{"id":6897,"date":"2026-07-01T05:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T05:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/?p=6897"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:30:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T12:30:39","slug":"where-will-tigrays-next-political-leaders-come-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigrayinsights.net\/en\/2026\/07\/01\/where-will-tigrays-next-political-leaders-come-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Will Tigray\u2019s Next Political Leaders Come From?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The most important political question facing Tigray today is not who should lead us next. It is whether we have built a society capable of continuously producing people worthy of leading us at all.<\/em><\/p>

On the night of November 4, 2021, police came to my house in Addis Ababa at around nine o\u2019clock. Seven of them. Two secret service agents and five uniformed police with a driver.<\/p>

I had seen them coming. I had a few seconds to change the television channel from Tigray media to CNN, hide my smartphone, and walk back to open the gate as if nothing was happening.<\/p>

They rushed in. They searched every room. They threw my books from the shelves looking for evidence of what they were certain I must be hiding. One of them, a secret service agent with a small handgun on his belt, hit me in the head with his hand. He told me, \u201cyou guys are so sinister and should be wiped out.\u201d<\/p>

Then they asked me to step outside. I walked out of the house where I was born and raised, and they loaded me into a police pickup truck. Along the way, they collected seven more Tigrayans from nearby houses before driving us to Yeka Police Station. The cell they put us in was roughly thirty square meters. There were already more than fifty people inside. The smell from the quasi-toilet nearby made sleep impossible. I sat through the night.<\/p>

After several days at Yeka, we were transferred. Loaded into a bus and taken to a compound in the northern outskirts of Addis Ababa, one of the locations the government had dedicated, in those weeks, to concentrating Tigrayans who had been swept up across the city.<\/p>

That was the beginning of fifty-three days.<\/p>

I am telling you this not to ask for sympathy. I was not alone. There were 378 of us eventually in that compound: refugees repatriated from Saudi Arabia, business owners, retired military officers, government employees, street vendors, university professors. The youngest were barely adults. The oldest was eighty-nine. We were Tigrayan. That was the only qualification required.<\/p>

During those weeks on the concrete floor, with a disease spreading through the compound and police beating prisoners for being slow to respond to roll call, I found myself returning again and again to one question that I could not shake.<\/p>

Not \u201cwhy is this happening to us?\u201d I knew why. We were Tigrayan. That was enough.<\/p>

But a deeper question. One that had been building for years and that those fifty-three days forced into clarity.<\/p>

What had gone wrong with Tigray? Not only what those who came for us with hatred had done. What we had failed to build. What we had not prepared. What we would need, when this was over, that we did not yet have.<\/p>

On December 27, 2021, I was released. A week later, on January 3, 2022, I boarded a flight from Addis Ababa. As the plane lifted, something irreversible clarified in me. I had simply stopped believing that the Ethiopian political identity I had carried since childhood still had room for me.<\/p>

The questions that had kept me awake on that concrete floor did not leave with the plane. They came with me. And over the past year, they became the essays I have published here at TigrayInsights.<\/p>

This article is their continuation.<\/p>

Over the past year I have written about Tigray\u2019s strategic position. About organizational decline. About cadre quality. About putting Tigray first. About the difference between stability and settlement. And increasingly, about the danger of political capability becoming detached from Tigray\u2019s own institutional life.<\/p>

Each of those essays circled a question I kept approaching but never asked directly.<\/p>

If political formation matters so much, where does it actually come from?<\/p>

We debate endlessly which party deserves Tigray\u2019s trust. Which leader has legitimacy. Which political arrangement best serves our interests. We organize conferences. We produce manifestos. We argue on social media. We form new parties. We split existing ones. We demand better leadership.<\/p>

But we almost never ask the prior question.<\/p>

None of these activities are useless. They are indispensable to political life. But they are episodic. They are conversations. Leadership formation requires continuity. It requires institutions that accompany people over years, exposing them repeatedly to responsibility, criticism, study, practical assignments, and organizational discipline.<\/p>

How does a society continuously produce people who are genuinely capable of strategic thinking, serious negotiation, constitutional judgment, organizational leadership, and the kind of political discipline that carrying an entire people\u2019s future demands?<\/p>

