Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from Eyoha Media’s YouTube channel, showing two hooded guests facing away from the camera during a segment on disputed online donations. Fair use.

A viral act of “kindness”

A TikTok clip began circulating, filmed inside a parked car near Bole, Addis Ababa. The camera faced inward. A man called Tamru sat in the passenger seat, shoulders hunched, voice low, describing illness and daily struggle. The man behind the camera never showed his face. When Tamru finished, a hand entered the frame and pressed a folded wad of cash into his palm.

The clip first appeared on @melektegnaw_ (about 1.7 million followers), a popular TikTok handle that seemingly encourages charity. There are countless others built on the same formula: emotion as the hook, the subject as the thumbnail, a small cash handoff as “proof,” and clicks that translate into engagement and revenue.

On the recording, Tamru asked if there might be longer-term help that could put him back on his feet. The two exchanged phone numbers and a bank account. The man told him to keep praying — that the money came through prayer, and that he was merely a messenger connecting givers and the needy.

The scene hinted at transformation.

The money moved, but the promise did not

After the TikTok clip went viral, people mobilized — and so did the money. Within weeks, more than USD 1,576 (about ETB 260,000) moved through a bank account in Tamru’s name, while an estimated USD 2,120 to 2,4251 (about ETB 350,000 to 400,000) went to accounts he says were tied to associates of the masked organizer. Much of it came from members of the Ethiopian diaspora who believed they were lifting a stranger out of poverty. The funds were meant to buy Tamru a Bajaj, a three-wheeled taxi that could have put him back to work.

Instead, Tamru recalls being told over the phone by the same man who met him in person — the faceless figure in the earlier clip who filmed him handing over the wad of cash shown on TikTok to send more money for ‘tax clearance,’ ‘transport fees,’ ‘processing,’ and even ‘frozen account’ penalties. By the end, he estimates he wired USD 1,212 (about ETB 200,000) from funds deposited into his own account. Only after the promises kept shifting did he take his story public, sitting for a nearly three-hour interview on Eyoha Media, a YouTube channel with a large audience, hoping exposure might force answers.

The men behind the masks

In that interview, Tamru never mentioned @melektegnaw_, even though the clip first appeared there. Instead, he said the man behind the camera was ‘Baladeraw’ — of the TikTok channel @baladeraw — and added that when the host phoned him, he thought he recognized the voice.

Baladeraw’s “charity” brand mixes faith, emotion — and opacity. Screenshot from Baladeraw’s TikTok page. Fair use.

From my review, both channels use the same staging: hoods up, the camera fixed behind the “giver,” and slogans printed across sweatshirts — “the trustee” (ባለአደራው) and “the messenger” (መልክተኛው). They frame anonymity as religious humility. It remains unclear whether this involves two men, a coordinated group, or one operator using multiple identities.

A screenshot from @melektegnaw_  on TikTok, whose viral “charity” clips turn compassion into clicks amid growing scrutiny over how donations are handled. Fair use.

What is clear is the pattern. Both accounts follow the same template: a humanitarian persona across Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok who appears faceless, selfless, and devout. Each video traces the same emotional arc — a vulnerable subject, an anonymous “rescuer,” and a small on-camera handout — crafted to look like spontaneous charity while evading scrutiny.

Faith, optics, and profit

On Facebook and TikTok, a stream of handheld, emotional clips does most of the legitimizing. Platforms reward the optics; audiences read them as proof. A cursory look at Baladeraw turns up a Facebook page labeled “Charity Organization” and a website — trappings of credibility with little visible oversight.

That credibility converts to cash. Baladeraw reports raising more about USD 10,958.96 (more than ETB 1.5 million) through Chapa, an Ethiopian-licensed payment gateway regulated by the National Bank of Ethiopia as a “payment system operator.”

Meanwhile, both men’s TikTok presences blur personal and fundraising content. TikTok’s own rules state that fundraisers must be verified organizations — with registration, a website, and at least 1,000 followers — and, in some regions, additional tax documents. Yet these creators solicit donations as private users, outside TikTok’s verified fundraising tools, raising basic questions of compliance and transparency that the platform has not addressed.

On Facebook, Baladeraw’s “Charity Organization” page remains active, even though Meta’s policies explicitly ban charity fraud and scams. Why a masked operator with no public accounting can present as a charity remains unclear.

Anatomy of a confession that wasn’t

In a follow-up, Eyoha Media brought in both @melektegnaw_ and “Baladeraw,” hoping to settle the story. But instead of pressing for documents or receipts, the host guided Tamru toward retracting his accusations. Identities were obscured: no on-screen names or identifiers appeared; both fundraisers wore hoods, kept their backs to the camera, and only their voices were audible. No documentation was presented or reviewed. The hooded fundraisers walked away without answering how much was raised, who handled it, or whether any of it reached the beneficiary.

On his website, Baladeraw also embeds a clip from his interview with EBS, one of Ethiopia’s largest private broadcasters — hooded, facing away from the camera, his voice the only part revealed. The hosts never addressed the obvious: anonymity may be defensible when one gives their own money, but not when soliciting the public’s. Ethiopian law requires registered charities to disclose finances, keep records, and file reports. Masked fundraisers with donation links cannot claim exemption. Yet no one asked about this. The spectacle continued: the benefactor unseen, the gaze unflinching, the suffering on display.

The unmasking

In a late twist, the person behind @melektegnaw_  unmasked himself on Seifu on EBS, Ethiopia’s top late-night show, calling his work “God’s work.” He blamed impostors using look-alike accounts, said he posts beneficiaries’ own bank numbers so money goes ‘directly’ to them, and cited a 20,000 ETB (about USD 120) diversion he claims was the fault of an intermediary. He denied taking commissions, describing himself as a messenger who shares ‘verified’ cases and runs small drives like the ‘100 birr (about USD 0.60) challenge.

As in the Eyoha Media and EBS appearances, Seifu let him pass unchallenged, skipping basic questions of accountability and transparency. None of his claims were independently verified, and key issues remained unanswered: who verifies these cases, what records exist, and who is responsible when funds disappear.

The bigger story: Platforms, poverty, and profit

Ethiopia’s social media crisis is often framed around hate speech and misinformation. But scams thrive too — especially in under-served languages. In April 2023, AFP’s Ethiopia fact-check desk exposed a viral in Oromo Facebook post falsely promising “free travel to America” for two million Africans; the US Embassy confirmed it was a scam, and the link led to a job-search app, not visas.

Globally, the same pattern persists. Internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters revealed that about 10 percent of its 2024 revenue was projected to come from ads tied to scams or banned goods. The company estimated users see 15 billion scam ads a day. In 2023, UK authorities reported that 54 percent of all payment scams involved Meta platforms.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They are symptoms of an attention economy where fraud scales faster than oversight — and where the platforms profiting from engagement have little incentive to act.

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from the YouTube video, ‘Why Egypt and Somalia are Teaming Up Against Ethiopia‘ by TLDR News Global. Fair use.

In the Horn of Africa, where fragile political alliances and military tensions are the norm, conflict between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Somalia has found a new battleground: social media. Platforms like TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook are now key players in a digital war where misinformation is stoking nationalist fervor and increasing the risk of real-world violence.

Two major geopolitical flashpoints fuel this online conflict: Ethiopia's construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile River and its recent diplomatic engagement with Somaliland, a self-declared independent region seeking international recognition. For Egypt, which relies on the Nile for its water, the dam is seen as a direct threat to its survival. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s outreach to Somaliland has sparked outrage in Somalia, which views the move as a challenge to its territorial integrity.

Screenshot from the TikTok video by Mafi Fasil. Fair use.

Though these conflicts stem from deep-rooted historical and geographic disputes, they have now reached millions through social media.

TikTok's influence

TikTok, in particular, has emerged as a stage where complex geopolitical tensions are reduced, dramatized, and frequently distorted. In a widely-shared trend, an Ethiopian user posted a video where a woman symbolically pours water from a jar marked with Ethiopia’s flag into smaller jars labeled Egypt and Sudan, representing Ethiopia’s control over the Nile. Accompanied by patriotic music, the video is a bold display of national pride, amplifying Ethiopian narratives across social media.

Egyptian TikTok users have responded in kind. In one video, two men pour water from a bowl marked with Ethiopia’s flag into glasses representing Egypt and Sudan, only to return the water to the bowl. The video ends with the placement of an explosive device on the bowl, hinting at Egypt’s frustration and alluding to the possibility of sabotage. While these videos are symbolic, the underlying tensions they reflect are very real.

Screenshot from the TikTok video by eslamyears22 Fair use.

With an ongoing information war between Egypt and Ethiopia as the backdrop, Ethiopia’s growing relationship with Somaliland has further complicated the region’s fragile dynamics. In January 2024, Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, hinting at possible recognition of its independence — a move Somalia vehemently opposed. Sensing an opportunity, Egypt reinforced its ties with Somalia through a military cooperation agreement, escalating tensions in the region.

Reports have since emerged that Egypt has supplied military equipment and personnel to Somalia.

As news of the Egypt-Somalia alliance spread, TikTok and other social media platforms were flooded with celebratory videos, many of which relied on AI-generated content and manipulated footage.

Among the most provocative was an anonymous TikTok user, operating under the handle “user74220974543408,” who gained attention for a series of incendiary posts. In one, a map of Ethiopia is shown underfoot with the Egyptian flag circulating around it, accompanied by ominous music designed to evoke a sense of threat.

Screenshot from the TikTok video by user74220974543408. Fair use.

An Egyptian Tiktok creator, @100._._6, frequently posts videos praising Egypt’s military power and celebrating its alliance with Somalia. Her content has gained significant traction in Somalia, becoming a rallying point for those who see the partnership as vital in countering Ethiopia’s regional influence. These videos have attracted hundreds of comments in Arabic, Amharic, Oromo, and English, highlighting the cross-border impact of this escalating digital conflict.

The comments sections are rife with nationalist rhetoric and flags. Ethiopian supporters boast, “Ethiopia is ready” and “We are kings in Africa,” while those bearing the Somaliland flag offer their support, referring to Ethiopians as “brothers” ready to “fight back.” Somali accounts, on the other hand, express readiness to align with Egypt and join forces against Ethiopia.

Some accounts take it a step further, advocating violence against specific communities in Somalia. In particular, accounts like @anti_qabiil2023 have targeted the Oromo community, stoking tensions by encouraging violence against them, especially given the Oromo heritage of Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Even TikTok's “live match” feature — where users compete for digital gifts from followers — has been co-opted into the fray. Some users stage live “battles,” with one person representing Ethiopia and the other Egypt, urging their followers to send digital gifts as a show of support. These five-minute contests, though framed as playful, mirror deep-rooted nationalist tensions. The side with the most virtual gifts wins, turning what appears to be lighthearted interaction into a reflection of the region’s real-world political divisions.

AI and disinformation tactics

Disinformation tactics have not been confined to viral videos and memes. Egyptian and Somali actors have repurposed speeches from former global leaders to fuel regional tensions. A widely circulated video features former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 comment that Egypt might “blow up” the GERD, used by Egyptian and Somali figures to stoke fears of imminent conflict.

Meanwhile, pro-Ethiopian and Somaliland actors have weaponized Trump’s past criticisms of Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, using his comments about Somalia being a “lawless” state to undermine Somalia’s government.

Screenshot from the TikTok video by mona_christ1. Fair use.

The information war has also relied on exploiting internal divisions within Ethiopia. Actors aligned with the Egyptian and Somali governments have targeted opposition groups in the Ethiopian diaspora, particularly Amhara nationalist groups, to deepen political rifts. These groups have circulated conspiracies suggesting that the Amhara community could align with Egypt and Somalia if those nations intervened against Abiy Ahmed’s government. This narrative, casting the Ethiopian government as a national security threat, has been eagerly picked up by Egyptian and Somali figures seeking to capitalize on Ethiopia’s internal discord.

Pro-Ethiopian government users on TikTok have not remained silent in this digital conflict. They have responded with content drawing on Ethiopia’s long history of resistance to foreign powers, including past conflicts with Egypt, framing the GERD as a symbol of national sovereignty. These narratives emphasize Ethiopia’s broader struggle for self-determination, casting the dam project as a point of national pride.

Screenshot from the YouTube video, ‘ከኢትዮጵያ ጦር ጋር ገጠሙ | መንገድ ለመዝጋት የሞከሩ ተመቱ | የሱማሊያው መሪ “እንታረቅ” አሉ | እስራኤል ዓለምን አስገረመች | ኔቶ ፑቲን ዛቻ ብቻ አለ‘ by GMN TV Ethiopia. Fair use.

Further complicating the narrative, pro-Ethiopian government social media users have been highlighting Egypt’s regional rivals, such as Algeria and Morocco, in an effort to shift the discourse in Ethiopia’s favor. A recent development saw Ethiopia sign a military cooperation agreement with Morocco, adding another layer to the region's intricate web of alliances and rivalries.

One prominent TikTok account regularly publishes AI-generated propaganda glorifying Ethiopia’s military capabilities, featuring images of the Ethiopian flag and a lion accompanied by motivational music, projecting Ethiopia’s strength to crush its opponents. Another account mimics the voice of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed speaking in Arabic, generating thousands of comments praising his linguistic abilities and diplomatic outreach.

Cross-platform dissemination

The disinformation war has spread across platforms, with content being reposted on Facebook and X, often without proper verification. This has fueled imitation and the viral spread of memes, amplifying the reach of misinformation and escalating tensions in an already fragile political environment.

