Addis Abeba — The long-awaited National Dialogue Conference formally commenced in Addis Abeba on 15 July 2026. Organised around eight principal thematic areas, the proceedings drew to a close two weeks ago after four years punctuated by considerable difficulties and shifting dynamics. The most revealing sentence from Ethiopia's National Dialogue, however, may have come at its end. Deputy Chief Commissioner Hiroute Guebre Sellassie said, "National dialogue is not about determining winners and losers." She was describing a method of resolving disagreement. In Ethiopia, the sentence also challenges a much older way of settling political questions. The dispute over Addis Abeba shows why.
On 22 August, The Reporter disclosed that representatives from Oromia had objected to a consolidated proposal under which Addis Abeba would remain Ethiopia's capital while becoming a self-administering federal entity. They wanted constitutional recognition of the city as Oromia's capital as well. Their concern was practical: they reportedly feared that without it, a future government could simply tell Oromia's institutions to leave. Amhara regional representatives argued that the question required wider public discussion and objected to reopening recommendations they believed had already passed through the dialogue's working groups.
Geopolitics consulting This is usually framed as a dispute over who owns Addis Ababa. But "ownership" compresses several different claims into one word: historical dispossession, the political rights of current residents, federal jurisdiction, and the security of institutions that control land, taxation, and public authority.
One city, many claims
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The Oromo historical claim has evidence behind it. Historian Getahun Benti places Addis Abeba's establishment in 1887 within Menelik II's southward expansion and the conquest through which the modern imperial state was built. Asebe Regassa Debelo and Teshome Emana Soboka go further, arguing from fieldwork in the zone surrounding Addis that the city's expansion converted farmland and grazing areas into urban land, feeding the grievances that erupted around the 2014 Integrated Development Master Plan.
Oromia President Shimelis Abdisa drew on that memory in an August 2020 OBN interview later authenticated by AFP. "Finfinne is our home. It is our heartland," he said, before referring to Oromo forefathers who had been evicted from the city.
Another history developed on the same ground. Addis became the political and economic centre of Ethiopia. People from across the country built homes, businesses, and families there over generations. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed expressed that competing claim at a March 2019 press conference: "Addis Abeba belongs to all Ethiopians." He immediately qualified it: there was nothing wrong with feeling that the city was yours, he said; the problem came when that claim denied everyone else's.
The Constitution itself holds the contradiction rather than resolving it. Article 49 makes Addis Abeba the federal capital and grants its residents "a full measure of self-government." The same article requires that Oromia's "special interest" regarding social services, natural resources and joint administrative matters be respected. The present dialogue has therefore inherited a constitutional tension layered over an older historical conflict.
Geographic Reference Discover moreMagazinesBreaking news alertExecutive BranchHistoryAddis Ababa eventsPoliticsNewsNewspaper subscriptionwarGeopolitics consulting History alone cannot explain why the issue remains so combustible. Addis is also material power: these are the institutions that decide who can tax, police, adjudicate, plan, and remain institutionally present in the country's most powerful city. According to Mayor Adanech Abiebie's July 2026 report to the City Council, the city's annual revenue rose from 51 billion birr in 2021 to 350 billion birr in 2026, with its budget reaching roughly 360 billion birr. National Dialogue discussions covered not only legal status but also the city's budget, police, courts, boundaries, district names, and relationship with Oromia.
Asebe Regassa and Teshome Emana's fieldwork adds a further layer: peri-urban land around Addis has been incorporated into urban administration and converted through lease and development, sometimes following expropriation. Beneath the historical question sits a distributional one -- who bears the cost of metropolitan expansion, who benefits from land conversion, and which authority decides.
No settlement can make the competing histories disappear."
It would be too easy to call this greed. There is no evidence that Oromo leaders pursue Addis simply for its revenue, or that everyone defending a common federal capital is consciously protecting an older ethnic advantage. Historical grievance can be sincere while constitutional recognition also provides institutional security; a commitment to equal citizenship can be genuine while preserving an arrangement that gives one conception of Ethiopia greater permanence.
Evolutionary psychology helps only if its role is kept narrow: it cannot tell us who should govern Addis or prove what any Ethiopian politician secretly wants. In a 2014 model, economists Mukesh Eswaran and Hugh M. Neary showed how possession or production makes people value an object more strongly and defend it harder than outsiders will fight to acquire it. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm's cross-cultural work points to the counterforce: human groups have also built coalitions and social sanctions to restrain would-be dominants. Together the two illuminate a recurring political tension between defending what one controls and building rules that keep control itself from becoming the sole source of legitimacy.
Ethiopian political history repeatedly exposes that tension. Imperial expansion produced one distribution of territory and authority; the post-1991 federal order produced another; political change after 2018 altered the balance again. Each order inherited institutions created under earlier distributions of power and supplied narratives explaining why those arrangements were legitimate -- and where a story begins changes what justice looks like. Begin with communities displaced during Menelik's expansion, and Addis appears through the history of dispossession. Begin with the generations who subsequently built their lives in the city, and it becomes a shared civic space. Begin with the 1995 Constitution, and the problem becomes how to reconcile resident self-government, federal authority, and Oromia's special interest.
Geopolitics consulting Conclusion: End to winner-take-all politics
None of those histories automatically cancels the others. Descendants of those dispossessed may have a valid claim to remedy, even as someone born and raised in Addis reasonably rejects the idea that ancestral identity should decide who governs the city today. Federal institutions have another concern: a national capital must remain politically accessible to a population that extends far beyond its surrounding region.
Nor are the political camps as coherent as ethnic labels suggest. The Reporter found that disagreement over Addis cut across political affiliations and divided representatives of the ruling Prosperity Party itself. Influential Oromo opposition parties such as the Oromo Federalist Congress and Oromo Liberation Front have also opted out of the National Dialogue process over concerns about inclusiveness, independence and the Commission's approach. There is no single "Oromo position," just as there is no single Amhara or Ethiopianist position -- the labels can conceal disagreement within each constituency.
Geographic Reference The people who will live with the settlement are more varied still. An Addis renter worried about municipal services, a business owner concerned with taxation, an Oromo farmer facing urban expansion, and a regional official worried that Oromia's institutions could someday lose their place in the city approach the constitutional question from very different material positions. "Who owns Addis?" turns these different problems into one contest for possession.
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That is why Hiroute Guebre Sellassie's rejection of winners and losers matters. Ethiopia's political orders have repeatedly emerged after somebody won, through imperial expansion, revolution, armed struggle, or regime collapse, and institutions then gave the resulting balance of power durability. The National Dialogue is attempting something harder: producing rules that people can trust without first defeating the people who disagree with them.
For Addis, that requires more precision than deciding which group gets the stronger historical sentence in the Constitution. Oromia's historical and material interests need enforceable protection. Residents need meaningful authority over their city government. Land expansion and compensation need rules that surrounding communities can challenge without depending on political patronage. Policing, courts, revenue, boundaries, and the institutional presence of both federal and Oromia governments need arrangements capable of surviving changes in who governs Ethiopia.
No settlement can make the competing histories disappear. A more demanding test is whether people can live under the settlement when their political opponents are administering it.
Geopolitics consulting If security still depends on possessing the institution, a new constitutional formula may simply formalise another victory. If the rules protect people even when their side is out of power, the National Dialogue will have addressed something much deeper than the status of Addis Abeba. AS
Editor's Note: Eyob Yohannes is a writer and data analyst based in Ethiopia. He can be reached at eyob.yo1862@gmail.com
