Gezahegn Engida
Within the next 25 years, Ethiopia is projected to become one of the ten most populous countries in the world.¹ In theory, this could be a source of strength. In practice, it is a looming catastrophe.
Population growth is the only national indicator clearly moving upward. Economic productivity, institutional capacity, political stability, social cohesion, and peace are all stagnating or deteriorating. This widening gap between demographic pressure and state capability is the defining danger of Ethiopia’s present moment.
Yet Ethiopia’s political and intellectual elite appears largely indifferent to this reality. Instead of confronting the scale of the challenge, it remains consumed by internal feuds, ideological trench warfare, and identity-based power struggles—like two bald men fighting over a comb.
The uncomfortable truth is this: Ethiopia’s enemy is not external. It is internal. Ethiopia’s enemy is its elite.
Since at least the 1960s, successive Ethiopian elites have set the country’s political and intellectual agenda. They shaped its revolutions, counter-revolutions, constitutional designs, and governing doctrines. They cannot now disclaim responsibility for the results.
The central failure has not been malice but unthinking imitation. Imported ideologies were embraced as creeds rather than tested as tools. Marxism, later ethno nationalism, and more recently technocratic slogans were adopted without serious effort to adapt them to Ethiopia’s social, economic, and ecological realities.
The problem was never that Ethiopia leaned left during the Cold War. China, Vietnam, and others did the same.² The difference is that their elites subordinated ideology to outcomes. They experimented, adjusted, and reversed course when policies failed.
Ethiopia did the opposite. Ideology replaced thinking. Moral certainty replaced institutional design. Revolutionary language substituted for policy competence.
The most tragic example came in the early 1970s. As drought, famine, disease, and illiteracy devastated the population, the elite declared Ethiopia’s primary enemies to be feudalism, imperialism, comprador classes, and abstract “national questions.” A “proletarian revolution” was prescribed for a country with almost no proletariat. The consequences—economic collapse, militarized politics, and normalized violence—still define Ethiopian life today.
Half a century later, Ethiopia remains trapped in cycles of civil war and political instability, while peer countries that made more pragmatic choices lifted millions out of poverty and built functioning states.³
This is not destiny. It is a human agency.
Elites chose ideology over pragmatism, grievance over governance, and absolutism over compromise. They continue to fight old wars based on exhausted narratives while the future collapses under demographic pressure.
No foreign power can rescue Ethiopia from this condition. No volume of aid can substitute for elite responsibility.
What Ethiopia needs is not another imported doctrine, but a national reckoning—an honest dialogue about how elite habits of thought, culture, and political behavior have repeatedly sabotaged the country’s prospects.
A society begins to develop when it stops lying to itself. If Ethiopia has an enemy, it is not outside its borders. The enemy is us—until we decide otherwise!
References
- United Nations, World Population Prospects, UN DESA.
- Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy; Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works.
- Alice Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant; Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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You nailed it well. Even the invisible hands of the external enemies of Ethiopia are currently made public by the same elites. They should face justice for they betrayed the nation again and again. They were educated or trained to develop the nation but they sow the seeds of divisions instead of the seeds of unification. Our elites proved again and again that they are the most selfish elites. They were supposed to be a problem solver but practically they were problem manufacturers. Thank you for calling them by their real name; the only Enemy of Ethiopia in the contemporary world.
Your point is that Ethiopia has problems, and these problems are caused by imported ideologies. Ethiopia’s greatest enemies are not external, but internal political and intellectual elites.
What readers need to know is that Ethiopia has both internal and external enemies. The failure of the socialist system in Ethiopia was primarily caused by internal saboteurs ( Oromo and Tigrians separatist groups ) and their external sponsors ( Arabs and the west ). The elites are not the problem, it is cronyism that creates the problem. OLF and TPLF were supported by the west and some Arab nations. The EPRDF – PP ethnocentric ideology is not an imported ideology. Ethiopia’s ethnocentric ideology is an anti-Amhara ideology developed by the Tigrian and the Oromo political elites.
As to other things like the economy, there are no scientific models that can be used to measure Ethiopia’s ethnic based socio economic and political system. It is ethnicity that dictates everything in Ethiopia.