Political Organization Is Not a Copy-and-Paste Exercise

Politics is often consumed by events. History is shaped by institutions.

At a time when political developments in and around Tigray are moving quickly, this may seem an unusual moment to write about political organization rather than current events. That choice is deliberate. Events will continue to unfold, and there will be time to analyze them as the picture becomes clearer. What cannot wait is a deeper conversation about the institutions that will determine whether Tigray succeeds regardless of how the current moment resolves. It is in that spirit that I offer the reflections that follow.

It has been some time now since a familiar argument began taking root in Tigrayan political debate. Youth and intellectuals must come forward. Political organizations need new blood, new thinking, new energy. The current leadership is too old, too entrenched, too rooted in habits that no longer serve. On the surface, this sounds obvious. No society renews itself without new generations and new ideas. But the phrase conceals a question that is almost never asked clearly: come forward into what?

This question is not abstract for Tigray. It is being asked now, in real time, after a war that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and shook every institution Tigrayan society had built over three decades. It is being asked after a factional crisis that split the very organization that built those institutions. And it is being asked in a society that once had an organization that understood, perhaps better than it is given credit for, exactly what political responsibility requires. That history is worth thinking about carefully before we copy something else.

Into public participation? Into party membership? Into organizational responsibility? Into cadre commitment? Into leadership? Into the authority to make decisions whose consequences may outlive those who make them? Each of these is a different thing. Each carries a different weight. And the conversation about political renewal in Tigray, and in many societies like it, tends to use the language of participation without examining the organizational meaning of what is actually being proposed.

That is the question I want to think through carefully here. Not whether youth and intellectuals should come forward—of course they should. But into what kind of organization, under what standards, and carrying what responsibility?

I approach this question not as a political theorist but as someone who has spent years in systems and organizational analysis. That lens shapes everything that follows. What I want to offer is not a defense of any particular organization or a critique of any individual, but a framework for thinking about what political organization actually means—before we assume the answers can be borrowed from somewhere else.

Why Societies Fragment — and Why Organization Matters

Every human society is naturally pulled toward fragmentation. This is not a criticism of human nature. It is a description of social reality.

People live in families. Families belong to clans. Clans identify with villages and regions. Communities organize around professions, religions, generations, languages, and economic interests. Every individual carries a set of attachments and ambitions that pull in specific directions. Left to itself, without deliberate countervailing structures, a society gradually becomes more fragmented, more difficult to coordinate, and progressively less capable of sustaining collective action over time.

From a systems perspective, this is a problem of entropy. Complex systems naturally move toward disorder unless energy is deliberately invested in maintaining and renewing their coherence. Political organizations are one of the primary instruments through which societies resist that drift. They exist not simply to win elections or represent narrow interests in legislative chambers, but to create and maintain the capacity for higher-order coordination—the ability to translate the divergent interests, energies, and aspirations of thousands of people into sustained collective action in pursuit of shared historical objectives.

That is a fundamentally different task from what most voluntary associations do. A professional guild manages a specific set of occupational interests. A religious institution cultivates belief and spiritual community. A civic organization advocates for particular causes. All of these are valuable. None of them are designed to carry the full weight of a society’s historical responsibilities.

Tigray lived this directly. TPLF’s historical strength was not primarily ideological. It was organizational. It converted scattered rural grievance, village-level suffering, and fragmented communities into something coherent enough to sustain a liberation struggle across decades and to build a functioning regional administration afterward. That was not automatic. It was the product of deliberate organizational work, under conditions that were not favorable to it.

Political organizations are designed to do exactly that. And understanding this changes everything about how we evaluate them, what we demand from them, and what we are willing to invest in sustaining them. It also explains why their internal logic—the discipline they require, the structures they build, the standards they enforce—cannot be simply borrowed from institutions optimized for different purposes.

What a Political Organization Actually Optimizes For

Different institutions exist to accomplish different objectives. That difference in purpose shapes everything: the people they recruit, the standards they apply, the hierarchies they develop, and the accountability structures they build.

A company optimizes for profit. That is not a moral judgment—it is simply a description of the institutional logic around which everything else is organized. Hiring decisions, investment choices, strategic priorities, performance evaluations: all of these are ultimately governed by whether they contribute to commercial viability. A university optimizes for the production and transmission of knowledge. A church optimizes for the cultivation of belief and spiritual community. A military optimizes for command coherence and the ability to function effectively under the most extreme conditions imaginable. An NGO optimizes for program delivery in a defined area of impact.

