Piassa, demolished

Piassa was demolished. The palace was built. The arithmetic does not work.

A hundred-year-old urban quarter is razed in February 2024. By November, eight hundred and seventy-two people are forcibly evicted from Bole and Lemi Kura with seventy-two hours’ notice and zero compensation. Five hundred hectares on the Yeka Hills become the Prime Minister’s new $10–15 billion palace complex. The federal annual budget is $14.6 billion. The arithmetic does not work, and the political economy that produced it is a federal-government strategy of accelerating urban transformation against the population the transformation is supposed to serve.

Filed mid-May 2025, after the Amnesty International report

The Corridor Development Project was formally approved by the Addis Ababa City Administration Executive Council on 23 February 2024. The Project’s stated objective, in the federal-government and city-administration communications that followed, was “urban transformation” — the comprehensive reorganisation of Addis Ababa’s road network, public space provision, and built environment along contemporary international design standards. In its first-phase implementation, the Project targeted the central historic neighbourhoods of the city — Piassa, Arada, Mercato — for demolition and reconstruction. In its second-phase implementation, launched in October 2024, the Project expanded to cover 132 kilometres of road corridors across eight new routes, totalling approximately 2,000 hectares of Addis Ababa’s urban area. By April 2025, the Project had expanded to operations in 58 cities across Ethiopia, with what city authorities characterised as a “transformative” architectural ambition. By Minister of Urban and Infrastructure Chaltu Sani’s May 2025 parliamentary briefing, the Project’s scope had expanded to 63 cities. [Wikipedia, “Corridor Development Project,” accessed June 2026; Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Federal government must pause the corridor development project and end forced evictions,” 14 April 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr25/9098/2025/en/]

The Project’s substantive achievements, as visible in May 2025, include genuinely improved road infrastructure in some Addis Ababa corridors, expanded pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, and underground services in certain zones, and the construction of new public-space amenities in others. The new infrastructure is, in many cases, of substantially higher quality than what it replaced. The Project’s costs — in displacement, in destruction of historic urban fabric, in violation of property rights, in suppression of civil-society criticism, and in expenditure of public funds at a scale the federal budget cannot rationally support — are the central political question the Project raises.

The Piassa demolitions of early 2024, the Bole and Lemi Kura evictions of November 2024, and the Yeka Hills palace construction running in parallel are three components of the same political-economic strategy. Each component deserves separate description.

Piassa.

The Piassa neighbourhood of central Addis Ababa was established during the Italian occupation period of 1936–1941 and developed substantially through the imperial-period building activity of the 1950s and 1960s. It contained, at the beginning of 2024, a substantial portion of Addis Ababa’s pre-1974 architectural heritage — Italianate commercial buildings, Art Deco residential blocks, vernacular Ethiopian commercial structures, religious buildings, and the dense informal market structures that had organised the neighbourhood’s commercial life for decades. The neighbourhood’s population in early 2024 was approximately 25,000–40,000 people depending on the boundaries used; the daily commercial population (workers, shoppers, traders) was substantially larger.

The Piassa demolitions began in February 2024. Notice periods given to households and businesses were, by multiple contemporaneous accounts, between five days and one week. Demolitions were conducted by city-contracted heavy equipment with security force protection. Building destruction, by mid-March 2024, had cleared substantial portions of the neighbourhood; the heritage buildings that had organised the neighbourhood’s character were largely demolished by April 2024. The displaced residents — estimated by various sources at thousands of households — were variously promised replacement housing in condominium developments at the city periphery, offered alternative commercial-space rentals at higher cost in other parts of the city, or simply displaced without operational assistance. The demolitions drew sustained international attention through spring 2024; The Economist, Al Jazeera, The Conversation, and Ethiopian outlets including Addis Standard and Ethiopia Insight produced critical coverage that the federal-government and city-administration communications characterised as “biased” reporting that overlooked the development benefits of the project. [The Conversation, “Demolitions in Ethiopia are giving rise to a new Addis Ababa,” 7 November 2025, https://theconversation.com/demolitions-in-ethiopia-are-giving-rise-to-a-new-addis-ababa-it-comes-at-the-expense-of-the-citys-residents-237494]