I am not writing this as an academic contribution to political science. I am writing it as a Tigrayan reflecting on a question that experience has forced upon me. Throughout my career \u2014 in universities, research institutions, and later in technology and organizational analysis \u2014 I have learned that complex systems rarely improve simply by wishing for better outcomes. They improve when the mechanisms that produce those outcomes are understood and deliberately strengthened. I suspect politics is no different. Whether that suspicion is correct is a question better explored by those who study these subjects professionally. My purpose is simply to encourage those better positioned than I am to explore this question much more rigorously than I can here.<\/p>

Such people do not appear automatically. They are not guaranteed by education. They are not conjured by revolutionary enthusiasm or by suffering, however deep that suffering has been.<\/p>

They are cultivated.<\/strong><\/p>

What, then, is the most important quality such formation is trying to cultivate?<\/p>

Above all, this formation cultivates judgment: the ability to distinguish what is urgent from what is merely loud, what serves Tigray\u2019s long-term interests from what merely satisfies today\u2019s emotions, and what must never be traded away regardless of circumstance.<\/p>

And that cultivation requires something Tigray has not yet thought carefully enough about: a deliberate mechanism for political formation.<\/p>

There is also a question of timing that cannot be avoided.<\/p>

The genocide did not merely destroy Tigray\u2019s infrastructure. It accelerated something harder to see and harder to reverse: the generational transition of political leadership. People who carried the institutional memory and the political formation built over decades were killed, displaced, imprisoned, or exhausted. The political class that remains will not lead forever. And the institutions that should have been preparing the next generation were not strong before the war. They are weaker now.<\/p>

The pipeline for producing serious political people has not merely slowed. In important ways, it broke.<\/strong><\/p>

This conversation therefore cannot wait. Not because urgency is a rhetorical device. Because the clock on this particular question moves in one direction only, and the distance between where we are and where we need to be is real.<\/p>

I want to be direct about one lesson the last decade has forced on me.<\/p>

One of the enduring lessons of the Meles era is not that he was irreplaceable. It is that no political movement should ever need another irreplaceable person.<\/strong><\/p>

He was exceptional. The depth of his thinking, his understanding of the intersection between strategy and politics, his capacity to hold long time horizons while managing immediate pressures: these were rare. Those who worked in or around his era understand this even when they disagree with specific decisions he made.<\/p>

But the lesson I draw from his absence is not about him. It is about what his absence revealed.<\/p>

What institutions had Tigray built to produce the next generation of people with comparable strategic depth? Not another Meles. No political movement produces another founder by institutional design. The question is different and more serious: what was being prepared to come after him, not to replace him, but to ensure that Tigray\u2019s next political generation had been genuinely formed?<\/p>

The liberation struggle that produced him was itself a school. The question is what replaced it when that school closed.<\/p>

For roughly the first three decades of the TPLF era, Tigrayan political leadership was formed largely through practice rather than through formal institutions.<\/p>

The liberation struggle. Organizational assignments. Endless meetings. Party conferences. Criticism and self-criticism, a culture that was demanding and often harsh but that built a particular kind of political seriousness. Committee work. Government responsibility. Experience accumulated over years of collective decisions made under real pressure.<\/p>

Looking back, I realize that political formation in the liberation era did not happen primarily through conventional higher education. It happened through an unusually demanding combination: systematic study, disciplined reading, ideological education, organized debate, practical responsibility, and the continuous pressures of struggle itself.<\/p>

Meetings were one part of that process \u2014 perhaps the most visible, but far from the whole. Cadres were expected to read seriously: political economy, revolutionary theory, organizational strategy, party documents, the histories of other liberation movements. They were expected to defend what they had studied, absorb rigorous criticism, connect theory to organizational practice, and assume growing responsibility over time. Political education was not a stage that concluded with any graduation. It was treated as a continuous obligation, woven into the daily texture of organizational life.<\/p>

The movement was the classroom. During the liberation years and the first decades that followed, that experience remained Tigray\u2019s leadership school.<\/strong><\/p>

This formation had genuine weaknesses. The ideological framework was sometimes too rigid. The repetition was real. The culture of criticism and self-criticism, demanding as it was, could reward conformity as much as originality. But it accomplished something modern political life struggles to reproduce: it forced people to think collectively under sustained pressure, defend ideas before peers who were equally prepared, absorb serious criticism, and gradually carry responsibility larger than themselves.<\/p>

War can produce extraordinary leaders. It cannot become a permanent leadership academy.<\/strong><\/p>

