ETHIOPIA: TPLF Rift Deepening & more – 13th Mar 2025

Salaam salaam from BA! This is the Rorshok Ethiopia Update from the 13th of March twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Ethiopia.

Let’s begin with updates from the rowdy Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where the region’s top political party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (or TPLF), is still divided. Speaking to the media, Debre-Tsion Gebre-Michael, the Party’s chairman, blamed the Pretoria agreement, which ended the war between Tigray and the federal government, for the Party’s internal strifes. He said that Getachew Reda, who is the current head of the region’s interim administration and the lead negotiator for the Pretoria agreement, was pressured into accepting terms that were only dictated by the federal government and didn’t serve the region’s best interests.

Despite his doubts and complaints, he said his group is committed to fully implementing the agreement. It’s hard to see how they’re going to do that since about three weeks ago, the National Election Board barred the TPLF from engaging in political activities because it didn’t call for a general assembly by its deadline.

Still in Tigray, the National Rehabilitation Commission revealed that it will resume its efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate former combatants into society. This effort was halted for over a month because of technical difficulties and political instability in the region, but the Commission said it will resume its operations by the end of this week. In the meantime, combatant rehabilitation took place in other parts of the country, like the Afar, Amhara and Oromia regions.

In the next four months, the Commission plans to rehabilitate about seventy-five thousand ex-fighters across five regions. The Commission also said there are over three hundred thousand former combatants who fought against the government (but subsequently surrendered), and over seven hundred and fifty million US dollars are required to rehabilitate and reintegrate them back into society.

There are some more political parties’ updates. Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, one of the largest opposition parties, accused the ruling Prosperity Party on Tuesday the 11th of collecting funds from politically unaffiliated citizens seeking services from government offices.

The party said it has evidence of the governing party forcefully collecting money from citizens to strengthen the political group. The opposition party added that these trends are part of efforts to unfairly expand the party’s reach. They also urged the National Election Board to take measures against Prosperity and force it to stop taking money from unwilling citizens.

The ruling party has been previously accused of directly deducting money from wages. If it passes, The National Election Board’s draft bill will outlaw this practice.

Speaking of funding, the US Agency for International Development (or USAID) reduced spending after Trump’s election, is not only affecting health and education, but also businesses, specifically hotels. Hotels in the capital, Addis, have reported declines in revenue because organizations that the USAID used to fund are no longer renting out conference spaces and rooms.

One hotel reported that it had lost out on twenty-five thousand US dollars it could’ve earned in the next two months. The President of the Hotel and Tourism Employers Federation said this is a wake-up call for the tourism sector to strengthen its engagement with the local market and not rely on foreign sources.

Still in the capital, media outlets have reported that the Addis Ababa City Administration recently decided to take away twelve thousand square meters of land in the heart of the city from the Customs Commission. The land was going to be used to build the commission's new headquarters. What’s more controversial is that the city has given the land for the Oromo Cultural Center’s expansion project. Since most of the government officials are ethnic Oromos, this might be a case of favoritism. Over ninety households are going to be expropriated to clear the land for construction.

For context, the Customs Commission is currently paying almost seventy million birr, which is half a million US dollars, in rent for its head office. It is located right around the block from the land granted to build its new head office. The Oromo Cultural Center, on the other hand, is built on a sprawling plot, in the much sought-after part of town, near the land it was awarded for its expansion project.

In western Ethiopia, in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, about a hundred Sudanese refugees are crossing into Ethiopia, according to the region’s capital refugees and returnees service branch office. The office head said since the civil war broke out in Sudan, over a hundred thousand refugees have entered the country. He added that the refugees are receiving food, health and education support but said he was worried about how this assistance would continue with the USAID’s aid cuts.

Bruno Eduardo Rodrigues, Cuba’s Foreign Minister, was in Addis this week. He arrived on Wednesday the 12th and visited various landmarks including the recently renovated national palace. He said Ethiopia and Cuba have deep historical ties forged by mutual cooperation and support. Decades ago, when Somalia tried to invade Ethiopia, the attack was successfully repelled with the help of thousands of Cuban soldiers. The Minister also went to the Ethio-Cuba friendship park to remember and commemorate those who fought in the war.

More news on foreign affairs as the EU said in a press conference on Tuesday the 11th that it would review visa issuance restrictions it imposed on Ethiopian citizens last year. The EU increased visa application fees and the time it takes to process a visa application.

The restrictions were imposed because the Ethiopian government wasn’t willing to welcome its citizens, who had their asylum applications in Europe declined. The review is scheduled for May this year and might result in the lifting of the restrictions. The relations between Ethiopia and the EU deteriorated over the course of the twenty twenty-twenty twenty-two Tigray war but have gradually improved. The EU has hinted at resuming providing financial support to the government.

Back in local news, the Ethiopian Electric Utility said it’s going to increase power bills every three months starting in April. For the last three months, the Utility’s customers have been paying fifty cents of birr per kilowatt hour but for the next three months, that will rise to sixty cents. This is part of a broader plan to increase bills that reflect the costs of generating electric power.

It is predicted that in four years, bills will run up customers six birr per kilowatt hour. On top of the tariff, the Utility increased service fees.

In business, Selecta One, a German horticultural company, has unfortunately announced that it will relocate its operations in the Amhara region to Kenya and Uganda, citing security and political instability as the main reasons. This decision will cost the region over a thousand jobs. The company said it made sincere efforts to continue working in the region, but said security issues posed big hurdles, forcing it to move production elsewhere.

And for our final update, we’ve got a question for you. Do you know how many people live in Ethiopia? Well, your guess is as good as ours. The Ethiopian Statistical Service announced recently that Ethiopia’s population is under a hundred and ten million. This figure is significantly less than what other sources have stated. Some go as high as over a hundred and thirty-five million, others say it’s about a hundred and twenty million.

The Ethiopian Statistical Service says it’s the official source and that it has it right, but even the Prime Minister and other top government officials have repeatedly said that the mark is around a hundred and twenty million.

It might seem odd that a figure hasn’t been agreed on, but there hasn’t been a census in over fifteen years, although the Constitution requires a census every ten years. Last time an official census was conducted, the population was just under seventy-four million, but that was back in two thousand seven.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Ciao!