The Piassa demolitions were, by the standards of urban-planning ethics in democratic states, comprehensively defective. The notice periods were insufficient. The compensation arrangements were inadequate. The community-consultation processes were minimal or non-existent. The protection of historic urban fabric was effectively absent. The provision for displaced households’ alternative housing was, in many documented cases, not delivered. The Project’s substantive defects on the Piassa case prompted critical commentary not only from international human-rights organisations but from members of Addis Ababa’s professional and intellectual community whose own commercial and residential interests had been affected.

Bole and Lemi Kura.

The Bole and Lemi Kura sub-cities of Addis Ababa, located in the southeastern part of the city, contained mixed residential and commercial development that the second phase of the Corridor Development Project targeted for demolition. The evictions began in November 2024 and were conducted with what Amnesty International’s April 2025 report characterises as “unprecedented” administrative violence. The Amnesty investigation, conducted between 17 January and 10 February 2025, surveyed 47 affected homeowner households and interviewed eight victims and community leaders.

The specific findings of the Amnesty investigation:

The 47 homeowner households surveyed contained 254 individuals who had been forcibly evicted from their homes in November 2024. The household compositions included 114 children under the age of 18 and 13 elderly persons over the age of 65. Additional tenants in the same buildings comprised 618 individuals, bringing the total documented forcibly-evicted population from the surveyed sample to 872 people. The 47 surveyed households were drawn from a substantially larger affected population in Bole and Lemi Kura that Amnesty did not have the resources to enumerate completely; the true count of forcibly-evicted persons in these two sub-cities alone was, by Amnesty’s assessment, likely several times larger than the surveyed figure. Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab confirmed, through satellite imagery analysis between early November 2024 and early February 2025, that at least 29 hectares of densely built-up urban area in Bole and Lemi Kura had undergone structural clearing during the period. [Amnesty International, April 2025 report]

The process of the November 2024 evictions, as documented by Amnesty: Affected residents received approximately one week’s verbal notification at a public meeting. Following the meeting, “municipal administration members went door-to-door, asking residents to leave their homes within three days and warning them their homes would be demolished.” The homes were then demolished within 24 to 72 hours of the door-to-door warnings. No written notices were issued. No compensation was provided to any of the 47 households surveyed. The displaced residents were forced to rent housing on the city’s periphery at significantly higher rents than they had been paying; transportation costs to their work and to schools for their children increased substantially; children’s school enrollment was disrupted by relocation; informal community support networks were destroyed.

The most consequential operational detail in the Amnesty documentation is that the 47 surveyed households included many that held Sened Alba documentation — legally recognised residential title in the Ethiopian property-rights framework. Sened Alba properties had been, throughout Ethiopian land-tenure history, the most secure form of urban residential title available to non-government residents. The Bole and Lemi Kura evictions demolished Sened Alba properties without compensation. The federal-government and city-administration communications characterised these demolitions as legally appropriate exercises of the state’s eminent domain authority; the substantive legal question of whether Sened Alba title-holders were entitled to compensation under the Ethiopian constitution and under federal-government property-rights law was, in operational practice, not adjudicated, because the federal courts that would normally address such questions were not, in November 2024, operating with the independence required to challenge city-administration decisions.

The November 2024 evictions were not isolated. The same pattern — short notice, no compensation, security-force enforcement, destruction of legally-titled property — has been documented by Amnesty, by Addis Standard, and by Borkena across multiple Ethiopian cities through 2024 and into 2025. Jimma, where Prime Minister Abiy claimed in January 2025 that “15,000 evictees… have not demanded compensation,” was the most prominent case outside Addis. Hawassa, Jigjiga, Dessie, and approximately fifty other cities have produced documented eviction cases with similar process defects.

Yeka Hills / Chaka.

