SEWASEW TEKLEMARIAM · COMMENTARY

Seven Brothers in Arms, One Blackout, and a Press Told Where Not to Look

A week after Ethiopia’s armed opposition announced its intention to topple Abiy Ahmed, the world’s newsrooms have filed story after story. At home, the regulator has filed a ban.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

26 September 2026 · Meskerem 16, 2019 E.C. · The Ethiopian Tribune

It was a Sunday-night broadcast, as these things so often are. On 20 September, Zemene Kassie of the Amhara Fano National Movement — whose fighters spent 2020 to 2022 marching beside the federal army against Tigray — sat before the cameras of Tigrai TV and read a joint statement on behalf of seven armed movements. They declared that they bore “the historic responsibility of overthrowing this regime”. They called themselves the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival. The name is long; the ambition is short: remove the Prime Minister and install a transitional government.

Within three days, Tigrayan forces had taken the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire. Within four, flights to Lalibela were suspended as fighting reached the approaches to the rock-hewn churches. By Friday, the telephones of Tigray had fallen silent. Ethiopia, which spent nearly four years assuring everyone that the Pretoria Agreement had closed the book, found the book reopened — by the world’s press, if not by its own.

The world has noticed

Consider the ledger. Reuters broke the alliance story on 21 September and has since filed on the airport seizures, on Lalibela, on the overnight detention of veteran Tigrayan commanders, and on the blackout. That copy has travelled by syndication from US News in America to CNBC Africa, the Sowetan in Johannesburg, Business Recorder in Karachi and ThePrint in Delhi. Al Jazeera has published at least seven pieces in six days, from the founding statement to a question-and-answer explainer and an opinion column warning that this front may go the way of 2021’s short-lived nine-group coalition. AFP’s reporting from Afar, sourced from humanitarian workers on the ground, has run in Euronews, the Oman Observer and the Taipei Times.

The Associated Press produced a five-point explainer. CNN asked what had changed. NPR warned of a return to full-scale war. DW declared the battle lines redrawn. Foreign Policy led its daily World Brief with Ethiopia. The BBC reported panic-buying in Mekelle and noted that the region’s cash machines have not worked for months. Asharq Al-Awsat, Türkiye Today, Anadolu, Kenya’s KBC and Azerbaijan’s AnewZ all carried the story to their own audiences.

Diplomacy followed the headlines. The UN Secretary-General pronounced himself gravely concerned, named the three captured airports, and warned against a broader and more devastating conflict. The African Union Commission chairperson urged immediate de-escalation and direct talks, and dispatched Olusegun Obasanjo once more. The EU insisted differences be settled by dialogue. London condemned attacks by Tigrayan forces in Afar and southern Tigray, rejected the alliance’s stated aim of removing the federal government, and redrew its travel map. Washington’s ambassador said he was disappointed in the TPLF leadership, and the US Embassy barred its own staff from Tigray and Afar.

By this column’s count — a snapshot, not a census — at least twenty international outlets on four continents have reported the crisis in a single week. The appendix below lists them.

The world is reading about Ethiopia’s war. Ethiopians, increasingly, are reading about it in the world’s newspapers.

Darkness — and who switched it off

On the night of 24 September, telecommunications across Tigray went down. NetBlocks recorded a sub-national shutdown; Ethio Telecom services were cut entirely, while Safaricom’s smaller network limped on. It would be satisfying — and, given this government’s record in 2020–22, entirely plausible — to lay the blackout at Arat Kilo’s door. The evidence of this week does not allow it. Reuters, citing four people with knowledge of the matter including a diplomat, reports that it was the TPLF that ordered both operators to cut service, possibly to deny federal drones the mobile network. NetBlocks itself says its data cannot establish who pulled the plug. Neither the Prime Minister’s office nor the operators have commented.

Sewasew records the correction because this publication does not trade in convenient villains. But let no one mistake the point. People who lived through two years of severed lines, blocked cash and famine-like conditions are once again in the dark — and, with cash machines already dead, now cut off from the digital payments that had replaced them. A blackout ordered by self-declared liberators is exactly as dark as one ordered by the state.

Nor is the dark confined to phone masts. Reuters reports that Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede, the former commander of Tigrayan forces and former head of the interim administration, was detained overnight along with three other veteran officers who had voiced doubts about a return to war. An Alliance for Survival, it seems, does not extend survival to dissent within its own ranks.

Meanwhile, at home

The day after the announcement, the Ethiopian Media Authority suspended Tigray Television indefinitely, citing incitement and threats to national security. It went further: every digital, broadcast and print outlet in the country was forbidden to use the channel as a source or to reproduce its content, on pain of legal and administrative measures. Pause on that. The founding statement of the most consequential armed coalition in Ethiopia since 2021 was broadcast on that channel. An Ethiopian journalist who wishes to quote it from its source now does so at personal risk.

This did not arrive from nowhere. In February the same Authority revoked the registration of Addis Standard; in April its managing editor, Million Beyene, was taken from the newsroom and held incommunicado for nearly two weeks; in August its editor-in-chief, Yonas Kedir, was detained and beaten and its offices raided. Wazema Radio lost its licence. All nine of DW’s Ethiopian correspondents were suspended last October. Three Reuters journalists were refused accreditation. An AFP reporter was stopped from flying to Tigray in February. Four journalists who covered the Amhara conflict have spent close to three years in detention and, according to CPJ, could face life imprisonment or death. Reporters Without Borders places Ethiopia 148th of 180.

When readers ask why Ethiopian media show no interest in this war, Sewasew must issue a correction. Interest is not the problem. Permission is.

In fairness, the domestic record is not blank, and to say so would insult those still working. The Reporter covered the suspension of flights to Tigray and the Tigray TV ban. Addis Standard, publishing while it contests its revocation in court, reported the alliance’s formation. Ethiopia Observer carried the UN statement. Wazema reports by newsletter. Tigrayan outlets such as Kulu Media and UMD Media are documenting the blackout with commendable care about what they cannot verify. But these are narrowing spaces — increasingly online, increasingly in exile, and read by a fraction of the population.