Screenshot from the YouTube video, ‘ከኢትዮጵያ ጦር ጋር ገጠሙ | መንገድ ለመዝጋት የሞከሩ ተመቱ | የሱማሊያው መሪ “እንታረቅ” አሉ | እስራኤል ዓለምን አስገረመች | ኔቶ ፑቲን ዛቻ ብቻ አለ‘ by GMN TV Ethiopia. Fair use.

TikTok has launched its Sub-Saharan African Safety Advisory Council, modeled after Meta’s Oversight Board, though its success in curbing harmful content in this turbulent region remains to be seen.

As the gap between online disinformation and real-world conflict narrows in the Horn of Africa, the stakes in this digital war are becoming increasingly severe.

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot of the victim's mother, Abekyelesh Adeba, from the YouTube video, ‘የኢትዮጵያ እናቶች ይፍረዱኝ! እጅግ ዘግ’ናኝ እና አ’ሰ’ቃ’ቂ እውነት! ‘ፍትህ’ ፍለጋ የተደረገ ከባድ ተጋድሎ!‘ by Eyoha Media. Fair use.

In July 2023, the city of Bahir Dar in Ethiopia's Amhara Region was left reeling after the brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl named Heaven. The tragedy cast a deep shadow over the community, and the perpetrator — her mother's landlord — was sentenced to 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole. Nearly a year later, as the convicted man sought to appeal the sentence, the victim’s mother, Abekyelesh Adeba, turned to YouTube to share the agonizing story of her daughter’s death.

This crime unfolded in a region already burdened by escalating ethnic tensions. From 2020 to 2022, Ethiopia was engulfed in a brutal conflict between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The war led to widespread suffering and displacement, intensifying long-standing animosities between the Amhara and Tigrayan communities — neighboring groups with a complicated and often troubled history.

A screenshot of Heaven Awot from the YouTube video, ‘የኢትዮጵያ እናቶች ይፍረዱኝ! እጅግ ዘግ’ናኝ እና አ’ሰ’ቃ’ቂ እውነት! ‘ፍትህ’ ፍለጋ የተደረገ ከባድ ተጋድሎ!‘ by Eyoha Media. Fair use

In the aftermath of the conflict, the region has continued to grapple with an armed insurgency, with some Amhara political leaders accusing the federal government of deliberately targeting their people.

These simmering tensions have increasingly spilled into the digital realm, where leaders and influencers from both the region and the diaspora frequently disseminate graphic content and incendiary rhetoric on social media.

In this volatile environment, the mother’s emotional testimony quickly went viral on Ethiopia’s social media platforms, sparking widespread outrage. The hashtag #JusticeforHeaven, named in memory of the victim, quickly amassed millions of views on TikTok.

These videos, which featured users expressing their anger over the crime and demanding justice for Heaven, became a focal point of the online conversation. Many people were outraged by the criminal’s attempt to appeal his conviction, criticizing the judicial process and pointing out perceived flaws in the case.

Screenshot from a video featuring Heaven Awot from the TikTok account @mottakeranyoo9. Fair use.

The situation garnered further attention when American rapper Cardi B urged her followers on X to sign a petition on Change.org demanding justice.

SIGN! https://t.co/rcxZPvReKV

— Cardi B (@iamcardib) August 27, 2024

However, the responses online were not unanimous. Some questioned the authenticity of the mother, Abekyelesh Adeba's account, suggesting it was part of a conspiracy to distract the Amhara people from their ongoing struggles against the Ethiopian federal government. One of the most prominent voices casting doubt on Adeba's story was “Mota Keraniyo,” a U.S.-based TikTok user. The day after her testimony, Mota posted inflammatory videos filled with Amhara-nationalist rhetoric, attacking both the victim and her mother.

In a shocking turn, he even claimed that the mother deserved to be raped because her daughter was fathered by a Tigrayan.

In response to Mota’s inflammatory remarks, a collective response emerged on TikTok, both within Ethiopia and among diaspora communities. As tensions grew, many TikTok users, motivated by longstanding grievances against Mota, organized coordinated reporting campaigns and hosted online gatherings that drew thousands of participants.

The atmosphere was marked by anger and frustration as users sought to have Mota’s content removed from the platform.

Campaigners hold a dress stained with red ink symbolizing blood, alongside images of Heaven Awot. Screenshot from the TikTok account a.b.c_24. Fair use.

Despite widespread efforts to report his content, the results were only partially effective.

While TikTok reportedly removed some of Mota's most extreme posts, he continued to reach his 420.9k followers. In a follow-up video, he issued an apology for his earlier remarks about the child Heaven Awot, framing the backlash against himself as an attempt to silence his advocacy for the Amhara community.

He urged his followers to support him by subscribing to his account and engaging with more of his content. Shortly thereafter, he shifted focus, advocating violence against the perpetrator, his relatives, and anyone associated with him, including his lawyer.

TikTok’s algorithm, which is designed to amplify content that garners engagement — whether positive or negative — further propelled Mota’s violent rhetoric, leading to its widespread dissemination across the platform.

His messages rapidly extended beyond TikTok, appearing on other social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram and even making their way to podcasts, talk radio, and television. Among this content were AI-generated videos that falsely posed as news reports, claiming authorities were investigating both the perpetrator and Mota, as well as others who spread conspiracy theories. Some users embraced these AI-generated videos as truthful, believing their online activism had effectively brought about justice.

Despite TikTok's policy prohibiting AI-generated content featuring individuals under 18 — whether real or fictional — videos featuring the likeness of the victim, Heaven Awot proliferated across TikTok and other platforms without being removed, in clear violation of the platform's guidelines. Throughout this surge in content, TikTok provided minimal moderation.

Mota’s rhetoric did not exist in isolation. Other figures in the diaspora and within Ethiopia followed suit, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. One such figure was Bethlehem Dagnachew, a former singer living in Switzerland, who combined nationalist rhetoric with false claims about the incident. Her disinformation campaign persisted until public pressure compelled her to retract her claims and issue condolences to the victim's mother.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, another TikTok user who denied the crime’s authenticity and insulted the victim was violently attacked by locals, who compelled him to issue an apology.

The spread of Mota’s violent messages, the actions of his followers, and the proliferation of fake AI-generated videos underscore a broader issue: the rapid metastasis of harmful content in African languages across social media platforms. Despite years of efforts by the media, academics, and social media companies themselves to address this problem, such content has become more pervasive and widespread than ever, posing a significant challenge to content moderation and platform accountability in under-resourced languages across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Originally published on Global Voices

Hachalu Hundessa interview with OMN via Firaabeek Entertainment / CC BY 3.0.

Editor’s note: This is a two-part analysis on Hachalu Hundessa, a popular Oromo musician whose murder incited ethnoreligious motivated violence fueled by disinformation online. Read Part I here.  

Within an hour of musician Hachalu Hundessa’s assassination on June 29 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopians netizens hit social media with scattershot conspiracy theories, hate speech & disinformation campaigns — particularly on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Most of these conspiracy theories tap into the country’s divisive historical issues with incendiary words that pitted Amhara and the Oromo communities against each other. Hachalu was an Oromo who wrote critical songs and spoke openly of fractured politics in Ethiopia. 

Stories began to circulate that Hachalu’s murder was orchestrated by government authorities — and by some accounts, by Prime Minister Abiy Ahemd himself, seen by many diaspora-based Oromo activists as a stooge of the Amhara people. The term neftegna or “riflemen,” is often hurled as a dog-whistle reference to Amhara people, Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group after the Oromo. 

CARD analyzed the trend in use of inflammatory terms, ‘ነፍጠኛ’ (neftegna) and ‘ጋላ’ (galla), on twitter and found out substantial increase in October 2019 and July 2020, when violence occurred. pic.twitter.com/GECulI5Cru

— CARD (@CARDEthiopia) August 5, 2020

Among these theories, one of the more popular claims holds that Hachalu’s disparaging remarks about Menelik’s II statue made during an interview with Oromia Media Network (OMN) a week before his killing incensed the “neftegna” and led them to assassinate him. (The statue has been a focus of tensions between the political elites of Amhara and Oromo).

Since Hachalu’s assassination, OMN has run several segments on YouTube and Facebook, with page viewership numbers ranging from 10,000 to over 200,000, that lay out different versions of this theory — that the Amhara were somehow involved in Hachalu's murder. 

Proponents of this theory seem to cherry-pick lines from the consequential OMN interview to find the nuggets that fit their desired spin.

These speculative claims moved swiftly to far-reaching satellite TV channels. Several “talking heads” based in the diaspora then repeated the same unconfirmed claims — particularly on two major opposition media outlets: OMN and Tigray Media House (TMH).

It was given further prominence when several top politicians—including Ilhan Omar a US Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district, home to the largest percentage of the Oromo diaspora community in the United States — possibly unwittingly retweeted a New York Times story about Hachalu’s killing with an insinuating quote:

The world isn’t kind to people who raise the political conscious of the public.

The music and activism of Hachalu Hundessa provided hope to the Oromo people and so many others.

May he rest in power.https://t.co/V19dngZT3T

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 30, 2020

At the same time, false and misleading claims bubbled up in a debate over where Hachalu should be buried. Some diaspora-based Oromo activists asserted that government authorities pressured Hachalu’s family to hold his funeral in Ambo, his hometown. Others accused authorities of rushing the funeral in Addis Ababa, to hide criminal evidence. These claims further inflamed ethnic tensions. Hachalu’s family and close friends tried to dispel these claims by notifying the public that it was their decision, in fact, to bury their son in Ambo. 

After the violence and destruction of properties targeted non-Oromo, non-Muslim families in parts of Oromia, many netizens viewed it as the inevitable result of specific speculations and innuendos about the ethnic identity of Hachalu’s killers — spread mainly via Facebook and OMN. 

OMN, already under fire for cutting out essential details from Hachalu’s fateful interview, then broadcasted an open call for genocide against Amhara people, immediately following Hachalu’s murder: 

July 1, 2020 OMN LIVE from MN: quotes from a speaker in a town hall meeting:

- “Amharas need to be exterminated in our neibourhood.” pic.twitter.com/VwsLZPJoYv

— Alemayehu Gemeda (@AlemayehuGK) July 5, 2020

Meanwhile, members of the Oromo diaspora community continued to emphasize the violence committed by government forces perceived as dominated by the Amhara elite. 

Other netizens say that local authorities in Ethiopia are complicit in the organization of vigilante groups — activists and political groups — who are actively stoking ethnic and religious resentment on- and offline. 

Putting together the political puzzle

While massive speculation continues to churn on social media, government authorities have issued one theory regarding Hachalu’s murder that that appears to be supported with some evidence.

Authorities are now pursuing a theory that the murder was carried out by two opposition groups with different motives but who may share a belief that Hachalu should be assassinated. The first group is Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the second group is OLF-Shane. 

The TPLF (once part of the now-defunct Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) controlled Ethiopia’s security and intelligence services for 27 years before they were ousted from power in April 2018. Hachalu was an outspoken opponent of the TPLF regime and spent most of his life fighting against them. 

In 2017, in a nationally televised concert, aimed mainly at helping members of the Oromo community who were displaced from the Somali region, he courageously and explicitly criticized the TPLF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoQiCFN0Ag4

Politically speaking, the TPLF associates Abiy with imperial Ethiopia, alleging that Abiy conspires to bring back its relics to the government. They benefit from the assertion that recent violence is the fault of Abiy’s government, who failed to provide national security. 

Abiy’s administration, in turn, denies such allegations and puts the blame on the TPLF, whom they accuse of wanting to wreak chaos and push for regime change in Ethiopia.

OLF-Shane is a splinter paramilitary organization of OLF that uses violent tactics to advance its political aim to establish an independent Oromia. The group has reportedly run shadowy death squads who call themselves Abbaa Torbee, – an Afan-Oromo phrase meaning, “Whose turn is this week?”

Abbaa Torbee has an active presence on Facebook. There are hundreds of user account profiles and roughly 28 pages and numerous groups devoted to this violent extremist group. Nearly all pages and user accounts were created over the last two years, as various factions of OLF were welcomed back to Ethiopia from exile and attracted tens of thousands of followers on Facebook.

In the months leading up to Hachalu’s assassination, Abbaa Torbee members intimidated, beat up, and, in some cases, killed sympathizers of the ruling Prosperity Party, both civilians and foreigners. They think these groups unfairly exploit Oromo peoples’ resources

These killings barely registered in Ethiopian media, let alone internationally.

Abbaa Torbee seemed to hold some inside knowledge about the chaos that followed Hachalu’s murder. Most notably, on one of their most popular pages, they warned that they will start “cleansing Addis Ababa” a day before Hachalu was murdered. 

A screenshot of one of Abbaa Torbees Facebook post. Screenshot was taken on August 5, 2020.

Turmoil indeed transpired in Addis Ababa and ethnic and religious minorities faced violence in parts of Oromia. The same page posted a close-up picture of Hachalu's corpse within hours of his assassination, accusing government authorities of killing him. 

Also, several Abbaa Torbe Facebook pages have called for Oromo protesters to march to Addis Ababa and haul down the statue of Menelik II. 

A screenshot of Abbaa Torbee's Facebook post. Screenshot taken on August 5 2020.

To close observers of Ethiopian disinformation campaigns, this all sounds wildly familiar. Think back to the summer of 2019, when intra-ethnic rivalries among the Amhara elites ended with the assassinations of top government officials in the Amhara region. Facebook accounts associated with Amhara nationalists spread rumors that said the assassinations were part of a plot created by Oromo elites to wipe out the leadership of the Amhara people.

