The Arithmetic of Illusion: How Elites, Time, and Power Collude in Ethiopia’s Struggle for Redemption

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com    

Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne
Jigjiga, Ethiopia 

I have had the privilege to browse through countless articles written by some of our nation’s finest minds: eloquent, expressive, and concerned. Yet, many read like prolonged elegies of grievance, a national literature of despair. What they offer in passion, they often lack in solution. While I deeply respect the authors and acknowledge their anxieties, I remain perplexed by the pattern: the relentless habit of blaming our 300-year-old political architecture and historical sins solely on the current leader. This, to me, is not only an illusion but a dangerous arithmetic, one that multiplies confusion and divides possibility. It is this convergence of frustration and abstraction, accusation without prescription, that compelled me to pen this reflection. I ask not for agreement, only contemplation. And I wonder: will we ever find a cure for our political afflictions in our time?

In Ethiopia, history is not a closed book. It is an open wound, a ghost that still votes, governs, and whispers in parliament. This is not a nation simply governed, it is a nation haunted. The state is less a functioning structure than a haunted house of inherited fragility, recurring trauma, and political déjà vu. Governance here is not a craft, it is exorcism.

Our crisis cannot be reduced to one man. To do so is to romanticize the past, ignore the present, and sabotage the future. Ethiopia’s tragedy is not authored by a single hand but co-authored by a class of elites, a culture of political performance, and a paralyzing relationship with time. Time is not neutral here. It is politicized, wounded, and weaponized.

Our past inspires sovereignty and pride, yet suffocates the future with its unburied ghosts. The nation’s leaders do not merely govern, they mediate between competing funerals. Every policy is a rebuke of someone’s ancestor. Every reform reopens a coffin. Governance becomes a courtroom of the dead. In this equation, progress is forever deferred, trapped between yesterday’s trauma and tomorrow’s fear.

The present offers little sanctuary. It is experienced not as possibility, but paralysis. Public trust has evaporated into silence. Fatalism has become a governance model. “What can be done?” is not a question, it is an obituary. Reform is no longer anticipated—it is mourned before it begins.

The state mirrors this lethargy. Ministries produce more paper than policy. Speeches replace systems. Budgets are not blueprints, they are mirrors of fear, distributed to preserve peace rather than produce progress. The bureaucracy has mutated into a monument of inertia, embalmed in caution and over-seasoned with symbolism. Governments fear the people, the people fear tomorrow, and politicians fear each other. It is a republic ruled by reluctance.

And yet, it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge the duality of our time. Ethiopia’s current leader presides over both wonder and war. He holds contradiction in one hand and conviction in the other. While civil wars have raged and ethnic grievances boiled over, few can deny the magnitude of national undertakings beneath the surface. The resurrection of abandoned railways, the leap toward energy self-sufficiency, the urban renaissance of Addis Ababa, the burgeoning manufacturing parks, and the audacity of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – these are not trivial accomplishments. They are statecraft in concrete, steel, and sky. Had peace triumphed over gunfire and national unity replaced ethnic cacophony, the story might have been etched solely in wonder, not woe.

Indeed, the leader’s greatest tragedy might be that his pen of reform was forced to write in ink mixed with blood and hope. In a different setting, without the roar of militias or regional sabotage, and with a political class more eager to build than to bicker, the momentum of transformation could have reached a national crescendo. But even within an imperfect democratic process, and even while democracy walks with a limp, there is still forward motion. The real enemy is not imperfection; it is implosion. What could this country have achieved had the guns fallen silent and the debates risen louder?

The future, rather than a destination, has become a threat. It is whispered in warnings. Leaders dread it because they cannot control it. Citizens distrust it because they have never seen it arrive. Vision is substituted with visibility. Projects are judged by photographs, not by their economic multipliers. Politics has become a theatrical production of immediacy. Long-term thinking is not discouraged, it is ridiculed.