The broadcast mainstream, where most Ethiopians actually get their news, belongs to the state and its allies. Media monitors documented earlier this year how EBC, Fana and their stablemates had settled on a single frame for Tigray: the TPLF as the sole spoiler of peace, the government as patient and dialogue-minded. The army’s claim this week of 272 Tigrayan fighters killed in Amhara arrives in that ecosystem unverified — and no domestic reporter is at liberty to go and check.

The juxtapositions write themselves. On the day the alliance was announced, the state news agency’s English service offered readers Getachew Reda’s counsel that dialogue was the only way to prevent the disintegration of — Sudan. On 24 September, as fighting spread through Afar, the Prime Minister was in Djibouti launching a petroleum infrastructure project; the President was addressing the UN General Assembly in New York. The government will say, fairly, that it has its own National Dialogue. Sewasew will observe that a dialogue is hard to hold when one side of the conversation has been taken off air.

Dialogue, it appears, is an export commodity: prescribed for Khartoum, rationed in Mekelle.

A word of caution about the brothers

Sewasew is nobody’s cheerleader, and readers deserve the other half of the ledger. This is an alliance of former enemies. Fano and the TPLF both claim Western Tigray, which Amhara forces have administered since the last war. At least one listed member, the ONLF, has reportedly denied joining. The federal government alleges Eritrean financing; Asmara denies it; the founding statement does not mention Eritrea at all. And history is not encouraging: the nine-group front proclaimed in November 2021 lost its Afar member within two months and its Benishangul member within a year, before the TPLF signed at Pretoria alone. Analysts at the International Crisis Group say it is not yet clear the groups can fight together at all.

What is clear is the price of failure. The last war cost an estimated 600,000 lives. Every party now reaching for the rifle — in Addis Ababa, in Mekelle, in the Amhara highlands and the Oromia forests — knows that number. None of them will be among the civilians who pay it.

Following the smoke

Tonight the Demera will be lit across the country, and tomorrow is Meskel. We tell our children that Empress Eleni found the True Cross by following the smoke. This week the world followed the smoke — from Mekelle’s airport to the hills above Lalibela — and reported what it found. Ethiopia’s own newsrooms have been told to watch the bonfire in the square and nothing beyond it.

እንኳን ለመስቀል በዓል በሰላም አደረሳችሁ።

May you reach the Feast of the Cross in peace. This year, the words “in peace” are doing a great deal of work.

Appendix · Media Monitor, 20–26 September 2026

A non-exhaustive snapshot of international coverage compiled by the Tribune desk. Syndicated wire copy is grouped under the originating agency. Dates are publication dates as shown by each outlet.

Domestic and diaspora coverage noted this week includes The Reporter, Addis Standard, Ethiopia Observer, Wazema, Kulu Media, UMD Media and The Habesha. Coverage by state broadcasters was not independently audited for this appendix.

ANALYSIS · HORN OF AFRICA

The Diplomacy of Convenient Silence

As war returns to northern Ethiopia, every capital speaks the language of Pretoria. Beneath the shared vocabulary, the positions could hardly be further apart.

By E. Frashie  |  25 September 2026

Within hours of Tigrayan forces seizing the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire on 23 September, the statements began to arrive. The African Union urged restraint. The European Union asked for de-escalation. The United Nations Secretary-General warned of a wider war. Washington declared itself disappointed. Read side by side, they share a vocabulary — dialogue, restraint, the Pretoria Agreement — and almost nothing else.

That shared vocabulary is the diplomatic story of the week. The fighting now running along three fronts, from the Kobo–Tumuga line on the Amhara border to the Tonsa–Megale axis on the Afar frontier, has not produced a unified international response. It has instead exposed how far the principal outside actors have already chosen sides in a conflict they publicly insist must be settled at the table.

Washington: from sanctioner to partner

No actor has moved further than the United States. Its ambassador in Addis Ababa, Ervin Massinga, placed the blame squarely on the TPLF leadership, which Washington sanctioned earlier this year, calling the offensive a poor decision and an “unwinnable fight”. He warned that the United States holds further tools to sanction leaders who escalate, and reserved a pointed line for the remaining members of the new Alliance for Survival: they would be wise not to follow.

The statement did not arrive in a vacuum. In the space of a single week, the State Department removed Ethiopia from the ITAR §126.1 list, ending the presumptive denial of defence exports to the country’s security forces, and allowed the 2021 national emergency underpinning sanctions on Eritrea to lapse. Washington said the Eritrea decision was taken “to advance US regional interests” — interests now defined by the war with Iran and by the value of Red Sea shipping while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

The result is a policy pulling in two directions at once. The United States is re-arming the federal government while rewarding the very neighbour Addis Ababa accuses of bankrolling the rebels. Both moves make sense through the lens of the Bab al-Mandeb. Neither has much to do with the Pretoria Agreement the ambassador invokes.

“Everyone speaks the language of Pretoria. No one with real leverage is spending it to save the agreement.”

The African Union: guardian of a deal it cannot enforce

The AU Commission chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, issued the most detailed institutional statement, and it is notable for what it names and what it omits. It specifies the seizure of the three airports and the detention of federal personnel by the TPLF, and it voices concern about new political and military alliances. It says nothing of the drone strikes on Tigray that preceded the offensive and that the regional government cites as its reason for going to war.

Youssouf reaffirmed Pretoria as the cornerstone of peace, asked the AU High Representative for the Horn, Olusegun Obasanjo, to re-engage the parties urgently, and called on Ethiopia’s neighbours to refrain from actions that feed the escalation — an unmistakable, if unnamed, reference to Eritrea. IGAD added its own call for de-escalation. The AU is headquartered in Addis Ababa; its ability to speak even-handedly about its host government has been questioned since 2020, and it is about to be tested again.

Brussels and New York: the language of equidistance

The European Union called for immediate de-escalation and a renewed commitment to the permanent cessation of hostilities, insisting that differences be resolved through dialogue rather than force. António Guterres went further on the humanitarian dimension, asking all parties to protect civilians and guarantee unhindered aid access, and warning against a “broader and more devastating conflict”.