Similarly, disinformation campaigns about the tragic murder of Hachalu reflect a bitter divide within Oromo elites. 

On the one hand, there are those who attributed Hachalu’s assassination to Amharas, rooted in the interpretation of the modern Ethiopian state as an Amhara settler-colonial project — and Hachalu’s murder is the continuation of that project. 

On the other hand, there are those who believe Oromos played an integral role in building the modern Ethiopian state and Hachalu’s assassins want to shore up their dwindling political fortune by killing an Oromo icon — and pursue their political project of separatism.

Originally published on Global Voices

Hachalu Hundessa interview with OMN via Firaabeek Entertainment / CC BY 3.0.

Editor’s note: This is a two-part analysis on Hachalu Hundessa, a popular Oromo musician whose murder incited ethnoreligious violence fueled by disinformation online. Read Part II here.  

Iconic Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa gained prominence for using his creative talent to raise the consciousness of the Oromo people. He was assassinated in a suburb of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, on June 29.

That night, at 9:30 pm, as Hachalu was exiting his vehicle, a man named Tilahun Yami allegedly walked up to his car and fired a gun into the artist’s chest. He was rushed to the nearest hospital, where he was officially declared dead. It was later determined that the bullet severely damaged his internal organs.

Addis Ababa’s police chief reported two suspects were arrested. After a few days, government authorities charged an alleged assassin along with two other accomplices.

In the wake of his murder, the country has struggled to come to terms with the violence that followed. The truth of Hachalu's assassination is not yet fully clear, and in its aftermath, speculation began to fly as politicians and activists stoked long-standing tensions between Oromo and Amahara elites, two of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups.

That day, mourners flooded the streets of Addis Ababa and cities and towns across Oromia state. The next morning, Oromia Media Network (OMN), a satellite TV station on which Hachalu had his last contentious interview, provided online and TV coverage as his casket was transferred from Addis Ababa to Hachalu’s hometown, Ambo.

The slow, televised journey turned into a deadly battle between government authorities and opposition politicians over where Hachalu would be buried, and OMN interrupted its coverage as the hearse was forced to return to Addis Ababa. At least ten people were killed and several were injured in Addis Ababa.

The scuffle led to the arrest of several opposition politicians including Jawar Mohammed, an OMN figurehead, and opposition politician Bekele Gerba, who were both charged with instigating the mayhem.

Confusion swirled after government authorities eventually took Halachu's body back to Ambo by helicopter, where feuding parties continued to clash, denying the bereaved family members a proper burial.

Meanwhile, turmoil and violence ensued. A three-day rampage gripped parts of Oromia and Addis Ababa, at a substantial cost: 239 people were left dead; hundreds of others were injured and more than 7,000 people were arrested for violence and property damage worth millions of Ethiopian birr.

On June 30, the government imposed an internet shutdown to attempt to halt calls for violence circulating on social media that lasted three weeks.

A number of people were shot and killed by government security forces, but several news outlets including Voice of America and Addis Standard reported that angry mobs from the Oromo ethnic group attacked multiethnic, interfaith towns and cities in southeastern Oromia, targeting non-Oromo, non-Muslim families in the region.

Most of the violence fell along ethnic Amahara-Oromo lines, but religion may have played a more central role due to an intricate, localized understanding of ethnicity: The southeast Oromo community’s ethnic identity markers usually combine the religion of Islam and the Afan-Oromo language. A local farmer reportedly said “we thought Hachalu was Oromo” after he watched Hachalu's televised funeral rites that followed the traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

According to reports, most victims of the most gruesome violence were minority Christian Amharas, Christian Oromos and Gurage people. Eyewitnesses say mobs destroyed and burned property, committed lynching and beheadings and dismembered victims.

A fateful interview

When news of Hachalu’s assassination first hit, Oromo diaspora media outlets zeroed in on Hachalu’s fateful interview with OMN host Guyo Wariyo, that aired the week before Halachu was killed.

During the interview, Guyo repeatedly asked Hachalu provocative questions about his alleged sympathy for the ruling party, interrupting him multiple times to challenge his answers.

Hachalu fiercely denied any sympathies with the ruling party, but also decried the deeply discordant and fractionalized Oromo political parties, demonstrating his staunch independence as a thinker and musician — a quality that made him a target for online abuse until the day of his murder.

At one point, however, Guyo asked Hachalu about the historical injustices allegedly committed against the Oromo people by Menelik II, Ethiopia’s 19th-century emperor who shaped modern Ethiopia.

Hachalu shocked some listeners when he answered that the horse seen immortalized in Menelik’s equestrian statue in Addis Ababa belongs to an Oromo farmer called Sida Debelle, and that Menelik robbed that horse.

This exchange attracted applause — and criticism — from commentators on Facebook and Twitter.

When Hachalu was killed one week later, many members of the Oromo diaspora community immediately speculated that Hachalu’s criticism of the Menelik II statue infuriated sympathizers of imperial Ethiopia, which may have led to his murder.

On social media, Oromo netizens focused obsessively on Hachalu’s Menelik-related remarks, which led many down a winding path to an insidious disinformation campaign. The rest of the interview contains other loaded issues of divisions and contradictions within the Oromo community.

Throughout the interview, Guyo grilled Hachalu about the country’s ongoing political reforms, stoking anti-government sentiment with questions about Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, himself an Oromo, and whether or not the government had met the demands of the Oromo people after the prime minister came to power in 2018.

Hachalu reiterated his non-involvement in the rabid partisanship of Oromo politics but he did criticize those who question Abiy’s Oromo identity.

He defended his position against top Oromo opposition leaders who sought an alliance with the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a once-dominant party with historic ties to the now-defunct Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Front (the EPRDF). The TPLF turned into an opposition party after Abiy dismantled the EPRDF.

Hachalu also addressed the political violence in the Oromia region, blaming both government authorities and the militant, splinter right-wing Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) militia group (informally known as OLF-Shane).

Following Hachalu’s murder, the government was able to acquire and release the full 71-minute interview to the public. The missing tape included Hachalu’s accounts of death threats he received from parts of western Oromia, where the radical OLF-Shane militia is active. Hachalu said he believed he would not have been attacked on social media if he had praised OLF-Shane.

He addressed a direct conflict he had with Getachew Assefa, Ethiopia’s security and intelligence chief during the TPLF period.

Guyo, who promoted this interview on Facebook as “must-see TV” in the days before its broadcast, has since been arrested and the government is investigating the full 71-minutes of interview tape for further clues that may help determine the facts regarding Hachalu's murder.

Read more about the consequences of Hachalu Hundessa's murder in Part II. 

Originally published on Global Voices

Unity Park in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, December 2019. Photo by Ras Addisu via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

Heads of states from several eastern African countries gathered in October 2019 in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to celebrate the grand opening of Unity Park, an urban park located within the imperial palace.

The park — the personal initiative of Ethiopia’s reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — contains Ethiopia’s historical, ethnic and culture galleries. It also maintains a display of a colossal wax statue of Ethiopia’s past rulers including Emperor Menelik II and Emperor Haile Selassie — two monarchs whose combined reigns lasted about 70 years.

The park aims to tell the story of all Ethiopians and celebrate the country’s diverse ethnicities, religions, cultures, historical figures, and endemic plants and animals.

But a quick scroll through the news about the park’s opening on social media revealed politicized, nationalistic reactions with two mutually exclusive narratives that fell largely along ethnic lines of the two major ethnolinguistic groups: Amhara and Oromo.

At the core of this divide is two mirror-opposite reactions to the unveiling of the monuments that depict two emperors sitting on their thrones — adorned with imperial regalia: They represent entrenched fault lines in Ethiopian politics.

Wax Statue of Haile Selassie. Photo courtesy of Edom Kassaye.

Amhara nationalists were largely pleased even though some slammed it, describing it as Abiy’s vanity project — Abiy himself identifies as Oromo.

Meanwhile, several Oromo politicians and campaigners were furious — particularly, prominent opposition politician Jawar Mohammed, who was irked. Jawar said that building wax statues for Emperor Menelik II and Emperor Haile Selassie is an affront to Oromos and to all other ethnic groups crushed by the emperors.

Emperor Menelik II is widely regarded as the first modern Ethiopian monarch who transformed the Ethiopian State. He is venerated as a symbol of freedom and forgiveness; he is also blamed for kicking people in southern Ethiopia off their land and privileging Amharic language and Christianity.

The next day, Jawar along with Lencho Leta, a veteran politician and a founding member of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) led a pilgrimage to the east-central district of Hetosa of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, to visit the Anole Martyrs memorial monument, the historical site that signifies an enduring grievance of Oromo nationalists over what they call Emperor Menelik’s II brutal killings, cultural marginalization and loss of their ancestral land in the late 19th century.

Weeks later in a television interview, Jawar said:

 As long as they elevate Menelik, we will dig out his crimes and make generations know about his crimes, as long as they elevate Haile Selassie. … we are going to do that.

This was not a one-off case.

After Abiy lifted the oppressive lid off the nation in April 2018 — ending 27 years of dictatorship — controversies about cultural events, flags, political rallies, monuments and the significance of past rulers began to take up the bulk of Ethiopia’s social media conversations — which were often laced with inflammatory language.

It is a recurring pattern.

Briefly, it runs like this: A government official, opposition leader, journalist or prominent celebrity opines about a historical figure’s significance, let’s say, Emperor Menelik II, on one of the popular social media platforms. Within minutes, social media platforms are swarmed by hundreds of supportive or scathing responses.

Wax statue of Menelik II. Photo courtesy of Edom Kassaye.

These culturally-charged exchanges reinforce an atmosphere of resentment across numerous online spaces among different Ethiopian ethnic groups — or more accurately, their elites. These jabs entrench the feeling that one’s ethnic group is threatened with extinction as the object of another’s aggression.

Multiple TV stations that sprouted after April 2018 as a major part of Ethiopia’s fast-changing media landscape have tended to echo and amplify this division — with fatal consequences.

For example, communal violence rocked Oromia after Jawar wrote on his Facebook page alleging that government authorities had plotted to assassinate him in October 2019. The regional coup plot in the Amhara region in June 2019 can also nominally be connected to ultra-nationalist social media narratives.

In many cases, an army of Facebook and YouTube personalities, government supporters, opposition figures, political parties and diaspora journalists often participate in or seed inflammatory information into an already complex, confusing and heightened social media ecosystem — often as a way of gaining support for their causes.

How two opposition figures stoke support

Two opposition figures, Jawar Mohammed, member of Oromo Federalist Congress and Eskinder Nega, a former political prisoner and a chair of a recently formed political party, Balderas for Genuine Democracy, are spokesmen who stand out for the way they use social media to garner support.

Jawar, with nearly 1.9 million Facebook followers — often enthusiastic supporters — positions himself as a defender of Oromo interests. With a massive following, he commands symbolic importance to the Oromo youth movement known as Qeerroo and is generally portrayed as their leader.

This widely shared meme was used to mobilize residents of Addis Ababa to support Eskinder's call for a protest demonstration in the capital in October 2019. It presented Eskinder as a benign but courageous defender of the residents of Addis Ababa from a virulent-looking person dressed in a flag of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF).

Eskinder, on the other hand, has become increasingly reliant on Twitter as a means of bolstering support. Although Eskinder was late to join Twitter, he developed a sizable following and his comments often provoke furious reactions from detractors. His embrace of the platform is seen as a political imperative as mobile devices and mobile connectivity have become more widespread.

Eskinder routinely uses his Twitter handle to accuse Qeerroo members of committing genocide against religious and ethnic minorities in Oromia. His framing of Qeerroo resonates with thousands of Twitter accounts that represent Amhara nationalists and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church followers.

Although Jawar and Eskinder dominate two different platforms — Facebook and Twitter — their negative chemistry is equally apparent.

Both manage to articulate sharply opposing views on issues like Ethiopian federal structure, the legal status of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, an enclaved multi-ethnic city within the border of Oromia, the history of Emperor Menelik II and the Ethiopian constitution. 

A widely circulated meme presents Eskinder as a nonviolent person while framing Jawar as a violent person.

They aim to strengthen their already solid connections with their followers on social media. The reactions, comments, retweets and shares on Facebook and Twitter are higher than any other opposition figures.

And for all the differences between Eskinder and Jawar, they both do their fair share of injecting misleading information into Ethiopia's information ecosystem.

Often, Eskinder spins and overblows Ethiopian exceptionalism, destruction of historical sites and emphasizes atrocities committed in the Oromia region.

For instance, in the following tweet, Eskinder wrote approvingly that Amharic was selected to be included among the working languages of the African Union. But  Amharic was never selected:

YES to AMHARIC, Ethiopia's. working (offiical) language for over 700 years,as one of the working languages of the AFRICAN UNION…..AMHARIC is the embodiment of AFRICA'S long history of NATION BUILDING……this is not about a language,its about AFRICA'S place in world HISTORY pic.twitter.com/0hvK19tFRw

— Eskinder Nega (@eskinder_nega) February 10, 2019

Since September 2018, the two have been locked in a long-running battle that played out most recently in November 2019 in the United States, when both toured to raise funds from members of Ethiopian diaspora groups for their political projects in Ethiopia.

If Qeerroo is a rebel without cause, you would still be rotting in Weyane's gulags! Ungrateful! https://t.co/ekMS9rKxtu

— Jawar Mohammed (@Jawar_Mohammed) September 15, 2018

No moment better captured the rivalry and the ideological contestation between the two men than their tour in the United States as their supporters played a game of cat-and-mouse throughout their tours.