But that school did not continue indefinitely. As governance gradually replaced struggle, and as the quality of cadre recruitment and organizational formation began to weaken, the movement slowly lost its capacity to produce the next generation the way it once had. The organizational culture that had formed an entire generation through collective discipline became thinner. Face-to-face political life receded. The pipeline that had looked strong from the outside was already quietly deteriorating from within.<\/p>

Then the genocide struck. It did not shatter a healthy institution. It completed a rupture that was already underway \u2014 striking a pipeline that had been weakening for years, at precisely the moment Tigray needed it most.<\/p>

What replaced the school?<\/em><\/p>

I want to let that question sit for a moment, because I think it is the most important question in this essay, and I do not want to answer it too quickly.<\/p>

My first instinct was simple. Revive Meles Academy. Restart the training. Resume what had stopped. The longer I sat with the question, however, the more incomplete that answer began to feel.<\/p>

The problem was not one institution becoming inactive. The problem was larger: the entire ecosystem of leadership formation had become thin and underdeveloped. A serious political society requires more than party schools alone. It needs research institutions that provide the policy depth political organizations cannot generate internally. It needs civil service institutions that translate capacity into governance competence. And it needs the specific organizational formation that political movements require \u2014 the cultivation of people who understand not just what their organization stands for, but how to carry that stand under sustained pressure.<\/p>

Meles Academy was one attempt at the last of these. It had a role. Whether it is revived, reformed, or replaced by something better suited to the post-genocide environment, the function it served has not disappeared because the institution became quiet.<\/p>

But the academy was never the entire answer. It was one component of an ecosystem that, in Tigray today, cannot absorb the demands the political moment places on it.<\/p>

Even mature democracies do not leave political formation entirely to chance. Their parties, universities, campaign systems, civic organizations, local governments, media scrutiny, and public leadership programs form future politicians over many years. Recently, even institutions in the United States have begun creating dedicated programs to train future democratic leaders. If societies with such deep civic ecosystems still see the need to cultivate political leadership deliberately, how much more urgent is the question for Tigray, whose own political formation pipeline has been shattered by war, displacement, institutional decay, and generational rupture?<\/p>

This does not mean Tigray should copy foreign models. As I argued in my earlier essay on organizational composition and reform, political organization is not a copy-paste exercise. A leadership institute in California, a party school in China, a civil service college in Singapore, or a university program in Europe emerges from its own history and political culture. Tigray must learn from such examples without importing them mechanically. Its own institutions must be shaped by its liberation history, the genocide, the collapse of trust with Ethiopia, the divisions among Tegaru, the demands of reconstruction, and the strategic realities of the Horn. The lesson is not imitation. The lesson is deliberate formation.<\/p>

I want to ask a question I do not know the answer to.<\/p>

Tomorrow another crisis will come. Nobody knows its form. It may be diplomatic. It may be constitutional. It may be humanitarian. It may be a security threat that requires, simultaneously, strategic thinking, legal argument, international communication, and organizational discipline, all applied in the same moment by the same people.<\/p>

Who sits across the table?<\/strong><\/p>

Who prepared them?<\/strong><\/p>

If tomorrow Tigray needed fifty serious negotiators, people capable of arguing Tigray\u2019s case before African Union mediators or international human rights bodies with constitutional precision and strategic clarity, where would they come from?<\/p>

If it needed thirty people with the analytical capacity to navigate the intersection of Horn of Africa geopolitics, Ethiopian federal law, and Tigrayan security interests simultaneously, who would they be?<\/p>

I ask these questions not to discourage. I ask them because they reveal something important about the conversation Tigray has not yet had.<\/p>

We have been discussing who should lead. We have not been discussing who will be capable of leading. Those are related questions. They are not the same question. And the second one is more fundamental.<\/p>

I want to say something carefully about a new danger.<\/p>

Political visibility today can be generated very quickly. A person with genuine talent and real commitment can build a significant following on Facebook, on YouTube, on X, through podcasts and online communities. Some of those people are developing genuine ideas. Some are performing genuine service to political discussion.<\/p>

But visibility is not formation.<\/strong><\/p>

Popularity is not strategic judgment. Communication skill is not leadership. A person who speaks compellingly on camera is not necessarily a person who can navigate a constitutional crisis, manage an organization under pressure, hold together a political coalition across competing interests, or make decisions whose consequences extend twenty years.<\/p>

