Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia: we have had enough

We have had enough of being asked to admire the skyline while families carry the cost of political failure. Enough of measuring Ethiopia’s future by the image of its capital while children lose their education and civilians lose their homes. Abiy Ahmed’s leadership deserves our anger. The record of war, displacement and exclusion set out below demands something far more serious than another promise of progress.

Our anger begins with people we love. It begins with our mother and her sisters, with the opportunities one received and the exhausting struggle the others inherited. We refuse to discuss their lives as an unfortunate detail at the edge of a grand national project. Their lives are the point. Any government that loses sight of that deserves to be challenged without apology.

Our mother’s education changed the future of her children. Her sisters deserved that chance too. We are grateful for the life her education helped make possible, and furious that opportunity could be so uneven within one family. Their labour, intelligence and hopes were worth more than a lifetime of barely getting by. Calling such endurance resilience does nothing to change the conditions that demand it.

A growing population deserves a government that takes its future seriously. Every child represents a life that needs teaching, care and the chance to earn a decent living. Abiy should have to answer for what his administration delivers to those children beyond the capital. National ambition means very little when its promises remain out of reach of the families expected to believe in it.

There is something profoundly wrong with a political order in which a child’s future can be consumed by the struggle to get through the week. A boy should be able to help his family without sacrificing his education. A girl deserves the freedom to grow up, study and choose her own life. We will never accept forced marriage as an answer to poverty. Our mother’s opportunity should have been ordinary.

The burden belongs on the government to make schooling possible. Parents trapped by poverty deserve support; teachers deserve proper training, materials and pay. We want to see the urgency of an inauguration applied to a village classroom. A child waiting for a teacher cannot recover those years from a speech about the country’s bright future. That lost time should shame the people who govern.

Read those findings and then try to call this merely a disagreement about policy. A looted hospital means a person in pain with nowhere to turn. It means a family facing an emergency without the help that should exist. We are angry because destruction has consequences long after leaders finish arguing about who won. Abiy’s record must be judged against that suffering, not sheltered behind the language of national greatness.

Picture a household that works through a growing season, feeds itself from the harvest and takes a small surplus to market. After the sale, almost everything must go back into surviving and planting again. Where is the room for a medical emergency, better equipment or a child’s education? It is insulting to celebrate the dignity of farming while accepting that a farming family should have so little room to breathe.

The demands are practical: water that can be relied on, affordable equipment, useful agricultural advice, storage, transport and a fair chance to earn from a harvest. Farmers should be able to choose improvements they can sustain. They deserve the means to build a future from their work. Respect for rural Ethiopia must show up in the resources available to it.

Useful projects deserve recognition. They also make excuses harder to tolerate. Where an intervention helps a family earn more or gives a girl time to attend school, the government should explain how it will extend that opportunity. Publish the budgets, the results and the gaps. People left waiting deserve an answer that goes beyond being shown somebody else’s success story.

We are tired of the suggestion that admiring Addis Ababa is a duty of patriotism. We can love Ethiopia and demand to know who can afford to live in the city being celebrated. An influencer’s video cannot settle that question. Neither can a carefully chosen view of a boulevard. A government’s reputation must survive an honest look at the households outside the frame.

A home is years of work, a place of safety and the centre of a family’s life. A development project that strips that away without meaningful protection deserves outrage. Abiy’s government should have to answer to the residents affected, face to face and through institutions with the power to hold it accountable. The people who build and maintain Addis deserve safe work, fair pay and a place in its future.

We reject the ambition to turn Addis into a spectacle for wealthy visitors if ordinary residents must bear the cost of that image. Our objection to a Dubai-style vision is about whom it serves. A city becomes a source of pride when the people who sustain it can live with dignity. If they are pushed aside, the ceremony is an insult to the sacrifice underneath it.

Those announcements do not tell us where every dollar went. They give us every reason to demand the records. Publish the borrowing terms, project budgets, procurement decisions and independent audits. The public should be able to follow obligations undertaken in its name. The sums are too large, and the consequences too serious, for accountability to depend on confidence in one man.

Future generations should not inherit obligations wrapped in publicity and be told that questioning them betrays the country. Abiy’s administration owes Ethiopians an account of what it borrows, what it builds and who benefits. Anger at an opaque decision is a legitimate demand to be treated as a citizen. The government should answer it with evidence.

