The Project Behind the Performance: Oromo-Centered State Power and What Tigray Risks Missing

Tigrayan media is not wrong to engage anti-Abiy Oromo voices.
But engagement is not analysis. The suffering of Oromo opponents of Abiy Ahmed does not dissolve the Oromo-centered structure of the state project,
it only makes the project harder to see.

I have been watching Ethiopian politics for a long time. What I keep seeing troubles me. I see analysis that dresses up confusion as balance. I see silence, and that silence is helping a specific project move forward unchallenged. I am writing this piece because right now, a particular confusion is spreading. It is spreading among Tigrayan media, among Ethiopian opposition circles, and among international observers. That confusion is not accidental. It is doing exactly what the project needs it to do.

The confusion is this: because prominent Oromos oppose Abiy Ahmed, some people conclude that the state project itself cannot be Oromo-centered. By Oromo-centered, I do not mean that ordinary Oromos benefit equally or that Oromo society as a whole controls the state. I mean a specific network—urban, bureaucratic, security, and elite—that has reorganized land, administration, and authority in ways structured around Oromo political advantage. Tigrayan media may have tactical reasons to engage those voices. The suffering of anti-Abiy Oromos is real. But there is a difference between a tactical engagement and an analytical conclusion. That analytical conclusion is wrong.

I understand the tactical logic. I am not writing to dismiss it. I am writing because I believe the confusion it produces will cost both Tigray and ordinary Oromos far more than any tactical gain is worth.

Ethiopia’s seventh general election is scheduled for June 1, 2026. That date is days away. Opposition parties are under surveillance and cannot access the resources they need to campaign. Independent media has been systematically weakened or shut down across the country. The result is already decided before a single vote is cast. This piece is not only about the election mechanics. It is about the political structure that this election is designed to confirm.

My argument is this. Abiy Ahmed is not building a generic authoritarian state. He is building an Oromo-centered state. This state rewards loyal networks and crushes independent Oromo voices. It reassures non-Oromos through Ethiopian nationalist language. And it reorganizes land, administration, and symbolic ownership in ways that people on the ground experience as ethnic. This is not a claim I make alone. Ethiopian political scientists writing in peer-reviewed journals have already given this pattern a name: when Oromos came to power after 2018, they “began central power politics and were accused of working to make Oromo a core nation,” language that echoes how scholars described Amhara dominance in the imperial and Derg periods. The structural logic of ethnic state capture does not change depending on which group sits at the center. I am saying it has happened again, in a different direction.

Prominent Oromo opposition to Abiy does not disprove this. It helps explain how the project is managed.

I will show you the evidence. But first, I need to make three things clear.

Three things I need to separate before I go further

The question of who benefits from a state is not answered by asking who the state represses. A government can imprison members of an ethnic group while at the same time reorganizing land, administration, and economic access in that group’s name. Both can be true. In Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia, I believe both are.

To make this argument honestly, I need to keep three things separate. Collapsing them is exactly the mistake I am writing against.

The first is the Oromo people as a whole. Oromos are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. They are diverse in region, class, religion, and political alignment. Many are poor, displaced, imprisoned, or actively opposed to Abiy Ahmed. Oromo farmers have been killed in conflicts involving the OLA. Oromo opposition figures are in prison or exile. I am not writing about the Oromo people as a collective. Any argument that treats them as a single political bloc is wrong. I want to be clear about this before I go any further.

The second is the Oromo-centered ruling network. This is what I am actually writing about. I mean: Abiy Ahmed; the Oromia regional government under Shimelis Abdissa; the Addis Ababa city administration under Mayor Adanech Abebe, whose administration has been the public face of the corridor development project, defending demolitions and relocations as modernization while rights organizations documented forced evictions underneath, and whose administration’s decision to hoist the Oromia regional flag and play the Oromia anthem in Addis Ababa school compounds led to protests, arrests, and a public statement from the mayor that Addis Ababa “is the capital of Oromia”; documented security structures such as Koree Nageenyaa, a secretive Oromia security committee that Reuters reported in 2024 was linked to extrajudicial killings and illegal detentions across the region; land and administrative networks reorganizing Addis Ababa and the Sheger corridor; and religious-political narratives that give the project a language of destiny and divine mandate. Scholars writing in the Journal of Modern African Studies have documented how Pentecostal and prosperity-gospel thinking has shaped Abiy’s political language, his framing of Ethiopia as divinely chosen, his rule as a historic opportunity, and his confidence as theological conviction. Statements attributed to Shimelis Abdissa in opposition and diaspora media have framed this political moment in terms of civilizational Oromo victory. Even allowing for disputed translations, such language has deepened the perception among many non-Oromo Ethiopians that Oromo regional power is being pursued as a permanent ethnic project.

