Yonas Biru, PhD
Ethiopia’s current political fragmentation did not emerge overnight. Its roots run deep into the ideological ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, when university students and graduates sought to tear down the old imperial order. What they built instead was a template for political competition rooted not in class or ideology, but in identity. The revolution that promised to unite Ethiopia around social justice ended up sowing the seeds of tribal war.
This article examines how the Ethiopian student movement, initially driven by a lofty ideal of international proletarian liberation, degenerated into ethnic conflicts among Amhara, Oromo, and Tigray tribal forces, and further fueled sub-tribal divisions within these groups.
The first question the article tries to answer is: Why didn’t the Aklilu Habte Wolde and Ketema Yifru generation rebel against Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime? The answer is simple: they had a material stake in the system. The first college graduates had the opportunity to serve their country and their emperor in high positions. They were both stakeholders and gatekeepers of the system. It was in their best interest to maintain stability, while advocating for progressive reforms.
As the second and third generations of graduates entered the job market, however, the prestige and ownership stake in the economic and political system began to thin out.
Fast forward to the 1960s and 1970s. College graduates were sent to remote areas such as Kulu Qonta (ኩሉ ኮንታ) and Qob AsTel (ቆብ አስጥል) to teach. There was no running water, no electricity, but there was plenty of free time and cheap አረቄ. This toxic mix bred a disgruntled educated class with no stake in the system—a fertile ground for radicalism.
Had Ketema Yifru and Walelegn Mekonen swapped places on the generational calendar, the contentious manifesto “On the Question of Nationalities in Ethiopia” might have been authored by Ketema Yifru, while Walelegn Mekonen could have become a constructive force rather than a destructive communist.
Let us move to the second question: what necessitated the creation of the OLF, TPLF, and other movements to claim the banner of nations and nationalities first raised by the national student movement?
The former Haile-Selassie University became a Petri dish for radical activism. In the late 1960s, a network of Marxist intellectuals and student activists began calling for a revolutionary transformation of Ethiopia’s governance structure and institutional order. Inspired by global student movements and fueled by domestic grievances, hyper charged activists denounced the imperial system. But behind the slogans of proletarian liberation and anti-feudal struggle lay an unspoken competition over who would lead the revolution—and, by extension, who would control the future Ethiopian state.
In the early 1970s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) emerged as the flag-bearer of Marxist-Leninist revolution. While the party officially espoused equality and justice for all, its leadership was drawn primarily from Amhara and Tigrayan elites—reflecting both the demographic makeup of the university system and the dominance of highland intellectuals in early leftist networks. This imbalance fueled perceptions, and later accusations, of cultural hegemony and exclusion. Southern and Oromo radicals felt undermined and began to see the EPRP not as an instrument of national liberation, but as a rebranded continuation of highland dominance under Marxist colors.
Out of this tension emerged Meison (the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement), led by Oromo intellectuals and supported largely by Oromo and southern activists. Though both EPRP and Meison spoke the language of internationalism, their rivalry exposed the ethnic undertones that Marxist rhetoric had failed to suppress. What began as debates over “vanguardism”—who had the right to lead the revolution—masked deeper resentments rooted in ethnicity and regional identity. The EPRP dismissed Meison as narrow nationalists beholden to Oromo interests, while Meison accused the EPRP of perpetuating Amhara-centric dominance under a red banner.
The creation of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975 pushed these fault lines to the fore. Formed by Tigrayan Marxists excluded from the EPRP’s central leadership, the TPLF adopted its own brand of revolutionary nationalism. Its first declared enemy was the EPRP itself, signifying that Ethiopia’s revolutionary battlefield had shifted from class to ethnicity. The TPLF’s struggle for Tigrayan self-determination replaced Marxist internationalism with ethnically defined liberation, a transformation that would later shape Ethiopia’s post-1991 political order.
Marxism served as both an ideological refuge and a political weapon, but it could not transcend the ethnic and regional hierarchies it claimed to abolish. What began as a movement for equality degenerated into a competition for dominance among ethnic elites wearing revolutionary robes.
When the TPLF-led coalition came to power in 1991, it did not invent ethnic politics; it institutionalized it. The ideological vocabulary changed from “class struggle” to “self-determination,” but the underlying dynamic—organizing power along ethnic lines—remained constant.
The legacy of the student movement endures not in its ideals, but in its contradictions. Ethiopia’s radical left promised a classless society, yet it delivered a political system stratified by ethnicity. The revolution’s failure was not that it sought justice, but that it confused justice with power and ideology with identity. Half a century later, Ethiopia still lives in the shadow of that original confusion—a nation where every movement for liberation risks reproducing the very hierarchies it set out to destroy.
This brings us to the third question: if the 1995 constitutional project was truly about tribal justice and equality, why did ethnic conflict worsen? The number of ethnic-based killings during Emperor Haile Selassie’s and President Mengistu’s times was far lower than what we have witnessed under the TPLF and Prosperity Party. The conflicts and socio-economic problems in Ethiopia had very little to do with tribal justice. The real culprits were educated activists with vested interests in establishing tribal territories and fomenting conflict.
Finally, the fourth question: What explains intra-tribal conflicts? In the 1970s, the student movement deteriorated from an internationalist (communism) and national (justice for all) movement into a tribal one. Today, we are witnessing tribal movements fragment further into sub-tribal conflicts. This has created a new phenomenon: political leaders who wish to remain in power find themselves with little choice but to accommodate the demands of Qerros and Fannos. With the continued increase in high school and college graduates, coupled with the declining quality of education, Ethiopia is on a downward spiral as college graduates follow the lead of high school revolutionaries, the Qerros and Fannos.
This is the only plausible explanation for the “stupidification” and ደነዝification of our politics. All else is a cruel satirization of an already satirized life. The Ethiopian intellectual class has failed to produce opinion leaders to chart a path out of the perpetual crisis that is spiraling down. Having failed to properly diagnose the root cause of the problem, they call for a provisional government and a new constitution. Their manner reminds me of the story of a drunken Kafka, who went to a pub to look for his girlfriend’s bag. The pub owner asked him where in the pub she was sitting. Kafka replied, “She has not been at your pub at all, but I had to come and check not to leave any stone unturned.”
Ethiopia still lingers in the shadow of the 1970s student movement, where high-minded ideology slowly yielded to ethnic power games. Today, the question is urgent: can civic nationalism bind a nation torn by decades of ethnic politics, or are the fractures now too deep to mend? The answer is not in dusting off old manifestos but in facing an uncomfortable reality: revolutions collapse when justice is mistaken for power, and ideology for identity. Real change demands dialogue—but in Ethiopia, rivals rarely speak to each other. Perhaps, ironically, the solution might come from the unlikeliest conveners: ChatGPT, Grok, and Google Gemini drafting the manifesto that human actors could not. In a country where voices clash but rarely converge, who—or what—will finally stitch the nation back together?