Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party: Delusional Precepts as Tools of Regional Destabilization

Recent, ostensibly “academic”, analyses floated by certain, state-aligned, circles in Addis Ababa, are not only untenable in content and substance but also laced with blatant and irreconcilable contradictions in their packaging.

Indeed, in synchronized waves of publication by the Ethiopian Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFA) and The Horn Review among others, Prosperity Party (PP) media outlets seem to have set out to outline a malicious and aggressive agenda arrogantly flaunted as the “Grand Strategy on Eritrea”.

On the one hand, this state-backed media blitz attempts to pathologize the Eritrean state model as a “collapsing, disorganized, and highly militarized predicament” suffering from a self-styled “Nakfa syndrome” and a “defunct Isaias doctrine”; whatever that means!

Yet, in the very same breath, these publications warn that the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) maintains such a powerful, deeply entrenched, institutional depth and domestic organizational control that fractured, disjointed, external opposition groups that the PP regime has been doggedly propping up, have no prospects whatsoever, of challenging it.

In many respects, Addis Ababa’s sudden focus on Eritrea’s “governance architecture” is a classic psychological operations gimmick.  

The pronounced objective revolves around framing Eritrea as a “fragile power vacuum” ripe for external engineering.  Driven by this delusional pipedream, PP’s security organs have been incessantly engaged in incubating inconsequential groups of subversion, while admitting deep down, that this is indeed an exercise in futility.

Irrespective of material substance and impact, these subversive acts, and the ramped-up media campaign accompanying them, constitute blatant violations of international law on non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

The intensive campaigns are also not confined to, or solely prompted for reasons of, benign academic analyses.  They are part and parcel of a dogged agenda aimed at locating, funding, and weaponizing compliant proxies to justify future acts of subversion and annexation.

As the American author William Faulkner famously observed, “The past is never dead. In fact, it is not even past”.

This is a profound description of history and its continuous relevance to the present. It is always necessary to refer to the history of nation-building to comprehend the current situation, as historical foundations constantly inform and shape contemporary state decisions and foreign policy. However, history is also at risk of being altered, distorted, and even fabricated to fulfill ill-intentioned goals. Such is the case with Ethiopia.

Over the past decades, and especially in the past three years, Ethiopian leaders have displayed the proclivity to alter and revise Eritrea’s ancient history as well as its checkered ties with Ethiopia in the modern times to satisfy their renewed delusional ambitions of owning a sea outlet. They have gone so far as to question the sovereignty of Eritrea’s hard-won independence.

Eritrea and Ethiopia have always shared clear, legally defined and delimited boundaries. The current borders of the State of Eritrea were delimited through the Colonial Treaties of 1900, 1902, and 1908z: key and foundational international agreements signed between Italy, France, Britain, and the proto-Abyssinian kingdom.

In addition, the borders between Eritrea and Ethiopia were demarcated in 2007, in full consonance and alignment with the Colonial Treaties, by digital geographic coordinates following the signing of the Algiers Agreement in 2001, and the final and binding ruling of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Border Commission (EEBC).

Hence, any claim that Eritrea is a territory that “seceded” from the Ethiopian state is both ahistorical and fallacious in legal and factual terms.

The launching of the 30-year independence war in 1961 represented a legitimate war of national liberation prompted by, and in response to, the bogus “Federation” as well as the unilateral and subsequent dissolution of that Act by Ethiopia in flagrant violation of a UN imposed international instrument. The legitimate war of liberation was further fueled by state-sponsored mass atrocities committed by Ethiopian occupiers against the Eritrean population, infamously summarized by Emperor Haile Selassie’s declaration that he desired “Eritrean land, not its people.”

In the event, the disparaging allusion to the liberation struggle as merely a “thirty-year Eritrean People’s Liberation Front war against the Ethiopian State” by some minions of the ruling Prosperity Party posing as academicians is nothing more than deliberate distortion and revision of contemporary history.

The indelible fact is the liberation war was a just and natural response of a people that were denied their right to decolonization through major power machinations using the UN as a convenient mantle. This was indeed a ferocious and long war fought by every Eritrean, within and outside the country, to liberate their ancestral soil from uninvited foreign occupiers.

This is the historical and political backdrop behind the presumptuous media campaigns, dubbed as the “Grand Strategy on Eritrea”, that the propaganda machineries of the Prosperity Party (Institute of Foreign Affairs et al) are resuscitating these days with unprecedented frenzy.

The postulates are anything but grand, grounded entirely as they are, on flawed reading of history and essentially propelled by expansionist ambitions.

Furthermore, overarching and frequent references to Ethiopia as a “larger and more powerful neighbor” belie a strident imperial mindset that views neighborly relations through the lens of raw power and demographic grandeur rather than the rule of law.

Innately subversive as the underlying motives are, the articles do not focus on nurturing good neighborly ties with Eritrea and its government. The misguided approaches rest on instigating the “ascent” to power of a younger Eritrean generation that would “drop the torch” and be more “lenient” to Ethiopian aspirations of owning sovereign Eritrean territories.

This is a misleading and toxic presumption that can only hamper and jeopardize prospects for peaceful coexistence between the two states. The depth of Eritrean nationalism and the historical weight of the making of the Eritrean state have never been something confined to a particular generation or, as specified in the articles, the “Tegadalai/freedom fighters generation”.