Each of these institutions has developed its own recruitment standards, internal hierarchies, performance metrics, and accountability structures, all calibrated to what that institution is actually trying to produce. And each of them fails, in characteristic ways, when it imports the institutional logic of a different kind of organization and applies it uncritically to its own context.

A political organization optimizes for collective political capacity.

By that I mean the ability to build and maintain the power to act effectively on behalf of a constituency—not through force alone, but through organizational depth, constituency trust, strategic coherence, and institutional durability. The ability to translate complex, often conflicting popular interests into coherent political direction. The ability to carry responsibilities that extend across years and decades, not just across election cycles.

TPLF’s historic significance was precisely this. It built collective political capacity under conditions where Tigrayan society had almost no institutional protection. That capacity, sustained across years of armed struggle and then transferred into governance, was the foundation on which Tigray’s post-1991 development rested.

But organizational success contains a risk that is rarely discussed honestly. The very forms that generate capacity in one historical period can become inadequate, or even obstacles, in the next. As society changes, as education expands, as a professional class emerges, as political expectations deepen, an organization that does not examine and adapt its own assumptions begins to lag behind the people it claims to serve. The later failure was not that TPLF built strong structures. The failure was that those structures were not continuously examined and renewed as the society around them changed. What solved one generation’s problems was not automatically suited for the next generation’s challenges.

This is why importing human resources thinking directly into political organizations so often produces confusion and disappointment. The qualities that make someone an excellent engineer, consultant, or professor do not automatically make them an effective political actor. The institutional logic is different. The things being optimized are different. The performance metrics are different. And the standards of accountability, both internal and external, need to reflect that difference, not ignore it.

When we forget this, we end up asking political organizations to behave like companies (maximize short-term results), or like universities (reward individual excellence regardless of collective consequences), or like NGOs (measure success by visible outputs). None of these are wrong in themselves. Applied to a political organization operating under serious historical conditions, each of them misses the point.

The Question Nobody Asks First

With this foundation in place, we can return to the question that I believe is almost never asked in discussions about political renewal.

What does it actually mean to become a member of a political organization?

Before answering, consider a related question that I think forces the issue in a useful direction: Why doesn’t every citizen who supports a political cause automatically become a full member of the organization that represents it?

This is not a trivial question. In most mature liberal democracies, party membership is indeed open, broad, and relatively undemanding. Anyone who broadly agrees with a platform and pays a small fee can join. Membership numbers in the millions. This seems natural to us because we have absorbed the institutional assumptions of those political environments without always examining them.

But the answer to the question is not bureaucratic gatekeeping, nor is it elite exclusion. The answer is that political membership—real membership, as distinct from sympathy, support, or voting—is not a right of citizenship. It is a voluntary acceptance of responsibility.

A citizen can support a cause without carrying its organizational weight. A sympathizer can donate, advocate, and vote without being bound by the organization’s internal discipline. But someone who joins as a genuine member is taking on a different kind of obligation: to carry the organization’s responsibilities, to subordinate personal convenience to collective process, and to accept accountability in ways that ordinary supporters are not asked to accept. Once you understand membership this way, the entire conversation about political recruitment changes.

Political Responsibility Carries Irreversible Weight

There is a deeper reason why political organizations have historically applied rigorous standards to political responsibility, and it is one that I find analytically compelling.

Political organizations routinely make decisions whose consequences extend far beyond the tenure of the people who made them.

A surgeon who makes a wrong incision cannot always undo it. A military commander who advances into enemy territory cannot always retreat in time. A judge who issues a wrongful conviction may destroy a life that cannot fully be restored. Each of these professions has therefore developed, over long periods of accumulated experience, demanding standards of preparation, judgment, and professional accountability. Not because the people involved are untrustworthy by nature, but because the decisions they make carry consequences that cannot be easily reversed.

Political leadership operates in the same domain. A misguided military alliance. A premature or poorly negotiated ceasefire. A constitutional settlement that locks in unfavorable terms for generations. A decision to pursue armed confrontation when conditions do not warrant it, or to avoid it when they do. These decisions affect not just individuals but communities, generations, and in some cases the entire trajectory of a society. Their consequences outlast the leaders who made them.

The recruitment standard for political responsibility must therefore be naturally higher than for ordinary membership—not because ordinary members are less valuable, but because the weight of what political leaders carry demands a level of judgment, discipline, and institutional loyalty that ordinary membership does not require.