While the Corridor Development Project was demolishing the central neighbourhoods of Addis Ababa and the residential zones of Bole and Lemi Kura, the federal government was constructing, on the eastern hills of the city, a palace complex of unprecedented scale and cost. The complex, known publicly as the Chaka Palace or the Yeka Hills project, occupies approximately 503 hectares on the northeastern edge of Addis Ababa. The complex’s planned facilities include: the Prime Minister’s official residence (replacing the older Menelik Palace in central Addis as the primary executive residence), the Sky View hotel and conference facility, residences for cabinet ministers, three artificial lakes, approximately 29 kilometres of internal road infrastructure, an underground tunnel system whose purpose has not been publicly specified, and substantial recreational and ceremonial facilities. The complex’s estimated cost, by various credible analyses, is between $10 billion and $15 billion. The federal annual budget for the 2024 fiscal year was approximately $14.6 billion. [The Conversation, “Demolitions in Ethiopia,” 7 November 2025]

The arithmetic is the central question.

The Chaka Palace’s estimated cost, even at the low end of the available estimates, approaches the entire federal annual budget of the year it was being constructed. The federal budget includes, in the same year, allocations for federal civil-service salaries, federal pensions, federal infrastructure outside Addis, federal contributions to regional governments, federal funding for education and health services, federal contributions to international debt service, and the operational costs of the federal armed forces. The Chaka Palace’s cost — if accurate — could not have been funded from ordinary federal-budgetary appropriations without producing substantial reductions in other categories of federal expenditure that were not, in 2024, visibly reduced.

The funding source for the Chaka Palace has not been publicly disclosed by the federal government. Several hypotheses have been advanced in subsequent Ethiopian political analysis: that the construction is being funded by United Arab Emirates investment in a structured arrangement that does not appear on the federal balance sheet; that the construction is being funded through off-budget transactions with state-owned enterprises (Ethio Telecom, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Ethiopian Airlines) that have not appeared on the federal balance sheet; that the construction is being funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or other Gulf states through arrangements not yet publicly characterised; or that the construction is being funded through some combination of these sources. The federal-government Foreign Ministry and the Office of the Prime Minister have not addressed the funding question in public communications. The federal Ministry of Finance has not addressed the funding question. Parliamentary inquiries on the funding question have not produced operational answers.

The structural significance of the Chaka Palace’s cost is that, regardless of the specific funding source, the construction represents a substantial federal-government commitment of national resources to a project that does not, in any economic sense, generate direct economic returns. The complex is not commercial in its principal function; it is a presidential residence, conference facility, and ceremonial infrastructure. The opportunity cost of the construction — the schools, hospitals, infrastructure outside Addis, debt service, and other federal-budgetary expenditures that have not been funded because the federal-government’s resources have been committed to Chaka — is substantial and is borne, in immediate terms, by the population whose access to federal services is correspondingly constrained.

The political function of the Chaka Palace is more contested. The federal-government communications have characterised the complex as appropriate to Ethiopia’s stature as the second-most-populous African state and as the seat of the African Union, and as a long-term investment in federal-government dignity and capacity. Critical analysis has characterised the complex as a personalist project oriented toward the Prime Minister’s individual prestige rather than toward the federal state’s functional capacity. The two characterisations are not necessarily mutually exclusive; a presidential residence can be both a state-functional asset and a personal-prestige object. The empirical question is how the cost-benefit calculation balances against the alternative uses of the resources committed.

The historical significance of the Chaka Palace location is that the construction has rendered inaccessible the Washa Mikael Rock-Hewn Church, an early Ethiopian Orthodox heritage site that the complex’s perimeter security has substantially closed to ordinary pilgrim access. The Washa Mikael church, while less internationally prominent than the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, is a significant religious-historical site whose accessibility to Ethiopian Orthodox worshippers has been substantially compromised by the construction. The compromise has been protested by Ethiopian Orthodox figures and by cultural-heritage advocates; the protests have not produced operational changes to the complex’s security perimeter.

