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

On the Political Culture That Mistook Grievance for Strategy

By Brook Kidane 

Dear Ethiopian activists, commentators, and ethnic-nationalist influencers,

You have spent years explaining why Ethiopia is broken. But what have you built?
You have mastered the language of suffering. Have you mastered the language of solutions?

You can identify every enemy your community has ever had. Can you identify a single future you share with anyone outside it?

These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the questions history is already asking you, whether or not you choose to answer them. And history, unlike your followers, does not applaud on command.

I do not write this to insult you. I write it because insults would be easier, and easier is not what this moment requires. What Ethiopia needs from its intellectual class is not another voice of condemnation — you have produced those in abundance — but an honest reckoning with what condemnation, alone, has cost the country. You are not the cause of Ethiopia’s fractures. But you have become their most gifted narrators, and in narrating them so well, so constantly, so profitably, you have made them permanent.

The Archive of Suffering, the Empty Folder of Solutions

You have archives full of tragedies and empty folders of solutions. You have memorized the crimes of yesterday and neglected the obligations of tomorrow. You have built, across a thousand timelines and a thousand broadcasts, magnificent museums of suffering — and you have failed, almost entirely, to build a single bridge between the living.

This is not a failure of intelligence. Your command of history is often extraordinary. It is a failure of purpose. You have confused the documentation of a wound with the treatment of it, as though a country heals simply by being told, with sufficient eloquence and sufficient frequency, exactly how it was cut.

Ask yourself honestly what your archive is for. If it exists to inform, it should lead somewhere — to acknowledgment, to negotiation, to repair. If it exists to indict, and only to indict, then it is not history. It is ammunition, and ammunition is not stockpiled to build anything. It is stockpiled to be used against someone.

Outrage Is Not Courage

You have confused outrage with courage, visibility with achievement, victimhood with strategy, memory with wisdom, accusation with leadership, and resistance with politics. Each of these confusions is comfortable. Each of them is also a way of avoiding the only work that has ever actually changed a country’s trajectory: the slow, humiliating, unglamorous work of building something with people you do not fully trust.

Let us be precise about courage, since the word is invoked so often it has begun to lose its edge. It costs nothing to be fierce among people who already agree with you. That is not courage — it is comfort wearing courage’s clothes. The algorithm rewards it, your audience rewards it, and your sense of righteousness rewards it, all at once, which is exactly why it is so easy to mistake for bravery.

The harder act — the only one that has ever moved a fractured society forward — is to sit across from someone whose grievance contradicts your own and negotiate anyway. To acknowledge a complexity that does not flatter your side. To build a coalition with people who have wronged you, or whose grandparents wronged yours, because the alternative is a country neither of you will be able to live in. By that standard — the only standard that matters — how many of you have ever actually been tested?

The Incentives You Will Not Name

Here is the part of this letter you will resist most, because it does not accuse you of malice. It accuses you of something more uncomfortable: complicity through reward.

Anger creates followers. Enemies create relevance. Division creates influence. This is not a conspiracy any of you designed — it is simply how the architecture of modern political communication distributes attention, and attention, in your world, is currency. A calm proposal for coexistence earns a few dozen quiet approvals. A furious denunciation of the other side earns thousands, and a career. No one has to consciously choose destruction for a political culture to reward it systematically. The system does the choosing. You merely respond to its incentives, the way any rational actor would — which is precisely the problem, because a country cannot be governed by a generation of rational actors optimizing for engagement.

I am not asking you to believe you are villains. I am asking you to notice that you have built entire public identities — reputations, incomes, movements — on the continuation of the very conflicts you claim to be resolving. And I am asking the harder question underneath that: what happens to your relevance on the day the conflict actually ends?

If you cannot answer that question comfortably, you already know something about your own incentives that you have not yet said out loud.

The Contradiction You Carry

You who resist domination often reproduce it through exclusion. You who demand justice often fall silent when injustice is committed in your own name, by your own side, against someone else’s community. You who demand recognition for your suffering often refuse, reflexively, to extend that same recognition to a suffering that inconveniently contradicts your narrative.

