One Nation, Many Centers—Part I: The Crisis
By Fikeru Zewdie
Ethiopia’s recurring disputes over Addis Ababa are commonly presented as territorial conflicts. Oromia invokes geography, history, identity, and constitutionally recognized special interests. Residents of Addis Ababa invoke self-government, political representation, property rights, and their right to determine the future of the city in which they live. Other Ethiopians regard Addis Ababa as a national capital built through the labor, investment, memory, and participation of generations drawn from every part of the country.
Each position contains a reality that cannot simply be dismissed. The danger begins when one reality is elevated into an exclusive claim and every other relationship to the city is treated as illegitimate.
But the controversy surrounding Addis Ababa is not only a dispute over land, identity, or municipal jurisdiction. Beneath it lies a more consequential national question:
How can Ethiopia distribute national power without fragmenting national sovereignty?
This is the governing question of One Nation, Many Centers, a civic constitutional manifesto proposing that Ethiopia preserve one national sovereignty while decentralizing federal institutions, public opportunity, and access to government.
The proposal does not begin by asking who should conquer, inherit, or surrender Addis Ababa. It begins by asking why so much of Ethiopia’s political authority, economic opportunity, administrative capacity, diplomatic prestige, and institutional influence has been concentrated in one contested metropolitan space.
When one city becomes the principal gateway to the state, control of that city begins to resemble control of the country. A disagreement about municipal boundaries then becomes an existential national struggle.
That is the crisis beneath the capital question.
Addis Ababa Carries Too Much of the Nation
Addis Ababa is not ordinary administrative territory. It is simultaneously a city inhabited by millions of residents, the seat of the federal government, the headquarters of the African Union, an international diplomatic center, a major commercial hub, and a national space carrying historical and emotional meaning for Ethiopians throughout the country.
It is also geographically surrounded by Oromia and deeply interconnected with surrounding Oromo communities through transportation, employment, trade, water, land use, environmental systems, migration, and metropolitan development.
No sustainable settlement can deny any of these realities.
Oromia’s proximity and legitimate interests do not automatically create exclusive political ownership of the federal capital. Likewise, calling Addis Ababa a national city cannot justify making its residents politically invisible. A capital cannot meaningfully belong to the nation while the people living within it lack an effective voice over its government, boundaries, development, and institutional future.
The present Constitution attempts to recognize these overlapping realities. Article 49 identifies Addis Ababa as the federal capital, promises its residents a full measure of self-government, places the city’s administration under federal responsibility, provides for representation in federal institutions, and recognizes special interests of Oromia concerning the city.
The constitutional difficulty is not merely that these principles exist. It is that their relationship remains politically contested and incompletely resolved.
What constitutes a “full measure” of self-government? How should Oromia’s special interests be defined? Who may alter the city’s boundaries or administrative relationship? What role must residents play in decisions affecting their political status? How can shared economic and environmental matters be administered without transferring control of the city to one regional authority?
Ambiguity surrounding these questions allows temporary political power to substitute for durable constitutional legitimacy.
Constitutional Authority Is Not the Same as Legitimacy
A government may possess the institutional capacity to issue orders, redraw administrative arrangements, transfer land, or restrict political participation. But the ability to enforce a decision does not automatically make that decision legitimate.
Legitimacy requires more than authority. It depends upon meaningful representation, transparent procedures, enforceable rights, institutional restraint, impartial adjudication, and the informed participation of those directly affected.
This distinction has appeared repeatedly throughout Ethiopia’s modern constitutional history.
The 1931 Constitution formalized imperial institutions within a centralized monarchy. The revised Constitution of 1955 expanded written rights and governmental structures but preserved decisive imperial authority. These constitutional orders sought legitimacy through dynasty, modernization, unity, and centralized state-building.
The revolutionary government displaced the monarchy and eventually adopted the 1987 Constitution of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. It presented another source of legitimacy: socialist transformation, revolutionary authority, popular organization, and national unity. Yet formal institutions existed within a coercive one-party system.
The 1995 Constitution introduced another constitutional project. It reorganized the federation around nations, nationalities, and peoples and recognized regional self-government, language rights, cultural identity, and the principle of self-determination. This order responded to genuine histories of cultural suppression, political exclusion, and domination by a centralized state.
Nevertheless, a constitution created to answer one crisis of legitimacy can produce another when its institutional design allows ethnicity, territory, political representation, public employment, land entitlement, and governing power to become inseparable.
The lesson connecting these constitutional eras is not that they were identical. They were not. Each contained different institutions, ideologies, and claims to authority.
