By Amsal Woreta
There is a kind of political theater where the final act arrives quietly, as an afterthought, well after the audience has gone home believing the show is over. Ethiopia just staged one. On August 22, 2026, the National Dialogue Commission announced its “historic” conclusion — 4,000 delegates, eight working groups, a claimed near-total consensus (Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission). Nine days later, on August 31, the actual headline surfaced: merge the premiership and the presidency into a single executive presidency, chosen by a parliament the ruling party already controls by supermajority (Africa news/AFP). Three and a half years and more than 1.7 billion Birr later, the process had produced a recommendation with potentially enormous consequences: a constitutional route through which executive authority could be concentrated in a presidency selected through a parliament already dominated by the ruling party. That does not prove the dialogue was designed from the beginning for this outcome. But it raises the question at the center of this essay: has a process presented as national reconciliation become, in practice, a vehicle for institutional consolidation?
This is not a story about one dramatic reveal. It is a story about two horizons converging — what was visible through August 25, and what the following twelve days made harder to ignore. Read together, they do not prove that a single outcome was planned from the beginning. They do, however, show how a dialogue presented as a vehicle for national reconciliation can become entangled with a far more consequential question: who will hold executive power, under what constitutional form, and with what degree of political consent.
The argument unfolds in three movements: first, the conflict landscape as it stood through August 25; second, the twelve days that clarified the National Dialogue’s institutional consequences; and finally, the throughline connecting those developments to a recurring tension in Ethiopian political transitions — negotiated settlement on one side, consolidation by those already controlling the state on the other.
Part One: Where Things Stood Through August 25, 2026
By late August, Ethiopia was best described not as a country at war, and not as a country at peace, but as a country holding four separate, unresolved fires. No single actor was strong enough to put any of them out. None was weak enough to lose.
Amhara: stalemate and partial consolidation
In Amhara, the war with Fano had settled into what regional analysts call a “complex stalemate”: insurgents holding the countryside across Gojjam, Gondar, and Wollo, the army holding the towns and the roads, neither side capable of the decisive blow (CASS Center). What had changed was structural — unification. In January 2026, the scattered Fano commands merged into the Amhara Fano National Movement under a single chairman, Zemene Kassie, with a former regional Special Forces general, Tefera Mamo, as military commander (Wikipedia; Martin Plaut). On paper, this was the missing piece for turning an insurgency into a negotiating position. In practice, independent reporting still described a movement whose factions did not reliably answer the center (Al Jazeera; Horn Review).
Oromia: chronic insurgency without resolution
In Oromia, peace talks between the government and the Oromo Liberation Army collapsed for the second time in April, in Dar es Salaam, both sides calling the gap unbridgeable (Oromedia). The OLA held no fixed territory, operated out of forest hideouts, and was judged by most observers incapable of threatening the federal government directly — a chronic insurgency, not an existential one (Washington Post).
Tigray: institutional rupture and fragile deterrence
Tigray was the more dangerous picture, and the least tied to any single ethnic ideology, whatever the national conversation usually assumes. The Pretoria Agreement was not broken by rhetoric. It was broken by concrete institutional acts: the federal government unilaterally extended the mandate of the Tigray Interim Regional Administration in April without consulting the TPLF, and the TPLF answered by reinstating its own pre-war administration and electing Debretsion Gebremichael as regional president — a move Addis Ababa still refuses to recognize (Reuters; SWP Berlin). Real fighting followed: drone strikes in January, clashes near the Amhara border that pushed Tigrayan forces out of Tselemti in February, and a serious flare-up in Western Tigray on August 1, with casualty claims from the two sides differing by a factor of two in opposite directions — which tells you less about the battle itself than about how little anyone outside it can actually verify (UN News; Al Jazeera).
Eritrea, the Red Sea, and Tsimdo
Over all three fires hung a fourth, external one: Abiy Ahmed’s public campaign for Red Sea port access, which Eritrea reads given the history — as a direct threat to Assab. A military parade in March carried a banner declaring Ethiopia “will not remain landlocked” (NYT; Africanews). Out of that tension grew the most-discussed and least-confirmed story of the summer: “Tsimdo,” an alleged alliance stitching together Fano, the TPLF, Eritrea, and the Ogaden National Liberation Front against the federal government, announced by Zemene Kassie in mid-August (Martin Plaut). Careful audits called it “announced and partly corroborated.” Real conversations had clearly happened. But there was no signed framework, no joint command, and — critically — no TPLF confirmation (Daily News Egypt Africa).
The National Dialogue Beneath the Fires
And under every one of these fires sat the National Dialogue, which by August 22 had produced its “conclusion” — rejected, within days, by every armed actor with the power to disrupt it: the AFNM calling it a legitimacy exercise for the ruling party, the OLF-OLA calling it a “national monologue,” a transitional coalition calling it a “mock dialogue” (AllAfrica). All of that was already knowable by August 25. What was not yet visible was how the dialogue’s institutional consequences would come into focus.
Part Two: What August 26–September 6, 2026, Revealed
The twelve days from August 26 to September 6 did not bring the wider war many feared. They brought something more revealing: a sequence of developments that made it increasingly difficult to describe the National Dialogue primarily as a process of mediation, reconciliation, or conflict settlement.