Neither has apportioned blame, and that equidistance is itself a position. Some regional outlets have reported that the United States, the EU and the AU are jointly threatening sanctions. On the public record, only Washington has done so.

Asmara: the party no one names

Eritrea is the actor most discussed and least named. It is absent from the alliance’s founding statement, as the Oslo scholar Kjetil Tronvoll has observed, and it is absent from the AU’s. Yet Addis Ababa places it at the centre. The prime minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, said the alliance’s members had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing, and that their announcement was “only attesting to what the Ethiopian government has been alleging time and again”. Getachew Reda, the prime minister’s adviser on East African affairs, has gone further, accusing Eritrea and Egypt of running a proxy campaign through the TPLF, Fano and the OLA. Asmara has consistently denied supporting Ethiopian armed groups.

What Asmara has not hidden is its satisfaction with Washington. Its information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, said the 2021 sanctions had never been justified and welcomed the Trump administration’s remedy. Eritrea thus enters this war with its international standing stronger than at any point in five years.

Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi: the Red Sea proxy map

Beyond the Horn, the war slots neatly into an alignment already visible in Sudan. The analyst Martin Plaut describes Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia as backing the Sudanese Armed Forces and Eritrea, while the United Arab Emirates, and to a lesser degree Israel, maintain ties with Ethiopia and the Rapid Support Forces — links that all parties officially deny. Jawar Mohammed, once among Abiy’s closest allies, sketches a similar map of the alliance’s patrons.

Egypt’s interest is structural. Cairo regards the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as a threat to its water supply, and two of the alliance’s constituent movements come from Benishangul-Gumuz, the region in which the dam stands. Egyptian commentary this week has framed the fighting less as an Ethiopian affair than as a danger to Sudan and the Red Sea. For these capitals, public statements reveal far less than the alignments they are accused of maintaining.

Addis Ababa: pre-empting the narrative

The federal government has run a diplomatic campaign of its own. According to a report published this week, Addis Ababa warned Western foreign ministries days before the coalition was announced — a sign that it knew what was coming and meant to frame it first. Since the fighting began, Abiy has kept a conspicuously low profile, travelling to Djibouti to announce an economic partnership rather than addressing the nation on the war. Getachew Reda, asked about the alliance’s prospects, told state media he does not lose sleep over it.

Jawar reads the restraint as deliberate: the federal government, he argues, is limiting its engagement in order to demonstrate to foreign partners that the TPLF started the war. On the evidence of the American statement, the strategy is working. The army, meanwhile, says dozens of TPLF fighters have been killed and many more detained.

The inversion of 2021

The contrast with November 2021 is stark. Then, nine anti-government groups announced their coalition in Washington itself, the State Department urged Americans to leave Ethiopia, and Western envoys pressed Abiy towards unconditional talks. Today, a comparable coalition has been met by an American ambassador who blames the rebels and a Treasury that has just lifted sanctions on their alleged patron. The opposition has changed — Fano, the federal army’s ally in 2020, now fights beside the TPLF — but the world around it has changed more.

What the ledger leaves out

Missing from nearly every statement are the civilians. The Tigray regional government says the drone strikes of 22 September hit schools in Alamata; those claims have yet to be independently verified. A drone strike on 20 September destroyed an aid lorry carrying more than 41 tonnes of food. Aid workers in Afar are already moving supplies to the newly displaced. Only the UN Secretary-General has placed humanitarian access at the heart of his message.

The diplomatic posture of the world’s major actors is, in short, a contest over who fired first — because that answer will determine who is sanctioned, who is armed and who is forgiven. In that contest, Pretoria has become less an agreement to be defended than a vocabulary to be cited. The people of Tigray, Afar and Amhara, who paid for the last war, stand once again outside the ledger.

◆

ANALYSIS

Two Fronts, One Army

As Abiy Ahmed forms his new government, he faces a rebel alliance in the field, rumours of disloyalty in his own barracks, and a national dialogue report that offers another way out. What he does to guard against one threat may weaken his defences against the other.

By E. Frashie

The Ethiopian Tribune · 22 September 2026

When the House of Peoples’ Representatives opens its new term in the coming weeks, Abiy Ahmed will do what every Ethiopian prime minister does at the start of a mandate: name a government. The last time he did so, in October 2021, after an election held in the middle of a war, he used the occasion to place twenty institutions under his own office, among them the National Intelligence and Security Service and the Information Network Security Agency. The cabinet he names this time will tell us more than any parliamentary speech about how he reads the danger now facing him. That danger has two faces, and they point in opposite directions.

The threat in the open

Late on Sunday 20 September, Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement, read a founding statement on the TPLF-controlled Tigrai TV. It announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, a coalition of seven organisations: the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (Ugugumo), the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement and the Gumuz People’s Democratic Movement. Its declared purpose is to remove what it calls the Prosperity Party’s personalist and dictatorial regime and to install an inclusive transitional government.

There is no doubt about the coalition’s reach. Its members claim constituencies in six of the country’s twelve regional states, and in Amhara and Oromia they are already at war with the state. Its cohesion is much less certain. Fano fought alongside federal forces against the TPLF in 2020–22, and Amhara and Tigray still both claim Western Tigray. Within a day of the announcement, OLA figures were describing their participation as a procedural consensus, not submission to a unified military command. The founding text commits members to resolve their differences according to the “freely expressed will” of their peoples. Applied to Wolkait, that formula would divide the alliance’s two largest partners.

Addis Ababa’s first responses were predictable. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, told Reuters that the groups had long been collaborating with Eritrean financial backing. Asmara has denied such accusations before, and no evidence has been published. On Monday the Ethiopian Media Authority prohibited news outlets from using Tigrai TV as a source.

The threat in the barracks

The second threat is harder to see. For some time, claims have circulated on social media that elements of the officer corps are prepared to move against the Prime Minister. Some of these claims are attributed to the exiled Oromo politician Jawar Mohammed. The Tribune has not been able to verify them, and nothing in this analysis depends on their being true. Rumours of disloyalty in the barracks shape a ruler’s behaviour whether or not they are accurate. In a system as personalised as Abiy’s, the perception of a threat is a threat in its own right.