What does that actually mean in practice? Not simply that a person must be educated, articulate, or popular. Political organizations operating under difficult historical conditions require qualities that are much harder to measure and far less visible in any recruitment process.

Judgment under pressure. The discipline to subordinate personal ambition when collective interest demands it. Emotional maturity in moments of institutional crisis. Loyalty to processes rather than only to outcomes you personally prefer. The willingness to accept criticism without treating it as an attack on your dignity. The ability to hold people together rather than repeatedly create new fractures. The habit of placing the organization’s long-term coherence ahead of short-term personal advantage.

TPLF’s early cadre culture understood this, at least in practice if not always in articulated theory. Membership was not open enrollment. Cadre formation was deliberate, demanding, and tied to demonstrated qualities under real conditions. That rigor was part of what made the organization effective. But those standards did not remain stable. Over time, loyalty came to be confused with personal alignment, and critical judgment came to be treated as disloyalty. The qualities the cadre system was designed to cultivate gradually became secondary to other considerations. That shift was the beginning of a long organizational decline.

These qualities do not appear on a curriculum vitae. They reveal themselves only over time and under stress. And their absence, in an otherwise talented individual, can do more damage to a political organization than the absence of raw intellectual capability. I have watched this dynamic play out in organizational settings that had nothing to do with politics. The most technically skilled person in a team is not always the person who strengthens the team’s capacity to function. Sometimes that person, lacking discipline, institutional loyalty, or the habit of subordinating personal preference to collective process, becomes the greatest source of organizational instability.

This is not an argument for obedience over intelligence, nor for conformity over independent thinking. An organization that suppresses critical thought destroys its own capacity for renewal. The quality I am pointing to is different from obedience: it is the combination of capability and discipline that allows an individual to contribute to something larger than themselves without eventually dismantling it from within.

Membership Is Not a Single Category

A second assumption leads to persistent confusion in discussions about political renewal.

The assumption is that “membership” describes a single, uniform category. You are either in or out. You either belong to the organization or you do not.

In practice, every serious political organization, everywhere and under any ideological label, develops different layers of participation. These layers are not always formally named. They are not always clearly mapped. But they exist, and they exist for good organizational reasons.

At the broadest level, there are those who broadly support an organization’s purposes and may vote for it or speak positively about it, but take no active role in its affairs. Then there are sympathizers who engage more closely, attend some activities, and follow developments with genuine interest. Then grassroots activists who give time, participate in local structures, and carry the organization’s presence into communities. Then formal members, who have made an explicit commitment and are held to explicit standards. Then cadres—those who have demonstrated the combination of capability, discipline, and organizational loyalty that qualifies them for deeper responsibility. And then leadership at various levels, where the responsibilities—and the standards—become most demanding of all.

This layering is not an invention of authoritarian political culture. It is a natural consequence of what organizations are. Not everyone who supports a cause is capable of managing it. Not everyone who manages it well at a grassroots level is ready for strategic leadership. These are different roles. They require different capacities. Confusing them does not democratize an organization. It simply redistributes organizational fragility.

The mistake I often hear is the assumption that if only more educated people, more young people, or more professionals joined the formal membership, the quality of leadership would automatically improve. This conflates different levels of the organizational pyramid. Excellence at one level does not automatically prepare someone for another. A respected academic is not automatically prepared for political leadership. A gifted communicator is not automatically suited for strategic organizational responsibility. These require something additional that education and talent alone do not guarantee.

Political organizations, when thinking about renewal, need to think about the entire pyramid—not simply the broadest base or the most visible peak.

Organization Evolves with Society

One more dimension of political membership receives almost no attention in these discussions.

Political organization does not evolve in isolation. It evolves together with the society it serves.

A political organization operating in a predominantly subsistence agricultural society—where most people have limited formal education, where institutional infrastructure is minimal, where survival itself is often the central organizing concern—must recruit, organize, and operate in ways appropriate to that reality. The cadres it needs, the discipline it requires, the structures it builds, and the standards it enforces will necessarily reflect those conditions.

As that society changes—as education expands, as prosperity grows, as institutions mature, as a professional class emerges, as media develops, as citizens become more experienced with political participation—the organizational demands shift. The pool from which political organizations can recruit naturally becomes broader. The standards they can reasonably apply become more sophisticated. The participation they can meaningfully incorporate becomes more diverse. The feedback mechanisms available to them become richer and more capable.

