{"id":6742,"date":"2026-06-02T02:15:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T02:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/?p=6742"},"modified":"2026-06-02T02:43:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T02:43:25","slug":"the-generation-that-demands-more-is-tplfs-achievement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/2026\/06\/02\/the-generation-that-demands-more-is-tplfs-achievement\/","title":{"rendered":"The Generation That Demands More Is TPLF\u2019s Achievement"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How TPLF helped transform Tigray \u2014 and Ethiopia \u2014 and why its achievements and failures must be held in the same frame<\/span><\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The main argument of this essay is simple.<\/em><\/p>

TPLF is not just a party name. For more than five decades, it has been part of Tigray\u2019s political life, social organization, sacrifice, and survival. During the armed struggle, it mobilized almost every Tigrayan family against oppressive Ethiopian regimes. After 1991, it became the main political force through which Tigray was governed and represented. Because of this deep social base, the line between TPLF as a party and Tigray\u2019s government was often blurred. That gave TPLF strength, but it also gave it an authoritarian character, especially in the eyes of those who wanted more open political space.<\/em><\/p>

So TPLF must be criticized. Its failures were real. Some of those failures were serious, and Tigray paid a very heavy price.<\/em><\/p>

But criticism must not erase history.<\/em><\/p>

TPLF did not build nothing. It helped change Tigray and Ethiopia in deep ways. It helped educate a new generation. It helped create institutions, expand services, and raise the expectations of ordinary people.<\/em><\/p>

That is why many Tigrayans today demand more from TPLF and from every political leadership. This demand is not proof that TPLF achieved nothing. It is partly proof that TPLF helped create a society that can now question power.<\/em><\/p>

So we must hold two truths together: TPLF built much, and TPLF also failed badly. Honest criticism begins only when we accept both.<\/em><\/p>

A brief note to my readers before I begin.<\/p>

Those who have followed my recent opinion pieces know by now that I do not write for quick consumption. My essays are often longer than the short, social-media-compatible arguments many of us have become used to. I do this deliberately, not because length is a virtue by itself, but because Tigray\u2019s political reality cannot be understood through short-memory commentary, emotional performance, and daily outrage presented as political analysis.<\/p>

I am grateful to those who continue to read patiently, respond thoughtfully, and send comments by email. Your feedback tells me that there is still an audience for careful argument, historical memory, and grounded political analysis. If you find value in these opinion pieces, I also ask you to share them with friends, colleagues, and fellow Tigrayans who may be interested in thorough analysis rather than quick reactions. This piece also asks for that kind of reading. It is not written for those who want a quick verdict on TPLF. It is written for those who want to understand Tigray\u2019s grassroots political history, the transformation that took place, the failures that followed, and why both must be held in the same frame.<\/p>

There is a growing habit among some Tigrayan commentators \u2014 and many Ethiopian ones \u2014 to speak about TPLF as if its entire history can be reduced to decay, arrogance, miscalculation, and failure. They take the tragedy that befell Tigray after 2018 and project it backward, as if the organization that failed on some strategic questions later must never have built anything serious before. They point to the war, the displacement, the genocide, the political decay, the factional collapse \u2014 all of it real \u2014 and use it as evidence that Tigray and Ethiopia gained nothing, or worse, suffered a net loss, under three decades of TPLF and EPRDF leadership.<\/p>

That argument does not survive serious examination.<\/p>

TPLF\/EPRDF\u2019s achievements do not need a certificate from its supporters. They are visible in the development record of the country and in the archives of the major international development and finance institutions that monitored Ethiopia\u2019s transformation for decades. At the same time, those same institutions and Western policy circles were often uneasy with EPRDF precisely because it did not fully submit to the neoliberal policy package that was being pushed across much of Africa in that period. It followed a developmental-state path \u2014 debated, contested, imperfect, and at times authoritarian in its methods \u2014 but intellectually argued, institutionally pursued, and materially consequential. That path transformed grassroots economies, expanded public services, raised expectations, and changed the social structure of both Tigray and Ethiopia in ways no previous Ethiopian state had achieved at comparable scale.<\/p>

This essay is not an inventory of those achievements. That record exists and speaks for itself. Nor is it an attempt to shield TPLF from criticism. TPLF must be criticized. Its failures must be examined honestly, without sentimental protection, without factional loyalty, and without the defensive reflex that confuses criticism with betrayal. Some of those failures were grave. They contributed to conditions under which Tigray paid the heaviest price in its modern history.<\/p>

