From Accidental to Reality – response to Yonas Biru 

Dear Dr.Yonas Birru,

I have read your recent article entitled, “The Accidental Rise and the Foreseeable Fall of Abbey Ahmed in the Land of Two Shane’s”, posted on Borkena.com media on January 14, 2023, and was appreciative of your exposure of the political landscape in your perspectives and to stop the confrontation. That reward was rather accidental. However, I was appalled by the rest of your analysis. I do not delve into your item-by-item presentation; however, I would like to point out what I took from your article.

I agree that Dr. Abbey Ahmed’s rise to power was accidental or a blessing in disguise. However, I do not see any tangible facts to support your assertion that he planned for the Nobel Prize. His stand to make peace with Eritrea was good but full of a naïve and shallow political outlook. What was seen is that he was not able to create any ground that could convince neither the Tigray people nor the TPLF. He did not also negotiate on the Assab Port that could have been a great advantage for businesses of Eritrea and Ethiopia. He acted intuitively and unsystematically. I did not know the unprecedented resources the US and Europe poured into the Ethiopian economy. If that was so, it could have changed the present behavior of Qeerroo. Qeroos that once played a pivotal role with other Ethiopians in the process of toppling the aristocracy of TPLF have now turned into bandits that ended up on robbing people either by joining Shanne or by harassing and infiltrating into local Oromia governments that made corruption a norm manifested in different forms: robbing people with different hair and destabilizing harmonious relationships among neighbors, kidnapping for ransom in exorbitant sum of money, barricading roads and killing people they hate, and denying people from exercising human freedoms in most Oromia region; forcing people to wave the black-red-green flag with an oak tree image on it as a sacred symbol in many places of the country wherever Oromos walk while harassment, torture, and death for an Ethiopian citizen found holding the Ethiopian traditional and historical tricolor is common in Oromia region including in the state capital, rampant street-level politicians that manifest hatred against Amaras and other Ethiopians in Oromo vicinity has become the order of the day.

He tries to behave like the ideal Machiavellian thought political gimmick; he pretended to be a person of unity when he let the exiled Patriarch, Abuna Markorios, return to Ethiopia; however, it has become a recent public news that his administration stopped rendering long time safety protection and also showed indifference to 25 Oromo archbishops’ declaration to tear down the Ethiopian Orthodox institution.  

All these manifest his poor thoughts and reckless governance that encourages anarchy. 

You also talked about reforms made by Dr. Abbey Ahmed. Dr. Abbey Ahmed had no fruitful political reforms. I could not see your explanation of his reforms objectively. You could reveal who are being billionaires and at whose expense and so on in the economic progress since he came to power. I did not know why you did not delve into that while it seems that you have the potential to do that. People know that he is turning the Ethiopian palaces into museums while building a new palace in his own image with public money or money assumed to be used by the public. You know that he championed opening parks around Addis Ababa, an activity that could have sounded better for a department in the Addis Ababa municipal administration. I rather would have been glad if your analysis included comments on the “Industrial Park” and so called “Green Project”, how much it is popular, how many with how much degree national capitalists participate in it, its feasibility and economic prospects or returns in terms of at least raising employment, and economic growth of the nation. Of course he feeds our innocent people with hope after hope that no one can see except displacements, inflation, unemployment and starvation, and soaring death.

Your portrayal of Amara-Shanne, tantamount to equating it with OLA-Shanne, manifests either a shallow explanation or an intended political representation of the victims with criminals. Is that what you advised the PM to characterize Fano? You are comparing a devil with an angel. OLA-Shanne, that is ignorant of the fact that 90% of the ethnic group it claims to represent are created by assimilation, has no human and nation-building dream except advancing barbaric xenophobic genocide against its opponents especially the Amhara race with its filthy objective ethnic sectarianism. One of the ignorance of this group is that it relied on the fiction book of a certain sectarian zygote called Tesfaye Gebre-ab to erect a statue that advances racial hatred and backwardness but not civility. If the PM stands for the real harmony of the people, he could have dismantled this hateful statue that was erected based on lies. OLA-Shanne is a savage and barbaric bandit clique while the Fano that you tried to portray as an Amhara-Shanne is a purposeful militant group that not only has been fighting to defend Amhara from the racist and expansionist TPLF and terrorist OLA-Shanne, it also has been defending Ethiopia’s foreign and domestic mercenaries like the barbaric OLA-Shanne, Gumuz, Kemant, and other TPLF surrogates that have no world outlooks about history, what is meant by equality, that all human beings deserve equal treatment, that oppression is not inherited by blood or language, and that language is simply a medium of communication among people. You tried to give recognition to a nameless infantile and immature personality who could create barbaric mobs like himself to murder innocent citizens. The ethnic sectarian politicians do not seem to know that that idea belongs primitively and that modern people freely live and move to work and relax in harmony, not only in one’s nation like Ethiopia, but to the extent of being naturalized citizens in foreign countries. However, these murder groups do not seem to have read the history of the USA that uses the English language, a language of its colonial past, many developed European countries, Australia, Latin American and African countries that use language as a medium of communication. They seem to be ignorant of the fact that the developed western world uses democracy that originated from Greece, the numbers that the whole world uses are invented by Arab pioneers, and that the Ethiopian alphabet was invented by our common ancestors unless they deny belonging to them. On the other hand, Fano, that mostly comes out of the Amara society endowed with broad outlooks of a diversified, and coherent Ethiopia and has been fighting to defend it from disintegrating while PM Abbey and his subordinates have rather apparently been observed to have colluded with enemies to discredit this noble militant group to alienate it from the rest of Ethiopia by equating it with other terrorist bandits. Of course, PM Abbey does not want any contender or noble militant group like the Amara Fano that he feels dangerous to erode his popularity on his shrewd stance to elongate his power through his filthy claim of being the indispensable savior, as you said redeemer, of this historical nation from anarchy while in fact he plays recklessly or ignorantly as an instrument of anarchy. His apparent stance of being behind primitive ethnic sectarianism does not commensurate with his wordy speech of being worried about the future instead of the past. In short he manifested a self-complacent narrow nationalist like his creators with a utopian dream of being Oromo supremacist while paying lip service to Ethiopia and its honest people.  