This evolution is natural. It is healthy. It should be encouraged. But it cannot be forced ahead of the social conditions that make it genuinely possible. And it cannot be borrowed wholesale from societies that evolved along entirely different historical paths under entirely different material conditions.

This is why I resist the copy-and-paste instinct that runs through so many discussions of political reform—not only in Tigray but in many developing societies. The answer to every organizational weakness cannot be: “Look at how they do it in Germany, or Canada, or Sweden.” Those organizational forms did not emerge in those societies through ideological preference alone. They emerged through historical processes that unfolded across generations under material and institutional conditions that are not simply reproducible on demand.

What any society needs is not a political organization designed for a society it has not yet become. What it needs is a political organization capable of accompanying society along the path of becoming, adapting its own structures as the people it serves grow and change. TPLF’s organizational assumptions were built for one historical moment. When that moment passed and society changed around it, those assumptions needed to be re-examined. That examination did not happen with sufficient honesty or speed. That, more than any individual failing, is what created the space for decay.

A Party Is Not Only Its Members

Even this does not yet capture the full picture. A political organization is not simply an assembly of its formal members. It also exists through its relationship with the society it claims to represent.

A political party that only organizes itself—that maintains active membership, holds internal elections, writes platforms, and competes for votes—while having no living organizational connection with the communities it represents is, from an organizational standpoint, a remarkably fragile institution. It is dependent on the emotional temperature of the electorate in any given season. When enthusiasm is high, it thrives. When disillusionment sets in, it hollows out almost immediately, because it has no structural presence in society to sustain it between moments of political excitement.

Serious political organizations understand that constituency organization is not optional. The structures they build in communities, linking members to neighborhoods, neighborhoods to local institutions, and local institutions to regional and national structures, are not simply instruments of mobilization. They are how the organization remains connected to the lived reality of the people it represents. They are how it converts popular support into durable institutional presence.

This is a distinction that many critics of organizational structures like those that existed in Tigray miss almost entirely. Structures such as ልምዓት ጉጅለ, local Baito institutions, and woreda-level networks are often dismissed as backward or undemocratic. But this criticism typically conflates two entirely separate questions.

The first question is whether such organizational structures should exist at all. The second question is whether the specific structures that existed remained genuinely accountable to the people they were intended to serve. These are entirely different questions. Conflating them produces analysis that simply misses the point.

Development does not organize itself. Public participation does not organize itself. The link between a political organization and a geographically dispersed, largely rural population does not maintain itself through periodic elections alone. Every political organization, everywhere and across ideological traditions, builds instruments that connect it structurally with its constituency. The form those instruments take varies enormously. Whether they remain accountable, responsive, and genuinely representative is a legitimate and urgent question. But the very existence of such instruments is not a defect. It is an organizational necessity.

The structures that existed in Tigray, including ልምዓት ጉጅለ, local Baito institutions, tabia and woreda networks, were serious attempts to solve a real organizational problem: how to maintain a living connection between a political organization and a largely rural, dispersed population under poor institutional conditions. Critics who dismiss them as backward are often comparing them to the constituency structures of prosperous democracies, which developed under entirely different material conditions over much longer periods of time. The more honest comparison is to ask what the alternative was, and whether the alternative would have worked better.

The honest question is therefore not whether constituency structures should exist. The honest question is whether they became more bureaucratic than representative. Whether they evolved into instruments of downward command rather than upward accountability. Whether the relationship between organization and community remained genuinely two-directional, or gradually became one-directional. That is the right question, and it is a serious one. But you can only ask it honestly if you have first understood what such structures were there to do.

Nothing I have argued above should be read as a defense of any specific organization’s record. Organizations can develop serious weaknesses even while pursuing the right organizational logic. The existence of the right structure does not guarantee that it will be operated with integrity. That distinction matters, and I will have more to say about it in subsequent essays in this series.

What Every Organization Requires to Stay Healthy

Let me now turn to what every organization ultimately depends on, and what political organizations in particular cannot afford to neglect.

Every organization, no matter how necessary, no matter how historically significant, no matter how disciplined, accumulates weaknesses over time. This is not a peculiarity of political organizations. It is a universal property of complex institutions. Systems develop internal inefficiencies. Personnel decisions gradually become influenced more by personal loyalty than organizational merit. Information flows that once moved freely begin to get filtered. Critical voices learn that raising difficult questions carries costs. Gradually, the organization develops a stronger interest in protecting its own reputation than in honestly examining its own performance. From a systems perspective, this is precisely what happens when feedback loops weaken.

