Re: Which one is horsey?
If Eritrea dares to defend itself against Ethiopia’s impending invasion, the world community must take actions against Asmara.
- Ethiopian top army general
Re: Which one is horsey?
የፀረ-አገዛዝ የትጥቅ (ወታደራዊ) ትግሎች በመላው ኢትዮጵያ ተነስተዋል።
ጎሳ ተኮር፣ የፍትሐዊ ጥያቄ ፀረ-አገዛዝ ትግሎች ናቸው።
አማራ፣ ትግራይና ኦሮሚያ ብቻ አይደሉም። በየክልሎች እና እያንዳንዱን ጎሳ የሚመለከቱ ናቸው።
ምክንያቱም የዛሬዋ ኢትዮጵያ ፋሽስታዊ አምባገነንነትን የምትሸከም አይደለችም።
በቅርብ ጊዜ ሁሉም ኢትዮጵያዊ በዚህ የትግል ስልት ውስጥ ይሳተፋል።
ፋሽስታዊው አገዛዝ እንዴት አርጎ "የሚገብር ኢትዮጵያዊ" እንደሚፈጥርና ስልጣኑን እንደሚያደላድል የምናየው ነው።
የሚቻልና የማይቻል፣ የሚሆንና የማይሆን ነገር አለ።
በመጣንበት መንገድ ግን አይሆንም!!
Re: Which one is horsey?
Opinion
Ethiopia on the Edge: Abiy Ahmed Ali’s Brand of “Oromummaa”, and the Deepening National and Regional Crisis
December 21, 2025
By David Yeh
https://redseabeacon.com/ethiopia-on-th ... al-crisis/
Ethiopia now confronts one of the gravest crises in its 130-year history. Under the Potemkin leadership of Abiy Ahmed Ali, the country has been ranked fourth among the ten nations most at risk of instability and collapse, a damning verdict on the state of its political, social, and security institutions. The irony could not be sharper. In 2019, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for allegedly ending decades of conflict with Eritrea and heralding reconciliation in the Horn of Africa.
Today, that promise lies in ruins. Ethiopia is fractured by proliferating ethnic wars, armed insurgencies, and chronic political mismanagement. Far from unifying the country, Abiy’s brand of “Oromummaa” has been weaponized to violently reorder the political and cultural landscape, concentrating power within a narrow Potemkin Party elite while deepening alienation, repression, and instability across Oromia and the wider Ethiopian state. What was marketed as reform has devolved into fragmentation, and what was celebrated as peace has given way to accelerating national unraveling.
Historical Context: Ethnic Federalism and the Origins of Division
To understand Ethiopia’s current crisis, one must begin with the political architecture put in place, after 1991. Following the collapse of the Derg regime, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), operating through the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), introduced the 1995 constitution, which institutionalized ethnic federalism. The country was reorganized into ethnically defined regional states:
ostensibly to empower communities that had long been marginalized.nations, nationalities, and peoples,
In practice, however, this system functioned less as genuine empowerment than as a sophisticated divide-and-rule mechanism. While it granted formal recognition and representation to multiple ethnic groups, it also entrenched ethnicity as the primary axis of political life. This arrangement enabled a minority TPLF elite to dominate the state, centralize power, and siphon national resources, while fostering competition, grievance politics, and centrifugal tendencies among the regions.
A key instrument in this strategy, was the creation of satellite parties within the EPRDF. To counter the influence of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) led by figures such as Lencho Letta and Dawud Ibssa, the TPLF helped establish the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). Formed largely from Oromo prisoners of war captured by the EPLF and TPLF, the OPDO was led by figures such as Kuma Dameksa (Taye Teklemariam) and Aba Dula Gamada (Minase Woldegiorgis). Though presented as an Oromo representative force, it functioned primarily as a subordinate arm of TPLF power.