Jawar’s tour had come on the heels of several tumultuous days in which communal violence spread across Oromia, which led to the death of 86 people after his allegation on Facebook sparked off a chain of reactions that started with his supporters gathering in front of his residence in Addis Ababa.

His detractors say his Facebook post caused the death of 86 people — and Eskinder, in particular, pinned the responsibility on him.

Jawar denied that his posts had anything to do with the violence, claiming instead that his actions actually prevented worse violence.

As he traveled across the United States, his supporters showed solidarity, coordinating town hall meetings and raising funds in various US cities with sizable Oromo populations.

People opposing Jawar, — most of whom are members of Eskinder’s support base — held a series of rallies opposing Jawar’s town hall meetings.

Like Eskinder, Jawar also has a habit of using questionable persuasion techniques. He often accuses authorities of the Amhara regional state of being nostalgic for Ethiopia’s imperial era and highlights violence that targets minorities in the Amhara region.

After he completed his US tour, Jawar accused authorities of Amhara regional state of organizing and funding what he described as a “hateful, shameful and violent campaign.”

As proof of his accusation, he accompanied his note with a photograph that showed a top-level Amhara regional state official, Yohannes Buayalew, posing with Yoni Magna, a diaspora-based social media personality who is notorious for his rants, insults and conspiracy theories.

The attempt is to insinuate that Amhara regional state officials have worked with Yoni Magna, — who was also seen at one of the demonstrations.

Some people did openly hurl bigoted slurs used to refer to an individual of Oromo ancestry during the protests, but there is no evidence to suggest that these rallies were in fact organized and funded by Ethiopian authorities.

Ultra-nationalist sentiment through songs

Until now, inflammatory language has been confined to writing, memes, short clips, graphics and pictures. But as the role of social media gains ground, the terrain of ethnic tension has expanded to YouTube music videos.

In a flood of Afan Oromo and Amharic language music videos, singers promote nationalistic narratives that assert the superiority of their group — sometimes even promoting conflict with the other group.

Some of the most nationalistic expressions in songs focus on the homeland, flag and historical figures. Praising Emperor Menelik II as a liberator or denouncing him as a monster has long been a recurring theme.

In fact, there is a Facebook page that went up in 2013 to highlight the atrocities committed by a soldier of Emperor Menelik II.

But the launch of Unity Park elicited several Oromo music videos that focus on ethnic origins of government authorities.

Because the park is Abiy’s project, some songs portray him as a person who committed ethnic treason by honoring Emperor Menelik II. One song depicted him as a sellout; another one questions if he is an Oromo at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8zDUmtVc-w

Caalaa Daggafaa, an Afan Oromo singer, accused Abiy of being a sellout for praising past monarchs. He rails against the statue of Menelik II, whom he described as a monster. 

In the same video, he pays respect for the armed forces of the Oromo Liberation Front, describing them as heroes doing a tough job by continuing the struggle for the emancipation of the Oromo people.

Meanwhile, Amharic singers deliver odes to Menelik II, describing him as a unifier and liberator. 

In one music video, Dagne Walle, a rising Amharic singer, swings toward the camera, wielding his rifle while humming that he has inherited valor from Menelik II — alluding to the emperor as his father. 

Footage of crowds with traditional cloth armed with rifles, stomping their feet while waving Ethiopian flags, and a roaring lion punctuates the music video, titled “Wey Finkich” (“Hell No”).

These songs rack up a huge number of views on YouTube — reaping advertising dollars while hardening ethnic polarization.

This article is part of a series called “The identity matrix: platform regulation of online threats to expression in Africa.” These posts interrogate identity-driven online hate speech or discrimination based on language or geographic origin, misinformation and harassment (particularly against female activists and journalists) prevalent in digital spaces of seven African countries: Algeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, Tunisia and Uganda. The project is funded by the Africa Digital Rights Fund of The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA).

Originally published on Global Voices

Political activist Jawar Mohammed. Photo by Dotohelp [CC BY-SA 4.0]

On November 17, all except one ethnic party that comprises Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front — the EPRDF —declared that they have agreed to merge.

Tigray People's Liberation Front, (TPLF) the most senior of the four parties, determined to reject the agreement and delay the merger, setting the stage for convulsions in the messy political transition instigated by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that began in April 2018.

However, the move is expected to lessen the country's ethnic divisions and violence incited by hate speech, disinformation and misinformation on social media.

The announcement comes after several universities in Ethiopia have become a focus of vicious misinformation battles among political groups following the killing, in November 2019, of two Oromo students at Woldia University, a university located in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara region:

“He checked mine and said, ‘he is Oromo.’ Then one of them hit me with a metal stick and the other one with a rock. I fell down and fainted. When I became conscious, I saw myself laying in pool of blood.” https://t.co/ILfzpRIMiv

— Tigist Geme (@TigGeme) November 13, 2019

On November 10, 2019, it was reported that an obscure fight broke out between Oromo and Amhara students at Woldia University.

Then, a swirl of rumors, spread by social media, had warned of attacks by one group of students against the other, and this set off widespread panic among students studying in universities located outside their home states.

Government authorities have pleaded for calm, and Prime Minister Abiy denounced the rumor-mongering and vowed if local authorities do not enforce the law and restore calm, the government will shut down universities.

The panic at the country’s several universities has not only underscored the deep roots of ethnic tensions in Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions are usually simplified as a conflict between Amhara versus Oromo, but also a symptom of a complex and deadly power struggle inside the EPRDF.

EPRDF is the coalition of four ethnic parties. Members from these four parties: Amhara Democratic Party (ADP), Oromo Democratic Party (ODP), Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement (SEPDM) and Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), currently make up Ethiopia’s top leadership.

Since 1991, the EPRDF has been the central actor in Ethiopian politics. However, over the last two years, it has practically disappeared as a cohesive coalition, although it continues to govern the country.

The party is entangled in a deadly and incessant power struggle, mostly along ethnic lines among its four members, supporters and members of each ethnic party are taking their fight to social media.

Members of the coalition, particularly, ADP, ODP and TPLF, were openly flirting with belligerent nationalist opposition groups. They are battling each other by leaking embarrassing stories to opposition media outlets that add fuel to the ongoing misinformation.

The stories they leak are sometimes completely made up. More often, they are misleading or biased, put together to serve the purposes of these parties in their power struggle.

For instance, in October, amid rising tension, Seyoum Teshome, a prominent social media commentator, started to publish a series of dubious screengrabs of email exchanges allegedly hacked from the email account of a top TPLF member. Teshome, a strong supporter of Prime Minister Abiy, has been imprisoned two times in 2016, 2018, for unknown reasons.

The hacked emails alleged that top TPLF members were planning to incite chaos across universities in Ethiopia, in order to erode Ethiopians’ trust in Prime Minister Abiy's ability to guarantee security in the country.

Jawar Mohammed's ‘assassination plot': A disinformation case

On October 21, Jawar Mohammed, a prominent Oromo political activist and former ally to then-Prime Minister Abiy, wrote several Facebook updates in which he reported events that transpired around near the gate of his residence in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.

Collectively, his posts in three different languages, Afan Oromo, Amharic and English reported a squad of federal policemen who came near his home after midnight and ordered his government-assigned protective team to pack and leave.

Since April 2018, the government has eased media restrictions, allowing once-banned leaders of opposition parties and activists back to Ethiopia, providing security details for them, including Mohammed.

A screenshot of Jawar Mohammed's Facebook post. Screenshot taken on October 25, 2019.

In the updates, Mohammed warned that if any of the armed men attempted to move closer, his protective team would defend themselves and if blood gets spilled, he would blame the government.

In the hours after his updates, amid concern and anticipation from both supporters and detractors, Mohammed appeared on a Facebook live stream broadcast by the Oromia Media Network (OMN) TV station, which he co-founded and currently serves as executive director. During the stream, he escalated his clash with government authorities and accused them of a plot to get him killed.

But government authorities, including Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, denied Mohammed’s allegation, saying if they wanted him to get killed, they would not have provided him with security in the first place.

His allegations sparked off a chain of reactions that started with supporters gathering in front of his residence in Addis Ababa.

There were street protests in parts of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, which in turn triggered violence at rallies, followed by what news media described as “communal violence” in the region.

Vocal minority groups who accuse the Oromia administration of discriminatory practice also held protests in Adama Nazeret, a city located in eastern Oromia; episodes of sporadic violence led to deaths among both minority groups.

In one of the deadliest episodes of Ethiopia’s numerous violence cycles, at least 86 people were killed, and several injured between October 21-23, 2019, in Oromia.

The post-violence social media circulation of images and videos shows Ethiopians have inflicted extreme violence and atrocities upon their fellow citizens that led to widespread fear and communal tension.

As violence subsided in the region, a new battle began online over interpretations and the assignation of blame.

The heightened polarization along ethnic lines filled Ethiopian social media with starkly different interpretations of the violence: “Ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” terms were used by Amhara nationalists, Ethiopian nationalists and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo followers, while Oromo and Sidama nationalists used phrases like “government-prompted violence.”

These interpretations strained relations between mostly Amhara and Oromo elites that led to mutual name-calling fraught with disinformation and misinformation.

Mohammed’s critics were unsparing in assessing blame as they spread stories, images and memes on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that pinned responsibility on him.

For them, he caused the violence by falsely alleging an assassination plot and deliberately stirring up nationalist sentiment.

Also, one of the hacked emails Seyoum Teshome published on October 25, 2019, claims that Mohammed and the TPLF were covertly working to incite violence in Oromia with the purpose of preventing the EPRDF merger.

Opponents characterized the violent incident as a massacre caused because of Mohammed's Facebook posts, a narrative that has gained widespread traction on Ethiopian Twitter under a hashtag “#October2019massacre.” They called for a tough response from Prime Minister Abiy (an Oromo), whom they routinely accuse of either being too soft on Mohammed or secretly working with him.

Mohammed's allies see the protest in Oromia as a victory that prevented an attempt on his life and hail protesters in Oromia as heroes.

They lay the blame for the deadly violence on Amhara nationalists and other opposition political parties.

Most Oromo advocates and politicians who showed solidarity with Mohammed said Oromos were waiting for the opportunity to protest, with his murder plot allegation as the last straw. In one widely shared protest video on Facebook, protesters were heard hurling insults at Abiy, calling him “Habesha”, a term popularly used to refer to Ethiopians as a whole, but Oromo nationalists use it to accuse an Oromo person who is yielding to non-Oromo interests.

Mohammed is something of a protest guru, a media executive and political strategist in his community. With nearly 1.8 million followers on Facebook, he used his page to guide street protest, raise money and solicit information from groups inside EPRDF that helped to bring down the once-dominant TPLF, which for years had blocked social media and arrested and tortured bloggers.

Even then, EPRDF was able to actively use social media to mobilize support, spread disinformation and attack opponents, including Mohammed. In fact, the true precursor for the current dizzying disinformation swirling Ethiopian social media began back in 2014.

For several years, paid online commentators tied to the EPRDF had posted comments that favored party policies and attacked opponents. The commentators were known as cocas, an Amharic expression roughly translated into English as “contemptible cadres.” The cocas apparently were hired by members of the EPRDF coalition in an attempt to manipulate public opinion.

The cocas used to unite easily around stories and memes generated by the EPRDF. For example, when Tedros Adahanom, a member of TPLF, ran for an election to lead the World Health Organization (WHO) as Director-General in 2017, he mobilized thousands of supporters on Facebook and created the impression that he has widespread support.

Likewise, Mohammed has exploited the seismic changes unfolding inside the EPRDF. On his Facebook page, he often posts and provides a punditry analysis on OMN’s Facebook live streaming service, pitching himself as a person who receives top secrets from the EPRDF. He posts with no particular schedule, sometimes several times in a day, some days not at all. His posts provide information about what he often calls the collective interest, grievances and alleged threats of the Oromo people.

OMN’s Facebook page, with 1 million followers, is one of the fastest-growing pages among Ethiopia’s media organizations.

Mohammed ranks first among Ethiopian political figures in a number of followers of his verified Facebook page of 1.8 million followers. No other Ethiopian public figure who has some political sway is even close.

This article is part of a series of posts examining interference with digital rights through methods such as network shutdowns and disinformation during key political events in seven African countries: Algeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The project is funded by the Africa Digital Rights Fund of The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA).

Originally published on Global Voices

A young man in Ethiopia works at a desktop computer. Photo taken on November 28, 2011, via UNICEF on Flickr.

This story is the first in a two-part series on online disinformation and politics in Ethiopia. You can read the second part here.

A deep split that exists within Ethiopia's ruling coalition — the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (the EPRDF) —was made evident over the last few weeks when a Facebook row broke out between two major political party members who disagreed on the historical accounts of Ethiopia as a modern state.

The row revealed how party members within the EPRDF use social media — through posts and memes — to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation and incendiary content.

The EPRDF is a coalition of four ethnically-based parties. Members from these four parties: Amhara Democratic Party (ADP), Oromo Democratic Party (ODP), Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement (SEPDM) and Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), currently make up Ethiopia’s top leadership.

Until 2018, the TPLF was the dominant party in the coalition, holding absolute power for over 25 years. ADP and ODP have joined forces to put an end to the supremacy of TPLF, yet its members continue their rivalry, with infighting that usually goes under the radar. Tensions have risen steadily since April 2018, when Abiy Ahmed of the ODP was sworn in as prime minister.

On October 4, ODP-ADP infighting burst out into the open when members and supporters of ADP and ODP started to bicker over a remark made by the vice president of Oromia Regional State, Shimeles Abdisa, in Addis Ababa, on the eve of Irreecha (an annual celebration marking the beginning of spring).