Start with Obasanjo. The African Union’s special envoy met Debretsion in Mekelle on August 24, in a visit meant to salvage what remained of Pretoria. By August 25, Tigray’s government said flatly that it produced “no new proposals or tangible progress” (AFP via Ahram; Ethiopia Observer). If anything, the TPLF’s demands hardened — into five explicit preconditions: lift the blockades, end the encirclement, restore what it calls Tigray’s sovereign territory in Wolkait and Raya, return the displaced, reinstate the TPLF’s legal status (Borkena). The United States and the European Union, joined by Canada, Norway, and the UK, issued coordinated statements — unusual in their unanimity — voicing “great concern” and urging compromise (Ethiopia Observer; Addis Standard via AllAfrica). None of it moved anything. Drone strikes over Tigray continued into early September (Africa File/Critical Threats), though ACLED’s own calibration is worth holding onto as the renewed conflict remains “more localized” than the catastrophic 2020–2022 war (ACLED).
The region has not tipped into general war. The diplomatic track has not gone anywhere either.
Then came the reveal. On August 31, it became public that one of the dialogue’s most consequential recommendations was a proposal to fuse the ceremonial presidency and the premiership into a single executive presidency, to be selected by a 90 percent parliament held by one party and tabled when that parliament reconvenes in October. The dialogue also recommended cutting funding to ethnic-based parties (Africanews/AFP). Commentators reached for the obvious comparison. Befekadu Hailu called it a mechanism that “would only allow the current prime minister to assume the executive presidency while effectively concentrating power in a single individual.” Morera Gudina said it “cannot ensure the two greatest needs of the country: durable peace and stability, and democratic governance” (Africanews/AFP). Reports of a sweeping cabinet overhaul followed in the same week — 70 to 80 percent of ministerial posts reassigned in closed-door, phone-free sessions, timed to land just ahead of that same October session (Borkena). The sequence raises a harder question: is this a peace process arriving at painful compromises, or an institutional consolidation arriving on schedule?
The constitutional question
An executive presidency is not inherently authoritarian; democratic presidential systems exist in many countries. The constitutional question is therefore not whether Ethiopia may adopt one, but how, under what safeguards, and through what degree of political consent such authority is created. When a dominant party possessing an overwhelming parliamentary majority redesigns executive power while major armed and political constituencies remain outside the process, institutional form cannot be separated from political context. A constitutional system gains legitimacy when the rules governing power are negotiated broadly enough to bind both winners and losers — not when a preexisting imbalance risks being converted into constitutional permanence.
Meanwhile, the fires kept burning in ways that undercut any claim that the country was stabilizing. ACLED documented an 80 percent year-on-year rise in Fano-linked militia activity in western Oromia — Horo Guduru, Kellem, East and West Wollega — driven by a “Bizamo Command” the AFNM now claims as its own and has folded into the Tsimdo framework. On August 19, that command ambushed a convoy near Tulu Lencha, killing at least sixteen people, including bank managers and a midwife, and burning more than seven vehicles (ACLED). This is Fano’s war spreading into new ground, not receding. At the same time, the Tsimdo coalition took its first public hit from the inside: Eskinder Nega, a senior Fano-aligned figure, told German broadcaster DW that an alliance formed “without the approval or knowledge of all its members” was unacceptable, and that he’d refused a role assigned to him after being pushed out of leadership (Martin Plaut). The TPLF, notably, still has not confirmed it is part of Tsimdo at all (Africa File/Critical Threats).
On the Eritrea front — the one everyone had been watching most closely — nothing happened directly. No new incident, no new troop movement, no new statement out of Asmara (Shabait/Eritrean Ministry of Information). Instead, the friction quietly migrated south, into Sudan’s civil war: reports surfaced of a significant Ethiopian military buildup at Asosa, read by regional analysts as support infrastructure for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (Ayin), while Sudan’s army chief paid his second visit in two months to Asmara (Shabait; Horn Review). The confrontation everyone expected at the Red Sea never arrived. A quieter, less watched one may be forming on a different border entirely.
The Throughline
What the twelve days revealed
Set side by side, the “before” and “after” pictures are not two different stories. They are one story, and the second half changes how the first should be read. Through August 25, Ethiopia looked like a state managing unresolved conflicts through stalemate, while the National Dialogue’s institutional consequences remained uncertain. By September 6, the political function of the process looked clearer. Whatever its stated purpose, the dialogue had not materially advanced settlement in Amhara, Oromia, or Tigray, and Fano, the OLA, and the TPLF were not in the room. What it did produce was a pathway toward a more unified executive presidency while the ruling party holds an uncontested supermajority. That does not prove the outcome was predetermined; it does make institutional consolidation impossible to dismiss as a peripheral consequence.
The older pattern returns
Ethiopia’s transitions of 1974, 1991, and 2018 differed sharply in origin and character, but they share a recurring institutional pattern: actors emerging with control of the coercive and administrative machinery also gained disproportionate power to define the next political order. Negotiation occurred, but rarely among political forces with equal leverage. A national dialogue that excludes major actors capable of disrupting the outcome and culminates in a mechanism that may concentrate executive power risks repeating that pattern. The danger is not that the present is identical to the past, but that those who control the transition again gain the greatest influence over the rules that follow it.
The final test
If the National Dialogue was meant to extinguish these four fires, it has failed. If, instead, it was the anvil upon which a new executive diadem was forged, it has been remarkably efficient. But a crown forged in a closed chamber carries little authority over a burning landscape, and the impression remains of a state proceeding on schedule, as if the fires were someone else’s problem.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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