Your remarks of “Great Oromia Champions’ attempts to build recognition for Oromo supremacists while a state of anarchy has been taking place on the ground; this situation is neither legal nor ethical. There is no shadow government as you tried to portray. Adanech Abebe and Shimelis Abdissa are simply his subordinates that breathe and function by representing himself. What can be seen is a self-complacent leader who lives on his utopian flowery words and appears to be liberal or naive to power monger Oromo nationalists whilst his ignorance that building such recklessness among his own group never bore fruits anywhere but could eventually oust him from his prominence. The other fact is that Dr. Abbey lives by exploiting the trust of the great majority of patient and silent Ethiopians that understand the importance of decent state leadership, its ups and downs, and who also understand that no matter what the PM does, at the end of the day, it would make him accountable on the doom’s day. It is the noble Ethiopians that are trying to control things from being exacerbated that survived him. But he keeps on exploiting this civility. 

He haphazardly entered a war that he did not have any knowledge or political capacity to avoid; he had to get out of it intuitively while he could not have the capacity to deplete the fighting capacities of TPLF for total surrender instead of negotiation that opened the door for the enemy to revive as will be evident in course of time. In fact, fighting with TPLF was not Abiy’s intention just as negotiating with it; after all, he is brought up and shaped by TPLF with its narrow ethnic nationalism. This is manifested in the fact that his OPDO and TPLF love the existing apartheid constitution that was imposed on the people to stay since both know they need it for their narrow ethnic schemes. You tried to downplay the necessity of removing this discriminatory and unpopular constitution with your statement that there are beneficiaries. It is just like saying there were beneficiaries of the serfdom and it was dangerous to make a land reform – a statement that justifies the narrow nationalism to grow narrower and narrower. You need to understand that the 80 or so ethnic groups have the same rights as Oromos, Tigres or Amaras and there is no way to stop the whole nation from tearing apart as long as the constitution exists. However, this discrepancy would have come to a point of no returns if Ethiopians decide on their fate. Ethiopians know how to live in harmony; it is the demagogue politicians that create distortion working to tear down the fabric of the nation in the guise of freedom while they pull people into the abyss of anarchy. Ethiopians are not supposed to be considered like herds anymore; they are more conscious and capable to control the state affairs at the end of ups and downs; but why to elongate their suffering for the sake of a handful of hooligans? Therefore, it is very important for Ethiopian nationalists to come together; if the demagogue politicians become wise enough to change their minds and work together with their differences, they can save their common nation before their parties become lifeless. This is where an intellectual like yourself can play a role instead of lamenting individually as I got from one of your articles, “ሙሾ ከመደርደር አንድነትን ማፍቀር”, and as a well-known writer said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Your elastic presentations that extend from economic analysis to state leadership and military engineering seems to make you a personality enshrined with all pertinent professions. It seems to me that you can be a good candidate for the prime minister’s cabinet. The fact that you said you produced over a hundred articles to help the PM’s best governance and enlighten our society on state leadership and perhaps on civil rights and obligations, I believe, are efforts that could have been more productive if you had played a role in breaking the silence of at least the intellectual group by making them work together to save the nation from disintegration. You repudiated that individuals or groups running alone could not bring about a national triumph but are limited to achieving personal goals, and that personal goals are usually static and temporary that do not extend to the far-reaching growth of a nation. Unless these statements, “ከበሮ በሰው እጅ… ሲይዙት ያደናግር፤ ለተናጋሪው ሰማይ ቅርቡ ነው፤” defy many writers including yourself; and you do not remain wordy, I believe that your relentless efforts can bring together other intellectuals to muster their potential capacity and work together to save the nation from civil strife and advance its renaissance. 

Thank you 

Tefera Dinberu

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