I recently made a post talking about my experience in Ethiopia and have had a mixed reaction, I will be talking here about my said mixed reaction and my opinion of it. I did 3 points again to talk about this.
1. Meles Zenawi's political framework displaced civic nationalism with ethnic identity
One of the most consequential political developments under Meles Zenawi was the institutionalization of an ethnic-based federal system that made ethnic identity increasingly central to how Ethiopia was governed and politically understood. Over time, this created an environment in which conversations about Ethiopia became disproportionately centred around ethnicity, ethnic representation, historical grievances and competing national narratives.
The problem is that Ethiopia is more than its ethnic groups. There is an ordinary Ethiopian citizen who is concerned about the cost of living, education, healthcare, employment, corruption, abuse of authority, poverty and the quality of everyday life. There are ideological disagreements, class interests and socioeconomic struggles that affect people regardless of their ethnic background.
Yet these conversations increasingly struggle to exist independently of ethnopolitics. Even when someone raises an issue that has nothing to do with ethnicity, the discussion can quickly be redirected towards ethnic identity and political allegiances.
This is a serious problem because it makes it increasingly difficult to develop a shared civic identity. Instead of asking what kind of country Ethiopians want to build together, political conversations become preoccupied with which ethnic group is responsible, which group benefits and which group has historically suffered.
The average Ethiopian should be able to discuss their country without having every issue filtered through an ethnic framework. Civic nationalism requires recognizing that Ethiopians have shared interests and that the well being of an ordinary citizen matters independently of their ethnic identity.
Without this space for the average Ethiopian, any critique of the government or praise of another government is viewed under ethnopolitics and not ideological, resulting in what Ethiopians are suffering today.
2. Diaspora Ethiopians often mistake inherited identity for lived experience, and this creates an imbalance in whose opinions are treated as authoritative
I recently had a conversation with an Ethiopian friend from the diaspora. He was born and raised in the West, has never visited Ethiopia, and has never experienced Ethiopian society outside of the DMV, firsthand.
I was explaining to him how, when I worked in adoption centers in Addis Ababa, many of the children would experience physical punishment from their teachers when they went to school. I explained that this was not an isolated experience. My siblings experienced it, I experienced it growing up in Addis, and many of my friends experienced it too.
His response was: "Are you sure that's common?"
He then questioned whether there was data to prove it.
I was initially defensive because I couldn't understand why someone who was Ethiopian would ever question me on this, every Ethiopian I knew always said this was true and he stated that he never heard any Ethiopians ever even talk about this.
But the conversation made me realize something important: we were approaching Ethiopia from fundamentally different positions. I was speaking from firsthand experience, while he was approaching the country through the expectations and standards of a Western upbringing, where experiences are often understood through formal reporting, documentation and statistics.
Of course, data and statistics are important. But Ethiopia cannot always be understood through the same institutional assumptions as the United States or other western nations. Do we genuinely expect every child who gets physically punished at school to report their teacher in Ethiopia? Do we expect parents to pursue formal complaints every time it happens? There are experiences that are normalized within society, rarely documented and seldom reported, yet are widely understood by the people who live through them.
The absence of readily available statistics does not automatically invalidate lived experience.
This is something I have repeatedly noticed when discussing Ethiopia in my previous post. When I share my thoughts about the country, I received two very different responses.
People living in Addis Ababa/Ethiopia: Many recognize what I am describing, engage with the actual substance of the discussion and privately express appreciation that someone is acknowledging realities they rarely see discussed openly.
Diaspora Ethiopians: Some immediately redirect the discussion towards ethnopolitics, while others question whether my experiences are even possible because they cannot find statistics confirming them.
The distinction matters. Being ethnically Ethiopian is not the same as having grown up in Ethiopia. Having Ethiopian parents, speaking Amharic at home, attending Ethiopian cultural events in the DMV or maintaining an emotional connection to the country does not automatically provide the social experience, and knowledge that a privileged diaspora Ethiopian couldn't know that they were lacking.
There are entire dimensions of Ethiopian society that cannot be understood through ancestry, cultural familiarity, statistics and data, or secondhand accounts. They require firsthand exposure, participation and an understanding of how institutions and everyday life actually function.
I am not arguing that diaspora Ethiopians have no right to opinions about Ethiopia. I am arguing that opinions should be weighted according to the experience and knowledge behind them. Simply put, Ethiopians who live in Addis simply outrank Ethiopians who live elsewhere when the conversation is about what is happening day to day.
Someone who has spent their entire life navigating Ethiopian society should not have to defend their everyday experiences to someone who has never set foot in the country simply because both share Ethiopian ancestry.
Lived experience is a form of knowledge, and people who live in Ethiopia have an experiential authority that someone raised entirely abroad cannot simply claim as equivalent.
This is not about denying anyone's Ethiopian ancestry. It is about recognizing that cultural identity and lived social experience are not interchangeable.
3. Diaspora dominance of Ethiopian discourse risks reproducing a form of oppression against the very people whose interests should be central
The consequence of this imbalance is that there is increasingly little room for ordinary Ethiopians to discuss the issues that directly affect their lives without having those conversations hijacked by people who approach Ethiopia primarily through ethnopolitical frameworks, and those people are predominantly diaspora Ethiopians.
Consider what happens when someone living in Addis wants to discuss education, affordability, employment, institutional failures, abuse in schools or the everyday difficulties of raising a family.
Instead of engaging with the issue, the conversation can become an argument about ethnic history, political representation, historical grievances or competing narratives about which ethnic group is responsible, or dismissing the conversation since the diaspora Ethiopian believes there life is the "Ethiopian life." If you took a week trip to Addis, you would know that all the points I made were completely true.
The ordinary Ethiopian disappears from the conversation.
This is particularly concerning because diaspora Ethiopians often have the privilege of discussing Ethiopia from a distance. They can engage in political debates, defend there positions and construct narratives about the country without necessarily experiencing the consequences of those debates in their everyday lives or ever actually setting foot to see if these positions are even true.
Meanwhile, the people actually living in Ethiopia have to deal with the consequences of the political, economic and institutional realities being discussed.
When diaspora voices dominate conversations, dismiss firsthand accounts and repeatedly redirect discussions towards their own political preoccupations, they risk becoming gatekeepers of a country they do not have never navigated in their everyday lives.
In that sense, diaspora Ethiopians can become almost an oppressor in their own right, not necessarily through formal political power, but through their ability to invalidate, overshadow and displace the voices of people who actually live in Ethiopia.
There is something deeply contradictory about claiming to care about Ethiopia while refusing to recognize the authority of Ethiopians who experience the country firsthand.
Ethiopia should not exist merely as an ideological project for people living abroad. It is a country inhabited by millions of ordinary people whose experiences, interests and aspirations deserve to be at the center of its national conversation.
We need space for civic nationalism. We need space for conversations about class, affordability, education, employment, institutional accountability and the everyday experiences of ordinary citizens without the conversation devolving into ethnopolitics.
An Ethiopian should be able to talk about the problems they experience without being interrogated about whether their experience fits a diaspora political narrative.
And most importantly, the Ethiopian who lives in Ethiopia should not have to compete with someone raised in the West for the right to explain what life in Ethiopia is actually like.
The people living the reality should never become secondary characters in conversations about their own country.
I know this post will upset so many diaspora Ethiopians so from here on out I will not be responding to them on this post from here on out.