In his remarks, Abdisa hailed the Irreecha celebration in Addis Ababa, which he described as the very place where Oromos were defeated and humiliated by the old regime:

The Oromo people were defeated right here, our humiliation started right here.

In his speech, Abdisa struck a triumphant tone and marked the day's celebration in Addis as a turning point in the struggle of the Oromo people. He used the Amharic word neftegna (“riflemen” in English) to refer to the ruling class established in the wake of Emperor Menelik II's conquest in southern Ethiopia in the late 19th century.

Today, many ethnic Amahras view Emperor Menelik II as a symbol of triumph and defiance of European colonialism, while many Oromos consider him the root cause of their social and cultural subjugation.

Abdisa’s use of the term neftegna prompted backlash given that it is often used to refer to members of Emperor Menelik II’s army after TPLF came to power in 1991.

The following day, in a Facebook post, Asemahegn Aseres, a top ADP member, accused Abdisa of employing coded language to intimidate the Amhara people and, in turn, drew the ire of Taye Dendea, a top ODP member, who saw Asemahegn’s accusation as a denial of the historical social and cultural subjugation the Oromos suffered.

Dueling statements made by Aseres and Dendea exemplify the differences in interpretations of Ethiopia’s historical events among the country’s elites. While the ADP considers the formation of a modern Ethiopian state as faultless and virtuous, the ODP understands its formation as a process that led to the subjugation and humiliation of Oromos at the hands of Ethiopian emperors.

Aseres and Dendea have several things in common: They are young politicians who aspire to long political careers and whose parties, the ADP and ODP, — have banded together to bring down the supremacy of TPLF in April 2018.

Their row on Facebook bolstered their popularity and ushered an intense wave of political polarization freighted with misinformation.

A screenshot of Aseres's post on Facebook. Screenshot taken on October 16.

Their spat led to an outpouring of support on their respective Facebook pages, feverishly gathering up reactions, comments, and shares.

A screenshot of Taye's Facebook post. Screenshot taken on October 16.

Taye’s page, with 56,432 followers, racked up about 5,000 shares and generated 3,500 comments, while Asemahegn’s page, with 45,565 followers, mustered about 3,000 shares and 2,500 comments — just within 24 hours of their posts.

These numbers aren’t enough to gauge the extent of this political divide among Ethiopian citizens. However, it shows how two distinct nationalist discourses on social media struggle for primacy in the debate over Ethiopia’s past events and political future.

The heated exchange not only tests the tactical alliance of ADP and ODP, but it also exerts a “contagion effect” by galvanizing sympathizers by employing misinformation, inflammatory stories, memes and videos on social media.

Manipulating public opinion: The case of EthiopianDJ

For years, members of the EPRDF have used social media to manipulate public opinion on social media for their benefit. In 2017, when a series of EPRDF top-secret documents were leaked online, an army of paid Facebook personalities and bloggers was deployed to produce disparaging comments and misinformation about critics of the Ethiopian government.

However, as the internal power struggle and the ideological battle intensified among EPRDF members, misinformation tactics are shifting from targeting critics of the Ethiopian government to targeting each other and building allies from opposition groups.

For example, on September 3, 2019 Aseres made a little-noticed interview with EthiopianDJ, a Facebook page with about 1.1 million followers, known for spreading fake news, incendiary memes and conspiracy theories including one that says Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed somehow was part of the plot that killed the country's top military officials and leaders of the Amhara region in June 2019.

In another incident, EthiopianDJ posted images that purported to show security officers confiscating green, yellow and red flags from followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, during an annual Meskel celebration, while tolerating the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) flag. (The green, yellow and red flag is associated with Ethiopia’s past emperors while the OLF flag represents Oromo resistance.)

The images are authentic, but they are misleading. The images were actually taken from two different celebrations, Meskel and Irrechaa, held a week apart — albeit in the same venue. During these celebrations, security officers seized and removed flags considered unlawful by the Ethiopian government.

Most often displaying flags associated with opposition groups and old Ethiopian regimes during public events such as Meskel and Irreechaa are considered illegal.

There is no indication that EthiopianDJ has received money from EPRDF, but it offers a fresh example of the misinformation tactics of the disintegrating party.

Screenshot of a post by EthiopianDJ Facebook page taken on October 16. The post alleges that the police were allowing Oromos to fly their resistance flag.

EthiopiaDJ's post with these images was shared about 1,000 times and generated 782 comments.

No empirical data shows that automated accounts or bots may have generated these comments, but signs of social media manipulation exist in hundreds of sham Facebook accounts with numerous made-up names that regularly post, like and share incendiary content.

Repeated, deliberated disinformation

Manipulation tactics used by EPRDF members against each other in their internal power struggle serve as a blueprint for opposition groups to attack their opponents and the government.

Over the last two weeks, Ethiopian netizens witnessed repeated, deliberate disinformation around public holidays and political events that often led to unintentional misinformation.

In one high-profile incident, well-known opposition activist, Eskinder Nega, tweeted a two-line poem purportedly written by famed poet and actress, Meron Getenet, which takes a swipe at the leadership of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But the poem was subsequently found to be taken from an imposter Facebook page that used Meron’s name. The poem, a sharp and direct takedown of Abiy Ahmed’s leadership (without mentioning Abiy's name), characterizes his administration as “directionless.”

A fact-checking journalist reported the poem attributed to Meron was wrong, but Nega’s original message had already been retweeted over 76 times and his tweet has not yet been deleted.

In another online incident, Oromo activist Jawar Mohammed, who has more than 1.7 million followers on Facebook, questioned the integrity of the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE), after its communication adviser tweeted a question to Addis Ababa’s mayor (an ODP member) when the Irreecha holiday-related road closures will end.

In what has become one of his most high-performing posts, Jawar shared the screengrab of the tweet along with a statement questioning the integrity of NEBE on his Facebook page.

Given the intense political polarization around the celebration of Irreecha in Addis Ababa, some consider the tweet from NEBE's communication adviser insensitive. But Jawar's Facebook post is also misleading.

These incidents of mis- and disinformation and misinformation fuel pre-election suspicion as Ethiopia plans to hold highly-anticipated general elections in about ten months.

A screenshot of post by Jawar Mohammed questioning the integrity of the election board.

This article is part of a series of posts examining interference with digital rights through methods such as network shutdowns and disinformation during key political events in seven African countries: Algeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The project is funded by the Africa Digital Rights Fund of The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA).

Originally published on Global Voices

A priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church rests inside the 13th century rock-hewn Church of Bet Giorgis, Lalibela, Ethiopia, November 1, 2007. Photo by A. Davey via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

On September 1, 2019, an ad hoc committee formed by Oromo clerics from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC), declared their plan to establish a new regional parish administration unit in Oromia Regional State. They want to establish a regional “episcopacy” — in church speak — that caters to the spiritual, administrative and linguistic needs of the Orthodox Oromo people.

The EOTC currently has over 50 million members comprised of members from all over Ethiopia.

Oromo church members say that inefficiency and corruption hinders EOTC from addressing their spiritual, linguistic and administrative needs and members of the ad hoc committee threatened to take measures into their own hands — including the launch of a distinct, separate administrative unit — if they don’t hear back within 30 days from EOTC's ruling body, known as the Holy Synod and Church fathers.

The EOTC has its own unique administrative structure that does not match Ethiopia’s federal government structure, which constitutes nine autonomous ethnic regions — among which Oromia is the largest. The Oromo clerics want to reorganize the church's structure to follow Ethiopia's federal political system.

The EOTC has about 35,000 churches throughout Ethiopia. Some reports suggest about 7,000 are in Oromia. This constitutes about 20 percent of all churches.

If Oromos create a regional parish administrative structure without approval from the Holy Synod, it could create an administrative conflict.

The clerics believe that reorganizing the church’s administrative structure will help revitalize empty and neglected churches whose followers left them for expanding Protestant churches in Oromia.

According to the head of the ad hoc committee, arch-scholar Belay Mekonen, there is already a precedent for doing this. He says that the church has changed its governance structures throughout history to match changes in government structures.

He also insisted that new administrative unit will help the EOTC realize its apostolic mission by bringing the church closer to Oromia people, with plans to consolidate and institutionalize the use of Afan Oromo (the Oromo language) within the EOTC.

Unlike Protestant churches that offer services Afan Oromo, Oromo clerics say the EOTC expects Oromos to worship in Ge’ez, the church’s liturgical language, or Amharic, the working language of Ethiopia's federal government. But Ge'ez is an ancient language that most people barely understand — not only in Oromia but throughout Ethiopia. And Amharic is a language spoken mainly by people who reside in major cities and towns in Oromia, and less so in rural areas, where Afan Oromo is prevalent.

Another member of the ad hoc committee said the new administrative unit will help to bring the people who felt alienated back to church.

A monk reads Ge'ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopia Orthodox Tewahedo Church, October 15, 2018. Photo by Rod Waddington via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Stinging, holy rebuke

The committee’s push prompted a stinging rebuke from the Holy Synod, setting up a protracted intra-institutional administrative conflict.

Opposition to the committee has also come from Orthodox faithfuls, who feel the push to establish a separate administrative unit is profoundly disturbing. They say their church is a sacred institution only willed by God.

Others variously labeled the move as an opportunistic shot or attempt to destroy the defining element of their national, cultural and religious identity:

This why I think these new rebels aren’t EOC institutionalists who seek greater inclusiveness. They are cultural vandals who have suddenly got the opportunity to economically and politically profit from the chaos and crisis in one of humanity’s greatest institutions. https://t.co/zyvHonOC9V

— Abiye Teklemariam Megenta (@abiyetk) September 1, 2019

I don’t think I will ever identify with any specific religion anymore but I have a soft spot for EOTC [ which I used to taunt in my college days when I was “ woke” ]
It’s historic and was nurtured and protected by our forefathers. I am proud of EOTC and its wisdom. https://t.co/5ZUOBPiDEX

— Mady Yonas (@Madyyon) September 2, 2019

Numerous Addis Ababa-based EOTC organizations and parish administrators have scheduled to hold a rally on Sunday, September 15, 2019, protesting an escalation of violence against Orthodox clerics, laity and the destruction of churches.

Rally organizers said the demonstration is planned to demand the government to provide protection for Orthodox Christians throughout Ethiopia. They emphasized the planned rally has nothing to do with the Oromo clerics and could be called off if they get a practical response.

But the planned rally takes on added significance because the organizers say they support the response the Holy Synod has given to Oromo clerics.

The Oromo clerics have also gotten lukewarm support from an unlikely source: Daniel Kibret, a prominent EOTC personality, writer and strong ally of Ethiopia’s reformist prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

In a lengthy blog post, he wrote that while he agrees with the clerics’ analysis of the problem in the EOTC, he also wrote the clerics’ solution is wrong.

But members of the ad hoc committee insist that they do not want to splinter the EOTC in Oromia. They have not proposed a distinct theological element nor introduced a new canon and ritual activities, they say.

Religious tension, ethnic rivalries

Crucially, the dispute has also become an important manifestation of religious tension freighted with ethnic rivalry among political elites of Ethiopia’s several ethnic groups­.

On social media, the clerics’ move has amplified increasing ethnic tensions, due to a long-standing rift between Amhara and Oromo people, two of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups: Conflicts over land, history, economy and culture have intensified, nearly a year after their ruling elites entered a tactical alliance within the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (the EPRDF), to bring down the supremacy of Tigryan elites who ruled for 27 years.

Both Amharas and Oromos practice a wide range of religions. Christianity and Islam are the main ones.

Statistically, 30.4% of 25 million Oromos follow the EOTC, while 82.5% of 19 million Amharas are Orthodox faithfuls.

The Amharas have a tangled relationship with the EOTC. A prominent historian Harold Marcus describes the Amharas alongside the Tigrayans as inheritors and avatars of Orthodox Christianity.

This contrasts sharply with the Oromos’ relationship with EOTC. Although there is a significant number of Orthodox Oromos, some argue Oromo nationalists have tended to promote the development of secular nationalism as a unifying ideology.

In fact, a long-held belief among Oromo nationalists asserts that when Oromos and other southern peoples of Ethiopia incorporated into modern Ethiopia, the EOTC was an active agent for assimilationist policies of successive Ethiopian emperors.

They contend that most of bishops and priests historically appointed to Oromia were native Amharic speakers who aimed to “Amharize” Oromos by discouraging the use of Afan Oromo in church.

The latest dispute between Oromo clerics and the Holy Synod is a new incarnation of a long-standing strand of EOTC’s intra-institutional conflict — albeit with different features and players.

In 1991, after the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) troops assumed control of the country, a prolonged intra-institutional conflict broke out within the EOTC, when the TPLF-led regime plotted to force the abdication of the fourth Patriarch, Abune Merkorios.

Following the abdication of the Patriarch, a movement supported by members of the Ethiopian diaspora in the US formed a Holy Synod in Exile in 1996.

This resulted in division among clergy and faithful that stemmed from ethnic and political tension between the Amhara and Tigray.

The EOTC in exile also operated as an anti-EPRDF body based in Washington, DC.

In July 2018, Prime Minister Abiy assisted the reunification of the Synod of the EOTC and the Synod of the EOTC in exile.

Regardless of one's ethnic background and recurring intra-institutional conflict, most Orthodox followers consider the church a defining element of Ethiopian national identity. Even people who describe their affiliation to the church as cultural rather than faith-based feel a connection.

