- Migration News feature
- 23 April 2025
“Please come back, my son, I will share everything I have with you.”
Editor’s note: This ongoing series explores the humanitarian implications of South-South migration. Although South-South migration flows are larger than the numbers of people heading South to North – with all the inherent risks of undocumented travel – these cross-border, intra-regional journeys tend to be neglected by governments and aid agencies. See previous articles in the series here.
OROMIA, Ethiopia
In late 2014 something strange, anarchic and powerful began to stir in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region. It was a protest movement, which over the next four years would bring wave after wave of defiant young men into the streets.
The protesters called themselves Qeerroo, an Oromo word traditionally used to describe a young, unmarried man. The term soon came to epitomise the frustrated ambitions of an entire generation of Oromos, as well as their increasingly assertive demands for change.
The Qeerroo movement was an expression of youthful anger: anger at the landlessness and joblessness that many young Oromos faced; at what they saw as the marginalisation of the Oromo by Ethiopia’s political elite; and, above all, at the repressive governance of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the political party that had ruled the country with an iron fist since the early 1990s.
The rumblings of discontent that began in 2014 would eventually produce a political earthquake: In 2018, after massive protests led by the Qeerroo, Ethiopia’s prime minister resigned. The man chosen to succeed him, Abiy Ahmed, would be the first leader in Ethiopian history to openly identify as an Oromo. He promised a future of political freedom and economic prosperity.
But seven years after Abiy was sworn in, the brighter future the Qeerroo hoped he would usher in has failed to materialise.
Landlessness and unemployment remain ubiquitous. An economic crisis caused partly by the fallout from Ethiopia’s 2020-22 civil war has sent the cost of living skyrocketing. Meanwhile, an armed insurgency launched by the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) has ravaged parts of Oromia since late 2018, causing widespread suffering. Both the OLA and government security forces have been accused of rampant human rights abuses.
“In the small towns, there is just no work,” explained Terje Østebø, a professor at the University of Florida and an expert on Oromia. “Corruption is completely out of control, and prisons across Oromia are filled with people.”
The government or its militias “can accuse anyone of being OLA and try to get money from them. If you don’t pay, you’ll be put in prison, and unless you pay you won’t get out,” Østebø told The New Humanitarian. “There is so much discontent and hopelessness.”
No options other than migration
The anger that spurred the Qeerroo movement a decade ago has faded into despair. For many disillusioned young Oromos, there seems to be no point in protesting or demanding change. Thousands are deciding the only way out of their misery is to migrate.
The symptoms of this malaise are on full display in Kofele, a district of the Arsi Zone in central Oromia. Numberless groups of young men sit idle in the streets of the region’s major town (also called Kofele) – living evidence of the joblessness that plagues much of the region.
In the countryside, in the mud-and-wattle houses dotted among the rolling hills, large families scratch out a living cultivating barley and bananas on tiny plots of land. Grown-up children soon discover there is no land for them to inherit. So they move to the towns, where there is no work for them to do.
“It is difficult for young people to sustain their lives here, and their families are in difficulties,” said Bushra Ibrahim, a Qeerroo representative in Ashoka, a small town in Kofele. “They feel they have no choice but to go abroad and change their lives.”
Many Oromos who choose to migrate use the so-called Eastern Route, seeking to cross the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden into Yemen, with the ultimate goal of reaching Saudi Arabia. While the trend has traditionally been young men, there was a sharp increase in women and girls making the journey – accounting for nearly one third of all migrants using the route in 2024.
It’s a hazardous ordeal: 558 deaths were recorded last year, mostly caused by drownings. Overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels capsized on at least six occasions in 2024, and smugglers have also been known to throw people into the sea.
Major towns on the route from Oromia to Puntland
According to the UN’s migration agency, IOM, at least 96,670 people crossed from the Horn of Africa into Yemen over the course of 2023, about one third more than made the journey in 2022. Some 95% of those migrants came from Ethiopia.
Last year, an even greater number of people tried to leave. By October 2024, the IOM had registered 184,701 people exiting Ethiopia along the Eastern Route, surpassing the total number of exits for the entirety of 2023.
Overall, at least 234,015 people left Ethiopia in 2024 and headed towards the Red Sea coastline – a 27% increase on the previous year.
In 2023, about three quarters of the crossings into Yemen occurred via Djibouti. But owing to tightened security and increased patrols by Djibouti and Yemeni coast guard vessels, an increasing share of migrants had switched by the end of that year to crossing from the port of Bosaso, in the Puntland region of Somalia.
The IOM’s figures may represent only a fraction of the true number of crossings. And while Ethiopians of other ethnic groups, including Tigrayans and Amharas, are also migrating in large numbers, Oromos appear to account for a large share of the crossings, particularly those leaving from Bosaso.
One local government official in Kofele told The New Humanitarian that in his district alone perhaps 10,000 people are now emigrating on an annual basis. The New Humanitarian was unable to independently verify that figure.