The flawed assumption flies in the face of the decades-long, multi-generational, struggle maintained by the Eritrean people to ascertain and subsequently safeguard their inalienable national rights.

Disconcerting as it may sound, we must also recall that these “analysists” have taken their cue from the Ethiopian Prime Minister himself.

The specter of a long, drawn-out generational war; the nightmare of perpetual conflict; was first enunciated by Abiy during his disgraceful address to Parliament in which he declared that Ethiopia’s existential quest for “sovereign access to the sea” will be achieved “through negotiations if possible and by force if necessary”.  He went on to exorcise his audience, and the Ethiopian people at large, by ominously stating that if, for one reason or another, this goal were not achieved in these crucial times, it will surely be accomplished by next generations.

Such inflammatory statements paint a grim picture of perpetual conflict in which future Ethiopian generations would be entangled in zero-sum, irredentist, wars in pursuit of delusional objectives while overlooking and compromising their own vast natural endowments.

In stark contrast to these delusional precepts, Eritrea continues to play its modest but genuine contributions to the promotion of regional peace and stability anchored on fundamental pillars of international law, and that is cultivated through mechanisms and matrices of bilateral and regional cooperation based on unequivocal respect of each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

What PP minions deride as the “Isaias doctrine” and “Nakfa syndrome” are, in reality, constructive policy parameters of regional cooperation and integration that do not compromise the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the constituent parts, while also championing ownership of their individual development policies that eschew structural dependency and subservience to extraneous powers.

Indeed, Eritrea’s diplomatic engagements demonstrate a proactive commitment to healthy regional equilibrium.

The visits of several high-level Eritrean delegations to Sudan and the consistent reiteration of Eritrea’s commitment for the resolution of the conflict in a peaceful, Sudanese-led manner – free from meddling by foreign actors – stand as prime examples of its stabilizing role. An additional example is the constant institutional support extended to the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia in its continuous efforts to build sovereign national institutions, combat terrorism, and navigate the structural challenges of state-building.

And, despite the Prosperity Party’s wicked and deliberate historical amnesia, Eritrea had indeed contributed significantly to Ethiopia’s stabilization when the latter was enveloped in a vicious war few years ago; even if Eritrea’s response was also driven by its own exigencies of self-defense.

In recognition and as a tribute to this role, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had  publicly praised, in a speech to the Ethiopian parliament in 2021, Eritrea and its army for their support during Ethiopia’s darkest chapter. In his own words: “Ethiopia remains deeply grateful and indebted to Eritrea for its solidarity during a time when Ethiopia felt abandoned by others”.

In a broader perspective and although the underlying causes and dynamics of the intra-State and inter-State conflicts in the region are multi-layered and complex, it must be acknowledged that they have been exacerbated, to various degrees, by the Prosperity Party’s ill-advised policies as illustrated below:

• The Pursuit of Hydro-Maritime Hegemony: through the state-sponsored “Two Waters Strategy,” Addis Ababa treats the sovereign territories of Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia as zones for unilateral power projection. By attempting to combine hydro-hegemony over the Nile with forced physical access to the Red Sea, the Prosperity Party turns neighborly relations into zero-sum territorial contests that could potentially precipitate and trigger a massive inter-State conflict.
• The Normalization of Demographic and Economic Coercion: the Prosperity Party frequently weaponizes its large population size and economic needs to justify bullying smaller neighbors. This tactic introduces a dangerous precedent into continental politics. If international law is rewritten to allow large nations to annex territory based on demographic weight, it will completely undermine global stability and precipitate a dangerous regional arms race.
• Transnational Proxy Warfare in Sudan: Investigations have confirmed that Ethiopia operates secret military training facilities in its western Benishangul-Gumuz region near Assosa to train thousands of fighters for Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) (com). This covert operation directly feeds the devastating civil war in Sudan and threatens the vital Red Sea trade corridor. By hosting these camps, the Prosperity Party serves as a local agent for the destabilizing policy of “port imperialism” of some regional actors which continues to fuel security crises across Sudan, Libya, and Somalia (aljazeera.com).
• The Fragmentation of the Somali State: Ethiopia’s unilateral January 2024 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to lease a naval base from Somaliland is a severe blow to regional diplomacy. This act directly violates the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Somalia. By bypassing a recognized central government to strike deals with a regional administration, the Prosperity Party encourages separatism and undermines decades of delicate state-building efforts in the Horn of Africa.
• The Subversion of Continental Law: By questioning established international borders, Addis Ababa is actively dismantling the foundational pillar of African peace: the sanctity of colonial-era borders (uti possidetis juris). True pan-African integration requires absolute compliance with the African Union’s Constitutive Act: non-interference, mutual restraint, and absolute respect for inherited colonial (international) boundaries. The Prosperity Party’s continuous disregard for these inherited borders sets a highly destructive precedent, threatening to plunge the entire continent into endless, chaotic border disputes.

In conclusion, the fundamental challenge in the Horn of Africa is not Ethiopia’s landlocked geography. The real threat is the Prosperity Party’s willingness to sacrifice regional stability, international law, and state sovereignty on the altar of domestic political survival. On this front, Addis Ababa’s revisionist strategy will continue to fail.

 Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Research and Documentation Division

15 July 2026