Addis Abeba — Every nation survives on stories. Some are carved into constitutions, some whispered in prayer, and others passed from one generation to the next without words. They do not have to be objectively true; they only have to be believable. It is this shared belief--fragile, emotional, and often irrational--that keeps people from turning against one another when reality becomes unbearable.
Ethiopia has reached one of those unbearable moments. Too many wars have stripped away trust. Too many promises of unity have ended in suspicion. What remains is exhaustion--a collective awareness that no one is innocent and that no one can win alone. Out of that fatigue came the idea of a National Dialogue, a space where enemies could speak, or at least listen, before the next disaster.
The idea took concrete shape following the House of Peoples' Representatives' approval of the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission Proclamation in late December 2021. Its stated aim is conducting an inclusive nationwide discussion for bolstering national consensus and restoring social values in Ethiopia. Since its establishment, the Commission has been identifying participants and gathering input on the agenda for discussions concerning key national issues across several regions of the country.
But beneath its language of reconciliation, the National Dialogue is something more profound and more dangerous. It is an attempt to build a new shared belief, a story large enough to contain every wounded truth without collapsing under their weight.
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The stories that once held Ethiopia together have all fallen apart. The empire believed in divine order, the revolution in equality, and the federal system in coexistence. Each myth worked for a while, then decayed under the pressure of its own contradictions. The current moment is an empty space between dying faiths. The real task of the National Dialogue is not to fill that space with truth, but with meaning. Nations do not endure by truth alone; they endure through their capacity to transform pain into purpose.
Every community in Ethiopia has its graves, and every region carries its version of betrayal. If those wounds remain private, they will feed the next cycle of revenge. But if they can be woven into a shared fabric of memory, they can become something else: dignity. The National Dialogue must teach people that suffering, while never equal, can still be mutually acknowledged. Only then can grief stop being a weapon.
Yet even that is not enough. Ethiopia's tragedy has always been its inability to live with contradiction. Each system that promised order demanded sameness in return. But difference is not the enemy--it is the nature of this land. The mountains, languages, and loyalties have always pulled in different directions. The challenge is not to erase that tension but to learn how to contain it.
To live together in Ethiopia's reality is to accept that unity will never mean harmony. It will mean coexistence under pressure, a rhythm of disagreement that does not explode into war. The National Dialogue must find a language for that kind of maturity: to see fragmentation not as failure but as the price of being many.
To live together in Ethiopia's reality is to accept that unity will never mean harmony."
If it succeeds, it will not do so through grand speeches or perfect constitutions. It will succeed quietly--through rituals that make the story of coexistence feel real. Laws, elections, commemorations, even small gestures of respect--these are not decorations of democracy; they are its emotional infrastructure. They remind citizens, again and again, that the idea of Ethiopia still exists, however fragile. Without such repetition, belief fades.
Dialogue beyond politics
Power in this country has never only been about guns or offices; real control has always rested on managing emotion--deciding what people should feel pride in, what they should fear, and whom they should blame. For decades, leaders have turned humiliation into fuel and suspicion into strategy. The National Dialogue can only change the future if it changes that emotional economy. It must teach that restraint can be strength, that listening can be dignity, and that survival itself is a kind of courage.
Still, every story that holds a nation together comes at a cost. A shared illusion can too easily become a comfortable lie. Governments may wrap failure in the flag and call it unity. The only safeguard against that is honesty--not total honesty, which societies cannot bear, but the humility to admit that what we call "national truth" is, in the end, a chosen story. The difference between a sustaining myth and a manipulative one is precisely that self-awareness.
Perhaps the National Dialogue's most difficult work is emotional, not political. It must make people feel that they still belong to something unfinished. It must make the future seem heavy enough to care about but light enough to approach. It must show that survival is not the same as stagnation--that believing in something together, even temporarily, is better than fighting alone in the dark.
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Ethiopia's next chapter will not begin with triumph; it will begin with exhaustion, with a quiet agreement that the price has been too high and that no one wants to pay it again. Unity will no longer mean sameness but the stubborn decision to stay inside the same story, however contested it may be.
Years from now, the success of this National Dialogue will not be judged by documents or declarations, but by something far more fundamental: whether ordinary people, despite their differences, can look at one another and think, "We don't agree, but we still belong here." This is not the kind of peace that wins awards, but it is the kind that endures.
And perhaps that is all a nation ever truly is: a sustained negotiation between truth and illusion, with each generation striving to imbue its suffering with meaning that transcends mere survival. If this National Dialogue can give that meaning a tangible form, then even an imperfect belief may be sufficient to hold Ethiopia together--not because it is true, but because it is necessary. AS
Editor's Note: Eyob Yohannes is a writer and data analyst based in Ethiopia. He can be reached at [email protected]
