelling its youth into uniform on pain of death; families fleeing across the federal line rather than answer the call-up. If this is peace, it is peace only in the narrow, technical sense that the artillery has not yet opened. Strangulation is not the absence of war. It is war conducted by other instruments — and, more dangerous still, it manufactures the very desperation in which someone eventually decides that the open kind is preferable.

III. The Brink-Watchers

Against Omar stands a chorus that has spent the year insisting the moment is now. The Atlantic Council judged the two states to be on the brink of war again. The Horn Review wrote of a drift toward catastrophe in which open hostilities looked increasingly likely — a war the Ethiopian Defence Forces might be forced to fight on three fronts at once, against Eritrea, the TPLF and the Amhara Fano, inside a framework coordinated from Asmara: the alignment Ethiopian officials have taken to calling Tsimdo. Foreign Policy placed an Ethiopia–Eritrea war among the conflicts most likely to erupt in 2026. At a February parade in the capital, soldiers stood beneath a banner declaring, in Amharic, that Ethiopia would not remain landlocked whether its neighbours liked it or not. The Red Sea, Assab, the sixty kilometres between the Ethiopian border and a rusting, half-disused port — Abiy has named maritime access a question of national survival, and survival is not a register in which compromise comes easily.

And yet the soberest voices in this camp arrive, by a different road, somewhere close to Omar. David Shinn, the former American ambassador, doubts a war will actually break out: the costs are ruinous, and even the present talk of it frightens off the foreign investment Abiy cannot do without. Martin Plaut observes that the great northern mobilisation cannot be sustained for long without leaving the Oromo and Amhara fronts dangerously exposed — a clock runs against Addis Ababa, not for it. The risk analysts at RANE judge a full invasion of Eritrea unlikely this year, and locate the real peril not in anyone’s decision to attack but in an escalation that no one chooses: a clash along the border that runs away from both capitals. That is a different thesis from Omar’s, but it shares his essential intuition — that no rational actor wants this war, and that the danger therefore lies elsewhere.

IV. The Web That Would Catch Fire

Omar’s second argument is the one the brink-watchers should weigh most carefully, because it concerns not whether the war begins but what it becomes. A war in Tigray, he insists, cannot remain in Tigray. Eritrea, having backed the Front, will not wait for the fighting to reach Asmara; it will choose to wage it on Tigrayan ground. Sudan’s army, locked in its own ruin, already has a hand in the same theatre. Behind them stand the Gulf patrons — the Emirates aligned with Addis Ababa, the Saudis and Eritreans inclined toward Sudan’s generals — and behind them the Red Sea lanes already disordered by the war on Iran. Then the newest thread: Israel’s movement toward Somaliland, the reported interest in a naval presence at Berbera, and the Houthi promise to treat any such base as a target. The African Union, in Omar’s flat verdict, is almost powerless, absent from every mechanism that might matter.

On the particulars, an editor must be careful where an analyst, speaking live, was loose: the documented external sponsor of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces is the United Arab Emirates, not the actor Omar named in passing, and the distinction matters for any honest map of patronage. But the architecture he sketches is sound, and it is corroborated daily. Washington has now imposed visa restrictions on hardline TPLF figures even as it edges toward a rapprochement with Asmara; the sea-lanes are contested; the patrons are arrayed. The question Omar leaves hanging is the right one: if the shooting starts, which of these sponsors stays on the touchline?

V. When, Not If

What, then, of the question we began with? The honest answer is that Omar and the brink-watchers are not, in the end, disagreeing about the facts. They are disagreeing about the verb. The kindling is not in dispute — a strangled region, a coerced mobilisation, a maritime grievance dressed as survival, a ring of foreign patrons, a continental body that cannot act. The dispute is only whether the fuse is already burning or merely laid in place.

Omar’s wager is that Abiy prefers the slow method, and that the slow method buys time. It is a shrewd reading of a ruler who has, again and again, profited from letting others bleed. But it underrates the logic of its own central metaphor. Strangulation does not relax tension; it concentrates it. A leadership convinced it faces extinction does not pause to weigh foreign investment or the price of oil; it reaches for the only instrument that still promises survival. Omar himself supplied the trapdoor: if any one of them feels there is an existential threat, then it is possible. In a Tigray stripped of salaries and medicine and ordered to the front on pain of death, the existential threat is not a hypothesis to be debated. It is the daily weather.

So perhaps the question is the wrong one. To ask whether war is coming presumes that war is an event still to arrive, and that someone, somewhere, is deciding whether to summon it. The more exacting question — the one that does not let power hide behind tempo — is whether anyone with the means to stop it actually wishes to. On the evidence of this June, the silence is itself an answer.

E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune