Abiy Can Fall and Tigray Can Still Lose

Every path before us carries risk. Our task now is not to settle Tigray’s final destination, but to make sure each phase leaves us stronger, less isolated, and still able to choose the next.

Our displaced people remain displaced, our economy remains badly wounded, and now drought linked to the ongoing El Niño is again threatening families whose capacity to absorb another disaster is already exhausted. The kiremt rains were forecast months ago to fall below what the northern highlands need, and a forecast like that cannot be appealed.

Political alignments are moving. Old enemies are talking. Forces that disagree on almost everything are finding immediate reasons to cooperate. Addis Ababa is preparing to begin another political cycle in the coming weeks under a Prosperity Party government with overwhelming control of the federal system, confirmed in a June election in which all thirty-eight of Tigray’s constituencies were excluded, for the second consecutive time. Our own leadership is maneuvering between negotiation, deterrence, new relationships and preparation for whatever may come next. A great deal is happening around Tigray, and at the same time painfully little is changing in the daily life of our people. I think we Tegaru should begin from that contradiction.

This is not a moment that offers Tigray one clean road. Every available direction carries risk. Engaging one actor creates one danger; refusing to engage can create another. Preparing for war has political and economic consequences, but failing to prepare can expose us physically. Negotiating with Addis can be used to delay us, while refusing negotiation can isolate us. Working with forces that currently share some of our immediate interests can increase our leverage, but those same forces may pursue very different political destinations from ours.

In such a moment, I do not expect our leadership to produce a perfect solution. There is none. What I expect is something more difficult: the discipline to move Tigray through one phase without sacrificing the choices we may need in the next. For that reason, despite the questions I continue to have, I believe the present መኸተ (Mekhete) posture deserves both our support and our scrutiny.

That balance matters. Not blind support. Not destructive suspicion. Support and scrutiny. Tigray is moving through a difficult passage, and a people that has paid what we have paid cannot afford either political naivety or permanent internal war.

We should stop asking the wrong question

Much of the current discussion among Tegaru has centered on the emerging cooperation among forces opposed to Abiy Ahmed’s government. Political elites in different camps are interpreting that cooperation from the interests they represent or hope to advance. Amhara political voices look at it through Amhara interests. Oromo political voices look at it through Oromia. Eritrean state actors calculate through Eritrean security. Sudan has its own interests. None of this should surprise us.

I do not understand why we sometimes expect these actors to think from Tigray’s interests. Why should Oromo political elites think like me? Their political judgment is shaped by the Oromia they want. Mine is shaped by the Tigray I want to survive. Amhara political actors will calculate from what they believe protects Amhara interests. Eritrean state actors will calculate from what they believe protects Eritrea’s interests. The same is true of every serious political actor.

That is not a defect in politics. That is politics.

The question for us should therefore not be whether this or that political camp supports our position, whether a temporary partner loves Tigray, or whether any state or movement has suddenly become permanently aligned with us. The useful questions are different. Where do their interests overlap with ours now? What can Tigray gain from that overlap? What are they gaining from us? How long might the convergence last? What happens when the interests begin to separate? And can we change direction without having surrendered something we will need later?

I made a similar argument in Why Now? What Is Abiy Trying to Prevent? when I warned against confusing temporary alignment with permanent interest. That warning is even more important now. Because Tigray has lived through deep isolation, every new relationship can easily feel larger and more permanent than it really is. We should resist that temptation. A common danger can produce useful cooperation. It does not automatically produce a common future.

Tegaru cannot afford political innocence after what we have heard, seen and survived. Our recent history taught us that words, alliances and state calculations become material dangers when a people reads them too late. That is memory disciplined by experience.

This is why I do not think the present cooperation should be romanticized, but I also do not think it should be dismissed simply because the participants disagree on what comes afterward. If it reduces our isolation, increases our political leverage, complicates Addis Ababa’s ability to deal with us alone, and gives Tigray more room to maneuver, then it has strategic value in this phase. That may be enough.

What matters is whether we remain clear about what it is for.

A displaced family does not return home because we have found the right slogan for a coalition. A farmer whose harvest is threatened by failed rains is not protected by the emotional satisfaction of naming a common enemy. A young Tigrayan wondering whether to stay, leave or fight again will not be saved by confidence alone. Alignments matter only when they change Tigray’s position: more security, more leverage, more room to breathe, more ability to protect our people, more freedom to choose the next step.

What would it mean to win?

Recent statements from TPLF leaders have gone further. The message increasingly being presented is that Prosperity Party is not merely an adversary to be pressured but a system whose removal is necessary, and that the forces now cooperating against it already have ideas for a transition afterward. I understand why that rhetoric is being used. Leadership has to project confidence, reassure supporters and show partners that the effort is not directionless. There may also be understandings behind the scenes that ordinary Tegaru, including me, do not know and perhaps should not know in operational detail. But there is an important distinction here.

The fall of Abiy Ahmed or the defeat of Prosperity Party may become an objective of one phase. It should not automatically become Tigray’s definition of victory.

Abiy can fall and Tigray can still lose.

A new government can replace him while our displaced people remain away from home. Prosperity Party can disappear while Western Tigray remains unresolved. A transition can take place in Addis while Tigray remains economically weak, politically exposed and vulnerable to another coalition at the center. Even today’s cooperating forces can begin fighting over tomorrow’s order the moment the common pressure holding them together disappears.

So I would define our objective more carefully. Tigray’s long-term security cannot depend on the survival or disappearance of one man or one party. What we ultimately need is a political and security condition in which no government at the Ethiopian center can again isolate us, invade us, change our territory through force, economically strangle us, or make our existence depend on its goodwill.

The problem did not begin with one man

There is a deeper reason I hesitate to define Tigray’s victory around the fall of one government. The problem before us did not begin with Abiy Ahmed, and it will not necessarily end with him.

I have argued before that different political traditions around Tigray have repeatedly arrived, for very different reasons, at a similar conclusion: a strong, politically organized and economically capable Tigray complicates the order they want to build.

Part of Amhara political thought still carries an imperial imagination of Ethiopia in which the center, its history and its national identity are understood through an old unitary narrative. In that imagination, Tigray’s insistence on its own political agency, territorial integrity and national identity becomes an obstacle to the Ethiopia being imagined. I discussed this more deeply in The Mask I Wore Willingly, where I argued that the imperial inheritance did not merely shape relations between peoples; it also trapped Amhara politics inside the burden of imagining itself as custodian of Ethiopia.

A different pressure comes from Oromo elite politics, which I explored in The Project Behind the Performance. The history, grievance and political objective are different, but an ambitious Oromo-centered project can also see a strong Tigray as a limitation on the power it seeks to consolidate at the center. There I argued that opposition by individual Oromo politicians to Abiy should not prevent us from examining the deeper structure of the state project itself.

Eritrea presents yet another calculation. I have also written about the paradox in which the security of Eritrea and Tigray should naturally be connected by geography, history and economic complementarity, while political thinking in Asmara has often treated the emergence of a strong Tigrayan political economy as a strategic challenge. That contradiction was central to One Civilization Taught to See Itself as Two.

These are not the same political projects, and I do not want to pretend that they are. Their histories, objectives and internal debates are different. Amhara imperial-state imagination, Oromo-centered power ambition and Eritrean strategic anxiety do not come from one source. They do not speak the same language of legitimacy. They do not imagine the same future. But from Tigray’s side there is an intersection we should never lose sight of: different actors can arrive at an interest in weakening Tigray for completely different reasons.

This is why Tegaru should be careful not to let the event of the week become the whole explanation of our predicament. A statement from one political camp, an interview from another, an Eritrean calculation or even the fate of Abiy Ahmed may matter greatly in one phase. But underneath those events is an older structural problem: how does Tigray reach a condition in which its strength is no longer treated by surrounding power centers as something that must be contained?

I have made the related argument before in Can Tigray Afford to Put Ethiopia First?. The question is not simply which Ethiopian arrangement looks most attractive at a particular moment, but whether Tigray has built enough capacity, leverage and independent choice that its future no longer rests on the goodwill of whichever force controls the center.

That is why the final victory, whenever we are finally in a position to define it, has to solve something deeper than the problem of Abiy Ahmed. It has to break the recurring condition in which Tigray’s security, development and political agency can be periodically reversed whenever another regional project decides that a strong Tigray stands in its way.

This is not a reason to abandon the present phase. It is the reason to understand the present phase properly. Regime change may matter. A coalition against Prosperity Party may matter. Engagement with forces we distrust may matter. But none of these can be treated as the destination itself. They are instruments, openings, pressures and risks inside a longer struggle whose deepest question is whether Tigray can finally become strong enough that others no longer organize their ambitions around our weakness. How we reach that condition is still open.

That is why I do not think Tigray needs to commit itself today to one final theory of victory.

We need a theory of progression.

One phase may be about preventing isolation and preserving enough leverage to avoid being forced into another disastrous war on somebody else’s timetable. Another may be about returning our displaced people, resolving territorial occupation through law and political power, reopening our economy and restoring institutions. Another may involve shaping whatever political order emerges in Ethiopia so that Tigray cannot again be treated as an expendable enemy. Each success changes the environment in which the next decision will be made.

Only then may the final destination become clearer.

This is not indecision. It is the discipline of refusing to make permanent commitments while the conditions around us remain temporary and unstable.

Mekhete, as I understand it today, is therefore not the answer to Tigray’s final political destination. It is the structure that keeps us strong enough to have a destination to choose.

Support, scrutiny and the work in front of us

This is also why I think we should be fair when judging the current Mekhete structure. Look honestly at the choices before it.

Talking to Addis carries risk. Breaking with Addis carries risk. Engaging Eritrea after what our people experienced carries profound historical and political risk. Refusing to engage Eritrea when our geography and present security environment make it relevant also carries risk.

Working with Fano while the question of Western Tigray remains unresolved is uncomfortable and dangerous. Refusing every contact until every disagreement is settled could return us to the isolation that proved catastrophic before. Military preparation can be used by Addis to accuse us of abandoning peace. Lack of preparation could leave our people exposed if diplomacy fails.

There is no road here without danger.

That is why I think the right measure of leadership at this stage is not whether it finds an option without risk. We should ask whether it preserves options, builds leverage, protects our red lines, avoids irreversible mistakes, and leaves Tigray stronger when the next phase begins.

From what I can see, that appears to be the logic behind the steady posture being maintained now. I think that deserves recognition. It does not require silence from Tegaru. Support should never mean suspending judgment. In fact, a serious national strategy needs an informed public capable of supporting what is necessary while asking the questions that protect us from strategic drift.

Transparency matters here, but we should be precise about what we mean by it. I do not expect confidential political contacts, security arrangements or negotiations to be conducted on social media. Strategic ambiguity is sometimes necessary. If every understanding is made public before it matures, we may destroy our own leverage.

But strategic ambiguity is not the same thing as strategic absence.

There are times when leaders deliberately do not reveal the full content of an arrangement because disclosure would weaken negotiations, expose partners, or reduce room to maneuver. That is strategic ambiguity. The strategy exists, but not every element is public.

Strategic absence is different. That is when secrecy hides the lack of a sufficiently worked-out political logic: no clear understanding of what the relationship is for, what Tigray will not concede, what happens if partners diverge, or what comes after the immediate common objective. In that case secrecy stops being a tool of strategy and becomes a substitute for strategy.

We may not need to know every detail, but Tegaru should be able to understand the broad political direction. What is the purpose of the present phase? What are the interests Tigray will not trade away? What conditions would make us reconsider a partnership? What are we trying to preserve for the phase that follows? Those questions do not expose military secrets. They help a society understand the logic of the risks being taken in its name.

This is where criticism from political elites in other camps can sometimes be useful even when I disagree with their conclusions. I do not need them to speak for Tigray. I need us to ask whether anything in their criticism exposes a weakness that Tigray itself should examine. The mature response to criticism is not first to ask who said it, but whether there is something in it that can improve our own judgment.

The same discipline should apply inside Tigray. We should not turn every uncertainty into another internal political war. We have already paid too much for division, rumor and the habit of assuming bad faith before listening carefully. The present moment requires confidence, but not arrogance; unity, but not silence; caution, but not paralysis.

And while all of this political maneuvering continues, we must not forget the most immediate measure of any strategy: our people have to survive it.

The drought now developing around us is not secondary because the politics are dramatic. Farmers losing crops and livestock, families struggling for food and water, children whose education is again interrupted, and displaced people facing another season of hardship are not humanitarian details to be addressed after the political strategy succeeds. They are the reason the strategy exists.

Mekhete must therefore preserve Tigray’s future while protecting the Tigrayan who must live long enough to inherit that future.

That means whatever resources, networks, diaspora capacity, humanitarian diplomacy and internal organization we can mobilize against drought and hunger must be treated with the same seriousness we give to political alliances and security. A strategy that gains leverage abroad while our society weakens at home is not enough.

In the coming weeks, Addis Ababa is expected to begin another federal governing cycle. Tigray enters that moment still outside normal political life, absent even from the vote that produced it, with central questions unresolved and with no guarantee that the political environment around us will become easier. The temptation will be to look for certainty: one alliance, one enemy, one answer, one final destination.

I do not think certainty is available to us yet.

What is available is discipline.

We can keep our interests clear while our relationships remain flexible. We can support our leadership where it is building leverage while continuing to ask what that leverage is meant to achieve. We can prepare for danger without allowing an opponent to choose our timing. We can negotiate without mistaking negotiation for surrender. We can work with actors whose interests overlap with ours without pretending that their destination is ours.

Most importantly, we can refuse to let the objective of one phase imprison the choices of the next.

Perhaps Prosperity Party will fall. Perhaps it will survive longer than its opponents expect. Perhaps today’s cooperation will deepen. Perhaps some of it will weaken or change. Tigray’s national purpose should not depend on predicting every one of those outcomes correctly.

Our responsibility is to make sure that whatever happens next leaves us less isolated, less vulnerable, more capable of protecting our people and stronger when the next decision arrives.

That is how I understand Mekhete in this moment.

Not a fixed road to a destination already chosen, but the caution, tenacity and national discipline to survive each phase without losing the power to choose the next.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！