Seduced by the dalalas
Many young Oromos, Bushra explained, are seduced by the blandishments of dalalas – people-smugglers who call up frustrated young men or approach them in towns across the region, spinning tales of the lucrative job opportunities in Saudi Arabia and promising to facilitate the journey.
“They also see people who have been to Saudi Arabia and come back, and who have bought a house and a car,” the official noted. “Their plan is to be like them.”
Negesu Tabse, an elderly farmer in Kofele and father of 11 children, knows this only too well. One day in the summer of 2023, his 17-year-old son, Abdelfattah, disappeared. He had been listless for some time, Negesu recalled, saying he could see no future for himself at home.
Negesu owns just a quarter of a hectare of land, not enough to parcel out among his sons, who therefore cannot easily get married and/or start a family.
“I didn’t have any land to give him,” he said. “Sometimes Abdelfattah would say ‘This life is not good; maybe I need to go somewhere else’.”
But when Abdelfattah went missing, the family were shocked. “We didn’t know what had happened to him, and we were afraid,” said Negesu. “We were all crying at home.”
For a week, the family heard nothing. Then, suddenly, Abdelfattah rang home. He was calling from Las Anod, a contested Somali town between breakaway Somaliland and Puntland that has been at the centre of a war between Somaliland and a secessionist militia called SSC-Khaatumo since 2023.
Beatings and ransoms
Abdelfattah explained that he had been contacted by a dalala, who offered to take him to Saudi Arabia for free if he could meet him in Harar, a city in eastern Ethiopia. When Abdelfattah arrived, he was taken across the border into Somaliland, and eventually on to Las Anod.
At first, he said, he and his fellow migrants were treated fairly well. But once in Somaliland the dalalas became abusive. In Las Anod they were beaten, Abdelfattah said, and told to call their families to ask for money. Abdelfattah told his father that if he didn’t send the dalalas 30,000 birr (about $230), they would kill him.
The family sent the money to the dalala’s bank account. Then they begged their son to come home.
“Please come back, my son, I will share everything I have with you,” Negesu told Abdelfattah. “He didn’t accept. He said he needed to work and change his life. So he didn’t come back.”
The dalalas took him on to Bosaso, a port city in Puntland on the Gulf of Aden, from where he eventually managed to cross into Yemen. Now Abdelfattah is somewhere in northern Yemen near the border with Saudi Arabia, his family says. He has tried to cross once but was pushed back by Saudi border guards. Every time his family calls, they beg him to return, but each time he refuses.
Just across the road from Negesu’s farm, another family is also mourning the departure of their children. Bonsai Said says two of her sons, Musa and Ramato, left for Saudi Arabia via Bosaso late last year, one within a month of the other.
Musa, aged 18, went first. His brother, Hussain, explained that he had been in touch with a dalala, who promised to buy him new clothes and a new phone and fund his trip to Saudi Arabia if he came to Adama, a city in central Oromia.
Musa disappeared, and the family heard nothing from him for several weeks, until he called them from Bosaso in severe distress. Like Abdelfattah, he described beatings and abuse by the dalalas, and said they were threatening to kill him unless the family sent them 40,000 birr.
They paid the ransom, and Musa managed to cross into Yemen and on into Saudi Arabia, where he now works as a labourer on a date farm. He is yet to send back any money, his family says, but they are glad he is alive.
“Don’t follow me”
When he called from Bosaso, Musa begged his brothers not to attempt the journey, describing his ordeal of hunger, beatings, and the killings of other migrants at the hands of the dalalas.
“Musa said: ‘Don’t follow me. The road and the situation is very difficult’,” Bonsai, his mother, recalls.
Yet, less than a month after Musa left, Ramato, aged 20, went as well. A few weeks later he too called from Bosaso, asking the family to pay a ransom, which they duly did. But unlike Musa, it is not clear whether Ramato managed to make it across to Yemen. When The New Humanitarian visited his family in late February, they had not heard from him in a month.
Boats carrying migrants across the Gulf of Aden regularly sink. In March, the IOM reported that four boats had capsized off the coast of Yemen, with more than 180 migrants feared dead. Even for those who survive the crossing, traversing war-ravaged Yemen is itself fraught with danger.
“We are very worried,” said Bonsai, tears welling in her eyes.
Despite knowing the dangers, many young Oromos seem to have decided, like Ramato, that they must reach Saudi Arabia at any cost.
Some stop initially in Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared independent Somaliland, working as shoe-shiners or casual labourers to save up money for the journey. On a trip to Somaliland in March, The New Humanitarian met several groups of young Oromos walking along the road towards the coast, in searing heat, with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Back in Kofele, the local government official says a new rhyming Oromo saying has recently been coined by local youth: “Gala Suudii, yookin gala luudii.”
In English, the rough translation would be: “I am going to Saudi Arabia, or to my grave.”