I would say this “What happened to Tigray was not the failure of a single party or a single leader. It was the failure of a system we all sustained,
and until we name that honestly, we will remain trapped in explanations
that cannot produce a future.”

On May 5, 2026, the TPLF reconstituted the Baito, the regional parliament that had existed before the 2020 war, and elected Dr. Debretsion Gebremichael as regional president. This was not an impulsive move. A week earlier, the TPLF Central Committee had made its decision, and in the days that followed, ideas circulated, positions hardened, and the Tigrayan political community at home and in the diaspora prepared itself for what was coming. By the time it happened, it was anticipated. That anticipation made it no less historic. What occurred yesterday is one of those moments that will be read differently depending on where you stand, what you fear, and what you believe Tigray’s future requires. Both internally, among Tigrayans, and externally, by the federal government and the international community, the interpretations are already forming, carrying their own calculations of risk, opportunity, and consequence.

Inside Tigray and in the diaspora, two distinct responses are already visible. The first sees this decision as a reckless overreach that risks bringing another catastrophe to Tigray. Those who hold this view argue that the only legitimate path forward is an inclusive transitional structure, one that gives no structural advantage to TPLF alone, and that brings together all political parties and civic organizations in Tigray. They are not prepared to bear the cost of what confrontation with Addis Ababa may bring. The second response says that this moment is exactly what Tigray needed and should have asserted long ago. Those who hold this view believe that Tigray must now shape its own political trajectory, through dialogue if possible, through whatever becomes necessary if not. They appear prepared to bear the cost. Both positions carry real weight. Both carry real risk. But alongside this debate, there is a deeper conversation that cuts across both groups, and it is the one this piece is most concerned with.

Setting aside the external interpretation of today’s events, which follows a predictable script, the more important conversation to examine is the one happening among Tigrayans themselves: the response of the Tigrayan elite, at home and in the diaspora, across social media timelines and in private exchanges. That conversation reveals something worth examining honestly.

It is being processed in two ways that are both understandable and both insufficient. The first is to locate the source of Tigray’s difficulties in a single individual, or in TPLF as a political organization, and to hold that individual or that party responsible for what a system produced. The second is to locate Tigray’s salvation in a single individual, or to expect TPLF to carry the full weight of expectation without examination or reform. Both are forms of the same error. Both reduce a structural crisis to a personal or partisan story. And both leave the deeper question untouched.

TPLF is a political party with a real record. That record includes social, economic, and cultural development that Tigray had not witnessed in its entire history. It also includes failures, some of them serious, some of them strategic. This is the story of every political movement that attempts genuine transformation under difficult conditions. A program of that scale will always produce both. The honest question is not whether TPLF failed in some areas. It did. The honest question is whether the organization has the capacity to recognize those failures honestly, learn from them, and change. A people’s party grows. It is not fixed. It does not need to be perfect to be legitimate. It needs to be capable of honest reckoning.

What Abiy Ahmed is pursuing is something entirely different from accountability. It is a structured project of erasure. And what must be understood clearly is that TPLF is not being targeted because of its policy failures. It is being targeted because of what it carries: the organizational memory, the political tradition, and the identity of a people. The failures are used as a pretext. The target is something deeper. Tigrayans understand this difference, even when they are most critical of their own leadership. Criticism from within is not the same as a verdict from an enemy. And Tigrayans read these events through that understanding in ways that external actors, and those who repeat external framings, consistently fail to see.

If Tigray is to secure its future, the conversation must move beyond individuals and partisan blame, and toward an honest audit of the system that produced both the achievements and the failures. That audit cannot begin honestly without first naming something that is rarely said clearly enough.

— —

The failure that produced the current crisis was not TPLF’s alone. It was a collective failure of all Tigrayans. All of us who were part of Tigrayan political and civic life, who were served by the system, shaped by it, and sometimes benefited from it, who saw its weaknesses and said nothing, who chose comfort over challenge, who put personal position before collective responsibility: we are all part of this story. This failure belongs to all of us.

This is the silence of the competent, the cautious, the complicit, and the afraid. The silence of those who knew and said nothing. The silence of those who benefited and asked no questions. The silence of those who saw the ceiling being built and decided it was not their responsibility to name it.

It is the silence of an entire civic and professional class that expected the political parties in power to build the right institutions, and never created the pressure necessary to make them do so.