But I will not accept the lazy and dishonest claim that Tigray suffered nothing but misrule under TPLF, or that everything those years built amounted to nothing, or that TPLF\u2019s developmental philosophy was merely backward ideology dressed in revolutionary language. This argument is not new. It has been pushed for years by Abiy Ahmed\u2019s Prosperity Party media ecosystem, and by state-aligned narratives. That external campaign is not the main subject of this essay. What concerns me here is something closer and more painful: the way similar erasure is now amplified daily by social-media activists, online commentators, and some media platforms, not only in the diaspora, but surprisingly inside Tigray\u2019s own media environment, that mistake grievance for analysis and weaken Tigray\u2019s own institutional memory. The irony, which they apparently cannot see, is that many of these voices are themselves products of the very transformation they are trying to erase. They speak with confidence, command platforms, frame political arguments, and demand accountability from positions created by literacy, university education, diaspora networks, expanded media, and political consciousness that simply did not exist at this scale before the transformation they now deny. A generation that TPLF helped educate is using that education to argue that TPLF taught it nothing. That is not critique. That is amnesia.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

I reject that claim because my memory of Tigray was not formed through daily political noise, but through family upbringing, professional work, field experience, and engagement with the institutions and communities that tried to rebuild the region. It was built first through remote attachment, as someone born and raised in Addis Ababa by Tigrayan parents, shaped from childhood by a strong Tigrayan discipline, political consciousness, and sense of cultural belonging, and later through direct immersion in Tigray\u2019s development work. In the late 1990s, while working on land-resource planning and administrative mapping, I travelled widely across Tigray, meeting local leaders, administrators, informants, and development cadres at Tabia, Woreda, and Zonal levels. That experience gave me a ground-level view of the region that no distant commentary could provide. I entered Tigray\u2019s development story not as a party member or factional defender, but as a geo-information and planning professional trained in mathematics, Geographic Information Systems, and remote sensing. In 2014, I also coordinated institutional documentation for Tigray\u2019s first International Festival, which gave me another vantage point on what regional institutions had tried to build over two decades.<\/p>

I am also a Tigrayan who has criticized TPLF since the early days, not since criticism became fashionable after collapse, but throughout the period when the party was powerful and those criticisms were unwelcome. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I raised questions about administrative efficiency, executive power, privilege, and bureaucratic abuse. As years passed, my critique sharpened toward the more fundamental question of democratic space: the absence of genuine political plurality, the suppression of independent voices, the danger of a system without honest internal or external mirrors. In 2009, I attended a TPLF forum in Frankfurt as a guest participant from Italy, representing concerns from the Tigrayan community there. The session was presided over by Ambassador Berhane Gebrekritos. I said publicly that Tigray deserved a wider political space than TPLF had allowed. By then, eighteen years after TPLF came to administer Tigray, the region still had only one radio station, one newspaper, and a Baito with one hundred percent of its seats held by TPLF members. The irony was hard to miss: especially during the first two decades of EPRDF rule, Addis Ababa, under the same system, had more visible political and media space than Tigray itself. Opposition parties, private newspapers, and public criticism existed there in ways that TPLF did not permit in the region it knew best and claimed to represent most deeply. My argument was that Tigray had a politically conscious and socially mobilized population that deserved to breathe. TPLF should have encouraged alternative voices, independent media, and organized opposition, not as enemies, but as mirrors that would help the party see its own face.<\/p>

The response in the room was hostile. My argument was dismissed as idealism, and nothing changed. But the absence of that mirror was not a small democratic inconvenience. It became part of Tigray\u2019s later vulnerability. A party that is not forced to see its own weaknesses eventually mistakes silence for consent, control for stability, and loyalty for truth. So the argument I am making here is not a defense of TPLF as a party. It is a defense of historical accuracy, because without historical accuracy, even criticism becomes shallow.<\/p>

This is where TPLF\u2019s strength and weakness began to meet. The same discipline that helped the organization mobilize people, debate policies, document programs, and push implementation also made it less willing to tolerate independent political space. In the early years, that discipline helped build capacity. Over time, when it was not balanced by real pluralism, independent media, organized opposition, and honest criticism, it weakened the party\u2019s ability to correct itself. TPLF did not only lose democratic credibility by closing political space. It also damaged its own ability to receive truthful information. A system that hears mainly from loyal cadres and controlled structures eventually begins to misunderstand the society it governs.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