But Ethiopians who live in regions dominated by non-Orthodox faiths emphasize that their identity is not predicated on Orthodox religiosity.

Originally published on Global Voices

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sits with Minister of Defense Lemma Megersa, November 24, 2017. Photo by Odaw via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0.

This story is the second in a two-part series on online disinformation, shutdowns, and rising political and ethnic tensions in Ethiopia. You can read the first part here. 

On June 18 of last year, in his second parliamentary address, Ethiopia’s reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced his government would no longer block online publications. Within a day, his then-chief of staff, Fitsum Arega, followed up in a tweet acknowledging the unblocking of more than 250 largely diaspora-based, pro-opposition websites and blogs.

At that time, the move was celebrated as a major step toward internet freedom in a country where the ruling regime, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front, (EPRDF) had for years controlled the flow of information.

As the political environment relaxed, comedians, journalists, bloggers and opposition activists voiced thoughts and criticisms that had been bottled up for decades. Ethiopia's embrace of civil liberties, however, has deflated as political rifts resurfaced between non-ruling elites of Ethiopia's two main ethnic groups: the Amharas and the Oromos. With ethnic and political tensions between the two groups manifesting online in the form of hate speech and disinformation, the government responded — on a number of occasions — by imposing restrictions on access to networks and social media platforms.

Prior to the political reforms introduced by PM Abiy Ahmed, disruptions of internet connectivity, cell phone services, or social media occurred for reasons ranging from curbing mass protest demonstrations to preventing cheating during examinations.

This time around, although politics is at the center of internet shutdowns, the dynamics are more complicated than they had been prior to the start of the political reforms.

Deadly communal violence and a shutdown

View over Churchill Road in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo by Mattias Kiel Nielsen via Wikipedia.

In September 2018, just two months after the government's pledge to open up the internet, deadly communal violence erupted in Burayou, a town located in outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, following the homecoming of two exiled political groups in competition with each other: Patriotic Ginbot 7 and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). In response, the government resorted to large-scale, deliberate disruptions of internet connectivity, cell phone service, and social media.

Authorities believe social media — particularly Facebook — played a central role in stoking communal tension, and they are not alone. The fact that communal tension hit a boiling point in Burayou just as social media made inroads in the area drove many to speculate that the violence was stoked by messages shared on social media.

However, a closer look at the violence reveals there are other deep-rooted factors, too.

In recent years, communal tensions have been a fact of life in Ethiopia. Among the many ethnic tensions that dominate Ethiopian politics, perhaps none have been as caustic as the issue of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital city, around which conflict and tension have been building for years.

Addis Ababa, geographically located in Oromia, is predominantly Amharic-speaking and continues to expand into Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest administrative region.

In reaction to the persistent expansion of Addis Ababa into Oromia until 2014, a protest movement started in 2015. After years of struggle, these protests slowed down the expansion of the sprawling city.

But the protest movement’s initial claim of halting the unrestrained expansion of Addis Ababa at the expense of Oromo farmers eventually evolved into nationalistic claims defined in terms of ethnic ownership of the city.

In the days leading up to the communal violence in Burayou, the supporters of the two rival political blocks spread an “us-versus-them” philosophy through various means of communication. They hoisted and waved flags and banners of the competing groups in the streets of Addis Ababa. There were even physical confrontations and a few violent clashes in the capital.

While many factors contributed to the communal violence in Burayou, such as ethnic and linguistic divides and a lack of faith in the government, the internet was singled out to blame as the main reason.

This was the second time (as per available information) that internet services were suspended after authorities promised the government would no longer block the internet nor restrict access to specific apps or websites.

Authorities also shut down the internet on grounds of security or public order measure when ethnic violence broke out in eastern Ethiopia in August 2018. Authorities only reversed their decision after a short-lived positive turn — following the political reforms that began in April 2018 under Abiy.

And these shutdowns were all a sign of things to come.

Multiple shutdowns in June

Since then, as communal tension and flare-ups began to proliferate, so did internet shutdowns and restrictions on social media on the grounds of security or public order.

June 13, 2019 was the start of a disruptive run of three major shutdowns that included a preemptive shut down due to a national exam that lasted three days, an unexplained internet blackout the lasted for at least 100 hours and a shutdown due to political violence in Amhara State, Ethiopia’s second-largest region.

These incidents do not reflect cases of bandwidth throttling (lowering the quality of their cell signals or internet speed) and restrictions on access to social media sites or specific websites that lasted several days or still continuing.

The longest of all shutdowns came, on June 23, 2019, in the aftermath of high-profile political assassinations of top military officials in Addis Ababa and the president of Amhara region, along with his two top advisers in Bahir Dar, Amhara region’s capital. Internet was intermittently available in the days following the killings, but the network shutdown was only lifted after 10 days.

Major social media platforms that have relatively large user bases such as Facebook and WhatsApp remained blocked until August 15, 2019, almost two weeks after tensions eventually subsided.

Government authorities, including Prime Minister Abiy, invariably claim that these deliberate blackouts of internet and restrictions on social media are useful to control misinformation and hate speech. At a recent press conference, Abiy laid out his thoughts about the three major internet shutdowns. When asked how long Ethiopia will continue to disrupt internet connectivity, his six-minute answer covered a lot of ground. He stressed safety, security and public order. He also argued that other countries, such as India, also do it as necessary.

Government officials maintain that such measures help protect national security, but these claims often come without evidence. These shutdowns represent an infringement on Ethiopians’ right to access to information and freedom of expression online.

The shutdowns occurred without official announcements, reasons or projected duration, nor any information about who ordered them or which networks and social media platforms will be affected. This lack of transparency makes it impossible for the Ethiopian public to challenge shutdown decisions.

Whenever there is internet shutdown in #Ethiopia, #Instagram is the last one to be free. Photographers like myself use it as a professional portfolio and gallery. It is an online office. We present our works for potential clients following our page. Fix it #Ethiopia

— Martha T. (@Marthinolly) August 5, 2019

Originally published on Global Voices

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed [left] sits with Minister of Defense Lemma Megersa, November 24, 2017. Photo by Odaw via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0.

Protesters demonstrated their opposition to the current government, waving flags missing the characteristic yellow pentagram, a symbol of Ethiopia’s collective national identity.   

Pro-government supporters, mostly of Oromo ethnicity, marched to confront the anti-government protesters. They wore red, yellow and green, Ethiopia’s national colors, and carried Oromo Liberation Front flags. 

Demonstrators got close enough to hurl insults at each other. 

But this real-life confrontation pales in comparison to the intense, bitter political agitation taking place in every corner of Ethiopian social media, and especially on Facebook. Ethiopians use Facebook more than any other social media platform and many citizens consider Facebook to be the “internet.”

Since last year, Ethiopia has undergone a much-lauded transition from dictatorship to democracy. Many Ethiopians embraced the transition spearheaded by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But the euphoria accompanying Ethiopia’s embrace of civil liberties has deflated as political rifts resurfaced between non-ruling elites of Ethiopia's two main ethnic groups: the Amharas and the Oromos.

Tensions between the two groups manifest online as Facebook Live and YouTube videos featuring Ethiopian personalities with strong opinions and political viewpoints. Hundreds of Facebook pages and YouTube channels create content for Ethiopia's diverse cultural and language groups. In Ethiopia, there are about 83 native languages spoken but Amharic, Afan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Somali are Ethiopia's major internet languages.

These widely shared videos shape and inform the current discourse on Ethiopian politics, both at home and among its large diaspora, often exchanging and amplifying mis- and disinformation originating with these videos. 

Online conspiracy theories, political rants and rumors laced with communal hatred are now common genres in Ethiopian social media.

Almaz, an Amhara anti-government protester who is using a pseudonym to protect herself from abusive attacks online, was one among the incensed crowds at the Washington D.C. demonstration. Her experience of social media organizing and agitation is typical of many of the other protesters. She first heard about the anti-government demonstration via Facebook and follows a range of anti-government activists on the platform.

Since she moved to the US in September 2018, she has been using Facebook to follow the news from home — especially Facebook’s live streaming services. 

Almaz and her friends use the newsfeed to both signal interest in certain stories and to coordinate watch parties, in which like-minded viewers gather online to watch popular live streams. She often joins parties to watch Yoseph Yitna, a conspiracy theorist who broadcasts daily from abroad about Ethiopian politics.

As part of its democratic reforms, the new government stopped blocking websites from Ethiopian diaspora opposition groups and ended politically-motivated content filtering. It has decreased surveillance and harassment of journalists and opened up the telecom market. In the absence of developed local media institutions, Facebook has become the primary portal for news and information for Ethiopian internet users.

For every political development, a fresh set of broadcasts appears, mainly on Facebook and increasingly on YouTube in Amharic and Afan Oromo.

Almaz also tunes into political ranter Yoni Magna for news analysis on Facebook.

Manga launched his rage brand of social media in 2015 and regularly offers inflammatory comments ranging from current political events to religion to pop culture in Amharic language. His tagline reads “Thanks to the Mother (Mary) and Her Son” and he describes himself as a truth-advocate for Ethiopians. His Facebook page has a significant and engaged audience. At the moment, he has about 161,000 followers and his YouTube channel has been viewed more than 29 million times. On a typical show, he talks for nearly an hour and bounces from topic to topic. He shouts, feigns menace, and insults his critics with ethnic slurs that target various ethnic and religious groups.

Almaz also watches dozens of Facebook live videos by Tolosa Ibsa, a Facebook conspiracy theorist whose YouTube channel has been viewed more than 11 million times. Gigi Kiya, a commentator who also trolls her opponents, garners about 10 million views on her YouTube channel.

Yoni Magna, Gigi Kiya, Tolosa Ibsa, and Ambo Urge. These are few Ethiopian Live Streamers on Facebook and YouTube

These formerly fringe Ethiopian social media figures have benefited from Ethiopia’s new opening. They are mostly diaspora-based monologuists broadcasting from their living rooms, complaining vigorously about the Ethiopian government, and attacking each other. Facebook is their headquarters, although some have migrated to YouTube, to monetize their work through ads.

Many of these content creators share inaccurate and blatantly false reporting. They run Facebook pages populated by people who share similar political views, hardening political differences by creating echo chambers, information-cascade and filter bubble effects among Ethiopia’s diverse ethnolinguistic groups.

The comment sections of Facebook live broadcasts from these figures fill with people throwing insults and memes at each other.

Amhara regional ‘coup’ attempt: A disinformation case

Over the past few weeks, Almaz incessantly shared Facebook Live video links and posts about an incident that happened in June 2019 in Amhara, Ethiopia's second-largest region. On June 22, an armed group murdered the region’s president along with his adviser and the region's attorney general in an alleged failed regional coup attempt. General Asaminew Tsige, chief of security forces in the Amhara region, commanded the armed group. This incident was triggered by a simmering intra-party dispute in the region’s governing party, Amhara Democratic Party (ADP).

On Facebook, rumors swirled that the assassinations were part of a plot created by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who is an Oromo, to wipe out the leadership of the Amhara people. 

One of the unsubstantiated claims about the assassinations of the three leaders of the Amahara Region Almaz shared on her Facebook page. The picture on the right is General Asaminew Tsige who allegedly led the coup before he himself was killed.

The misinformation epidemic via Facebook live video transcends ideological and ethnic divides.

Another pro-government protester at the DC rally, who uses the name Yoseph, just returned to the US following a visit to Ethiopia after 15 years of exile.

Like Almaz, Yoseph heard about the demonstration on Facebook, but from a completely different universe of Facebook live video broadcasters. For his daily media diet, Yoseph usually visits the Facebook pages of Ambo Urge and Hangaasa Ahmed Ibraahim, two fervent supporters of Ethiopia’s prime minister who broadcast unsubstantiated claims about people who do not support him. They regularly bash citizens who oppose Abiy as settlers who are nostalgic for Ethiopia’s pre-1974 imperial era, where Ethiopians were merely considered as ”a collection of imperial subjects” rather than citizens. Yoseph shares videos that exaggerate Abiy's heroism and spreads rumors about his rivals.

Campaign urges Facebook to act

One of the viral campaign banner ads circulating on Facebook during the campaign

Earlier in July, activists and concerned Ethiopians began a social media campaign to limit misinformation and hateful content on Facebook. They flagged violent content to Facebook and encouraged others to report them using Facebook’s on-site reporting tool. One activist who asked Global Voices to remain anonymous says he flagged content that ranges from bigoted memes to inflammatory videos, yet most of the content he reported remained on Facebook. For example, he reported a YouTube video of an ethnic extremist who threatened to kill Amharas and their children who live in Oromia. The truncated version of the video was still circulating on Facebook at the time of publication of this article.

A Twitter user flagged another ethnic extremist who called on Facebook for Amhara women to poison their Oromo husbands to wipe out the Oromos.

In this video, this man speaking in Amharic calls for a genocide against ethnic #Oromo. He is appealing to all Amhara wives who are married to Oromo men to poison their husbands. I’m only translating his message for the world to see it. @BBCAfrica @USEmbassyAddis @hrw #Ethiopia pic.twitter.com/YxotYfXjty

— Alex A (@lakimlakim) July 21, 2019

These are just a few examples of the estimated hundreds of thousands of hours of videos streamed in at least five major Ethiopian languages. Activists are frustrated that most malicious content flagged is not removed, leaving them to wonder if Facebook cares about the damage it might be causing in Ethiopia.

Facebook has recently employed an Ethiopian as one of its market specialists for sub-Saharan Africa. According to Facebook, markets specialists ”play a key role within the global community operations team by keeping the platform safe, vibrant and diverse.”