In any complex system, feedback is not a luxury. It is how the system learns what is actually happening and adjusts. An organization that receives honest, continuous, credible feedback about its own performance—about where it is succeeding and where it is failing—has a mechanism for self-correction. It can identify weaknesses while they are still manageable and address them before they become structural. An organization that insulates itself from honest feedback does not remain stable. It drifts. Errors accumulate quietly. What began as a minor cultural problem becomes an institutional habit. What began as informal influence gradually displaces formal accountability.

There is an analogy from organizational analysis that I think captures this precisely. In business intelligence, we sometimes observe that a bad dashboard does not create problems—it hides them. An executive team that sees only green lights on their reporting systems is not necessarily managing a healthy organization. They may simply be managing an information system that filters out the red lights before they reach the top. The underlying problems are still accumulating. The only difference is that leadership has lost visibility into them. Eventually, those problems surface. But now they surface as a crisis, rather than as a correctable signal.

Political organizations work exactly the same way. When feedback mechanisms weaken—when internal critics are silenced, when unfavorable information stops reaching decision-makers, when performance metrics are designed to confirm rather than to challenge—leadership does not gain more control. Leadership begins managing reports instead of managing reality. The gap between the organization’s self-image and its actual condition grows, quietly and invisibly, until something external forces the truth into the open.

TPLF’s organizational decay follows exactly this pattern. It built strong structures. It built real constituency connections. It built cadre capacity. What it did not build with equal seriousness were the institutions capable of scrutinizing, correcting, and renewing those structures from outside. Internal critics were not encouraged. Unfavorable information did not reliably reach the top. The gap between the organization’s self-image and its actual condition grew quietly, for years, until the crisis was no longer manageable from within.

This pattern—organizational capacity advancing faster than feedback capacity—has produced institutional crises in many political settings across history and across regions. It is not a problem unique to any particular ideology or geography. When it occurs in a society with limited institutional diversity and limited independent media, the consequences tend to be severe, because the external correctives that might otherwise catch what internal processes miss are not available. Tigray’s recent political experience is one illustration among many. The dynamic itself is a universal one. And this points directly to a dimension of organizational health that no organization can achieve alone.

The Institutions That Were Missing

A political organization’s long-term health depends not only on its internal structures but on the institutional environment surrounding it. An organization operating in an environment with strong independent media, credible civic voices, genuine political competition, and an active intellectual culture faces constant corrective pressure. It cannot easily hide its weaknesses from itself for long, because too many external actors have both the capacity and the incentive to make those weaknesses visible.

An organization operating in an environment where those external institutions are absent or weak enjoys no such corrective pressure. It may appear stronger in the short term. In reality it is more fragile, because it has lost the external maintenance system that would otherwise catch what internal processes miss.

This is not a familiar slogan about freedom of the press or more democracy. Those phrases, repeated often enough, stop carrying meaning. What I am describing is more precise.

Responsible media provides one specific form of corrective pressure. It forces organizations to account for the gap between their public statements and their actual performance. A political competitor with genuine organizational depth provides another form. It forces the ruling organization to stay sharp, because the cost of complacency is not just criticism but the actual transfer of political authority. An independent intellectual community provides yet another. It creates a public language for evaluating institutional performance that exists outside the organization’s own vocabulary and cannot simply be dismissed as hostile propaganda.

None of these institutions are enemies of a healthy political organization. Properly functioning, they are part of its maintenance system. They are how the organization remains connected to reality over time. An organization that systematically weakens them does not thereby become stronger. It becomes more invisible to itself.

Building these institutions alongside—rather than after, or instead of—political organizations is one of the most important lessons that societies like Tigray need to absorb.

Four Pillars, Not One

Let me bring these threads together into an analytical framework, not a political platform, for thinking about what any society serious about political organization actually needs to build.

From an organizational standpoint, a healthy political organization rests on four distinct pillars. Remove any one of them, and the structure eventually becomes either ineffective or brittle.

The first pillar is organization itself—the capacity to act collectively, to maintain institutional continuity, to coordinate action across large numbers of people and great distances, and to carry responsibilities that no individual or informal network can carry alone. This capacity does not emerge spontaneously. It is built, maintained, and defended deliberately. Societies that lose it do not simply become disorganized. They become vulnerable in ways that no individual talent, however exceptional, can compensate for.