The rumours also carry a politics of their own. In July, according to a ZeHabesha summary of a TikTok discussion, Jawar warned against coalitions formed only to topple Abiy without first agreeing on what would replace him. A transition managed by the army and a victory by an armed alliance are very different outcomes. Those who talk up the first may be positioning themselves against the second.

Nor is the idea alien to Ethiopian history. The Imperial Bodyguard moved against Haile Selassie in 1960. The Derg dismantled the monarchy from within the armed forces in 1974. Senior generals tried to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1989. And in June 2019, on the night of the killings in Bahir Dar, the Chief of the General Staff, Se’are Mekonnen, was shot dead in Addis Ababa. Every Ethiopian ruler has had reason to watch his own officers.

“Every lock he fits against his generals is a weight he hangs on his soldiers.”

The coup-proofing dilemma

Political scientists call it coup-proofing. A ruler rotates his commanders, divides the chain of command, promotes loyalists over the able, and builds parallel forces that answer to him alone. Each measure makes a coup harder, and each makes the army worse at fighting. Abiy must now do both at once: field an army strong enough to hold Amhara, Oromia and the Tigray frontier, while making sure that no part of it is strong enough, or united enough, to turn on him.

The precedent he will least want to hear is 1989. After the failed coup, Mengistu purged his senior officer corps and later had a number of its generals executed. The army that remained was loyal, and it was hollow. Within two years it collapsed before the EPRDF. The lesson is not that Abiy faces the same fate. It is that a regime which answers an open threat and a hidden one with the same instrument, a more tightly controlled army, can win the second contest and lose the first.

What the new government is likely to do

The first and most visible move will be at the top of the security state. Expect changes at the Ministry of Defence and in the general staff, and possibly further agencies brought under the Prime Minister’s office on the 2021 model. Expect, too, another round of promotions. Abiy has used mass promotion before to widen the pool of officers who owe their rank to him personally, and a larger pool of generals is a smaller risk from any one of them.

The second will be legal. The ban on Tigrai TV looks like an opening move, not a final one. The government has declared states of emergency before, nationally in November 2021 and in Amhara in August 2023, and it has designated armed movements as terrorist organisations, including the TPLF in 2021 before the designation was lifted after Pretoria. A designation of the alliance as a whole would make contact with any of its members a crime. That would reach far beyond the fighters, to intermediaries, diaspora organisers and journalists.

The third will be an effort to split the alliance. Its seams are visible, and Addis Ababa knows where they are. The ONLF can be reminded of its 2018 agreement, and the smaller Afar and Benishangul movements can be courted locally with offers of posts and budgets. Tigray’s own divisions give the government room to manoeuvre, as does the existence of Fano factions outside the AFNM. With the OLA, the government has already shown in its separate 2024 agreement with a breakaway commander that it prefers to peel off factions rather than negotiate with movements. Every member that signs a separate peace weakens the claim that the alliance speaks for Ethiopia’s peoples.

The fourth will be to externalise the threat. By naming Eritrea as the alliance’s paymaster, Addis Ababa converts a domestic insurgency into foreign aggression. That is useful for rallying nationalist opinion, and useful for binding an uneasy army to a common enemy. It is also dangerous. Combined with the government’s long-running rhetoric about access to the Red Sea, it builds a momentum towards interstate war that may prove easier to start than to stop.

The fifth will be aimed at those who spread the rumours. If talk of disloyal commanders worries the palace, it will act against the people spreading it. Jawar Mohammed was charged once before, in 2020. Renewed proceedings against him in absentia, pressure on Oromo Federalist Congress figures still inside the country, and action against journalists who amplify the claims are all plausible.

Finally, there will be the language of dialogue. The government will continue to present the National Dialogue as the peaceful route that the alliance has refused. It may repeat the gesture of 2021, when three opposition figures were brought into the cabinet, while keeping every security portfolio in trusted hands. Whether the dialogue amounts to more than language depends on what the new government does with the Commission’s report.

The Commission’s offer

The new government will not start from a blank page. The National Dialogue Commission was due to hand its report to the outgoing parliament before 22 September. It followed a 38-day conference in Addis Ababa at which more than 4,000 delegates debated over 400 agenda items under eight pillars: nation-building; government structure and electoral systems; federal cities; religious affairs; institution-building; social and economic questions; corruption and good governance; and peace-building. The full text has not yet been published, and the Commission insists that its recommendations are advisory, not binding. But the proposals reported to have emerged from it add up to the most coherent alternative yet placed before Abiy to the path of coercion described above.

The first is electoral: a move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation. Under the present system the Prosperity Party took 438 of the 486 seats decided in June. Under a proportional system, parties that now win nothing would win something, and the arithmetic of armed struggle would change. A movement that cannot win a constituency outright has little reason to lay down its arms for an election. A movement guaranteed a share of seats has more. It is also a reform that peaceful opposition parties and civic movements have pressed for years. Adopting it would reward those who chose the ballot over the gun, and show that non-violent pressure can change the rules.

The second is constitutional. Amending the 1995 constitution is the demand that unites the government’s critics and divides them at the same time. Amhara nationalists want to revise the ethnic federal settlement and Article 39, while Oromo, Somali and Tigrayan movements regard that same article as the guarantee of their existence. Like proportional representation, constitutional reform belongs to the vocabulary of peaceful protest. It was the largely non-violent demonstrations of 2015–18, the movement that brought Abiy to power, that first put the 1995 settlement openly in question. Opening the constitution through dialogue would answer the protesters in the streets, not only the fighters in the field. The alliance has avoided the question, and so, carefully, has the government. It should also be said plainly that a constitutional door opened in the name of dialogue can be walked through in either direction. Before the election, critics alleged that Abiy wanted to amend the constitution to create a presidential system. A reform that entrenched the executive would serve none of the Commission’s purposes.

The third concerns cities: metropolitan governments for the country’s major urban centres. This goes to the heart of the contest over Addis Ababa, in which Oromo nationalists assert a special constitutional interest, and over the control of fast-growing regional towns. Giving cities their own governance, instead of treating them as trophies of whichever ethnic region surrounds them, could take one of the most combustible questions off the battlefield. It would also be fiercely resisted by those who regard Oromia’s claim to the capital as settled and non-negotiable.