However, it is not clear if the employee's responsibilities include content moderation of Amharic videos. It also remains unclear whether Facebook and other platforms are investing enough resources to address problematic content in Ethiopia such as disinformation and hate speech.

The six regions of the African Union [Image Credit: Sahel and West African Club]

This is certainly not the first time, and probably won't be the last, that a North African's “Africanness” was questioned. In July 2015, The Guardian reported that Nigerian Chigozie Obioma was “the sole African writer on the longlist” for that year's Man Booker Prize for literature, overlooking the presence of Moroccan-born writer Leila Lalami among the 13 shortlistees.

Which raises the question: Why are Africans from north of the Sahara sometimes not considered definitively “African”?

North and south of the desert

The term “Sub-Saharan Africa” usually refers to the 46 countries that lie south of the Sahara Desert. Countries north of the Sahara, along with Sudan, are included in the geographical and geopolitical unit known as the “Middle East and North Africa region”, or MENA, as their linguistic, religious and cultural characteristics have more in common with the nations of the Middle East than with their neighbours south of the desert.

This divide has sparked heated debate among African intellectuals. Some blame colonialism for sowing the seeds of division, while others say the division existed much earlier.

The vision of the African Union

The organisation that theoretically unites the continent is the African Union (AU), which comprises all 55 sovereign states on the African continent, divided into five geographic regions: North, South, West, East, and Central. North Africa is made up of seven countries: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and Tunisia,

The AU traces its conception to Pan-Africanism, an intellectual movement which sought to strengthen African integration in the face of colonial intrusion. The main actors who formed the Organisation of African Unity, which later became the AU, were five heads of state, three from Sub-Saharan Africa and two from North Africa: Kwame Nkrumah, who later became the first president of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria.

North African leaders, therefore, played an equally important role in the formation of the African Union, the continent's most important geopolitical institution.

Northern “white” and Sub-Saharan “black” Africa

Yet many North Africans identify more as Arab or Arab-Muslim than as African, and it is the case that the “countries south of the Sahara have long been considered authentically “African” [emphasis added] while those to the north have been perceived as the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Islamic” argues Egyptian journalist Shahira Amin. In an article titled “Are Egyptians Africans or Arabs”, Amin gives an account about interviewing hundreds of Egyptians from various walks of life about how they viewed themselves:

My question raised a few eyebrows among people on the streets, the majority of whom replied ‘I’m a Muslim Arab, of course’ or “an Arab Muslim.’ They shrugged their shoulders and looked perplexed as they responded for wasn’t it an already-known fact that Egyptians are Arabs and that Egypt has a majority Muslim population? A few of the interviewees said that they ‘were descendants of the Pharoahs’ but surprisingly, none in the sample interviewed thought of themselves as Africans.

“I’m not surprised to hear about some Africans (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) questioning the ‘Africanness’ of us, North Africans,” said Afef Abrougui, one of Global Voices MENA editors:

I come from Tunisia, and most Tunisians would identify as Arabs. There is this joke in Tunisia which says that Tunisians only feel African when our national team is playing in the African Cup of Nations. I don’t remember in school that we learnt that Tunisia was not ‘’African’’ but the country’s Arab- Muslim identity is emphasized, particularly in politics.

To give an example, in its preamble the 2014 Tunisian Constitution refers several times to the country’s Arab and Muslim identities, and only once to Africa. Of course, I understand why Tunisians would mostly identify as Arabs because of the language element. Growing up as a child it’s Syrian, Egyptian and Lebanese series and music that were on our televisions. This, however, is unfortunate because identifying as an Arab does not prevent one from also identifying as an African. Africa is diverse and we should celebrate that, instead of putting a label on what an African is.

For North Africans, the definition of ‘Africanness’ may also be related to influence and power. After independence, countries like Egypt and Algeria looked to the Middle East for a model of an Islamic nation, and north to Europe for economic partnerships.

Egyptian Global Voices contributor Rawan Gharib saw the issue in light of recent tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt concerning an Ethiopian dam project:

… [the] Egypt regime's attitude of looking down towards Ethiopia ruined an amazing opportunity to collaborate and revive the African Union concept of the '60s. I think that the sense of detachment from Africanity among Egyptians comes from the lack of believing in a truth that's no longer factual or tangible. We're Africans, yes. The list-song of African countries the Nile River crosses was one of the first history lessons we learned in elementary school, some of us may even still remember it by heart so well, but over the last three decades the only time we were reminded we were Africans, we were referred to as Africans was during the Africa Cup of Nations.

As Algerian columnist Iman Amrani has written in The Guardian, the divide also has to do with the perpetuation of hierarchies of value in terms of skin color, class and race:

[C]ertainly there is something to be said about North Africans trying to distance themselves from ‘black Africa’.

Prejudices rooted in language, culture, religion

Racism expressed by North Africans toward sub-Saharan Africans, however, does not justify its reverse. And the notion that “black” is the same as “African” is itself rooted in racism. For centuries, the term “Sub-Saharan Africa” has lumped together cultures and nations far more diverse and complex in terms of ethnicity, language, experience, and history, than the stereotypes would suggest.

Global Voices contributor Prudence Nyamishana from Uganda was forced to confront some of her preconceptions about North Africa on a recent visit to Cairo:

I dressed like a clown in a big dress and jeans underneath. I had a scarf ready to cover myself. I was told that women were supposed to be all covered because it is a Muslim country and all this stuff I had read on the Internet. When I boarded the Emirates flight from Dubai to Cairo, there were many Egyptian women dressed in fancy jeans with beautiful uncovered hair. I wanted to go to the bathroom to change my dress because I had got it all wrong… I understood that my prejudices and fears were all hidden in the disconnection between North Africa and the rest of Africa. The history of Arabs and slave trade, the news we get fed is from western media houses. At first being asked whether I was from Africa was irritating. But then I realised that the Egyptians that were asking me if I was African had never traveled outside their own country. Maybe if it was easy to travel within Africa these barriers would be broken down brick by brick.

Joey Ayoub, a Global Voices MENA editor from Lebanon, notes that unlike Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism did not become an ideal with institutional backing:

The divide between ‘black’ Sub-Saharan Africans and ‘Arab’ North Africa seems to me to be the result of Pan-Africanism occupying a different historical route than Pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism ‘won’ in the sense that its narrative had more significant structural backing (Arab League). I also think it ‘won’ because the Palestinian cause coincided with the period of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Nwachukwu Egbunike, Global Voices contributor from Nigeria recalls that he wasn’t taught about Pan-Africanism in school:

Nigeria's fractured past, having fought a civil war, explains why history was kept out of high school curriculum. . . . Nonetheless, I grew up in a Nigeria when almost all our musicians sang about the horrors of Apartheid rule in South Africa. Thus, the deep-seated belief in Africa solidarity was a mark of my childhood…. Nonetheless, I am not oblivious to the equally prevalent dichotomy between black Sub Saharan Africa and Arab Northern Africa. I think the reason behind these labels is obvious, stereotypes need to be reinforced. I have come to realize that ethnic or racial bias are integral aspects of our deeply flawed humanity. People hide behind categories and labels because to do otherwise means a radical transformation; an encounter with that ‘other’ in truth and love.

“It is hard to recognize today Algeria, the country that Nelson Mandela said: “It's Algeria that made me a man,” said Global Voices contributor Abdoulaye Bah, a Guinean-born Italian formerly with the United Nations:

Algeria played a big role in liberating former colonies in Africa. That is why it is difficult to see today that this government issues racial laws stigmatizing and limiting the freedoms of blacks on its soil.

In Morocco and Tunisia also the Sub-Saharan suffers. Yet these two countries also played a great role in the creation of the Organization of African Unity. In addition, these two countries are becoming members of the African regional economic groupings, south of Sahara. Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt has also been very active in terms of African unity.

On the other hand, the citizens of some sub-Saharan countries did not need an entry visa [for some of these countries] when I was there the last time. In addition, all these countries have trained thousands of sub-Saharan academics. In my opinion, despite all that the Sub-Saharans endure in these countries, it is difficult to question their Africanity.

Political analyst Imad Mesdoua, an Algerian raised in Nigeria, asserts that the dichotomy between an Arab North Africa and a supposedly black Sub-Saharan Africa is false. Africans, says Mesdoua, are not defined by language, boundaries or geography but rather a “common history, binding values, and a common destiny.”

Perhaps, in the spirit of its founding Pan-African values and vision, the African Union should focus on deconstructing this divide between the north and sub-Saharan Africa and this common destiny.

EPRDF rally in Addis Ababa in 2010. Photo by Uduak Amimo/BBC World Service via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Over the past two months, a series of leaked documents from Ethiopia’s powerful political elites have been circulating online.

Among other revelations, the leaks show that the Ethiopian government has been paying online commenters to influence social media conversations in the ruling party's favor. The documents include hundreds of pages of chat logs and email correspondence of Ethiopia’s top government officials, multiple government planning documents and top-secret meeting records.

The leaks have come at what may be a turning point in Ethiopia's recent political crisis. Since mid-2015, thousands across Ethiopia rose up, demanding more political freedoms and social equality and a stop to government land grabs in the Oromia region, which represents Ethiopia's largest ethnic group. The government response was brutal: Hundreds have been killed, thousands have been arrested, and critical voices — both on and offline — have been systematically silenced.

Among the recent leaks, which began to circulate on Facebook in November 2017, one of the most revealing documents is a list of individuals who appear to have been paid to promote the ruling coalition on social media. The list shows the names of the so-called “social media commentators” along with their job titles and a precise amount of money that they apparently received for their online postings. Most of the people listed are government employees.

The list corroborates previous evidence that the Ethiopian government has been hiring online commenters to promote its agenda and harass its opponents.

Online communities in Ethiopia have been calling these paid commenters “cocas”, a colloquialism in Amharic (the most widely spoken language in the country) that can be translated as “contemptible cadres.” In Amharic, this term typically refers to people who sell themselves for easy money. But in this case, most of the commenters listed in the leaked directory are already on the government payroll.

Who is responsible for the leaks?

The origin of the leaks has been rumored and contested at several levels. The documents were originally sent to diaspora activists from the at least two Facebook accounts, both of which belong to government employees, in November 2017.

The first known leak, of the “coca” list, came from the Facebook account of Gebremichael Melles Gebremariam, an employee of the communications affairs office of the Tigray state. Gebremariam first denied sending the documents, claiming his account was hacked. But he then backtracked on this claim. It is now rumored that he has been dismissed from his job.

Soon after the initial leak, more documents began arriving in the inboxes of diaspora activists, this time coming from the Facebook account of the Director of the Federal Communications Affairs office, Haddush Kassu. Shortly thereafter, Haddush began to publicly shame those government officials who are implicated in the leaks. On January 18, he denigrated Deputy PM Debretsion Gebremichael in a public Facebook post.

It is unclear whether Haddush sent the documents himself have been hacked.

Social media ‘cocas’ push pro-government discourse

The revelations of political and state officials paying “cocas” to promote the ruling party agenda online correspond with a recent rise in polarization and hate speech on social media, alongside increased online persecution of independent journalists.

The leaked “coca” list reveals that at least thirteen commentators were each paid at least USD $300 (a large sum in Ethiopia, where average GDP per capita was USD $660 in 2016) for blog posts or Facebook messages that they wrote at the behest of the ruling coalition.

List of paid internet commentators. Image widely circulating on Facebook

Among individuals named on the list are Daniel Berhane and Dawit Kebede, publishers of two Ethiopian internet news site HornAffairs and Awaramba Times respectively. The two journalists have long been accused of cheer-leading a pro-government information campaign especially during a heightened political tension.

In recent years, independent Ethiopian journalists reporting on government affairs, corruption and human rights have been arrested or exiled en masse. The resulting gap in news coverage has thus been filled by opposition activists and protesters who often work with diaspora-based media outlets to draw global attention to the brutal military crackdown on protesters that has killed more than 1200 people and has led to several mass arrests since mid-2015.

On the heels of the list came a separate leak of what appears to be a proposal to counter opposition groups using social media platforms. The Amharic-language document from the office of Ethiopia’s longtime governing coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF), enumerates solutions and strategies to curtail the influence of online diaspora-based activists.

The document also describes how officials have ordered paid commenters to attack people who call for democracy and to praise the ideologies of ruling coalition. The document encourages its members to post comments on the internet as if they were regular citizens.

Other documents show that Ethiopia’s spy agency, the Information Network Security Agency, known to surveil and censor journalists and political dissidents, issued a money order of USD $12,000 to send two of their employees to China for special training. The documents do not specify what kind of training the two employees were meant to receive, but this information has begun to come to light with the release of subsequent chat logs.

Five weeks after the list was leaked, another document surfaced showing a written exchange over Facebook Messenger between two high-level public servants —  Haddush Kassu and a high-level operative of Ethiopia’s spy agency, Zeray Hailemariam — who were furious about the leaks, and the disclosure of the paid commentators.

One said the leaks are threats to their security and pledged to seek help from  Information Network Security Agency to investigate the source of the leaks. The other blamed a “disgruntled regional communication officer” for leaking the names to diaspora-based political rivals.

At one point in the exchange, the operative of Ethiopia’s spy agency suggested that they should encourage a “brave solider” like Daniel Berahane “who is fighting every extremists”. In response, the official from government communications affairs confirmed their support for him and wrote back “we pay him 33,000 [about USD $1200] for two articles.”

