Addis Abeba — The most serious accusation against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government is not that it secretly commands every armed group operating in Ethiopia. That claim requires evidence the public record has not established.
The stronger accusation is more difficult to dismiss: the government has learned to govern through the political consequences of unresolved insecurity. Violence does not have to be invented by the state to become useful to the state. Fear can be inherited, prolonged, selectively confronted, and politically harvested. A government benefits from a society too exhausted to question it, even if it doesn't create every crisis.
This is the logic now shaping Ethiopian public life. Insecurity is no longer merely a failure of governance. It has become one of the conditions through which governance is maintained.
Across the country, citizenship has been reduced to the private work of survival. The questions many Ethiopians ask each morning are no longer the questions of a normal political society: Is public money being spent responsibly? Are institutions accountable? Are reforms improving life? Do leaders deserve another mandate?
Keep up with the latest headlines on WhatsApp | LinkedIn
The questions are more immediate and more frightening: Is the road safe? Can food be afforded? Will a family member return home? Will tomorrow be worse than today?
That shift is politically decisive. A government operating under normal conditions would have to defend collapsing purchasing power, unemployment, corruption, deteriorating services, and the growing distance between official promises and daily life. A government operating under permanent insecurity is judged against catastrophe rather than competence. It no longer has to prove that life is improving. It only has to present itself as the wall standing between citizens and total collapse. That is why Ethiopia's economic crisis cannot be separated from its security crisis. The two now protect each other politically.
Economy of Fear: Insecurity shielding cost-of-living crisis
In July 2024, the government moved Ethiopia toward a market-based foreign-exchange regime. The reform was presented as necessary to narrow the gap between official and parallel exchange rates and secure international financial support. But the birr's official value fell from roughly 56 to the dollar before the reform to more than 150 by November 2025, sharply raising the domestic cost of imported fuel, medicine, fertilizer, industrial inputs, and basic consumer goods.
Discover moreAfricans & DiasporapoliticalPoliticsPublic PolicyPsychologygovernMathematicsSecurity Products & ServicesgovernmentHistory
Insecurity is no longer merely a failure of governance. It has become one of the conditions through which governance is maintained."Mathematics
The policy may have had a coherent macroeconomic rationale. But macroeconomic necessity does not erase political responsibility for who is forced to absorb the shock first. Workers paid in birr became poorer without their salaries formally changing. Savings lost value. Businesses passed rising import and production costs to consumers. Families adjusted not through resilience, but through deprivation: less food, delayed treatment, abandoned plans, fewer school expenses, fewer visits, fewer ordinary dignities.
The point is not simply that prices rose. It is that economic pain became politically less explosive because insecurity had already reorganized public life around fear. A citizen calculating whether a road is safe, whether a relative may be abducted, or whether fighting may reach a town is less able to organize against inflation, corruption, or failed policy. Survival consumes the energy accountability requires.
A "Budget of Survival" investigation documented how fixed-income workers were being crushed by transport costs and rising prices, including private travel costs reaching 6,000 birr on routes where public transport was unavailable or unreliable. Movement itself has become a class privilege.
Fuel prices deepened the pressure. In April 2026, diesel rose to 163.09 birr per liter and benzene to 142.41 birr, with diesel increasing by more than 26% since February. Officials also acknowledged entrenched corruption, concentrated control of distribution, and the diversion of billions of birr worth of fuel into illegal markets.
A fuel increase does not remain at the petrol station. It enters the price of food transported from farms, construction materials, public transport, factory production, and emergency services. It travels through the economy until it reaches the person least able to absorb it.
Even administrative modernization has become another point of extraction. Under the national vehicle-registration system introduced in June 2026, the stated fee for plates on private fuel-powered vehicles reached 56,000 birr, while electric vehicles were charged 44,500 birr. Officials framed the system as necessary for a unified database, fraud prevention, and improved vehicle tracking. Those goals may be legitimate. But when security and modernization are used to justify fees far beyond the reach of ordinary workers, reform begins to look less like public service than compulsory extraction.
Against this reality, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed continues to speak in the language of national ascent. In October 2025, he told Parliament that Ethiopia's growth was "no longer just numerical" and promised double-digit expansion.