The third layer is the hardest to discuss. It is also the one most often avoided. This layer is the broader social participation in and around the project. The project is not carried only by the inner circle. It moves through administrators, licensing officers, land officials, local security figures, and community networks who see this moment as a historic opportunity and act on it, often without being told to from above. This same layer is visible in the informal surveillance and economic gatekeeping that many people now report encountering in hotels, cafés, public offices, and business spaces. These networks may present themselves as politically neutral or even anti-Abiy. But they quietly defend the order his system has created, and they are hedging against the day it no longer does. I see this layer operating. I believe it is decisive. This does not mean ordinary Oromo civilians designed the project, control it, or benefit from it equally. It means the project moves through more than just the top leadership. And I believe refusing to name it, for fear of being misread, is itself a form of the silence I am warning against.

The evidence, from the capital outward

Let me show you what I mean. I will start in Addis Ababa and work outward. The pattern is clearest when you follow the geography.

In October 2022, the Oromia government created Sheger City. It took six towns surrounding Addis Ababa and merged them into a single Oromia administration. A scholar writing in the Journal of Eastern African Studies has called this “pericapital urbanism,” the assertion of ethnic power through administrative consolidation, spatial reclassification, and symbolic restructuring at the edges of a capital city. That is an academic phrase for something very concrete: taking territory around a capital city and placing it under ethnic administration. Ethiopia’s own Human Rights Commission found that forced evictions in Sheger City broke federal law. Oromo political networks made claims about Addis Ababa’s demographic composition. Political parties and observers accused Oromia-PP officials of issuing ID cards to non-residents and organizing Oromo resettlement into the city. Amnesty International documented that at least 872 people were forcibly evicted from Bole and Lemi Kura sub-cities in November 2024. They received no adequate consultation, insufficient notice, and no compensation. Satellite imagery confirmed at least 29 hectares cleared. Freedom House has noted that the Corridor Development Project was implemented with minimal public input and that civil-service hiring processes allow for patronage appointments. Foreign journalists can go to Addis Ababa and Sheger City and test these claims through serious reporting. They should. The point is not to repeat rumor. The point is to examine the structure that residents encounter every day.

Move east. Formal proposals have been submitted to the National Reconciliation Commission to incorporate Dire Dawa and Harar into Oromia. Three major Ethiopian opposition parties have condemned these proposals as destabilizing. This is not a new idea. The scholarship on Dire Dawa shows that the city’s administrative status remained unresolved from 1991 to 2004 precisely because of Oromo-Somali rivalry over incorporation, and that Oromia’s “special interest” rights in the city have never been settled under the constitution. What is new is the political environment. For the first time in modern Ethiopian history, the federal center and the Oromia apparatus are effectively the same political formation. Old territorial claims now arrive in a fundamentally different setting.

Move south. In August 2023, the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region was dissolved and replaced with a cluster arrangement. This denied genuine self-governance to groups that had sought it under the constitution. The Rift Valley Institute’s December 2024 report documented this in detail: the Wolaita, the Gurage, and others were placed into cluster structures they had not chosen. An earlier RVI briefing paper from March 2023 was more direct: forcing the Gurage into Central Ethiopia State was “a clear violation of the Gurage’s constitutional right of statehood.” The same briefing observed that after the dissolution, political power at the federal level was now “largely held by the Oromo, Amhara, and the newly-empowered Somali elites who have essentially replaced the southern elites in the political hierarchy of Ethiopia’s federal states.” Those are a policy institute’s words, not mine.