The exchange between the two top government officials also sheds light on the power struggle at the helm of Ethiopian ruling party, where infighting has led leaders to hire figures like Daniel and Dawit to undermine political opponents or curry favor with diplomats and foreign organizations in Addis Ababa. Daniel and Dawit have been leading voices in the pro-government media backlash against opposition activists and diaspora media.

And what is the Minister of Communication and Information Technology up to?

Other revelations have pointed to the online habit of Ethiopia’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Communication and Information Technology Dr. Debretsion Gebremicheal.

On December 16, 2017 member of the inner circle of the ruling party dumped screenshots of ten years browsing history of Dr. Debretsion Gebremicheal on his Facebook page. The details only lasted for about two days. It was removed sometime on December 18, 2017 without any explanation.

ደብረጽየን ለራሱም ለሴቶችም ክብር የሌለው ሰው ነው። ደሞ ገብረሚካኤል ሃክ ተደረገ በሉ። ሰው አስሬ ሃክ ይደረጋል እንዴ? ዋይ https://t.co/a0I5jbRwyz

— Gebremichael Melles (@Tiggovgpr) December 16, 2017

Debretsion does not have a respect for woman as well as for himself. Okay, you can go ahead say my account was compromised. Does a person has to be hacked ten times? Hell no!

For Dr. Debretsion this looks especially bad because he could not even clean his browsing history or encrypt his online communications, which means it was much easier than usual for the hackers to steal his browsing history. It’s quite amateurish mistake for a person who brands himself as one of the country's top ‘intelligence’ personnel.

Abebe Gelaw, a prominent diaspora based journalist pieced together a revealing fifteen-page expose after he scrutinized over two hundred pages of Dr. Debretsion’s embarrassing and salacious browsing history.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the story itself was the sourcing of the revelations. The documents are said to originate from various sources, some say disgruntled insiders leaked them, others say hackers are responsible. But from an incoherent drip of leaks a common outlook emerges that there is unprecedented power struggle happening among Ethiopia’s ruling elite.

Ibrahim Shafi. Photo shared on Twitter by Abiye Teklemariam Megenta.

In one of his last public comments, Ethiopian journalist Ibrahim Shafi wrote on his Facebook page: “Wake me up when I have a state.”

Not two weeks later, Shafi died in Nairobi, Kenya. His comment shed light on the deep personal toll of Ethiopia’s enduring political crisis that has swept the country over the last three years that sent Ibrahim into exile.

Ibrahim had worked as journalist covering sports and politics for nearly a decade, until he he no choice but to flee in 2014. Ibrahim, who was 40 at the time of his death, was not alone. He left for Nairobi, Kenya in June 2014, on a path taken by hundreds of Ethiopian journalists over the last twenty years.

According to data from Committee to Protect Journalists, Ethiopia's government has driven more journalists out of the country than any other nation in Africa.

Ethiopian journalists most often flee their country because they fear imprisonment and violence. In the lead-up to Ethiopia’s 2015 elections, the ruling party, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Revolutionary Front (EPRDF) have arrested and charged journalists and bloggers with terrorism offenses, sometimes over their writing, or even their posts on Facebook or Twitter. They can also face extrajudicial threats and torture.

For Ibrahim, such threats were familiar. Nearly ten years before departing from his homeland, he was arrested and beaten by the police during the 2005 Ethiopian post-election violence. His friends say that the police tortured him so brutally that they left one of his legs permanently damaged.

Ibrahim Shafi. Photo of Addis Ababa University Political Science and International Relations departments graduates.

Before moving to Kenya, Ibrahim had lived several creative lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, where he was born in September 1977. After graduating from Addis Ababa University’s Department of Political Sciences in 2001, he taught civic education to high school students, and was revered by his students for his hard work and dedication.

He also earned a reputation as a respected and rising independent journalist. He was a deputy editor-in-chief in one of Ethiopia’s major sports newspapers that made him a critical voice in Ethiopian sports journalism. He was a star on the fast-growing sports talk radio shows in Addis Ababa. Alongside his successful career as a sports journalist, he was a columnist for Addis Guday, the now-defunct weekly news magazine. He later served there as deputy editor-in-chief.

In Nairobi, Ibrahim joined countless other Ethiopians who've been forced to leave their homelands, fleeing political persecution.

While exile can be a source of pain on its own, Ethiopian government is known to make things even more difficult by sending covert intelligence agents to silence members of Ethiopian exiled dissident groups.

Despite these difficulties, Ibrahim made it clear that he was incapable of staying quiet. He remained connected to a life in Ethiopia that at times must have seemed distant. He shared his frustrations and his joys on his Facebook page.

On January 3, 2018, two weeks after writing his prophetic remark on Facebook, Ibrahim Shafi passed away in Nairobi, Kenya. The cause of his death has not been made public, but his close friends in Kenya said that living in exile had taken a toll on his physical well-being. Some have suggested that the injuries he suffered at the hands of Ethiopian police may have contributed to his death.

At the time of his passing, Ibrahim had recently concluded the long and grueling vetting process to be resettled as a refugee in the United States, only to be cancelled by the Trump administration, and making his untimely death even more tragic.

A small corner of the Ethiopian internet has been buzzing over Ibrahim’s passing since last week, and he became a trending topic locally. Many across the country who knew Ibrahim reacted to the news of his passing and fellow exiled journalists offered their condolences.

It’s heart-wrenching to learn the death of my beloved friend, Ibrahim Shafi. I’ll miss his energy, love for disputation, wit, playful mischief making, warmth, & disdain for autocracy. His reward for having conscience in a country that criminalises it was torture & death in exile. pic.twitter.com/lfm2AZv86d

— Abiye Teklemariam Megenta (@abiyetk) January 4, 2018

Journalist and former Committee to Protect Journalists staff member Tom Rhoades wrote:

It is with a heavy heart that I learn my friend Ibrahim Shafi from Ethiopia has passed away. Last time I saw him was a couple years ago at my house…we had a small party…no clue what we were celebrating. My final memories of Ibrahim were jovial –but I knew he and many other Ethiopian journalists in exile were experiencing huge challenges. The lack of work / opportunities, the constant harassment from local police and fear of Ethiopian security –many colleagues that I knew via email whose projects and words suggested a vibrant, active life grew listless and disconsolate while in exile. The journalist I would meet from Addis, forced to flee a hypersensitive oligarchy, would appear very different from the correspondences we previously shared from their home. I daresay colleagues told me Shafi was struggling here and I kept telling myself that “I must catch up with this guy”. Now it's too late. If only I had done more. R.I.P. Ibrahim Shafi Ahmed. You are greatly missed..

Prominent sports journalist Mensur Abdulkeni wrote on his Facebook page:

Words fall short of expressing my sorrow for your loss! Those hard days we shared together will never be forgotten. Goodbye the humble one, my beloved colleague and friend! Rest in peace Ibro!

An online memorial fund created at GoFundMe raised more than USD $10,000 in a few days for Ibrahim’s mother, who remains in Addis Ababa.

Campaign billboard for the EPRDF next to TPLF 35th anniversary billboard. EPRDF billboard says “electing EPRDF means ensuring the continuation of development and the renaissance of the country” TPLF billboard says “we will repeat our past victories”. Photo from 2010 by Uduak Amimo via BBC World Service. CC BY 2.0

Over the last six months, an ongoing protest movement in Ethiopia has triggered a power struggle within the country's longtime governing coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF), posing an unprecedented challenge to its 27-year rule.

On December 30, it became apparent just how much the growing opposition has threatened the political status quo when EPRDF addressed the country in a lengthy televised statement aimed at appeasing the three-year-old movement, which has braved deadly crackdowns to demand, among other things, fairer government representation of Ethiopia's ethnic groups

It came after the 36 members of the highest decision-making body of the EPRDF, the executive committee, convened in a heavily guarded secretive meeting that lasted a little over two weeks (from December 12 to 30, 2017).

But if hopes were high the mounting pressure would result in serious political reform, they were dashed with the statement, which offered nothing of the sort.

A coalition of power imbalances

The EPRDF is a coalition of four ethnic-based parties: the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), the Oromo People's Democratic Organization (OPDO), the Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement (SEPDM) and the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF). All four purport to represent Ethiopia’s major ethnic groups, but are closely aligned in ideology, political association, and policy preferences.

The TPLF is the core of the EPRDF coalition, holding absolute power over the last quarter of a century.

For opposition activists, “Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front” is a misleading term because among the four parties it is the TPLF, not the other three parties, that determines whether to bestow power to other members of the coalition, or take it away.

The criticism goes that TPLF uses the coalition to confirm its own ability to keep both the center of the country and the regions under control while the remaining three ethnic parties participate as a “patronage network,” trading the needs of their people for political influence.

The most dominant member of the coalition, TPLF, is a mother party reminiscent of the Soviet Communist Party. TPLF created EPRDF, maintained it through a range of ideological machinations & used the vassals to bolster its legitimacy and squelch opposition from autonomous parties.

— Awol Allo (@awol_allo) January 1, 2018

In terms of representation, Oromos make up 35 percent of the country’s 100 million people, Amharas account for about 30 percent of the population, and the Southern Ethiopian region accounts for 14 percent. While Tigrayans represent only 6 percent of the population, they are among the most high-ranking military officers who control the nation's security.

Puppets no more?

The power struggle has become plain in the last several months. In October, the speaker of Ethiopian rubber stamp parliament resigned over of the claims of disrespect to Oromo people.

And tensions between OPDO and TPLF – which have simmered for some time – were laid bare when OPDO and later ANDM members of the Ethiopian parliament refused to perform their jobs unless the executive branch of the government offered them an explanation about the ongoing violence against protesters.

Oromo and Amhara MPs boycott parliament as winds of change (#OromoProtests + #AmharaResistance) and a bitter power struggle inside the governing EPRDF coalition reaches #Ethiopia’s (one-time?) rubberstamp legislative body—a new analysis with @AbbaKayo: https://t.co/J5D2cAmvcy pic.twitter.com/sA9TyeRH3t

— Mohammed Ademo (@OPride) December 22, 2017

Some say when OPDO and ANDM members challenge the TPLF, they are driven by considerations of power, rather than ideology.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that some sections of OPDO and ANDM have also emerged as advocates for political reform within EPRDF that comes on the heels of unprecedented popular protests in their respective regional states: Oromia and Amhara.

2017 was the year of the Oromo People's Democratic Organisation (OPDO). The OPDO was able to shake the puppet label and actually prove to be quite vocal in #Ethiopia‘s political arena. pic.twitter.com/4648ug8bCi

— Zecharias Zelalem (@ZekuZelalem) December 30, 2017

The political elites of the two parties have also started to forge an alliance, a significant development given that the elites from Oromo and the Amhara peoples have long been at opposite ends of the country’s political divide. Tsegaye Ararssa, a diaspora-based academic and opposition political commentator, wrote on his Facebook page:

That nothing has unsettled TPLF in recent years more than the OPDO-ANDM alliance and the gestures of #Oromara solidarity is confirmed in the EPRDF CC Press Release. This is a conclusive evidence that it is the content of this gesture of solidarity, its substance–given real flesh and blood–that will be the undoing of TPLF's hold on power. #Oromara #OromoRevolution

Appeasement, not true reform

For days, the outcome of EPRDF’s executive committee meeting was awaited in the hope that it would offer a crucial insight into TPLF's willingness to compromise in the face of the popular protests and mounting pressure from two members of the coalition, OPDO and ANDM.

However, the hopes that EPRDF’s executive committee meeting would lead to concrete reform within EPRDF appear premature.

In a statement read on state television and released on Facebook, EPRDF announced a new raft of political actions, including a vow to end corruption, rent seeking, and patronage politics.

It also expressed sorrow for deaths and displacement that have taken place since anti-government unrest began and thanked the Ethiopian defense and security forces for their service (even though they are largely blamed for the violence).

According to human rights groups, at least 1,500 people were killed over the last three years.

The statement also vowed, without specifics, to quash “unprincipled relations” implying the burgeoning alliance between OPDO and ANDM.

‘I don’t think there is a positive spin here’

Some believe that the statement, allegedly a joint expression from the four members of the coalition, fits neatly into TPLF’s political agenda.

Critics also cite that the delight of TPLF's social media following signal that that the party more than anyone still holds the power.

Mohammed Ademo, a diaspora-based journalist, summarized the statement in his view on Facebook:

Here is a quick reax: Sorry but not sorry; Oromia will be militarized to stop all protests, road blockage and similar activities; Allegations of Tigrayan hegemony unfounded; Thank you to our security forces for wanton killings and for turning a blind eye as hundreds of Oromos were killed and hundreds of thousands of Oromos and Somalis displaced; There will be heightened social media crackdown; OBN and Amhara TV will fall back in line and return to their old platform as agitprops; The budding Oromo and Amhara alliance is a threat to continued Tigrayan dominance over the country and it must be squashed; EPRDF will return to its democratic centralism and revolutionary democracy roots.On the surface, this looks like an embarrassing setback for OPDO. I don’t think there is a positive spin here. TPLFites must be smiling

Even some who were sympathetic to OPDO and ANDM said they doubted that the two parties were ever ready to contend TPLF:

Did OPDO buckle under the weight of 18-days of TPLF cajoling, intimidation, and bluster? If so, the country is headed straight to the abyss. God help our suffering people who will be fixed to pay a heavy price to make TPLF/EPRDF the last dictorship to Rule Ethiopia.

— Hassen Hussein (@AbbaKayo) December 29, 2017

As the country wrestles with its gravest crisis in a generation, the question remains: How will this ever-deepening political crisis end?