But growth figures are not living standards. An economy can expand while workers become poorer. Exports can rise while salaries lose value. Roads, parks, and public projects can be built while households quietly remove meat, medicine, and education from their budgets. Development that cannot be felt at the dinner table cannot be defended forever from the podium.
The contradiction became visible during Abiy's final parliamentary appearance before the end of the government's term in July 2026, when opposition MP Dessalegn Chanie argued that official macroeconomic figures "clash fiercely with the reality on the ground" and that the price Ethiopians had paid over the previous five years was "immense and heavy."
In a politically open environment, such a gap between official achievement and lived suffering would carry serious electoral consequences. In Ethiopia, it exists beside armed conflict in Amhara and Oromia, unresolved grievances in Tigray, displacement, kidnappings, military operations, and fears of wider regional confrontation.
Economic anger is not eliminated. It is trapped inside a larger atmosphere of dread. This is where weaponization becomes visible, not as a secret command structure, but as a public pattern of political behavior.
The government's negotiations with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) ended twice without agreement in 2023. The Pretoria agreement stopped large-scale fighting in Tigray, but core questions over territorial control, displaced populations, disarmament, and political authority remained unresolved years later. These are not technical leftovers. They are unresolved political questions that keep whole communities suspended between war and peace.
A government committed to peace as a governing priority would make the completion of agreements, the protection of civilians, and the restoration of political trust the center of national life. Instead, Ethiopia has seen a recurring pattern: negotiations begin and collapse; agreements halt the worst violence but leave decisive questions open; political disputes are recoded as security threats; and each new crisis becomes another reason citizens are told to wait, obey, and endure.
The prime minister's own language repeatedly returns the country to the vocabulary of threat. In July 2026, he spoke of "daily provocations" originating from forces in Tigray. Earlier, he framed Ethiopia's demand for Red Sea access as a question of "national existence" and "a matter of survival."
Ethiopia does face real security threats. They are not imaginary, and no responsible analysis should pretend otherwise. But the danger begins when survival becomes the permanent language of government. Once every dispute is described as existential, scrutiny becomes disloyalty. Criticism becomes destabilization. Patience becomes patriotism. Citizens are asked not to judge the government by the life it delivers, but by the catastrophe it claims to be preventing.
Civic restrictions reinforce this condition. Proposed amendments to Ethiopia's Civil Society Organizations (CSO) Proclamation raised fears of renewed government control, while opposition parties and human rights groups warned that repression, detention, and insecurity had narrowed meaningful political participation ahead of the 2026 election.
A government operating under permanent insecurity is judged against catastrophe rather than competence."Business Operations
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
This matters because elections held under fear do not measure consent in any meaningful democratic sense. A population that cannot move freely, organize confidently, criticize safely, or separate political choice from personal danger is not simply voting under difficult conditions. It is being asked to ratify power while living under pressure. That pressure changes what people are willing to accept. They tolerate economic decisions they would reject under peaceful conditions. They accept restricted movement, arbitrary enforcement, and failing services because every demand for accountability is made to appear secondary to avoiding war.
When survival becomes success
The government is measured not by whether citizens are free, secure, and economically dignified, but by whether the country remains barely intact. That is the central danger: a politics in which survival itself is converted into consent.
None of this proves that the government directs armed groups to attack civilians. That claim requires evidence not currently available in the public domain. But direct orchestration is not the only form of political responsibility.
A government can weaponize insecurity by failing to pursue peace consistently, by allowing agreements to remain incomplete, by treating negotiation as a tactical pause, by using crisis to discipline dissent and by converting public fear into public obedience. It can benefit from disorder it did not originally create. It can present the absence of total collapse as evidence of success.
Executive Branch The question Ethiopians must ask, therefore, is not only who started each conflict. It is who gains political protection from its continuation.
When insecurity becomes permanent, it stops functioning merely as a government failure. It becomes a governing system. And when citizens are kept close enough to catastrophe, mere survival can be sold to them as prosperity. AS
Editor's Note: Eyob Yohannes is a writer and data analyst based in Ethiopia. He can be reached at eyob.yo1862@gmail.com