A societal transformation without precedent in modern Ethiopian history<\/strong><\/p>

When EPRDF took power in 1991, Ethiopia was a country recently emerged from the combination of imperial feudalism, military dictatorship, prolonged civil war, catastrophic famine, and near-total institutional collapse. Life expectancy was among the lowest in the world. Child mortality was among the highest. Literacy was a minority condition. Road density was negligible outside the capital. Access to health services was a privilege of geography and wealth. Agricultural productivity was devastated. Millions of people in Tigray, Wollo, and other highland areas had been displaced, killed, starved, or broken by decades of war and misrule.<\/p>

What followed in the three decades after 1991 was, by any serious empirical measure, the most dramatic societal transformation in Ethiopia\u2019s modern history. Not the ideal transformation. Not a transformation without failure, corruption, repression, or loss. But a transformation that was real, documented, and that changed millions of lives in ways that the critics do not honestly account for.<\/p>

The claim is not that EPRDF was a uniformly progressive force across all regions, all policies, or all political moments. It is that the developmental transformation it oversaw was real, and that attributing Ethiopia\u2019s poverty to that period rather than to the conditions it inherited is historically unserious.<\/p>

Life expectancy rose by more than twenty years. Child mortality fell by more than half. Primary school enrollment went from a fraction to near-universal coverage. Health posts, clinics, and hospitals extended into rural areas that had known no formal medical care in living memory. Roads were built connecting markets, schools, clinics, and farms that had been isolated by geography and neglect. Agricultural extension services, however imperfect, reached millions of smallholders. Higher education expanded from a handful of institutions to a national network of universities. And in Tigray specifically, those national trends had their own regional expression, built on an institutional base that deserves its own accounting.<\/p>

Critics may argue about attribution. They may point to donor funding, global development trends, commodity prices, or the contribution of non-state actors. All of that is a legitimate part of the analysis. But no honest reading of the evidence allows the conclusion that TPLF\/EPRDF was the cause of Ethiopia\u2019s poverty rather than one of the most sustained and serious attempts in Ethiopian history to address it.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

What Tigray looked like \u2014 and what was built<\/strong><\/p>

In Tigray specifically, the transformation must be understood against the physical and institutional baseline of the early 1990s.<\/p>

When I arrived in Mekelle in August 1995, it was the first time I had seen Tigray with my own eyes. Until then, Tigray had lived in me through family memory, political consciousness, and attachment from a distance. What I saw was a small, dusty town with few paved roads, limited commerce, and a new college still operating from a converted military camp with a handful of academic staff and a tiny student body. Tigray\u2019s highlands were severely degraded: bare hills, exhausted soils, erratic water, a landscape stripped by decades of war, fuelwood collection, overgrazing, and the failure of earlier conservation programs. The trained professionals were few. The development organizations were just beginning to organize themselves for the long work ahead.<\/p>

What that environment produced in the following decade was an institutional foundation built from very little.<\/p>

The Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Rehabilitation in Tigray program \u2014 SAERT, later Co-SAERT under the Regional Government \u2014 set out to construct hundreds of micro-dams across Tigray\u2019s highlands, capturing seasonal runoff for dry-season irrigation and moving farmers from total dependence on erratic rainfall toward basic food security. The Relief Society of Tigray, REST, transformed itself from a wartime relief organization into a development institution running agricultural extension, water supply, soil and water conservation, and rural livelihoods programs across the region. The Tigray Development Association, TDA, drew diaspora resources and donor support into reconstruction: schools, health facilities, roads, and income-generating programs in marginal areas the state budget alone could not reach. EFFORT, the party-affiliated investment holding, established enterprises that provided employment and industrial capacity in a region that had neither. Dedebit Micro Finance extended credit to rural households at a scale that broadened the practical reach of economic inclusion for smallholder families.<\/p>