The fourth speaks most directly to the events of this week: that the armed movements now gathered in the Alliance for Survival be invited into talks within the framework of the Pretoria agreement. Pretoria was a bilateral deal between the federal government and the TPLF. Fano was not at the table and has never forgiven its exclusion. Extending that architecture to Amhara, Oromia and the other regions would turn a two-party ceasefire into something closer to a national settlement. The Commission has itself argued that armed groups belong in the dialogue. The question is whether a government that has just called the alliance an Eritrean project can bring itself to negotiate with it.

The fifth looks outward: negotiations with Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Egypt. Each relationship is a potential front. With Sudan there is the al-Fashaga border; with Mogadishu, Somaliland and sea access; with Asmara, an unfinished peace; with Cairo, the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Abiy told the BRICS summit this month that Ethiopia would seek sea access only through negotiation. If he means it, regional diplomacy is also domestic security, because a neighbour at peace with Addis Ababa has less reason to finance its enemies. The remaining pillars, from religious affairs and institution-building to corruption and the economy, lack the drama of these five but would matter as much to whether any settlement lasted.

“The best coup-proofing is a settlement that leaves the generals nothing to rescue the country from.”

This is where the Commission’s offer meets the barracks. Coups in Ethiopia have always been presented as rescues: of the nation from a failing emperor, of the revolution from a failing Derg. A government that opened talks with its armed opponents, reformed the electoral system and made peace with its neighbours would leave any ambitious officer without a story to tell. In effect, the Commission has handed Abiy a political alternative to coup-proofing. It is not the only option on his desk. The Reporter reported last week that Washington has lifted the arms embargo it imposed during the Tigray war, which makes the military route cheaper. Whether he takes up the report or shelves it will be decided in the same weeks as his cabinet.

The Mengistu question

Mengistu Haile Mariam hangs over this moment in two ways, and either could describe what Abiy does next. The first Mengistu went to any length in the name of Ethiopian unity. From the Derg’s early slogan, Ityopia Tikdem, “Ethiopia First”, to national call-ups, a war economy and the purge of his own officers, he justified everything as the defence of an indivisible state. A leader convinced that he alone stands between the country and disintegration can persuade himself that almost any measure is warranted. The alliance, by warning that Ethiopia is at risk of breaking apart, has handed him that argument.

The second Mengistu is the one who left. In May 1991, with his army broken and the EPRDF closing on the capital, he flew to Zimbabwe, and his departure hastened the end of the war. Most Ethiopians remember it as flight, not sacrifice, and his motives were his own. But the precedent stands: an Ethiopian ruler concluded that the state would outlast him only if he went. Abiy, too, could decide that national unity is better served by his leaving than by his staying. Such an exit could be negotiated through the very transitional process that the alliance demands and the Commission’s report points towards, and it could be made on his own terms instead of an enemy’s.

“The first path, taken too far, ends on the second — on worse terms.”

This newspaper does not predict which course he will choose, and there is no public sign that he contemplates the second. But the two paths share a premise: that the unity of Ethiopia outranks any individual, including the one in the palace. They differ in who pays. On the first, the price falls on soldiers and civilians; on the second, on one man’s ambition. The lesson of 1991 is that a ruler who follows the first path too far may find himself left with only the second, and on far worse terms than he could have had.

The hidden price

Each of these measures has a cost that will not appear in a communiqué. Emergency powers mean mass detentions, and mass detentions in Ethiopia have tended to fall along ethnic lines. Designation and media bans narrow the space for the reporting that might tell the public what is happening in its name. The drone strikes already recorded by conflict monitors in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia fall on communities, not only on combatants. And an army reorganised for loyalty is an army less able to protect civilians from anyone at all.

What to watch

The signs will come quickly. Watch who is named Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff, and whether more of the security apparatus moves under the Prime Minister’s office. Watch for a state-of-emergency proclamation and for any terrorist designation of the alliance. Watch for unexplained retirements, transfers or arrests of senior officers. Watch for a separate deal with any single member of the alliance. And watch the temperature of Addis Ababa’s language towards Asmara. Above all, watch whether the Commission’s report is published in full, and whether the new government’s first programme adopts any of it or merely thanks the Commission for its work.

In July, Abiy told lawmakers that even if others joined the TPLF, the government did not have “an iota of fear” for Ethiopia’s sovereignty. A government that fears nothing has no need to fortify its own barracks. The cabinet he now presents, and what he does with the report on his desk, will show which of his two fronts he fears more, and whether, in guarding against one, he leaves the other open.

E. Frashie writes long-form analysis for The Ethiopian Tribune.

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics: A Warning to the Ethiopian Political Landscape

Professor Girma Berhanu

17 September 2026

Synopsis

Editorial Foreword

Every liberation movement eventually faces a question it would rather not ask: at what point does the discipline needed to win begin to resemble the order it set out to defeat? Ethiopian history answers this with painful clarity. A generation of students who called for freedom in the 1970s watched the language of revolution harden into a culture of denunciation. In that culture, the wrong question could make someone an enemy of the people, and intellectuals became functionaries of the line.

Professor Girma Berhanu, a long-standing contributor to these pages, writes because he sees that pattern stirring again. He does not write as a detached observer. He states plainly that Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and he does not question the legitimacy of the grievances behind the Amhara struggle. What he questions is something more fragile and, in the long run, more decisive: the right to think aloud within a movement without being labelled for it.

His essay is notable for its restraint. He does not claim knowledge he lacks. He explains, with a candour that is rare in today’s polarised climate, why he has not rushed to pronounce on the alliances now dividing the diaspora. Some readers will find that restraint frustrating. We would suggest that it is the point of the essay. Where information is fragmented and interpretations are hardened by loyalty, the honest answer is often “not yet.” A movement that cannot hear that answer without suspecting treachery has already lost something it will need later.

Unity is not uniformity, criticism is not betrayal, and the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

The Ethiopian Tribune has spent many years documenting how the present government treats dissent: the arrests of journalists, the targeting of communities and the shrinking space for independent speech. We would be failing our readers if we held the state to that standard and exempted those who seek to replace it. Our commitment to accountability does not depend on who holds power or who seeks it.