After Abiy Ahmed’s rise, the OPDO was rebranded as the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP) under Lemma Megersa and Abiy himself, and later became the core of the Potemkin Party. In substance, however, little changed. The ODP did not dismantle the TPLF system; it inherited it. Ethnic manipulation, centralized control, and large-scale corruption persisted; merely under a different label.
Over time, ethnic federalism hardened divisions rather than healing them. Oromo, Amhara, Sidama, Wolayta, Hadiya, and other communities gained nominal recognition, but they were locked into cycles of rivalry and grievance while real power and wealth remained concentrated at the center. Under Abiy’s tenure, these structural fractures accelerated. The Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) unraveled, giving rise to the Sidama Region, the Southwest Ethiopia Region, the South Ethiopia Regional State, and the Central Ethiopia Regional State, an unravelling that continues to generate centrifugal pressure elsewhere. As the federal state weakened, particularly after Abiy took office, regional militias expanded their reach, the monopoly of force splintered, and Ethiopia’s already fragile cohesion eroded further.
This historical backdrop is essential to understanding Abiy Ahmed’s political strategy. Under the banner of “Oromummaa”, a legitimate aspiration for Oromo dignity, equality, and freedom, Abiy transformed ethnic identity from a vehicle of emancipation into an instrument of consolidation. What had once been framed as liberation was repurposed into a tool for sidelining rivals, restructuring power, and aggravating the very fractures that ethnic federalism had already hardened.
Beneath the rhetoric of national reconciliation lies a far narrower project: the selective elevation of his own version of “Oromummaa” as a governing ideology, deployed to entrench Potemkin Party Oromo dominance within federal institutions. Far from representing Oromo consensus, this strategy has been rejected by large segments of the Oromo population themselves, who see in it not emancipation, but cooptation and concentration of power.
Opposition Forces: TPLF, FANO, Oromo Shene, and so on
Ethiopia’s internal instability is further deepened by the persistence of organized opposition forces across multiple regions. In Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) retains substantial political and military capacity, exercising de facto influence despite formal ceasefire arrangements. Its continued leverage exposes the federal government’s inability to reassert authority and reflects unresolved grievances rooted in decades of ethnic-federalist rule.
In the Amhara region, FANO has emerged as a formidable militia force, mobilized in defense of Amhara interests and prepared to confront federal authority when marginalization is perceived. Its actions are tightly interwoven with disputes over power, identity, and territory, adding another layer of fragmentation to an already strained national security landscape.
In Oromia, the Oromo Liberation Army, often referred to as Oromo Shene, continues its insurgency under the ideological banner of Oromo nationalism associated with the Oromo Liberation Front (Adda Bilisummaa Oromoo). This persistence is especially revealing: even as Potemkin Party elites advance Abiy Ahmed’s version of “Oromummaa”within the federal system, armed resistance endures. The contradiction underscores both the limits of Addis Ababa’s control and the hollowness of claims that Oromo empowerment under the current order has resolved long-standing political and social grievances.
According to Asafa Jalata
Oromummaa is a complex and dynamic national and global project. As a national project and the master ideology of the Oromo national movement, Oromummaa enables Oromos to retrieve their cultural memories, assess the consequences of Ethiopian colonialism, give voice to their collective grievances, mobilize diverse cultural resources, interlink Oromo personal, interpersonal and collective (national) relationships, and assists in the development of Oromo-centric political strategies and tactics that can mobilize the nation for collective action empowering the people for liberation.
As a global project, Oromummaa requires that the Oromo national movement be inclusive of all persons operating in a democratic fashion. This global Oromummaa enables the Oromo people to form alliances with all political forces and social movements that accept the principles of national self-determination and multinational democracy in promotion of a global humanity that is free of all forms oppression and exploitation. In other words, global Oromummaa is based on the principles of mutual solidarity, social justice, and popular democracy.
The Concept of Oromummaa and Identity Formation in
Contemporary Oromo Society, Journal of Oromo Studies,
Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007.