None of this should be romanticized. These institutions had flaws. Some projects were rushed. Some were poorly studied. Some suffered from weak technical design, weak management, political interference, or the simple shortage of trained people. Tigray was trying to build administration, professional capacity, research systems, and development institutions at the same time that it was trying to deliver results to a poor and exhausted society. That created errors, waste, and uneven outcomes. But this is precisely what critics often fail to understand. Even at the time, there were voices that argued Tigray was moving too fast. They said universities, government bureaus, and development agencies should first build stronger capacity before expanding education, irrigation, roads, and other services. Some of those concerns were valid, especially when they raised questions of quality. But as a general argument, it was wrong. A people emerging from war and deprivation cannot first wait until it has perfect human capital, perfect institutions, and perfect infrastructure before beginning development. Nations build with what they have, and in the process they produce the people and systems they lacked. To say that Tigray should have waited until every institution had ideal capacity before expanding services was not seriousness. It was paralysis dressed as prudence.<\/p>

These were not symbolic gestures. They were the institutional scaffolding of a society being rebuilt after war. That is why the creation of trained professionals and local planning capacity mattered as much as the projects themselves.<\/p>

Parallel to the programs, a rural planning culture was being built that is rarely discussed but was central to what changed. The new college in Mekelle was not simply producing graduates; it was producing the technical cadres needed to make development possible in a harsh highland environment. Agricultural experts, natural-resource professionals, extension agents, irrigation specialists, soil and water conservation technicians, and rural development practitioners went into Woredas and Tabias across the region carrying practical skills that had no institutional home before 1991. Against Tigray\u2019s difficult conditions \u2014 degraded soils, erratic rainfall, steep terrain, severe land scarcity, chronic food insecurity \u2014 their organized, systematic work helped improve the livelihood base of rural families in ways that attracted attention in development circles far beyond Tigray. That is not a claim about perfection. It is a claim about institutional seriousness that the dominant criticism has largely failed to acknowledge.<\/p>

That culture of rural planning and technical engagement was aligned with the broader 1997 National Conservation Strategy and Environmental Policy, one of the more serious environmental governance documents of that period. It rejected the Derg\u2019s coercive conservation model and emphasized decentralization, participatory planning, local ownership, and the integration of traditional knowledge. The policy reflected an institutional moment in which Tigrayan practitioners, Ethiopian scientists, regional planners, and international partners were trying to answer a difficult question: how does a poor, degraded, postwar highland society rebuild without repeating the authoritarian failures of the past?<\/p>

This is also why I took the TPLF\/EPRDF system seriously as a political organization. It was not because of blind loyalty. It was because the organization produced policies and programs, debated them, documented them, taught them through its structures, and then pushed its members and institutions to implement them. That is one reason TPLF built such a strong social base. A party is not judged only by its leaders or its slogans. It is judged by whether its policies and programs improve the lives of the people it claims to represent. In that sense, TPLF\/EPRDF was not merely talking about development. It built a disciplined policy machinery that tried, with many flaws, to turn political doctrine into schools, roads, health posts, land policies, water structures, credit systems, and rural development programs.<\/p>

Over the years, as I worked with and later reviewed material from Tigray\u2019s regional bureaus, research institutes, and development organizations, the scale of that institutional effort became increasingly clear. These were not isolated names or scattered projects. They were parts of a wider development ecosystem: imperfect, uneven, bureaucratic, and often overburdened, but real. Their records reflected institutions trying to expand services, train people, solve problems, and document progress under difficult conditions.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

TPLF\u2019s greatest achievement: the society that now holds it to account<\/strong><\/p>

But I want to make a claim that goes beyond the physical record of roads, dams, schools, and health posts. It is a political and sociological claim, and it is the one that today\u2019s critics most systematically avoid.<\/p>

TPLF\u2019s most important achievement was not the infrastructure it built. It was the society it helped create, a society that is now educated enough, politically conscious enough, and morally confident enough to hold its own leadership to account, to criticize, to demand more, and to refuse the political childhood that previous eras imposed on ordinary Tigrayans and Ethiopians.<\/p>

Think carefully about what this means. When critics \u2014 commentators, intellectuals, journalists, and civic voices \u2014 criticize TPLF today, when they command platforms, demand accountability, challenge political decisions, and frame their arguments with the vocabulary of rights, legitimacy, and democratic failure, they are doing so from a Tigray, from an Ethiopia, that was transformed. The children of farmers who could not read are now university graduates. The communities that survived on emergency food aid in the 1980s now produce political commentary, civic organizations, and strategic debate. The region whose college had a handful of students when I first arrived now graduates thousands of professionals every year.<\/p>