Modern political life creates a temptation. Public visibility can now be achieved faster than political maturity. A society that confuses media prominence with strategic preparation risks elevating voices before it has formed leaders.<\/p>

I am not condemning social media. I do not believe Tigray’s grassroots political life is determined by online popularity alone. But social media can still distort our judgment. It can amplify visibility before formation, confidence before responsibility, and performance before tested leadership. That is danger enough.<\/p>

We have seen, in Ethiopia itself, what happens when political performance outruns political formation. A society exhausted by old failures can mistake charisma for renewal, theatrical language for vision, and emotional manipulation for leadership. That danger is not uniquely Ethiopian. It can happen anywhere a political society loses the ability to distinguish popularity from preparation. Tigray should not imagine itself immune.<\/p>

The question is worth sitting with.<\/p>

I do not mean that Tigray has no political activity or no emerging political actors. That would be false. Parties are meeting. Young people are debating. Podcasts, public forums, conferences, workshops, and social media discussions are all shaping a new political generation. Some capable people are certainly emerging from those spaces.<\/p>

But activity is not the same as formation. Debate is not the same as preparation. Visibility is not the same as tested responsibility. A society may produce politically active people through many channels and still fail to deliberately cultivate the smaller number of people who must carry strategic leadership.<\/p>

The danger is not that these spaces exist. The danger is that Tigray may mistake them for a leadership pipeline.<\/strong><\/p>

This question belongs to TPLF, SAWET, TIP, Baitona, Arena, and every political organization that claims a role in Tigray\u2019s future. If they want to lead, they must ask not only what they stand for, but how they are preparing the people who will one day carry that stand under pressure.<\/p>

One of the arguments running through my recent essays is this: political capability without institutional anchoring becomes rentable. A politically visible individual whose formation is not tied to a society\u2019s actual interests becomes available for functions that serve other agendas.<\/p>

I hope to return to that question separately. Here I want to focus on the earlier and more fundamental question: how does Tigray deliberately cultivate genuine leadership development in the first place?<\/p>

The answer is not to suppress talent or to demand that capable Tigrayans ask permission before developing themselves. The answer is to build institutions through which people are formed in organic connection with Tigrayan political life, so that a person\u2019s formation and Tigray\u2019s needs are aligned from the beginning rather than diverging over time.<\/p>

That is what an ecosystem of institutional cultivation actually means. Not a single academy. Not a single party school. A set of institutions, each cultivating a different dimension of political life, all of them producing people who understand what they are for.<\/p>

We speak constantly about rebuilding Tigray\u2019s roads, schools, hospitals, farms, businesses, and political organizations.<\/p>

Perhaps it is time we also began asking who is rebuilding the people who will one day lead them.<\/p>

If Tigray succeeds in rebuilding its roads but fails to rebuild the institutions that cultivate political judgment, it will eventually travel those roads under leadership no better than the one it failed to prepare.<\/p>

The next generation of Tigrayan leaders will not be produced by the next crisis. They will have to be prepared deliberately. Not by hoping that exceptional individuals appear when exceptional moments demand them. But by building, with intention and with seriousness, the institutions through which capable political people are continuously formed.<\/p>

No single organization can shoulder this responsibility. It requires political parties, research centers, universities, and public institutions to recognize that leadership formation is itself part of national reconstruction.<\/p>

Those questions first came to me on a concrete floor among hundreds of imprisoned Tigrayans. Years later, I still do not claim to have all the answers. But I have become convinced of one thing: if we do not begin asking this question now, the next generation will one day ask it of us.<\/em><\/p>

Tigray cannot delegate the formation of its future political class to history anymore. History already did its part. Now institutions must do theirs.<\/em><\/p>