Northwest of Addis Ababa, ACLED has documented sustained conflicts along the contested North Shewa and West Shewa zones, where Oromia’s administrative boundaries have been pressed outward against the older Amhara administrative space. Further west, along the Benishangul-Gumuz border, the Rift Valley Institute’s conflict trends analysis documented that the “indigenous vs. settler” framing has grown sharper since 2018, with Gumuz and Berta communities experiencing increasing tension around population dynamics in a region where that distinction carries direct legal and political weight.

And across all of it: a political leadership that speaks in Ethiopian nationalist language for national and international audiences, while reaching for Oromo historical and civilizational framing when addressing Oromo constituencies. This is not inconsistency. It is the management of multiple audiences by a project that needs both.

I state these findings not to argue that every Oromo benefits, or that every policy is openly declared as ethnic redistribution. I state them because the policies are experienced by many residents as ethnic. They encounter this daily, through land offices, licensing systems, demolitions, and administrative power, while the government continues to speak the language of national development. When resentment is built on real experience, it is harder to challenge than resentment built on propaganda. It is also harder to contain.

This also explains the violence in rural Oromia. Some observers use that violence to argue that the project cannot be Oromo-centered. But the Oromo-centered project I am describing is not a democratic empowerment of Oromo society as a whole. It is an urban, bureaucratic, security, and elite project. Its center is Addis Ababa, Sheger, the federal ministries, the Oromia regional apparatus, and the security networks that enforce them. Rural Oromia is not its beneficiary. Rural Oromo communities can suffer under this project for exactly the same reason: the regime does not tolerate autonomous Oromo society any more than it tolerates autonomous Oromo political leaders. The violence directed at Oromo farmers, the OLA insurgency, and the military response to it, none of this contradicts an Oromo-centered elite project. It confirms that the project is centered on a network, not on a people.

This distinction matters most. What I am describing under Abiy is elite command combined with a visible reorganization of administrative authority, land, urban space, and settlement patterns that reaches into daily life. Elite control is one thing. Ethnic administrative reordering is another. That difference matters for what comes next.

But is this not what TPLF did?

I am Tigrayan. I know what it felt like to be told that my people were benefiting from state power they never received. That is exactly why I insist on this distinction. Not to defend the TPLF. But to be precise about what elite capture means, and what ethnic redistribution means. They are not the same thing.

Under the EPRDF, TPLF dominance was real. It was concentrated at the top: the security apparatus, military leadership, intelligence services, and the inner circle of party strategy. The Clingendael Institute’s analysis of Ethiopia’s security sector documented the widely shared perception that senior security posts remained dominated by Tigrayan party members, with significant overlap between security chiefs and TPLF Central Committee membership. The Army Chief of Staff was Tigrayan for more than two decades. Both main intelligence agencies were TPLF strongholds. The Foreign Ministry was held by a Tigrayan for nineteen years.

The military command told a similar story in sharper numbers. A 2014 analysis found that of the 64 highest-ranking positions across the armed forces’ four departments and commands, 49 were held by Tigrayan officers. Oromo officers held eight. Amhara officers held four. In November 2020, the same week the war in Tigray began, Prime Minister Abiy carried out a fast, coordinated reshuffle: the army’s top leadership, the director of intelligence, and the federal police chief were all replaced within one week. Berhanu Jula Gelalcha, an ethnic Oromo officer, became Chief of the General Staff on November 8, 2020. A newly created Republican Guard, reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s office and placed under an Oromo commander, absorbed the protective functions previously held by NISS, which had been a TPLF stronghold. The Clingendael Institute, analyzing these changes in 2022, described the result as a coalition with “a markedly reduced Tigrayan presence” at the commanding heights of the state. What the TPLF had built over two decades was replaced, directionally, within months.

EFFORT, the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray, must be named honestly. It was established in 1995 using resources accumulated by the TPLF. It grew into at least twenty-four companies covering banking, construction, mining, and agribusiness. It became a major contributor to Tigray’s regional administration revenues. It was real, it was large, and it was politically tied to TPLF leadership. But it must also be placed in context. The EPRDF system produced similar party-linked endowment structures for all its member organizations: Tiret in the Amhara region, Tumsa, formerly Dinsho, in Oromia, and Wendo among the Southern parties. Ethiopian legal scholars writing in peer-reviewed journals have listed all four together as party-affiliated endowments, established on the assumption that the wider regional public would be the beneficiary. EFFORT was the largest and most powerful. It was not a uniquely Tigrayan invention. It was part of the political economy the ruling coalition created for itself.