That transformation did not happen by accident. And it did not happen despite TPLF. It happened, imperfectly and incompletely, partly because of it.<\/p>

The generation that now demands more from Tigray\u2019s political leadership is, in a real and specific sense, one of the products of the transformation TPLF helped generate. To say this is not to give TPLF credit it does not deserve. It is to observe a historical dynamic that its critics consistently refuse to examine: you cannot simultaneously argue that TPLF built nothing and that the society demanding more from it emerged from nowhere. That is not failure. That is development in its deepest form.<\/p>

This is not a contradiction in the historical record. It is one of the defining paradoxes of successful political transformation. When a movement lifts a society \u2014 educates it, connects it to wider political possibility, raises its expectations \u2014 it also creates the conditions under which its own authority will be challenged more seriously. That dynamic was visible across Tigray in those years: diaspora Tigrayans, professionals, students, and critics came to examine a transformation that had also helped produce their own expectations and their own capacity to examine. The generation criticizing TPLF today is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that TPLF did not fail in everything.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

The failures are real \u2014 but they require the right frame<\/strong><\/p>

TPLF failed on some strategic questions. Those failures were not the product of indifference or malice alone; they were the product of the complex, dangerous, and historically unprecedented nature of Ethiopian politics: the strains of managing ethnic federalism across competing regional elites, the transition away from an exceptional leader, the internal decay of the party\u2019s evaluation culture, the capture of institutions by patronage networks, and the misreading of a political moment that required more adaptability than the organization could produce. Had it been any other political structure governing Ethiopia in the post-1991 period \u2014 the imperial system, the Derg model, the unitary-state alternatives proposed by various opposition formations \u2014 I do not believe Ethiopia would have had even the imperfect institutional infrastructure it now possesses.<\/p>

But the failures must be understood in the context of what was built, not used as a retroactive license to erase it. The decay that became visible after 2001, and accelerated dramatically after 2018, was a decay from something. An organization that weakens its internal evaluation culture, tolerates cadre incompetence, suppresses genuine democratic space, allows patronage networks to replace political discipline, and eventually loses the capacity to read its own historical moment is an organization in serious crisis. TPLF was that organization in its last decade. I raised some of these warnings from inside spaces when the party was still powerful enough to dismiss them. But TPLF was also, in earlier decades, the organization that introduced land reform, built the institutional framework for Ethiopia\u2019s developmental state, lifted millions out of absolute poverty, and created regional administrations that were, whatever their faults, not failed states.<\/p>

Part of the confusion comes from a shallow understanding of political organization itself. Some critics speak as if TPLF was simply Meles Zenawi, and that after him there was essentially no TPLF left. This misunderstands both the achievement and the failure. Leaders matter, and Meles mattered greatly. But leaders do not build agricultural extension systems, land policies, regional administrations, rural credit institutions, and development planning frameworks by the quality of leadership alone. They build systems: systems of doctrine, cadres, institutions, and execution. The tragedy after Meles was not that there had never been a system. It was that a system which once produced results gradually lost its evaluative culture, internal accountability, and capacity for renewal.<\/p>

A related misconception is the idea that a political organization should function as an assembly of intellectuals. It does not. Intellectuals clarify ideas and challenge power, but parties are instruments for translating doctrine into policy, policy into programs, and programs into action. The real question is whether a party maintains honest internal evaluation, democratic restraint, and the capacity for self-correction. TPLF\u2019s later failure was precisely that those mechanisms weakened, not that it never understood governance, and not that it built nothing.<\/p>

One of the weaknesses of today\u2019s debate about Tigray is that too many voices confuse being active in public with being useful to politics. A mature political society requires a proper division of roles. Professionals turn policy into operational systems. Journalists investigate and hold power visible. Business people create employment, production, and economic capacity. Academics clarify ideas and train society\u2019s ability to think critically. Activists can expose, mobilize, and pressure. Political organizations carry a different burden: doctrine, mandate, discipline, and execution. They convert political will into organized action over time. Visibility is not the same as organization, and daily commentary is not the same as political responsibility. A healthy political society needs all these roles. It suffers when any one of them imagines itself to be the strategic command center.<\/p>

Two things must therefore be held together. TPLF built real institutions, expanded development, and helped transform society. TPLF also decayed, closed political space, weakened its own corrective mechanisms, and failed badly on strategic questions. Honest criticism begins by holding both truths together.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