The suppression of civil-society criticism.

The Corridor Development Project’s implementation has been accompanied by sustained federal-government efforts to suppress civil-society and journalistic criticism of the project. The most prominent specific case is the September 2024 arrest of artist Azeb Worku, who had publicly criticised the Piassa demolitions through her artistic and social-media work. Azeb’s arrest was, in subsequent international human-rights communications, characterised as an arbitrary detention prompted by protected expression. Her case was, by 2025, one of multiple documented cases of arbitrary detention of Ethiopian civil-society figures, journalists, and ordinary residents who had publicly criticised the demolitions.

In November 2024, contemporaneous with the Bole and Lemi Kura evictions, the federal Civil Society Organizations Authority suspended three Ethiopian human-rights organisations that had been documenting the eviction process: the Center for Advancement of Rights and Democracy (CARD), the Association for Human Rights in Ethiopia (AHRE), and the Ethiopian Human Rights Defenders Center (EHRDC). The suspensions were initially open-ended and were characterised by the federal-government communications as administrative actions related to compliance review. International human-rights organisations and Western donor governments objected; the suspensions were partially lifted in subsequent weeks under diplomatic pressure. The lifting did not produce structural protection for civil-society organisations against future suspension; the federal government’s demonstrated willingness to use administrative suspension as an instrument against critical civil-society organisations has, by 2025, become a structural condition of Ethiopian civil-society operation.

The pattern of repression has not been limited to the highest-profile cases. The April 2025 Amnesty report documented multiple cases of arbitrary detention of ordinary residents who had refused to vacate their homes within the brief notice periods that the eviction process provided; journalists attempting to report on the evictions faced harassment and threats; human-rights defenders attempting to document the evictions in Oromia Region (where parallel demolitions were occurring under federal regional-development initiatives) faced similar pressure. The cumulative pattern, by mid-2025, is one in which the federal government’s commitment to the Corridor Development Project has been matched by a federal-government strategy of suppressing the documentation of the Project’s human and social costs.

The political economy.

The structural question — what political economy produces the simultaneous implementation of the Corridor Development Project and the Chaka Palace construction — admits a clear analytical answer.

The federal government has, by 2024, decided that the political costs of mass displacement of urban populations are lower than the political benefits of the visible transformation of Addis Ababa into an international-grade capital. The calculation rests on three assumptions: that the displaced populations lack effective political representation to translate their grievances into electoral consequences; that the visible transformation of Addis Ababa will generate political support among the diaspora, the urban middle-class, and the international development community whose continued engagement the federal government requires; and that the federal-government’s control of media, civil society, and judicial institutions can suppress effective documentation and challenge of the displacement process. The political calculation has, through 2024 and into 2025, been substantially correct in operational terms. The displaced populations have not produced effective electoral resistance; the visible transformation has generated political support in the constituencies the federal government calibrated for; the suppression of documentation has limited but not eliminated international criticism.

The political costs of the calculation will be paid, in operational terms, at the points where the displaced populations’ grievances eventually find political expression. By mid-2026, those points have not yet been reached in any operationally significant form. The Addis Ababa residents whose homes have been demolished have not, in 2025 or in the first half of 2026, organised any sustained political resistance. The civil-society organisations that might have catalysed such resistance have been intimidated, suspended, or co-opted. The judicial institutions that might have provided legal remedies are not, in 2024–2026, operating with the independence required. The federal government’s political calculation, on the available evidence, will continue to be operationally correct for at least the near term.

The deeper question is whether a federal-government strategy that depends on the silencing of those bearing its costs is sustainable. The history of Ethiopian urban-development politics through the post-1974 period suggests that silenced grievances do, over time, find political expression — sometimes through electoral processes, sometimes through extra-electoral mobilisation, sometimes through the kind of inter-communal violence that has been a recurring feature of Ethiopian politics in the post-2018 period. The displaced populations of Piassa, Bole, Lemi Kura, Jimma, Hawassa, Jigjiga, and the dozens of other cities affected by the Corridor Development Project constitute, in mid-2026, a substantial and accumulating constituency whose political grievances against the federal government are real, documented, and unresolved. The eventual political expression of that constituency’s grievances is a forward question that the federal-government calculation has not adequately addressed.