This three-dimensional time trap – where the past dominates, the present paralyzes, and the future terrifies – creates a uniquely Ethiopian political syndrome. It infects not only governance but the intelligentsia.

Here emerges our next culprit: the elite class.

In Ethiopia, the term “elite” should come with a caution sign. It describes a generation of scholars, technocrats, and cultural influencers who had the resources to study the West, absorb its vocabulary, and return not as bridge-builders but as ideological importers. They learned the language of freedom but forgot its context. They mastered the grammar of democracy but ignored its institutional syntax. They became fluent in diagnosis but stuttered in design.

These elites, rather than illuminate the path forward, often mirror the same authoritarian instincts they critique. They demand allegiance to their ideology, cancel dissenting views, and offer abstraction in place of architecture. When they do participate in governance, they often mutate from critics to courtiers. Silence is not merely coerced, it is curated.

They are not unique in history. Across authoritarian regimes, we see this same surrender. In Pinochet’s Chile, in Kagame’s Rwanda, in Atatürk’s Turkey – intellectuals played dual roles: builders and bystanders. The Ethiopian case is no exception. Our elite class, particularly those embedded in commissions, academic institutions, and state-run media, often perform their roles with dazzling moral language, while enabling deeply unjust systems. This is not conspiracy; it is convenience.

The psychology of complicity is well studied. Fear of loss trumps hope of change. Loyalty is rewarded, courage punished. In such a system, power is a commodity traded in the black market of access, not earned in the meritocracy of ideas. Influence becomes a debt paid through silence. Corruption is not an anomaly – it is the currency.

And yet, the problem is not only structural. It is also cognitive. We defend our illusions because they are familiar. We excuse power because it flatters us. We parrot slogans because truth is too expensive. And the moment a leader offers temporary stability, we elevate him into a savior. In Ethiopia, messiahs have short tenures but long shadows.

Some argue, rightly or wrongly, that what Ethiopia needs now is a benevolent dictator: a Lee Kuan Yew, a Kagame, an Atatürk – someone who can centralize authority and use it to modernize the nation, suppress chaos, and restore civic order. There is a precedent for this. In times of disintegration, history has sometimes favored the decisive: the strongman who rebuilds while suppressing, the visionary who governs through iron discipline. Yet, the boundary between benevolence and tyranny is treacherously thin. What begins as reform often morphs into repression. Ethiopia’s tragedy is not the absence of strong leaders; it is the absence of strong institutions that can outlive them.

So what must Ethiopia do?

First, we must abandon the illusion of single-man salvation. No leader, however charismatic, can resolve a multi-generational crisis rooted in ethnic division, bureaucratic decay, historical trauma, and geopolitical vulnerability. The idea that one prime minister could unilaterally fix a 300-year-old dilemma is not just naïve, it is dangerous. It creates expectations no one can meet and excuses failures no one should ignore.

Second, we must rewire the system of incentives. Elites must no longer benefit from compliance. The currency of influence should be ideas, not silence. Political appointments must reflect merit, not mimicry. National dialogue must be a process of construction, not performance.

Third, we must repair our relationship over time. The past must inform but not dictate. The present must be a site of agency, not resignation. And the future must be decolonized from fear and reclaimed as a terrain of planning, innovation, and investment.

We are not doomed, but we are delayed. Ethiopia’s strength is not in its mythology, it is in its people – in their ability to adapt, rebuild, and rise again. But for that to happen, we must stop writing elegies and start drafting blueprints. We must replace the arithmetic of blame with the calculus of responsibility.

To those who still believe the answer lies in more critique, I say this: the orchestra of criticism has played for too long without harmony. Now is the time for a symphony of solutions.

And perhaps, just perhaps, our generation still has time left to compose it.

Mohamud A. Ahmed – Cagaweyne is Columnist, Political, Security Analyst, Researcher  andGreenlight Advisors Groups, Somali Regional State of Ethiopia. He Can be reached at : 251900644648

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com      

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