What erasure costs Tigray now<\/strong><\/p>

The critics who reduce TPLF to a backward ideology are not doing political analysis. They are doing political grievance. Grievance selects its evidence rather than reading it in full. It knows in advance what it wants to find. It finds the failures, presents them as the whole truth, and calls the result insight. That may be emotionally satisfying. It is not useful for understanding what happened, why it happened, or what a serious future for Tigray requires.<\/p>

The political stakes of this argument are not only historical. They are immediate.<\/p>

Tigray is currently trying to rebuild its authority, negotiate a contested post-Pretoria political environment, defend its people against ongoing occupation and displacement, and make its case to the world that it represents a legitimate political community with a serious institutional history and a viable future. That case is weakened when Tigray cannot tell its own story accurately.<\/p>

If Tigray accepts the idea that the last thirty years produced nothing useful, it enters today\u2019s negotiations without its own institutional memory. It weakens its claim to experience, continuity, capacity, and self-government at the very moment when those claims matter most.<\/p>

A people that accepts the lazy narrative \u2014 that TPLF only damaged, that the last thirty years produced only darkness \u2014 has surrendered its own historical agency to its enemies\u2019 framing. It is a people that, in trying to distance itself from political failure, has amputated the memory of political achievement. And it cannot then speak with authority about what it is defending, what it is rebuilding, or what kind of future it is trying to create.<\/p>

The agricultural extension agents, the SAERT engineers, the REST field workers, the TDA volunteers, the Dedebit loan officers working with smallholders, the teachers who built the enrollment rates that made the current generation possible, the health workers who pushed immunization coverage across remote woredas; all of them are erased when TPLF\u2019s history is reduced to the failures of its last decade. That erasure insults the people who did the work. And it deprives the current generation of the institutional memory it needs to rebuild seriously.<\/p>

\u2015\u2015\u2015<\/p>

I was in Tigray in the years when the transformation was being built. I was there as a professional who both contributed to and criticized the work. I am still writing about Tigray because Tigray has never left me, and because the obligation to remember accurately does not diminish with time. It intensifies.<\/p>

What I know is this: TPLF, with all its weaknesses \u2014 and those weaknesses were many, and some were catastrophic \u2014 produced a transformation in Tigray and in Ethiopia that no honest observer can dismiss. It helped educate a generation. It built institutions. It created a political culture that, however imperfectly, connected ordinary people in rural communities to questions of governance, land, water, and rights. And it helped create the conditions under which that generation now demands more.<\/p>

That demand is TPLF\u2019s achievement. The generation making that demand is the evidence the critics are ignoring.<\/p>

The correct response to TPLF\u2019s failures is not to pretend it built nothing. It is to hold both the achievement and the failure in the same frame, and to ask the harder question: how does a movement that built so much decay so badly? That question leads somewhere useful. Erasure leads nowhere except to the political convenience of those who want Tigray\u2019s history to disappear.<\/p>