We publish this essay not as a verdict on any organisation or alliance, but as an invitation. It asks readers to accept that unity is not uniformity, that criticism is not betrayal, and that the freedom a struggle promises must first be practised within it.

— Endex, Chief Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

When Intellectualism Gives Way to Cadre Politics

My years of engagement in social activism and human rights work have taught me an important lesson: a freedom struggle cannot sustain itself when independent intellectual thought is replaced by political conformity. Yet this is precisely the danger I increasingly perceive in the Ethiopian political landscape today.

The distinction between intellectuals and political activists is becoming increasingly blurred. More troubling still is the growing influence of what might be described as a cadre mentality—a political culture in which ideological loyalty takes precedence over independent judgement, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and questioning the dominant political line can be interpreted as betrayal.

This tendency is particularly concerning in the current debate over the direction of the Amhara struggle. Questions concerning political strategy, alliances, negotiations, military cooperation, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and the future political order of Ethiopia are far too consequential to be determined by political loyalty or factional pressure. They require serious intellectual examination, open debate, evidence-based reasoning, and the courage to challenge prevailing assumptions—even when such challenges are uncomfortable.

An intellectual is not a cadre. An intellectual’s responsibility is not to defend a political organisation, faction, leader, or predetermined political line. Rather, it is to interrogate ideas, examine evidence, identify contradictions, consider alternative interpretations, and assess possible consequences. Political activists and organisations have a legitimate role in mobilising people and pursuing political objectives. However, intellectuals should not be reduced to instruments for legitimising decisions that have already been made. Their role requires a degree of critical distance, even when they share the broader political aspirations of a movement. Straddling the roles of prophet, critic, political activist, and scientist, intellectuals defy easy categorisation. They often portray themselves as “free-floating” and independent of universities, political parties, and state power. Yet the reality frequently falls short of this ideal. Intellectuals across different historical and political contexts have not always lived up to their claims of autonomy and have often confronted difficult tensions between intellectual independence, political commitment, institutional interests, and social responsibility.

In this article, I wish to venture into the complexity of intellectual life and examine these tensions critically. What does it mean to be an intellectual? How can intellectual independence be maintained in politically charged environments? And what happens when intellectuals become too closely aligned with the organisations, movements, or power structures they are expected to scrutinise? These are large and complex questions, and the space available here does not allow me to address them in their full breadth. Instead, I offer some reflections on the tensions and dilemmas that lie at the heart of intellectual life.

When intellectuals become extensions of political organisations, intellectual independence is compromised. When disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty, genuine debate becomes increasingly difficult. And when political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

When political conformity replaces critical thinking, a liberation movement risks reproducing some of the very authoritarian practices and political cultures that it seeks to overcome.

This is not merely an intellectual problem. It is also a political and strategic problem.

The Amhara struggle cannot afford to silence critical voices at a moment when it faces difficult and consequential choices. Military alliances, political partnerships, relations with other Ethiopian constituencies, and competing visions for Ethiopia’s future should all be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. No organisation, leader, intellectual, or political faction should claim a monopoly over what constitutes the correct political line.

A freedom struggle worthy of the name must create space for disagreement. It must distinguish between criticism and betrayal, between independent analysis and political advocacy, and between intellectual responsibility and political discipline.

There is a profound lesson in the history of authoritarian political systems: when political loyalty becomes the principal measure of intellectual legitimacy, independent thought begins to erode. When independent thought is weakened, political movements become more vulnerable to strategic errors, internal authoritarianism, groupthink, and manipulation.

The objective, therefore, should be larger than winning arguments within a particular political camp. It should be to protect the intellectual and political space necessary for a genuine struggle for freedom, democracy, dignity, and self-determination.

The Amhara struggle needs organisation, but it also needs independent minds. It needs political activists, but it must not turn intellectuals into cadres. It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

It needs unity, but unity must not mean uniformity.

The future of the struggle—and potentially the future of Ethiopia itself—depends, in my view, on preserving this distinction.

I also want to be clear about my own position. I believe Ethiopia needs fundamental political change, and I support political processes that can contribute to a more democratic, accountable, inclusive, and just political order. However, supporting political change does not require me to endorse every political or military actor, alliance, strategy, or claim presented in its name. Political change and political conformity are not the same thing.

Recently, I have become increasingly aware of the intense polarisation surrounding the alliance between the Amhara Fano and other armed groups. I do not claim to know enough about these developments, nor have I involved myself deeply enough in all of the political and military dynamics, to take a definitive position on every aspect of these alliances. People from different parts of the world have nevertheless asked me why I have not been more explicit or vocal in taking a position.

My answer has consistently been that I am observing the situation carefully. It is difficult to position oneself when information is fragmented, interpretations are deeply polarised, and numerous actors are involved, often with different interests, objectives, and strategies. The result is considerable uncertainty and confusion.

My reluctance to take a premature position should therefore not be interpreted as indifference to political change. On the contrary, it reflects my conviction that positions on matters of such historical importance should be informed by evidence, context, careful analysis, and intellectual integrity rather than by political pressure or group loyalty.

What concerns me particularly is the extent of labelling, personal attacks, and verbal abuse surrounding these debates. When people become afraid to ask legitimate questions or express disagreement openly, the quality of political deliberation suffers. Such an environment is dangerous for any movement that aspires to contribute to democratic transformation. I have empirical observations that support this concern. In what began as a friendly or comradely WhatsApp group, I have noticed an increasing level of intensity and, at times, striking animosity in response to questions or alternative viewpoints. What I would describe as Mashemakek—the immediate belittling, dismissal, or rejection of an idea, accompanied by labelling the questioner or inquiry itself as an obstacle to be avoided—has become increasingly visible.

I have also observed what appears to be an emerging discourse of personality cult, expressed in ways that are deeply concerning and, at times, embarrassing. It is troubling to see political reverence and unquestioning loyalty re-emerging in a context where one might have assumed that such political practices had been relegated to the past. We had perhaps believed that we had moved beyond this kind of political culture decades ago.

