For decades, Egypt sought to manage the Nile equation through Ethiopia and Eritrea. The actor that repeatedly altered regional outcomes was neither — it was Tigray’s organized political capacity. The lesson is not about Egypt. It is about Tigray. If Tigrayans fail to understand their own strategic weight, others will continue to calculate it more clearly than they do themselves.…

Tigray has emerged from its most dangerous internal test more consolidated than many expected. The task now is not merely to preserve that consolidation, but to convert it into diplomatic strength: entering every room with one clear message, one clear objective, and the discipline to distinguish restoration from adjustment to loss. Tigray has spent the past months passing through one…

Tigray’s trauma has amplified its disagreements so deeply that many Tigrayans now struggle to recognize how much shared ground still remains. The task is to recover that ground, organize it, and turn friction into cohesion before others turn it into fracture. እዚ ፅሑፍ፡ ናይ ድሕረ-ፕሪቶሪያ ትግራይ ፖለቲካዊ ምስሊ ብቐሊሉ ኣብ መንጎ “ደለይቲ ሰላም”ን “ደለይቲ ኲናት”ን ወይ ኣብ መንጎ “ደገፍቲ ፕሪቶሪያ”ን…

Obasanjo’s re-engagement will have meaning only if it moves Pretoria from process to enforceable chronology. But that will happen only if Tigray enters the room with sharper demands, documented positions, and a second track that does not depend on the goodwill of those who benefit from delay. Obasanjo’s arrival in Mekelle comes at a consequential moment. It follows Ethiopia’s June…

No political alternative becomes serious until it explains who protects Tigray during the dangerous interval between rejecting the current framework and building a stronger one. I have been following, with real unease, the voices now filling the social media space against the current Tigrayan መኸተ authority. I did not follow them to dismiss them. I followed them because I wanted…

Tigray needs criticism that forces emergency institutions to become real, not commentary that reduces every crisis to one man. I listened carefully to Tedros Tsegaye’s commentary on the Sheraro drone strike and the reactions that followed. He raised some points I agree with. Formulaic statements after an attack that kills Tigrayan youth are not enough. Leadership must be accountable. Drone…

When a people is under pressure, the first test of its political class is not whether it can condemn past failures. It is whether it can hold together long enough to survive them. This brief reflection follows questions raised by many readers after my recent piece, The Generation That Demands More Is TPLF’s Achievement. Some asked whether a generation that…

A Tigray without northern strategic depth is a Tigray that depends on others’ goodwill. The record of others’ goodwill in this region is not encouraging. The short-term battle over Western Tigray must be fought through law, history, and political pressure, without compromise and without illusion about who benefits from its continued unresolved status. But Tigray’s long-term survival requires a northern…

How TPLF helped transform Tigray — and Ethiopia — and why its achievements and failures must be held in the same frame The main argument of this essay is simple. TPLF is not just a party name. For more than five decades, it has been part of Tigray’s political life, social organization, sacrifice, and survival. During the armed struggle, it…

Eritrea, Tigray, and the Reckoning History Will Not Let Them Escape Eritrea and Tigray were made politically separate, but they were never made civilizationally foreign to each other. Eritrea can stand as Eritrea, and Tigray can stand as Tigray. Two flags can remain. Two political realities can remain. But beneath them, one people can recover the organic bond that history…

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…

Tigray’s challenge is not only to prepare for danger, but to do so without breaking the moral bond between the youth, the people, and the national cause. Tigray is again being pushed into a dangerous moral and strategic debate. On one side, there is a legitimate fear that young people may be treated as expendable instruments of political or military…

Many Tigrayans have been asking why TPLF was moving so slowly. That question has not disappeared. It has changed form. On May 5, Tigray’s reinstated Baito (State Council) formally elected Debretsion Gebremichael as president, in defiance of federal warnings and in open tension with the Tadesse Worede interim administration. The Pretoria framework has entered a visibly contested phase, no longer…

When actors who helped make Tigray’s destruction possible return as architects of Ethiopia’s next political order, Tigray’s task is not to reject every conversation. ጽምዶ began as Tigray’s own survival project, a public-to-public insulation against mistrust, manipulation, and collective self-erasure among communities that share history, geography, kinship, and pain. The task is to protect it from capture, to read who…

The danger of Tigray’s splinter politics is not only that some actors want power. It is that they seek political relevance without carrying the full burden of Tigray’s national question. That is not a national program. It is political homelessness. —– In a recent Brake Show event, Tegadalay Godefay described the current splinter politics as a desire to return to…

The next negotiation will not be decided only by what Tigray demands, but by whether it enters the room as a political party seeking accommodation or as a governing institution asserting constitutional rights. —– Some of what I write here may sound familiar to readers who have followed my recent essays. I repeat these arguments deliberately, not because they have…

The danger is not simply that the Horn is being rearranged without Tigray in the room. The deeper danger is that Tigray may fail to read that rearrangement in time to convert its institutional reconstitution into political leverage. —– Washington is helping rearrange the Horn of Africa around interests that are larger than Tigray, and in some cases larger than…

On pressure, the opponent, and the logic of the decisive moment This memo is long, and intentionally so. It was not written for quick consumption or for emotional reaction. It was written for patient and focused reading. Some parts may need to be read more than once, because the argument being made is not about one event, one actor, or…

On collective responsibility, structural failure, and what genuine political reconstruction requires 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…

Tigray cannot afford to let its internal debate do what its enemies could not. There is a conversation happening inside Tigrayan households, in diaspora living rooms, on social media timelines, and in quiet exchanges between people who love Tigray deeply and disagree about what that love requires right now. It is not a comfortable conversation. It is often not a…