The hope attached to Abiy’s arrival makes the subsequent devastation more bitter. People were entitled to expect something better from a leader celebrated for peace. The Nobel Prize cannot shelter him from the record that followed. Its promise makes the demand for accountability more urgent. No honour should stand between a prime minister and the people entitled to question his judgment.

Let the anger land on the people who made decisions and the institutions that carried them out. Tigrayan civilians are not the TPLF. Oromo and Amhara civilians are not collectively responsible for governments or armed movements claiming to represent them. A family does not owe an explanation of its ethnicity before it deserves safety. Leaders must never be allowed to hide their own responsibility inside the identity of millions of people.

The uncertainty over the exact toll does nothing to soften our judgment of the leadership that brought Ethiopia to this catastrophe. We see a struggle for power in which ordinary lives became expendable. Abiy must answer for his government’s choices, and TPLF leaders for theirs. Families who buried relatives deserve more than a contest over military prestige. They deserve an honest reckoning with how they were failed.

We are furious that survivors should have to struggle for recognition while political loyalties determine whose pain people will acknowledge. Rape cannot be excused by the uniform of the perpetrator, the identity of the victim or the cause being defended. Survivors deserve care and justice. Every leadership implicated by the evidence must face investigation. Abiy’s government has no moral claim to an exemption.

The people killed at Dedebit deserve more than a place in a discussion of military capability. The government must answer for the civilian harm documented there. The ability to strike from the air carries an obligation to protect lives, and political responsibility does not disappear into the distance between a weapon and its target. We refuse to applaud strength measured without regard for the people beneath it.

A signature should have meant a chance for families to recover. Its value must be measured in people returning safely, services functioning and disputes being resolved without renewed bloodshed. If leaders celebrate an agreement while its promise remains insecure, the public is entitled to demand what happened to that promise. Peace belongs to the people who have to live with its failure.

We are exhausted by a politics that leaves communities fearing for their place in their own country. Abiy should be judged by whether his leadership makes equal citizenship more credible. Land, language, religion and representation require institutions people can trust. A prime minister who cannot build that trust should have to answer for the failure, however grand his claims about national unity.

We do not need a theory about Abiy’s private thoughts to condemn the failures laid out here. His public record is enough to demand accountability. Regional leaders must face the same scrutiny. No officeholder owns a community, and no movement earns permanent loyalty by invoking its suffering. People deserve the freedom to say that their supposed defenders have failed them.

Our anger at Abiy does not put our future at the disposal of the next armed leadership. Anyone asking for power must explain how civilians will be protected, how opponents will be heard and how the leadership can be removed. The country deserves answers before it is asked for allegiance. Exhaustion with this government must never become a blank cheque for another one.

The danger of another devastating war should provoke urgency, not fatalism. Further displacement and suffering can still be prevented. The government and its opponents are making choices now, and they should be held responsible for those choices now. Families should not have to endure another catastrophe before their warnings are treated as serious.

Abiy Ahmed should resign. That is our conclusion from the record examined here. Ethiopia needs a peaceful, lawful transition to credible elections and accountable civilian government. His departure must give people a real opportunity to choose and to reject their leaders. Replacing one unaccountable authority with another would squander the very freedom for which we are arguing.

Those of us abroad have a responsibility to remember who bears the consequences of the positions we take. We should support people’s freedom to decide their future and press for de-escalation. Egypt, Eritrea and the Gulf states should do the same. Ethiopian families deserve to live without their security becoming a bargaining chip in somebody else’s regional ambitions.

We want progress that can be felt inside a household: a girl staying in school, a farmer saving beyond the next planting, a worker returning safely and a displaced family rebuilding its home. Those demands are basic. A government that cannot meet them should face hard questions every day it remains in office. Citizens owe it neither applause nor silence.

Our mother’s education gave us a different future. We will always be grateful for that, and we will keep asking why her sisters were denied the same chance. That is the Ethiopia we want to see change. Our anger comes from refusing to accept that survival is the most ordinary people should expect. Abiy Ahmed has had years to lead. Ethiopia does not owe him another generation’s future.