The habit of pointing everything at TPLF, of treating the party as both the cause of every failure and the target of every frustration, is not honest analysis. It is the same argument Abiy Ahmed and his allies have always made. When Tigrayans repeat it, they do not become more credible. They become useful to the people who want Tigray to remain divided and without direction. Collective responsibility is not a comfortable idea. But it is the only place from which genuine reconstruction can begin.

The erasure project is not a rhetorical position. It is a documented intent. Abiy’s own senior adviser, Daniel Kibret, stated it publicly and without ambiguity: “Weyane is not something we can understand. We can only erase it.” He called for Tigrayans to be removed not only from institutions but from people’s consciousness, from their hearts, and from historical records. Senior Ethiopian officials told a European envoy that their objective was to “wipe out the Tigrayans in 100 years.” The US State Department condemned these statements as dangerous and unacceptable. The record is clear.

And the alliance that came against Tigray in 2020 was not accidental. It was structurally coherent. Abiy’s project of centralized Ethiopian authority cannot succeed while a self-governing Tigray with its own political tradition exists. The PFDJ in Eritrea cannot build a national identity that claims Tigrinya language and Axumite heritage while a confident Tigray stands next to it. The Amhara political project cannot reclaim ownership of Ethiopian imperial history while Tigray’s own historical primacy in that history is acknowledged. Each of them had a reason to want Tigray reduced. That is why the coalition was assembled so quickly. And that is why the erasure project, though it uses TPLF as its immediate target, reaches further than any political party. It reaches toward the memory, the identity, and the future of an entire people.

And there is a distinction that must be held clearly throughout this reckoning. Tigrayans who are honest with themselves see this moment differently from how that project frames it: as a political organization going through the painful but necessary process that every serious movement goes through when it faces the gap between its goals and its record. These are not the same thing. One is a verdict. The other is a process. The difference between them is the difference between burial and renewal.

— —

The roots of the current crisis are not recent. They go back to a structural shift that began around 2005, when a quiet but decisive change took place inside the TPLF and, by extension, across the entire political system it anchored, the EPRDF. This was not simply an organizational change. It was a degradation of the quality of political thinking inside the system.

The TPLF had always valued internal debate. Its culture of long deliberative meetings, sometimes lasting weeks or months, was real and well known. Democratic centralism as a doctrine permitted open discussion before a decision and required collective discipline after it. That process, in principle, was sound. Independent thinking was not prohibited. On the contrary, most party members will tell you that debate was encouraged, and they are not wrong.

But the quality of any debate depends entirely on the quality of the people conducting it. What changed after 2005 was not the presence or absence of debate. It was the intellectual depth of those sitting in the room. When the system began recruiting for loyalty over analytical capability, the debates continued in form but declined in substance. The meetings grew longer without growing sharper. Agreement was reached more easily, not because the thinking had improved, but because fewer people in the room had the capacity to challenge it meaningfully. Thinkers were replaced by followers. And without a strong external political opposition to press against, even the genuine thinkers inside the party had no outside mirror to sharpen their ideas against. The result was a system that talked endlessly to itself and heard only what it already believed.

This change did not stay inside the TPLF. It spread into academic institutions, business circles, and civic organizations. It produced a class of people whose main qualification was closeness to power, and whose main interest was keeping that closeness. Being a yes-man became a career path. Accommodation became a professional skill. Some of these people came to distrust their own people more than they distrusted Tigray’s actual enemies. That is not a minor observation. It is a structural diagnosis.

What that shift produced over time was not simply a weaker organization. It produced something more dangerous: a generation of leaders and cadres shaped entirely by the culture of agreement, who had never been tested by genuine internal debate, and who had learned that going along was safer than standing firm. Some of them built personal resentments inside the system and eventually found that serving outside interests was a more reliable path to relevance than serving Tigray’s collective good. Others simply could not see the difference between loyalty to the party and loyalty to the people the party was supposed to serve. In both cases, the result was the same. The bad apples that Tigray is now removing from its structures were not accidents. They were the predictable harvest of a system that had been growing them for nearly two decades.

And yet, naming this failure honestly does not mean condemning everything the system produced. The two must be held separately, because collapsing them is precisely the error that makes honest reckoning impossible.