But that dominance did not extend to the everyday bureaucratic machinery through which citizens experience the state. The municipal offices of Addis Ababa, the federal civil service, public enterprises such as Ethiopian Airlines, Ethio Telecom, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, and the administrative apparatus that reached into neighborhoods and licensing desks, none of this was a Tigrayan social space. It was staffed overwhelmingly by non-Tigrayans, visibly and practically, mainly Amharas, Oromos, and other Ethiopians, as anyone who lived and worked in Addis Ababa during that period knows. And in parliament, Oromia’s party held the largest delegation with 178 seats; Amhara’s party held 137; the TPLF held 38. The regions were governed by their own parties.

Ordinary Tigrayans received no ethnic dividend. The accusation of total Tigrayan dominance was a political story. It took real elite security power and converted it into a false claim of Tigrayan societal control.

Some Ethiopians, especially non-Tigrayans who lived through that period, would push back on this. They would say, as many used to say in Addis Ababa, that every building was “Hagos’s building,” Hagos being a common Tigrinya name that became shorthand for Tigrayan property and concealed TPLF wealth. That rhetoric was powerful. But rhetoric is not structure. The question is not whether some Tigrayans became wealthy. The question is whether the state systematically redistributed land, urban space, licensing, local administration, and economic opportunity to ordinary Tigrayans as Tigrayans. It did not. And many of those who repeated the “Hagos’s building” story knew, at some level, that what they were describing was not a systematic ethnic redistribution project. It was political language inherited from older unitary Ethiopian nostalgia, imperial and Derg-era resentment reactivated and redirected at Tigrayans under the cover of anti-TPLF politics.

That story was later expanded through diaspora media that circulated exaggerated lists assigning billion-dollar fortunes to former TPLF figures, Abay Tsehaye, Seyoum Mesfin, Sebhat Nega, and others, often attributed vaguely to Forbes, for which no verifiable confirmation exists. Some of these lists went further, attaching inflammatory accusations alongside the numbers. The point is not that corruption was absent or that EFFORT’s political economy was clean. The point is that real and legitimate questions about party wealth were turned into a story of total Tigrayan enrichment. That story made ethnic blame available and transferable to ordinary Tigrayans who had received none of what they were said to control.

There is something else I want to say. If Ethiopia’s political transition after 2018 had gone differently, without Abiy’s destructive politics and without the genocidal war against Tigray, it is possible, even likely, that Tigrayans themselves would have been among the first to hold the TPLF accountable. Tigray paid dearly for the federal order. The region’s sons and daughters fought and died for it. And yet large parts of Tigray remained chronically food-insecure and aid-dependent throughout that period, even while their ruling party sat at the top of the Ethiopian state for nearly three decades. The “Tigrayan dominance” story could never explain why the people of Tigray received so little of what they were said to control. Abiy’s war did not only destroy lives. It destroyed the political space in which that reckoning might have happened.

What I am describing today is structurally different. I am not saying that no non-Oromo entrepreneur, official, or businessperson can do well under the current system. Many do. But their success happens inside a larger frame in which land, administration, urban expansion, licensing, and symbolic ownership are increasingly experienced by residents as Oromo-centered. That is not the same structure as TPLF-era dominance. Treating them as equivalent is not careful analysis. It is the kind of false balance that allows a real pattern to go unnamed.

How this project manages its opposition

Here is the comparison I think Ethiopian analysis is missing. I have not yet seen it named clearly enough.

During the EPRDF period, Oromo opposition politics was largely built around claims of exclusion. The argument was familiar: the Ethiopian state was dominated by the TPLF, Oromo land was threatened, Addis Ababa expanded at Oromo expense, and genuine Oromo self-rule was denied in practice.