The deeper lesson is that constitutional language alone cannot produce legitimacy. A constitution becomes meaningful when citizens participate in authorizing it, institutions obey its limitations, governments can be held accountable under it, and rights remain enforceable even when political leaders find them inconvenient.
The False Choice of Exclusive Possession
The Addis Ababa controversy is frequently framed as though Ethiopia must select one of three unacceptable outcomes.
Under the first, the rights and self-government of the city’s residents would be subordinated to an exclusive regional claim.
Under the second, Oromia’s legitimate economic, cultural, environmental, and social interests would be dismissed as though the city had no relationship with its surroundings.
Under the third, Addis Ababa would remain nominally national but continue to function as a distant and overconcentrated center through which political elites compete to control the entire country.
None of these choices can generate durable peace.
The mistake is to treat recognition as ownership. Cultural connection, geographic location, historical memory, economic interdependence, and political sovereignty are related, but they are not identical.
Recognizing Oromia’s interests need not extinguish the political rights of Addis Ababa’s residents. Protecting residents’ self-government need not isolate the city from Oromia. Preserving Addis Ababa as the federal capital need not require concentrating nearly every important national institution within it.
A legitimate compromise begins when these questions are separated rather than forced into a single winner-take-all contest.
History Must Inform Justice Without Creating Permanent Enemies
Arguments about Addis Ababa—and about Ethiopia more broadly—are frequently accompanied by competing histories of conquest, migration, settlement, dispossession, assimilation, state formation, resistance, and cultural destruction.
These histories deserve serious examination. They should not be erased merely because they are politically uncomfortable.
But history becomes dangerous when it is used to classify living citizens as hereditary owners or hereditary intruders. No Ethiopian community possesses an immaculate political history, and no citizen should be required to establish ancestral innocence before receiving equal constitutional rights.
Historical inquiry can help identify injustice, explain grievance, and guide remedy. It cannot become a license for collective punishment, population displacement, or permanent territorial entitlement.
The purpose of constitutional reform should not be to reverse the direction of domination. It should be to make domination institutionally impossible.
The Crisis Is National, Not Merely Metropolitan
The stakes extend far beyond Addis Ababa.
When national authority and opportunity remain concentrated in one city, communities in the country’s distant corners experience the federal government as remote, selective, or inaccessible. Citizens may travel hundreds of miles to obtain documents, pursue administrative appeals, resolve federal matters, seek specialized services, or gain meaningful access to national institutions.
Young people may formally possess Ethiopian citizenship while finding that their language, ancestry, or place of origin affects where they can study, work, establish a business, own property, or participate in public life.
Political movements then conclude that controlling territory is the most reliable way to protect a community. Regional elites present themselves as guardians of ethnic survival. National elections become struggles over collective security rather than ordinary democratic choices. Losing control of the center appears dangerous because too much authority remains concentrated there.
This is why the Addis Ababa controversy cannot be solved through an Addis Ababa arrangement alone. Ethiopia must address the institutional structure that makes control of the capital carry such extraordinary consequences.
Toward a Different Constitutional Imagination
Ethiopia does not have to choose between centralized domination and national fragmentation.
Addis Ababa can remain the federal capital, principal executive and diplomatic center, and home of the African Union. Its residents can exercise meaningful democratic self-government. Oromia’s legitimate interests can be defined through enforceable arrangements covering shared matters such as transportation, water, environmental protection, cultural connection, markets, and coordinated metropolitan development.
At the same time, selected federal institutions can be established in consenting cities across Ethiopia. Federal services can be brought closer to citizens in every region. Public employment and national investment can be geographically broadened. No party, region, or political movement would then be able to treat one city as the master key to the Ethiopian state.
This would not create multiple sovereign capitals. Ethiopia would retain one constitutional sovereignty, one federal legal order, and institutions serving the entire country. What would change is the location of national functions and the accessibility of public authority.
Sovereignty concerns the constitutional source of authority. Location concerns where an institution performs its work. Confusing these two ideas prevents Ethiopia from considering solutions already demonstrated, in different forms, by countries that distribute governmental functions among more than one city.
The governing principle is therefore straightforward:
National sovereignty must remain indivisible, but national power, public opportunity, and access to government need not remain geographically concentrated.
The next question is more difficult. Can Ethiopia preserve cultural and linguistic self-government while ending the condition in which citizens become political outsiders inside their own country?
That question requires confronting the relationship between ethnicity, territory, and citizenship—the subject of Part II of this series.
This article is Part I of One Nation, Many Centers, a five-part series adapted from the manifesto and presenting a civic constitutional framework for distributing national power, protecting equal citizenship, and rebuilding legitimacy in Ethiopia.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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