The arithmetic of the Corridor Development Project and the Chaka Palace does not work in the standard economic sense; the resources committed do not generate proportional economic returns. The arithmetic does not work in the political-sustainability sense; the displaced populations whose costs the project imposes are not, on the historical record of Ethiopian politics, a population that can be indefinitely silenced. The arithmetic does, however, work in the federal-government’s short-term political-strategic calculation: the visible projects buy support from constituencies the government values; the silenced costs are imposed on constituencies the government can, in the short term, suppress. The political viability of the strategy depends on the continuing capacity of the federal government to suppress the displaced populations’ grievances. The capacity, on the evidence of mid-2026, remains operational.

The Piassa neighbourhood was demolished in February 2024. The Bole and Lemi Kura residents were evicted in November 2024. The Chaka Palace is, in mid-2026, substantially completed. The federal government has prevailed in the immediate political contest the Project represents. The longer political contest — between a federal-government strategy that depends on suppressing the grievances of its costs’ bearers, and the historical pattern of Ethiopian politics in which suppressed grievances have repeatedly produced unanticipated political crises — has not yet been concluded.

The arithmetic does not work. The strategy continues. The eventual reckoning is, in mid-2026, deferred but not avoided.

---

Sources for Article 19

1. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Federal government must pause the corridor development project and end forced evictions,” 14 April 2025 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr25/9098/2025/en/
2. Addis Standard, “Amnesty calls for ‘immediate pause’ to Ethiopia’s Corridor Development Project,” 15 April 2025 — https://addisstandard.com/amnesty-calls-for-immediate-pause-to-ethiopias-corridor-development-project-cites-forced-evictions-lack-of-compensation/
3. The Conversation, “Demolitions in Ethiopia are giving rise to a new Addis Ababa,” 7 November 2025 — https://theconversation.com/demolitions-in-ethiopia-are-giving-rise-to-a-new-addis-ababa-it-comes-at-the-expense-of-the-citys-residents-237494
4. Addis Insight, “Ethiopia’s Corridor Development Project: Progress or Human Rights Catastrophe?”, 16 April 2025 — https://www.addisinsight.net/2025/04/16/ethiopias-corridor-development-project-progress-or-human-rights-catastrophe/
5. Borkena, “Amnesty International Calls on Ethiopian PM to Immediately Halt ‘Corridor Development Project,’” 8 May 2025 — https://borkena.com/2025/05/08/ethiopia-amnesty-international-calls-on-ethiopian-pm-to-immediately-halt-corridor-development-project-over-forced-evictions/
6. Rachel Dubale, “Goodbye Piassa,” Africa Is a Country, 4 February 2024 — https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/goodbye-piassa
7. Ethiopian Business Review, “A City Without Its Past,” September 2023 — https://ethiopianbusinessreview.net/a-city-without-its-past/
8. The Economist coverage of Ethiopian urban policy, 2024
9. Addis Standard editorial on Corridor Development Project, April 2024
10. The Reporter (Ethiopia), “Amnesty Calls For Hiatus In Corridor Development Project,” 10 May 2025 — https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/45069/
11. L’Orient Today, “Amnesty urges suspension of Ethiopian mega project and stop forced evictions,” 14 April 2025 — https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1455952/amnesty-urges-suspension-of-ethiopian-mega-project-and-stop-forced-evictions.html
12. Various media coverage of Yeka Hills / Chaka Palace construction, 2024–2026
13. Ethiopia Observer reporting on Jimma demolitions, January 2025
14. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, “Ethiopia: New report by Amnesty International claims that at least 872 people forcibly evicted by the Corridor Development Project,” April 2025

---

End of expanded article for Dispatch 19. One article, approximately 3,000 words.