The second pillar is discipline—the internal coherence that allows an organization to function as more than a collection of competing personal agendas. Discipline does not mean obedience to any individual leader. It means loyalty to organizational processes, respect for collective decisions, the subordination of personal ambition where collective interest demands it, and the maintenance of standards that apply to everyone. An organization without discipline may still project an image of strength. But it will not sustain collective action under pressure, because every difficult moment will fracture along personal fault lines.

The third pillar is constituency—the living organizational connection between the political organization and the society it represents. This is not simply about winning elections. It is about maintaining a structural presence in communities that allows the organization to remain genuinely informed about how people live, what they need, and what they think. Organizations that lose this connection do not simply lose elections. They lose the ability to make good decisions, because they have lost access to the ground-level reality that good decisions require.

The fourth pillar is feedback—the institutional mechanisms that allow the organization to examine itself honestly, to receive credible information about its own performance, and to correct its weaknesses before they become crises. This includes not only internal accountability structures but the external institutions described above: independent media, civic voices, political competition, and an intellectual culture capable of honest evaluation. An organization that dismantles or marginalizes these mechanisms does not become stronger. It becomes progressively more blind to itself.

These four pillars are not independent. They reinforce each other. Strong organization without discipline becomes factional. Discipline without constituency becomes command. Constituency without feedback becomes patronage. Feedback without organization becomes noise. The task of political institution-building is to develop all four together, at a pace that reflects the society’s actual conditions and capacity—not the pace that external models seem to demand.

What This Means for the Future

This is not a pessimistic argument. Clarity about what political organization actually requires is the only honest foundation for building something genuinely better.

The temptation I want to resist, and that I want to encourage readers to resist, is the temptation to respond to organizational failure by abandoning the concept of organization altogether. That temptation is understandable. When institutions fail, and especially when they fail catastrophically, the instinct is to look for something simpler, something less structured, something that cannot be captured by any particular group and turned against everyone else.

But the answer to organizational failure is not the absence of organization. An atomized political environment, filled with individual voices, competing media personalities, diaspora networks, and informal coalitions, is not a stronger society. It is a more fragile one. Collective responsibilities cannot be carried by individuals, however capable. They require institutions that outlast individuals, that maintain continuity across generations, and that can act collectively when the moment demands it.

What is needed, therefore, is not less organization. It is better organization—organization that is disciplined enough to carry long-term responsibilities yet humble enough to remain genuinely open to correction. Organization that builds deep constituency structures while holding those structures to standards of genuine accountability. Organization that invests in its own feedback mechanisms rather than viewing them as threats. Organization that earns legitimacy not only through historical accomplishment but through continuous, visible, institutionalized accountability.

More broadly, what Tigray needs is a political ecosystem in which healthy organizations can develop and compete—not just one organization, but several, each keeping the others honest. It needs media institutions with the professional independence and organizational depth to report honestly on power. It needs civic organizations capable of constructive engagement with political institutions. It needs an intellectual culture that takes organizational questions seriously, rather than recycling imported formulas that were never designed for Tigray’s conditions.

Building a political organization capable of carrying historical responsibilities is one of the most complex institutional tasks any society can undertake. It cannot be accomplished by mechanically importing democratic models designed for entirely different circumstances. It cannot be accomplished by dismissing organizational discipline as authoritarianism, or constituency structures as coercion. And it cannot be accomplished by a political culture that is permanently more comfortable critiquing organization than building it.

Perhaps this is where the political conversation should begin—not with personalities, not with today’s factions, and not with yesterday’s grievances, but with a more fundamental question: What kind of political organization can carry the historical responsibilities of Tigray for the next fifty years?

That question cannot be answered by destroying inherited organizational capacity, nor by preserving it unexamined. TPLF’s history matters not because it should be copied as it is, but because it provides Tigray’s most important lived case of political organization: how capacity was built, how discipline shaped outcomes, how constituency structures connected politics to people, how feedback weakened, and how organizational decay eventually became a political crisis. Understanding that history clearly is the only honest starting point for building something better.

Until we learn to answer that question honestly—until we understand what political organization actually is, what it requires, and what it costs—we will continue debating individuals while neglecting the institutions that ultimately determine whether societies can carry their own historical weight.

Every generation has the right to question inherited institutions. That is how societies improve. But every generation also carries the responsibility to distinguish between reforming institutions and dismantling the organizational capacity that a society may one day desperately need again. That distinction, I believe, is becoming one of the defining political questions facing Tigray today.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！