This is not hypocrisy in the crude sense. It is something more human and more dangerous: the conviction, sincerely held, that your side’s grievance is categorically different — more urgent, more historically justified, more real — than anyone else’s. Every faction in every divided society has believed exactly this about itself. It is, without exception, what every faction believes right before the country it is fighting over stops functioning.

What Divided Societies Have Already Taught Us

You do not need to imagine what happens next. History has already run this experiment, repeatedly, and recorded the results.

Lebanon did not collapse because its communities had genuine and painful differences — they did, and some of those differences were entirely legitimate. Lebanon collapsed when its political and intellectual class decided those differences made shared governance unimaginable, and then built an entire political culture, sect by sect, to make that unimaginability a permanent fact rather than a temporary crisis.

Yugoslavia did not fracture because Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks discovered new hatreds in 1991. It fractured because a generation of political entrepreneurs — many of them intellectuals, writers, and commentators, not unlike the role many of you now occupy — spent the preceding years mining historical grievance for political capital, until the grievance became more real, more urgent, and more mobilizing than the shared country it was consuming.

Syria did not descend into a decade of ruin because its people were incapable of coexistence — they had coexisted, imperfectly but functionally, for generations. It descended because every faction became convinced that its enemy’s total defeat was the only acceptable form of safety, and negotiation became, for each side, indistinguishable from surrender.

Afghanistan did not fail because Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks lacked common ground. It failed because armed and unarmed factions alike found it more useful, generation after generation, to be indispensable to a conflict than replaceable within a settlement.

Iraq’s sectarian catastrophe was not written into its demography. It was written by political actors — some with guns, some with microphones — who found that a divided public was easier to lead than a united one, and who never had to answer for the country they left behind, because there was no country left capable of holding them accountable.

The lesson, in every case, is the same, and it is not comforting: countries do not collapse because they have differences. Every functioning country has differences. Countries collapse when their political actors — including, decisively, their intellectuals, their commentators, their loudest and most eloquent voices — decide, deliberately or by a thousand small incentives, that those differences make coexistence impossible. That decision is never made all at once. It is made one post, one broadcast, one applauded accusation at a time, by people who believed, sincerely, that they were only telling the truth.

Ethiopia is not Lebanon. It is not Yugoslavia, Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. But the mechanism that produced those catastrophes is not a regional curse specific to those places. It is a political pathology, and pathologies do not respect borders. They only require the same ingredients: real grievances, a political class that profits from keeping them unresolved, and an audience conditioned to reward the profiteers.

The Question History Will Actually Ask

Every faction in this country believes it holds the more authentic grievance, the more legitimate anger, the more historically justified position. Perhaps some of you are even right, in the narrow sense that your specific complaint is more documented, more provable, more severe than another’s. But that victory, even if you win it completely, will not govern anyone. A perfectly proven grievance still cannot fill a single pothole, staff a single hospital, or write a single line of a constitution that all of your children can live under.

Future generations will not ask who had the most convincing grievance. They will not comb through your archives to determine whose suffering was catalogued most thoroughly, or whose accusations were most rhetorically devastating. History does not grade essays in outrage. It asks a single, unforgiving question of every generation that inherits a fractured country:

Who had the courage to stop the cycle?

Not who was right. Who stopped it. Those are not the same question, and the confusion between them is the single greatest failure of the political culture you represent.

You did not inherit Ethiopia’s fractures by choice. But you are choosing, in real time, with every broadcast and every post, whether those fractures widen or close before they reach the next generation. That is not a metaphor. It is an accounting that is already underway, whether you participate in it consciously or not.

The tribunal you should fear is not mine. It is the one convened by your own children, and by everyone else’s, sitting in judgment of a generation that had every tool required to build a shared future and chose, instead, to perfect the argument for why it was impossible.

You can still change what that tribunal finds. But not by being right one more time.

Only by being responsible — for once, and starting now.

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

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