Abiy’s hidden agenda, however, manifests in concrete and troubling ways. Preferential appointments of Potemkin Party aligned Oromo officials across the military, judiciary, and civilian administration have become routine, while other communities, most notably Amharas and Tigrayans, dismissively labeled “Semitic” by Potemkin Party elites, are increasingly marginalized. Publicly, these moves are packaged as reform and inclusivity; in practice, they function as a calculated consolidation of power around Abiy’s personal base within segments of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region, while systematically weakening potential rivals.
Abiy’s personalized version of “Oromummaa” is not a project of collective emancipation but an expression of unchecked ambition, an attempt to refashion ethnic identity into a vehicle for personal rule and grandiose visions of a mythical “Cushitic kingdom” stretching across Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Sudan. Far from stabilizing the country, this approach has intensified ethnic polarization and directly fueled the growth of armed opposition. The result is a dangerous convergence of insurgent forces, TPLF remnants in Tigray, FANO militias in Amhara, Oromo Shene in Oromia, and others, operating in parallel theaters of conflict. As ethnic militias entrench themselves regionally, the federal government’s authority continues to erode, locking Ethiopia into a self-reinforcing cycle of fragmentation, violence, and instability.
Taken together, these dynamics illustrate a state pulled apart from within, unable to monopolize force, reconcile competing nationalisms, or translate political rhetoric into durable stability.
Ethnic Conflict and the Weaponization of Identity
Abiy’s concealed “Oromummaa” agenda has sharply intensified Ethiopia’s ethnic polarization. By selectively empowering a Potemkin Party–aligned Oromo identity while sidelining other communities, he has turned ethnicity into an instrument of political control, whether by design or by consequence. Long-standing grievances, unresolved disputes over land and resources, and chronic federal neglect have compounded the damage, igniting violent clashes among communities, insurgent groups, and state forces.
By failing to build a genuinely inclusive political framework, the federal government has allowed ethnic identity to be weaponized as political currency. This has entrenched cycles of retaliation and armed confrontation, eroding trust in the state and pushing the country toward deeper fragmentation rather than durable stability.
Conclusion: A State Unraveling by Design
Ethiopia now stands at the edge of a historic rupture. What it faces is not a passing crisis or a temporary security setback, but a systemic breakdown rooted in decades of distorted governance and accelerated under the Potemkin leadership of Abiy Ahmed Ali. Being ranked among the world’s most at-risk states is not an abstract statistic; it is a verdict on a political project that has hollowed out institutions, fractured society, and normalized permanent instability. The bitter irony remains unavoidable: a leader once lionized as a peacemaker now presides over one of the most volatile internal collapses in modern Ethiopian history.
The promise of 2018, has been fully exhausted. What was sold as reform has metastasized into fragmentation; what was celebrated as reconciliation has degenerated into proliferating wars; what was framed as empowerment has become exclusion by other means. Abiy’s personalized appropriation of “Oromummaa”, divorced from its emancipatory roots and stripped of its inclusive moral core, has not unified Ethiopia. It has weaponized identity, centralized power around a narrow elite, and pushed the country deeper into centrifugal conflict.
The deeper tragedy is that Ethiopia’s implosion is not accidental. It is the cumulative outcome of ethnic federalism left unreformed, opposition militarized rather than reconciled, and a federal center that has abandoned inclusivity for coercion. The convergence of armed actors, TPLF remnants, FANO militias, Oromo Shene, and others, is not a coincidence; it is the predictable result of a state that no longer commands legitimacy, trust, or monopoly over force. Each insurgency feeds the next, each grievance multiplies the last, and the center continues to erode.
History will be unforgiving here. States do not survive on rhetoric, awards, or mythologized leadership. They endure through institutions that treat citizens as equals, through power arrangements that restrain ambition, and through identities that bind rather than divide. Ethiopia today has none of these in working order. Unless the current trajectory is reversed, unless identity is de-weaponized, inclusion made real, and power genuinely decentralized, the country risks sliding from chronic instability into irreversible disintegration.
This is no longer a warning. It is a reckoning already underway.