\u1275\u130d\u122b\u12ed \u1275\u1235\u12d5\u122d\uff01\u1230\u120b\u121d \u1295\u1205\u12dd\u1265\u1293\uff01<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How TPLF helped transform Tigray \u2014 and Ethiopia \u2014 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\u2019s political life, social organization, sacrifice, and survival. During the armed struggle, it mobilized almost every Tigrayan family against oppressive Ethiopian regimes. After 1991, it became the main political force through which Tigray was governed and represented. Because of this deep social base, the line between TPLF as a party and Tigray\u2019s government was often blurred. That gave TPLF strength, but it also gave it an authoritarian character, especially in the eyes of those who wanted more open political space. So TPLF must be criticized. Its failures were real. Some of those failures were serious, and Tigray paid a very heavy price. But criticism must not erase history. TPLF did not build nothing. It helped change Tigray and Ethiopia in deep ways. It helped educate a new generation. It helped create institutions, expand services, and raise the expectations of ordinary people. That is why many Tigrayans today demand more from TPLF and from every political leadership. This demand is not proof that TPLF achieved nothing. It is partly proof that TPLF helped create a society that can now question power. So we must hold two truths together: TPLF built much, and TPLF also failed badly. Honest criticism begins only when we accept both. A brief note to my readers before I begin. Those who have followed my recent opinion pieces know by now that I do not write for quick consumption. My essays are often longer than the short, social-media-compatible arguments many of us have become used to. I do this deliberately, not because length is a virtue by itself, but because Tigray\u2019s political reality cannot be understood through short-memory commentary, emotional performance, and daily outrage presented as political analysis. I am grateful to those who continue to read patiently, respond thoughtfully, and send comments by email. Your feedback tells me that there is still an audience for careful argument, historical memory, and grounded political analysis. If you find value in these opinion pieces, I also ask you to share them with friends, colleagues, and fellow Tigrayans who may be interested in thorough analysis rather than quick reactions. This piece also asks for that kind of reading. It is not written for those who want a quick verdict on TPLF. It is written for those who want to understand Tigray\u2019s grassroots political history, the transformation that took place, the failures that followed, and why both must be held in the same frame. There is a growing habit among some Tigrayan commentators \u2014 and many Ethiopian ones \u2014 to speak about TPLF as if its entire history can be reduced to decay, arrogance, miscalculation, and failure. They take the tragedy that befell Tigray after 2018 and project it backward, as if the organization that failed on some strategic questions later must never have built anything serious before. They point to the war, the displacement, the genocide, the political decay, the factional collapse \u2014 all of it real \u2014 and use it as evidence that Tigray and Ethiopia gained nothing, or worse, suffered a net loss, under three decades of TPLF and EPRDF leadership. That argument does not survive serious examination. TPLF\/EPRDF\u2019s achievements do not need a certificate from its supporters. They are visible in the development record of the country and in the archives of the major international development and finance institutions that monitored Ethiopia\u2019s transformation for decades. At the same time, those same institutions and Western policy circles were often uneasy with EPRDF precisely because it did not fully submit to the neoliberal policy package that was being pushed across much of Africa in that period. It followed a developmental-state path \u2014 debated, contested, imperfect, and at times authoritarian in its methods \u2014 but intellectually argued, institutionally pursued, and materially consequential. That path transformed grassroots economies, expanded public services, raised expectations, and changed the social structure of both Tigray and Ethiopia in ways no previous Ethiopian state had achieved at comparable scale. This essay is not an inventory of those achievements. That record exists and speaks for itself. Nor is it an attempt to shield TPLF from criticism. TPLF must be criticized. Its failures must be examined honestly, without sentimental protection, without factional loyalty, and without the defensive reflex that confuses criticism with betrayal. Some of those failures were grave. They contributed to conditions under which Tigray paid the heaviest price in its modern history. But I will not accept the lazy and dishonest claim that Tigray suffered nothing but misrule under TPLF, or that everything those years built amounted to nothing, or that TPLF\u2019s developmental philosophy was merely backward ideology dressed in revolutionary language. This argument is not new. It has been pushed for years by Abiy Ahmed\u2019s Prosperity Party media ecosystem, and by state-aligned narratives. That external campaign is not the main subject of this essay. What concerns me here is something closer and more painful: the way similar erasure is now amplified daily by social-media activists, online commentators, and some media platforms, not only in the diaspora, but surprisingly inside Tigray\u2019s own media environment, that mistake grievance for analysis and weaken Tigray\u2019s own institutional memory. The irony, which they apparently cannot see, is that many of these voices are themselves products of the very transformation they are trying to erase. They speak with confidence, command platforms, frame political arguments, and demand accountability from positions created by literacy, university education, diaspora networks, expanded media, and political consciousness that simply did not exist at this scale before the transformation they now deny. A generation that TPLF helped educate is using that education to argue that TPLF taught it nothing. That is not critique. That is amnesia. \u2015\u2015\u2015 I reject that claim because my memory of Tigray was not formed through daily political noise, but through family upbringing, professional work, field experience, and engagement with the institutions and communities that tried to rebuild the region. It was built first through remote attachment, as someone born and raised in Addis Ababa by