I therefore distinguish clearly between support for political change and uncritical support for particular political actors. A movement that cannot tolerate independent thought, critical inquiry, and internal disagreement will struggle to build the genuinely free society it claims to seek. Political transformation requires more than a change of government or political leadership. It also requires a political culture in which disagreement, scrutiny, accountability, and independent thought are protected.

Ethiopia is at a delicate historical juncture, and the future of the Amhara people is likewise being shaped by developments whose consequences may be profound. This calls for greater transparency, intellectual honesty, and a carefully considered path forward. We need to examine the available evidence, engage with competing interpretations, and distinguish political claims from ideological positions and empirically grounded analysis.

My conclusion is therefore straightforward: I support political change, but I do not believe that political change should require intellectual conformity. Let intellectuals, researchers, journalists, and other independent thinkers engage openly with evidence, historical context, competing perspectives, and difficult questions. Political activists and political organisations have their own legitimate roles, but those roles should not replace independent intellectual inquiry.

The distinction is crucial. One can support the necessity of political transformation while remaining critical, cautious, and intellectually independent of the actors who claim to represent that transformation. For me, this is neither neutrality nor political indifference. Rather, it is a commitment to intellectual independence at a moment when independent thinking is particularly important. For sustainable organisational growth and genuine democratic transformation to take place, freedom movements must actively cultivate feedback, tolerance, and humility. Rather than demanding blind loyalty or ideological uniformity, a healthy political culture should encourage constructive criticism, create space for internal disagreement, and cultivate the intellectual humility to recognise that no single faction holds a monopoly on truth.

By prioritising evidence, protecting independent thought, and allowing room for disagreement, a movement can guard against the emergence of internal authoritarianism and, in doing so, help lay the intellectual and democratic foundations for the freer society it seeks to build.

A genuine freedom struggle must be capable of accommodating disagreement within its own ranks. It must be strong enough to tolerate questions, confident enough to confront criticism, and mature enough to recognise that political unity cannot be built by suppressing intellectual diversity.

The struggle needs committed people—but it also needs people who are free to think.

Short Summary

The article argues that Ethiopia’s political transformation requires independent intellectual thought, open debate, and critical scrutiny—not political conformity or cadre mentality. It distinguishes support for fundamental political change from uncritical loyalty to particular political actors or alliances, while calling for greater transparency, evidence-based analysis, and space for disagreement, particularly within the Amhara political struggle.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984)

Coser, L. A. (1970). Men of ideas: A sociologist’s view. Free Press. (Original work published 1965)

Konrád, G., & Szelényi, I. (1979). The intellectuals on the road to class power. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Kurzman, C. (2008). Democracy denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the fate of democracy. Harvard University Press.

Leonard, M. (2008). What does China think? PublicAffairs.

The Ethiopian Tribune

Editorial Front Matter  ·  Foreword & Synopsis

GERD: From Engine of Ethiopia’s Renaissance to Engine of African Peace

An essay by Mefkereseb G. Hailu (PhD) — the twelfth and concluding article in the series

Foreword — The Bridge, and the Wall We Keep Building

For a year this newspaper has carried Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu’s argument in instalments, and readers have watched it accumulate into something rare in our public writing: a single, sustained case, built stone by stone, about what Ethiopia is and what it might yet become. Eleven essays traced the architecture — the Foundations of unity and a sovereign coast, the Means of broad-based development, and the Engine meant to drive them both. This twelfth and final essay turns to the Engine itself, and to the question the other eleven were circling all along: not whether the dam can be built, but whether we can build the country around it.

It arrives at an unusual moment. This month TIME’s Africa edition put the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on its cover and called it the power to unite a continent — a bridge, in the magazine’s image, rather than a wall. Dr Hailu takes that mirror and turns it on us with unsparing candour: strangers see cooperation in the concrete we poured; we see, in one another, one more thing to fight over. The distance between those two visions is his subject, and he refuses every comfortable name for it — settling, in the end, on shame.

A dam can be a wall or a bridge — Ethiopia must choose the bridge.

I will not disguise where the essay lands, for the Tribune does not run it to flatter anyone, least of all ourselves. Its charge falls on all four estates of what the author has called the racket the cadre, the oligarch, the pulpit, and, not least, the pen. Among the writings it names is one this newspaper published only a week ago: Dr Sosina Tadesse’s rebuttal in the Tsimdo debate. We printed her argument in full; we now print the essay that faults it and its rival for quarrelling over how to wage a war while sparing not one line for how it ends. That is not inconsistency. It is what an independent press is for: to carry the argument and its judge alike, and to trust readers to weigh both.

What Dr Hailu leaves us with is not a lament but a blueprint five conditions under which a shared nation becomes the lived experience of ordinary people, not one of which asks any Ethiopian to surrender his language, his faith, or his pride in his people. Whether we build it is not for a newspaper to decide. But the question deserves to be put plainly, and few have put it more plainly than this.

Read it as it was written: as a wake-up.

— The Editor, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

In the concluding essay of a twelve-part series, Dr Mefkereseb G. Hailu argues that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam must cease to be a monument and become an engine the physical spine of Ethiopia’s transformation, and then of its peace.

He begins from a mirror held up by outsiders: TIME’s Africa cover, The Power to Unite Africa, which reads GERD as a bridge an anchor of regional electricity trade and African integration where Ethiopians see only one more thing to fight over. That gap, he contends, is not about the dam but about the state behind it. A development engine is not self-executing; it needs a functioning institutional order to turn electricity into factories, factories into cities, and cities into a productive middle class for whom cooperation pays more than fragmentation. This is the “missing bridge” and precisely what a racket built on ethnic fear cannot supply.

Drawing on the economics of urbanisation and the arithmetic of a youth cohort of two million a year, Hailu recasts peace and development as a single question, answerable only by a national bargain in which every constituency holds a material stake that war would destroy. He sets out five conditions under which unity is actually made, impartial security, impartial delivery, the material bond, the mixing city, and an honest reckoning, none of which demands that any Ethiopian surrender his identity.

