The author: on 20 Sept seven fronts (Fano, TPLF, OLA, ONLF, and smaller Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz groups, per Borkena) said they would replace Abiy Ahmed; the OLA called it a political understanding, not one army. That followed a National Dialogue (~4,000 delegates, ~400 unpublished recommendations). Reported items include an executive presidency and cutting public money for ethnic parties. The Prosperity Party holds 438 of 486 June seats.

The author wants civic citizenship but says defunding registered identity parties first leaves the 1995 ethnic-federal constitution untouched. “National” vs “regional” is a geographic test; the ruling party is national on paper and ethnic in origin. Armed groups get no subsidy. Legal parties already face a tight field (Freedom House participation score: zero).

The author’s sequence: equal rights in every region, language without territorial ownership, minority and land referees, an insulated election board, then finance by votes—not identity. Partners funded about half the dialogue. Squeeze the legal route first, the piece warns, and politics moves to groups no board can audit.

Ethiopia needs a civic politics, not an ethnic one. Cutting public money to identity-based parties while leaving an identity-based state intact will not get it there.

On Sept. 20, seven armed and political movements announced a coalition to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and install a transitional administration. According to Borkena, its members include the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and three smaller fronts from the Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz regions. A TPLF official told AFP that the aim was to “remove the regime.” The OLA said it had joined a political understanding rather than a unified military command — a sign the coalition may be looser than its name suggests.

The announcement came a month after Ethiopia’s National Dialogue closed. Over roughly five weeks ending Aug. 22, some 4,000 delegates produced about 400 recommendations. The African Union’s high representative for the Horn of Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, described the conference as historic and urged that its recommendations be used to address the country’s outstanding national questions. Most international attention went to one of them: merging the offices of prime minister and president into an executive presidency. Less noticed was a proposal, reported by Africanews and AFP, to cut public funding for parties organized along ethnic lines in favor of “national” ones.

The full text of the recommendations has not been published. The commission has said it will eventually release its documents but has not said when, so the precise wording, the level of delegate support and any proposed implementation mechanism are not yet known. What follows addresses the recommendation as reported, and its conclusions should be tested against the text once it appears.

Because this argument is easily misread, let me state my position plainly. I do not believe that organizing politics by ethnicity and language serves Ethiopia. A state that sorts its citizens into linguistic nationalities, and ties land, jobs and security to that sorting, produces the very insecurity it claims to manage. Ethiopia’s future lies in civic citizenship: rights held by individuals, wherever they live and whatever language they speak. I therefore share the goal behind the funding recommendation. My objection is that it pursues that goal from the wrong end. It de-ethnicizes the weakest actors in the system — registered parties — while leaving the ethnic architecture of the state untouched. The problem is not too much civic reform. It is too little, applied in the wrong order.

I should also be clear about what I am not arguing. Ethiopia’s languages, cultures and histories are part of its wealth, and a civic state should protect them: children should be able to learn in their mother tongue, communities should be able to use their languages in public life, and no Ethiopian should be made to feel that his or her heritage is a liability. My objection is not to language or culture. It is to converting them into the basis of political membership — into the criterion that determines which territory a citizen belongs to, which offices he may hold and which state protects him.

The timing raises the stakes. The recommendations pass this autumn to a new parliament dominated by the ruling Prosperity Party, just as armed movements offer an alternative to the ballot box. How parliament handles them will help decide where Ethiopia’s next political contests take place. The argument below proceeds in four steps: what the rule leaves untouched, who would bear its costs, where the mobilization it displaces is likely to go, and what a civic reform would require instead.

The Rule and the State It Leaves Untouched

The case against ethnic federalism is strong, and I share it. Organizing politics by nationality has narrowed debate, turned policy disputes into questions of group standing and left citizens outside “their” region as permanent guests; Amhara communities beyond the Amhara region, for example, have long complained that their protection was never addressed. Defenders of the system, particularly in Oromia and the south, regard ethnic self-rule as a hard-won right. That view deserves engagement rather than dismissal, because it grew out of real experiences of exclusion under earlier regimes. But protecting a community’s dignity, language and culture does not require making territory the property of a nationality. The question is not whether Ethiopia should move beyond ethnic categorization. It is how.

The funding proposal also has a coherent logic........

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