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The most important political question facing Tigray today is not who should lead us next. It is whether we have built a society capable of continuously producing people worthy of leading us at all. On the night of November 4, 2021, police came to my house in Addis Ababa at around nine o\u2019clock. Seven of them. Two secret service agents and five uniformed police with a driver. I had seen them coming. I had a few seconds to change the television channel from Tigray media to CNN, hide my smartphone, and walk back to open the gate as if nothing was happening. They rushed in. They searched every room. They threw my books from the shelves looking for evidence of what they were certain I must be hiding. One of them, a secret service agent with a small handgun on his belt, hit me in the head with his hand. He told me, \u201cyou guys are so sinister and should be wiped out.\u201d Then they asked me to step outside. I walked out of the house where I was born and raised, and they loaded me into a police pickup truck. Along the way, they collected seven more Tigrayans from nearby houses before driving us to Yeka Police Station. The cell they put us in was roughly thirty square meters. There were already more than fifty people inside. The smell from the quasi-toilet nearby made sleep impossible. I sat through the night. After several days at Yeka, we were transferred. Loaded into a bus and taken to a compound in the northern outskirts of Addis Ababa, one of the locations the government had dedicated, in those weeks, to concentrating Tigrayans who had been swept up across the city. That was the beginning of fifty-three days. I am telling you this not to ask for sympathy. I was not alone. There were 378 of us eventually in that compound: refugees repatriated from Saudi Arabia, business owners, retired military officers, government employees, street vendors, university professors. The youngest were barely adults. The oldest was eighty-nine. We were Tigrayan. That was the only qualification required. During those weeks on the concrete floor, with a disease spreading through the compound and police beating prisoners for being slow to respond to roll call, I found myself returning again and again to one question that I could not shake. Not \u201cwhy is this happening to us?\u201d I knew why. We were Tigrayan. That was enough. But a deeper question. One that had been building for years and that those fifty-three days forced into clarity. What had gone wrong with Tigray? Not only what those who came for us with hatred had done. What we had failed to build. What we had not prepared. What we would need, when this was over, that we did not yet have. On December 27, 2021, I was released. A week later, on January 3, 2022, I boarded a flight from Addis Ababa. As the plane lifted, something irreversible clarified in me. I had simply stopped believing that the Ethiopian political identity I had carried since childhood still had room for me. The questions that had kept me awake on that concrete floor did not leave with the plane. They came with me. And over the past year, they became the essays I have published here at TigrayInsights. This article is their continuation. Over the past year I have written about Tigray\u2019s strategic position. About organizational decline. About cadre quality. About putting Tigray first. About the difference between stability and settlement. And increasingly, about the danger of political capability becoming detached from Tigray\u2019s own institutional life. Each of those essays circled a question I kept approaching but never asked directly. If political formation matters so much, where does it actually come from? We debate endlessly which party deserves Tigray\u2019s trust. Which leader has legitimacy. Which political arrangement best serves our interests. We organize conferences. We produce manifestos. We argue on social media. We form new parties. We split existing ones. We demand better leadership. But we almost never ask the prior question. None of these activities are useless. They are indispensable to political life. But they are episodic. They are conversations. Leadership formation requires continuity. It requires institutions that accompany people over years, exposing them repeatedly to responsibility, criticism, study, practical assignments, and organizational discipline. How does a society continuously produce people who are genuinely capable of strategic thinking, serious negotiation, constitutional judgment, organizational leadership, and the kind of political discipline that carrying an entire people\u2019s future demands? I am not writing this as an academic contribution to political science. I am writing it as a Tigrayan reflecting on a question that experience has forced upon me. Throughout my career \u2014 in universities, research institutions, and later in technology and organizational analysis \u2014 I have learned that complex systems rarely improve simply by wishing for better outcomes. They improve when the mechanisms that produce those outcomes are understood and deliberately strengthened. I suspect politics is no different. Whether that suspicion is correct is a question better explored by those who study these subjects professionally. My purpose is simply to encourage those better positioned than I am to explore this question much more rigorously than I can here. Such people do not appear automatically. They are not guaranteed by education. They are not conjured by revolutionary enthusiasm or by suffering, however deep that suffering has been. They are cultivated. What, then, is the most important quality such formation is trying to cultivate? Above all, this formation cultivates judgment: the ability to distinguish what is urgent from what is merely loud, what serves Tigray\u2019s long-term interests from what merely satisfies today\u2019s emotions, and what must never be traded away regardless of circumstance. And that cultivation requires something Tigray has not yet thought carefully enough about: a deliberate mechanism for political formation. There is also a question of timing that cannot be avoided. The genocide did not merely destroy Tigray\u2019s infrastructure. It accelerated something harder to see and harder to reverse: the generational transition of political leadership. People who carried the institutional memory and the political formation built over decades were killed, displaced, imprisoned, or