But that story requires an important correction. It was the EPRDF order, for the first time in modern Ethiopian history, that constitutionally established Oromia as a defined federal state with its own geography, language, culture, and self-administration. That was not a small achievement. It created the institutional basis through which Oromo national identity could develop within a federal framework. Oromos were not excluded from the constitutional logic of this settlement. They were among its intended primary beneficiaries.

The failure was elsewhere. ODP/OPDO did not develop the political quality, ideological confidence, and democratic ownership needed to carry that federal opportunity forward. As the TPLF decayed, ODP/OPDO decayed with it. The problem was not that the federal structure denied Oromos what they deserved. The problem was that Oromo political leadership inside the EPRDF framework did not rise to the level required to turn constitutional recognition into mature, democratic, developmental self-government. That is a more honest account of that period. And it matters for understanding what came next.

Because what followed was not simply the correction of Oromo exclusion. It was the capture of a federal opportunity, one designed to serve Oromo self-rule, by a personalized Oromo-centered project that tolerates no competition, even from within the Oromo political world.

Today the picture is different, and I want to state the difference precisely.

Prominent Oromo figures do oppose Abiy Ahmed. The opposition is real and wide-ranging: from the OLA insurgency led by Kumsa Diriba, known as Jaal Marroo, to legal opposition figures including Merera Gudina of the Oromo Federalist Congress, Dawud Ibsa of the Oromo Liberation Front, Bekele Gerba, and Jawar Mohammed, to diaspora intellectuals and activists such as Tsegaye Ararsa. These are serious people. They have documented records of opposition and documented records of suffering for that opposition. Their suffering is real. I do not minimize it.

But I ask: what does this opposition actually oppose?

I do not believe all of this opposition is directed against an Oromo-centered state as such. In many cases, what appears to be opposed is Abiy’s monopolization of that state. He wants all Oromo political energy routed through him, not through Jawar, Merera, Dawud, Bekele, Tsegaye, or any other figure with independent public standing. His Ethiopian nationalist rhetoric reassures non-Oromo audiences. But when he speaks to Oromo audiences, he frames his rule as a historic Oromo opportunity that must not be lost. That is not contradiction. It is audience management. The imprisonment of Jawar, the fragmentation of the OFC, the house arrest of Dawud Ibsa, and the exile of Tsegaye Ararsa all demonstrate one thing: they are not evidence that the state is anti-Oromo. They are evidence that Abiy will not allow any Oromo political force to stand beside him as a competing source of authority within the project he leads.

I see this distinction being flattened constantly. I hear it in Tigrayan media. I see it in diaspora commentary. I read it in analysis that treats Abiy’s repression of Oromo opposition as proof that his project cannot be ethnically structured. That inference does not follow. It is the confusion the project depends on. And I refuse the false equivalence it produces.

The election that is not an election

What is approaching in June is not an election. It is a performance. It is designed to produce legitimacy while blocking genuine competition. The conditions for genuine competition do not exist. Opposition parties operate under surveillance and are denied access to resources. Independent media has been dismantled. The electoral commission operates under heavy political pressure. The result is decided before a single vote is cast.

The strategy behind it is what the ODP/OPDO tradition perfected over decades and Abiy has refined: Convince or Confuse. Where genuine political persuasion is possible, it is attempted. Where it is not, the goal is to generate enough noise, contradiction, and competing stories that organized resistance becomes impossible. Confusion itself is a tool of control. The repression of prominent Oromo opponents is often misread by outside observers as proof that Abiy’s project cannot be ethnically structured. But a ruler who silences competing Oromo voices while building Oromo-centered administrative structures is not contradicting himself. He is consolidating.

Nominal opposition parties may participate. The European Union cancelled its observer deployment after Ethiopia rejected standard conditions for mission independence, including the right to import communication equipment. Whether any other external observers appear or not, the mechanics of voting will be used to claim that competition occurred. The conclusion drawn, that Ethiopia chose its government, will serve the project for another cycle, buying time for further consolidation of land, administration, and symbolic ownership.

Convince or Confuse. Where persuasion fails, generate enough confusion that the alternative cannot organize. I watch this happening. I think it is working.

