Signed editorials · opinion

Opinion

Signed editorial argument — the author's own analysis and judgement, kept apart from the site's neutral reference entries. Factual claims are sourced; the synthesis, emphasis, and conclusions are the author's.

Arguments by Zef Telahun

This is editorial perspective, not the site's neutral analysis.

The Abiy Chronicle

A serialized dispatch on Ethiopia, April 2018 to the present

A running, signed chronicle of Abiy Ahmed's premiership: dated dispatches tracing the arc from Nobel-laureate reformer to a centralizing leader presiding over a fragmenting state. From the April 2018 arrival through the Asmara handshake, the Tigray war, the Pretoria Agreement, the Piassa demolition, the July 2024 birr float, the Fano insurgency, and the June 2026 partial-map election. Twenty-nine dispatches and an editor's note, updated as the story continues.

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The Birr and the Pretence of Knowledge

A monetary history of modern Ethiopia

Ethiopia's monetary disorder across three regimes read as one recurring institutional disease. Fiscal dominance, suppressed prices, and a fixed-rate fiction have persisted from the Derg's printing press through the EPRDF's forex queues to Abiy's July 2024 float, surviving two revolutions and one substantial political opening. This series argues that the disease is knowable, its cure is known, and the patient has been unwilling. Twenty-eight articles across six parts, from the Maria Theresa thaler to what sound money for Ethiopia would actually require.

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The Hollow Pillar

A constitutional history of modern Ethiopia

Ethiopia has had five constitutional instruments across ninety-five years — the 1931 Constitution, the 1955 Revised Constitution, the 1987 Derg Constitution, the 1991 Transitional Charter, and the 1995 FDRE Constitution — and none of them have effectively bound executive authority. This series diagnoses the recurring constitutional pathology: executive sovereignty that operates outside the constitutional text regardless of what the text says. Twenty-five articles across seven parts examining what each document promised, what it delivered, and why the pattern of promise-and-departure has survived every regime change since 1931.

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The Price Without the Return: Ethiopia Against the Asian Model

An editorial series in twenty-eight parts

Ethiopia has paid nearly every cost of authoritarian developmentalism — political prisoners, suppressed opposition, restricted press, forced resettlement, state violence, delayed democratisation — without receiving the industrial base, working nation, or pan-national identity that comparable Asian states received in return. This series compares Ethiopia to Meiji Japan, Park’s Korea, Chiang Ching-kuo’s Taiwan, Deng’s China, and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, and asks why the price has been paid without the return. Twenty-eight articles across seven parts, arguing that if the next generation is going to pay the price anyway, they should at least receive what the price was supposed to buy.

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