exhausted. The political class that remains will not lead forever. And the institutions that should have been preparing the next generation were not strong before the war. They are weaker now. The pipeline for producing serious political people has not merely slowed. In important ways, it broke. This conversation therefore cannot wait. Not because urgency is a rhetorical device. Because the clock on this particular question moves in one direction only, and the distance between where we are and where we need to be is real. I want to be direct about one lesson the last decade has forced on me. One of the enduring lessons of the Meles era is not that he was irreplaceable. It is that no political movement should ever need another irreplaceable person. He was exceptional. The depth of his thinking, his understanding of the intersection between strategy and politics, his capacity to hold long time horizons while managing immediate pressures: these were rare. Those who worked in or around his era understand this even when they disagree with specific decisions he made. But the lesson I draw from his absence is not about him. It is about what his absence revealed. What institutions had Tigray built to produce the next generation of people with comparable strategic depth? Not another Meles. No political movement produces another founder by institutional design. The question is different and more serious: what was being prepared to come after him, not to replace him, but to ensure that Tigray\u2019s next political generation had been genuinely formed? The liberation struggle that produced him was itself a school. The question is what replaced it when that school closed. For roughly the first three decades of the TPLF era, Tigrayan political leadership was formed largely through practice rather than through formal institutions. The liberation struggle. Organizational assignments. Endless meetings. Party conferences. Criticism and self-criticism, a culture that was demanding and often harsh but that built a particular kind of political seriousness. Committee work. Government responsibility. Experience accumulated over years of collective decisions made under real pressure. Looking back, I realize that political formation in the liberation era did not happen primarily through conventional higher education. It happened through an unusually demanding combination: systematic study, disciplined reading, ideological education, organized debate, practical responsibility, and the continuous pressures of struggle itself. Meetings were one part of that process \u2014 perhaps the most visible, but far from the whole. Cadres were expected to read seriously: political economy, revolutionary theory, organizational strategy, party documents, the histories of other liberation movements. They were expected to defend what they had studied, absorb rigorous criticism, connect theory to organizational practice, and assume growing responsibility over time. Political education was not a stage that concluded with any graduation. It was treated as a continuous obligation, woven into the daily texture of organizational life. The movement was the classroom. During the liberation years and the first decades that followed, that experience remained Tigray\u2019s leadership school. This formation had genuine weaknesses. The ideological framework was sometimes too rigid. The repetition was real. The culture of criticism and self-criticism, demanding as it was, could reward conformity as much as originality. But it accomplished something modern political life struggles to reproduce: it forced people to think collectively under sustained pressure, defend ideas before peers who were equally prepared, absorb serious criticism, and gradually carry responsibility larger than themselves. War can produce extraordinary leaders. It cannot become a permanent leadership academy. But that school did not continue indefinitely. As governance gradually replaced struggle, and as the quality of cadre recruitment and organizational formation began to weaken, the movement slowly lost its capacity to produce the next generation the way it once had. The organizational culture that had formed an entire generation through collective discipline became thinner. Face-to-face political life receded. The pipeline that had looked strong from the outside was already quietly deteriorating from within. Then the genocide struck. It did not shatter a healthy institution. It completed a rupture that was already underway \u2014 striking a pipeline that had been weakening for years, at precisely the moment Tigray needed it most. What replaced the school? I want to let that question sit for a moment, because I think it is the most important question in this essay, and I do not want to answer it too quickly. My first instinct was simple. Revive Meles Academy. Restart the training. Resume what had stopped. The longer I sat with the question, however, the more incomplete that answer began to feel. The problem was not one institution becoming inactive. The problem was larger: the entire ecosystem of leadership formation had become thin and underdeveloped. A serious political society requires more than party schools alone. It needs research institutions that provide the policy depth political organizations cannot generate internally. It needs civil service institutions that translate capacity into governance competence. And it needs the specific organizational formation that political movements require \u2014 the cultivation of people who understand not just what their organization stands for, but how to carry that stand under sustained pressure. Meles Academy was one attempt at the last of these. It had a role. Whether it is revived, reformed, or replaced by something better suited to the post-genocide environment, the function it served has not disappeared because the institution became quiet. But the academy was never the entire answer. It was one component of an ecosystem that, in Tigray today, cannot absorb the demands the political moment places on it. Even mature democracies do not leave political formation entirely to chance. Their parties, universities, campaign systems, civic organizations, local governments, media scrutiny, and public leadership programs form future politicians over many years. Recently, even institutions in the United States have begun creating dedicated programs to train future democratic leaders. 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