Tigrayan parents, shaped from childhood by a strong Tigrayan discipline, political consciousness, and sense of cultural belonging, and later through direct immersion in Tigray\u2019s development work. In the late 1990s, while working on land-resource planning and administrative mapping, I travelled widely across Tigray, meeting local leaders, administrators, informants, and development cadres at Tabia, Woreda, and Zonal levels. That experience gave me a ground-level view of the region that no distant commentary could provide. I entered Tigray\u2019s development story not as a party member or factional defender, but as a geo-information and planning professional trained in mathematics, Geographic Information Systems, and remote sensing. In 2014, I also coordinated institutional documentation for Tigray\u2019s first International Festival, which gave me another vantage point on what regional institutions had tried to build over two decades. I am also a Tigrayan who has criticized TPLF since the early days, not since criticism became fashionable after collapse, but throughout the period when the party was powerful and those criticisms were unwelcome. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I raised questions about administrative efficiency, executive power, privilege, and bureaucratic abuse. As years passed, my critique sharpened toward the more fundamental question of democratic space: the absence of genuine political plurality, the suppression of independent voices, the danger of a system without honest internal or external mirrors. In 2009, I attended a TPLF forum in Frankfurt as a guest participant from Italy, representing concerns from the Tigrayan community there. The session was presided over by Ambassador Berhane Gebrekritos. I said publicly that Tigray deserved a wider political space than TPLF had allowed. By then, eighteen years after TPLF came to administer Tigray, the region still had only one radio station, one newspaper, and a Baito with one hundred percent of its seats held by TPLF members. The irony was hard to miss: especially during the first two decades of EPRDF rule, Addis Ababa, under the same system, had more visible political and media space than Tigray itself. Opposition parties, private newspapers, and public criticism existed there in ways that TPLF did not permit in the region it knew best and claimed to represent most deeply. My argument was that Tigray had a politically conscious and socially mobilized population that deserved to breathe. TPLF should have encouraged alternative voices, independent media, and organized opposition, not as enemies, but as mirrors that would help the party see its own face. The response in the room was hostile. My argument was dismissed as idealism, and nothing changed. But the absence of that mirror was not a small democratic inconvenience. It became part of Tigray\u2019s later vulnerability. A party that is not forced to see its own weaknesses eventually mistakes silence for consent, control for stability, and loyalty for truth. So the argument I am making here is not a defense of TPLF as a party. It is a defense of historical accuracy, because without historical accuracy, even criticism becomes shallow. This is where TPLF\u2019s strength and weakness began to meet. The same discipline that helped the organization mobilize people, debate policies, document programs, and push implementation also made it less willing to tolerate independent political space. In the early years, that discipline helped build capacity. Over time, when it was not balanced by real pluralism, independent media, organized opposition, and honest criticism, it weakened the party\u2019s ability to correct itself. TPLF did not only lose democratic credibility by closing political space. It also damaged its own ability to receive truthful information. A system that hears mainly from loyal cadres and controlled structures eventually begins to misunderstand the society it governs. \u2015\u2015\u2015 A societal transformation without precedent in modern Ethiopian history When EPRDF took power in 1991, Ethiopia was a country recently emerged from the combination of imperial feudalism, military dictatorship, prolonged civil war, catastrophic famine, and near-total institutional collapse. Life expectancy was among the lowest in the world. Child mortality was among the highest. Literacy was a minority condition. Road density was negligible outside the capital. Access to health services was a privilege of geography and wealth. Agricultural productivity was devastated. Millions of people in Tigray, Wollo, and other highland areas had been displaced, killed, starved, or broken by decades of war and misrule. What followed in the three decades after 1991 was, by any serious empirical measure, the most dramatic societal transformation in Ethiopia\u2019s modern history. Not the ideal transformation. Not a transformation without failure, corruption, repression, or loss. But a transformation that was real, documented, and that changed millions of lives in ways that the critics do not honestly account for. The claim is not that EPRDF was a uniformly progressive force across all regions, all policies, or all political moments. It is that the developmental transformation it oversaw was real, and that attributing Ethiopia\u2019s poverty to that period rather than to the conditions it inherited is historically unserious. Life expectancy rose by more than twenty years. Child mortality fell by more than half. Primary school enrollment went from a fraction to near-universal coverage. Health posts, clinics, and hospitals extended into rural areas that had known no formal medical care in living memory. Roads were built connecting markets, schools, clinics, and farms that had been isolated by geography and neglect. Agricultural extension services, however imperfect, reached millions of smallholders. Higher education expanded from a handful of institutions to a national network of universities. And in Tigray specifically, those national trends had their own regional expression, built on an institutional base that deserves its own accounting. Critics may argue about attribution. They may point to donor funding, global development trends, commodity prices, or the contribution of non-state actors. All of that is a legitimate part of the analysis. But no honest reading of the evidence allows the conclusion that TPLF\/EPRDF was the…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6742"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6749,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions\/6749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}