The silence that is doing harm

I write the following knowing it may be unwelcome in some Tigrayan circles. I write it anyway because I believe intellectual honesty right now matters more than political comfort.

The frame that Abiy Ahmed is fundamentally anti-Oromo, adopted by some Tigrayan media and activists to distinguish the suffering Oromo population from the political project, is analytically wrong and ultimately self-defeating. Abiy Ahmed can imprison Oromo opponents while at the same time building an Oromo-centered administrative, land, and economic structure. A ruler who represses dissenting members of the group in whose name he governs is not unusual in history. Describing only one of these realities as if the other does not exist is not solidarity with ordinary Oromos. It is a partial account that feeds confusion.

Tigrayans, of all people, should understand the danger of partial accounting. The accusation of Tigrayan dominance under the TPLF worked in large part because a partial account, who held top positions rather than who received material benefits, became the dominant story. An entire people paid for what a ruling elite had done. I am not willing to make an equivalent mistake now, in a different direction. It is not analysis. It is the same error in different clothing.

I understand why analysts avoid this subject. Naming Oromo-centered state consolidation risks being read as anti-Oromo. In the current Ethiopian political climate, that risk is real. I understand the caution.

The silence I am most concerned about is not Ethiopia’s silence as a whole. Many Amhara voices have warned loudly about Oromo-centered administrative and territorial consolidation around Addis Ababa. But I do not write from that political position. Much of the Amhara framing treats the old Ethiopian unitary order, shaped by Amhara culture, Amharic language, and centralized state structures, as the natural alternative. I do not share that view. My concern is more specific: how Tigrayan elites and media, who should understand the logic of federalism, self-rule, and ethnicized blame better than anyone, have hesitated to name the current structure clearly.

The answer to Oromo-centered state capture is not Amhara-centered restoration. It is a disciplined, democratic, and evolving federal structure. That is the very principle Ethiopia abandoned when the EPRDF decayed and the Prosperity Party replaced federal bargaining with personalized domination.

But I have watched the silence grow, and I believe it is now causing active harm. Not only to Tigray’s understanding of its strategic environment. Also to ordinary Oromos themselves.

When a state project reorganizes access to land, office, licensing, and protection along ethnic lines, visibly enough that those who are not benefiting encounter it every day, resentment does not stay confined to the architects of that project. When systems built around ethnic redistribution collapse, ordinary members of the associated group face exposure to collective anger they did not design and cannot control.

This is the lesson Tigrayans lived. TPLF was not foreign to Tigray. It came out of Tigray’s own political conviction that Tigray’s dignity and survival would be secured only through a federal order in which all nations and nationalities could thrive, socially, economically, culturally, and politically. Tigrayans who supported that movement were not fighting for ethnic privilege. They were fighting for an idea. But the leadership squandered that conviction, concentrating power and allowing the commanding heights of the state to become identified with Tigrayan senior officials in ways that made the accusation of ethnic domination both partially credible and dangerously generalizable. And once the narrative of ethnic benefit took hold, even where it was exaggerated, ordinary Tigrayans were made to pay for a political order they had believed in but had received far less from than others claimed. Under Abiy, the trajectory is different. A growing body of testimony, reporting, and documented administrative practice points to a pattern of Oromo-centered administrative reorganization that residents experience as real, and that experience is accumulating. When the political protection that sustains the project collapses, ordinary Oromos will not be shielded by the argument that prominent Oromos also opposed Abiy. They will be exposed to resentment shaped by what the state reorganized in their name.

To name this danger is not to justify any future retaliation against Oromo civilians. It is to warn against the political structure that could expose them to it.

That is the danger the Convince or Confuse strategy is designed to delay, not to prevent. Electoral theater, opposition fragmentation, and international confusion about who benefits and who suffers: all of it buys time. None of it resolves the underlying reality.

I write this not to assign collective blame to ordinary Oromos. I write it because I believe the silence around what is structurally happening will eventually expose them most.

The state that presents itself as national while organizing itself as ethnic is not building national stability. It is building a debt, payable, eventually, by the people it claims to serve.

I see the performance. I see the project behind it. And I think Tigray, and Ethiopia, can no longer afford the silence that lets both continue unchallenged.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！