Against this he sets the “paper war” of hermitised intellectuals who argue endlessly over how to fight while never asking how the killing stops, and warns that a nation squandering GERD on ethnic conflict forfeits its seat in the age of artificial intelligence. The choice, he concludes, was never between Ethiopia’s peoples. It is between the country and the racket that farms it: the bridge, or the abyss.

The Ethiopian Tribune

In Depth · Infrastructure & Debt

Running on Half Power

Addis Ababa’s Railways and the Arithmetic of a Broken Promise

By E. Frashie

8 September 2026

A decade after its unveiling as the future of African urban transit, the capital’s light rail now runs on less than half its fleet — and the reasons lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

Every weekday at Autobus Tera, Surafel Tafesework performs the same quiet calculation. A bank officer bound for Megenagna, he would rather take the train — it is the cheapest way across the city — but the platform now fills faster than the trains arrive. He waits up to an hour, he told The Reporter, watching the crowd thicken the way it does at a bus stop. The fare still wins the argument. The waiting is beginning to lose it.

Multiply Surafel by the tens of thousands who ride the light rail each morning and you have the small, daily face of a large, expensive failure. A decade after Addis Ababa’s trains were unveiled as the future of African urban transit, the network runs on less than half its lungs — and the reasons why lead, step by step, from a crowded platform to the foreign-currency desk of the National Bank and the loan books of Beijing and Ankara.

The tyranny of the spare part

The immediate problem is brutally simple. The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit Service began life with 41 cars; by the account of its own chief executive, Berhan Abebaw (PhD), only 19 are now fit to run. The culprit is not sabotage or mismanagement of the theatrical kind, but something more mundane and more damning: there is no hard currency to buy replacement parts, down to the tyres that wear out fastest. The service has no dedicated workshop of its own, and leans on Ethiopian Railway Corporation engineers dispatched from Dire Dawa and Dewale.

This is not a new wound. As far back as 2023, only eight trains were moving; China stepped in with a spare-parts package worth some USD 23 million, and repair estimates ran past USD 60 million. That the operational count has crept back to 19 is, in a bleak sense, progress. But a USD 475 million system — 85 percent of it financed by a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China — sitting idle for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

A USD 475 million system idled for want of imported rubber is the whole Ethiopian macro-crisis rendered as a stalled tram.

The ledger against the promise

When the line opened in 2015, it was sold as a machine that could sweep up to 60,000 passengers an hour. Today it carries roughly that number across an entire day. The Federal Auditor General has put the project’s accumulated loss at around ETB 16 billion. In the 2025/26 fiscal year, ticket sales brought in just ETB 270 million; the city administration pours in an annual ETB 500 million subsidy simply to keep the fares humane — a Kality-to-Piassa trip costs 20 birr by train against 80 to 100 by taxi.

Officials now wave away the original pledge that the line would service its own debt within ten years. “In any country, urban railway operates with state subsidy,” Berhan says — and he is right, as a matter of transport economics the world over. But that truth was conspicuously absent from the sales pitch a decade ago, and it does not answer the harder question: subsidy toward what return? The commercial ballast that was meant to make the numbers work — transit-oriented development, station retail, leased commercial hubs — has barely materialised beyond a handful of sites like Leghar and Autobus Tera. The light rail today carries only about six percent of the city’s public-transport load, stranded from the Anbessa buses, Sheger buses and minibuses it was never properly stitched into.

The case for the defence

Honesty requires the counterpoint, because the railway story is not simply one of waste. The cross-country Ethio-Djibouti Railway — a USD 4.2 billion line built on USD 2.5 billion of Chinese credit — earns its keep in a currency the balance sheet cannot see. It now moves better than nine in ten of Ethiopia’s port-bound goods and the overwhelming majority of its coffee exports, cutting the Djibouti run from three days by truck to ten or twelve hours by rail, and slashing the demurrage bills that once bled the treasury at the port. A senior corporation official, speaking anonymously, makes the fair point that judging a rail line purely on ticketed profit misses the productivity it lends everything else.

That defence is genuine — and it is also why the financing model matters so much. Even the EDR needed relief: in 2018 China agreed to stretch out its repayment terms, one of several reschedulings of an infrastructure debt to Beijing that now runs past USD 13 billion. A trade lifeline built on a loan that must itself be perpetually renegotiated is an asset and a vulnerability in the same breath.

The northern warning

Nowhere is that vulnerability clearer than on the Awash–Kombolcha–Hara Gebeya line. This USD 1.7 billion, 392-kilometre corridor — financed by Turkey’s Exim Bank and built by Yapı Merkezi — was nearly finished when war engulfed the north in late 2020. Looting, evacuation and two years of paralysis followed, and the contractor took its losses to arbitration in London, in a dispute reported to be worth around USD 2.6 billion all told. The London tribunal, with Professor Tilahun Teshome as sole arbitrator, threw out the bulk of the contractor’s roughly USD 1 billion claim and ordered a USD 29.1 million advance repaid to the corporation — hailed at home as a decisive victory.

It is worth a note of caution: the contractor’s counsel has publicly disputed the “bulk knocked out” framing, and even a favourable award does not make the episode cheap. Years of frozen construction, depreciating assets and contingent liabilities are their own tax on a state-owned enterprise — and Ethiopian Railway Corporation is one of nearly forty such enterprises now folded under Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign fund quietly restructuring their balance sheets away from public view. The line has since been relaunched, with the government hoping Yapı Merkezi will return to finish what the war interrupted.

Who carries it

The recurring lesson, from the light rail to Djibouti to the north, is the one the planners kept postponing: track laid without last-mile links, local maintenance capacity or a revenue base beyond the farebox becomes a liability the moment the currency tightens. The fixes experts keep prescribing — unified ticketing across modes, developed station real estate, domestic manufacture of high-wear parts, and a firewall between operating budgets and legacy construction debt — are neither exotic nor new. They were simply cheaper to defer.

The cost of deferral is not paid in arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera.

The cost of deferral is not paid in the language of arbitration awards or sovereign-fund spreadsheets. It is paid on the platform at Autobus Tera, in the extra forty-five minutes, in the taxi fare a bank officer can barely justify, by the several hundred thousand residents who continue to ride a network running, as it has for years now, on half power.

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