No political program of that scale and ambition, working under the conditions TPLF worked under, produces a clean record. The development achievements are real. The failures are real. The strategic errors are real. A people’s party is not measured by whether it made mistakes. It is measured by whether it has the capacity to recognize those mistakes, learn from them, and transform. Removing the bad apples is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the test. The current moment is exactly that test: whether what remains after the cleansing is a movement capable of genuine renewal, or simply a smaller version of the same structure.

— —

The era of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is remembered, with good reason, as a period of real development and international standing. He was a leader who worked at a strategic level that earned genuine respect beyond Ethiopia’s borders. But it is also necessary to say honestly that while the larger picture was being managed with skill, a quiet decay was taking root at the foundation. The very success of the macro-strategy created a false sense of permanence. The elite assumed the foundation was solid because the roof looked so impressive. They stopped examining what was underneath. The system began rewarding agreement over independent thought. It created a leadership gap that had no institutional way to fill itself. And when Meles was gone, that gap became fully visible. The tragedy is not that he failed. The tragedy is that the system he led did not build the strength required to continue without him.

— —

When the pressure of 2020 finally arrived, that weakened system was exposed in full. The war showed not only the size of the external threat, which was extreme, organized between the federal government and the PFDJ, and deliberately aimed at erasure, but also the internal weaknesses that had built up over years. The war was not only a military event. It was a stress test that the hollowed-out institutions could not pass. Strategic alliances had been mistaken for shared commitments. Closeness had been confused with real solidarity. The depth of the anti-Tigrayan political project inside the Ethiopian state had been underestimated. These were not failures of individual judgment alone. They were the result of a system that had lost the ability for the kind of honest internal review that survival requires.

— —

The internal tensions visible today need to be understood in this context. What appears to some as chaos is better understood as a process of painful but necessary realignment. The people who worked as apologists, who softened Tigray’s position when clarity was needed, who put their own comfort above the collective good, are being pushed out of the structures they occupied. This is not a return to the beginning. It is the beginning of an honest foundation.

What is happening inside Tigray’s political structures is an internal act of renewal: difficult, painful, and self-directed. It belongs to Tigray. What Abiy Ahmed is attempting from the outside is of an entirely different nature. It is not reform. It is not even the wrong kind of intervention. It is the attempt to destroy a people’s political capacity: to remove not just a party but the organizational memory, the governing tradition, and the cultural self-confidence that allow a people to determine their own future. A project that does not distinguish between what must be removed and what must be preserved is not cleansing. It is destruction. Tigrayans must hold this difference clearly, not because it is tempting to confuse them, but because the adversary benefits every time the distinction is blurred.

This is why Tigray’s internal reckoning, as honest and necessary as it is, must be disciplined. Every internal fracture that is left uncontained becomes material for the erasure project. Every voice that reduces the current crisis to TPLF’s failures alone, without acknowledging the system and the collective silence that produced them, inadvertently reinforces the argument that what is being erased deserves to be erased. The reckoning must go deep enough to be credible. And it must produce something strong enough to make the erasure project fail.

— —

What Tigray requires now is not the elevation of one leader above all criticism, nor the destruction of one leader as the explanation for all failure. What it requires is structural clarity: an honest examination of what the system got wrong, and a serious commitment to building one that does not repeat those failures under the next round of pressure.

Sovereignty is not a gift. It is not only a legal status. It is an internal capacity: the capacity to think clearly, to organize effectively, to hold together under pressure, and to make decisions that serve the collective good rather than individual survival. That capacity must be built into the institutions, not left to depend on any single person.

The priority in this moment is immediate and concrete: reverse the damage, secure Tigray’s territorial integrity, and ensure the safety of every displaced Tigrayan. Only when physical survival is no longer in question can the longer work of democratic reconstruction begin on a foundation that is genuinely stable. That reconstruction is not about rebuilding what existed before. It is about building something stronger: institutions forged from honest reckoning, not from the culture of agreement that weakened the previous generation.

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Leaders matter. But systems endure. Tigray’s future does not depend on the perfection of any single person. It depends on the strategic clarity of an entire people who have decided to take full responsibility for their own survival, and to build the institutions that make survival not a matter of luck, but of structure.

The catastrophe of 2020 was not the failure of a single individual. It was the failure of a system that had been weakening for years. If that system is not understood and rebuilt, Tigray will not only risk repeating the past, it will remain governed by it.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！